National Network for Equitable Library Service

Despite the mass dislocation and repatriation efforts of the last century, the study of return movements still sits on the periphery of anthropology and migration research. Homecomings explores the forces and motives that drive immigrants, war refugees, political exiles, and their descendants back to places of origin.

On May 11, 2003, The New York Times devoted four pages of its Sunday paper to the deceptions of Jayson Blair, a mediocre former Times reporter who had made up stories, faked datelines, and plagiarized on a massive scale. The fallout from the Blair scandal rocked the Times to its core and revealed fault lines in a fractious newsroom that was already close to open revolt.

The best-selling author of Why the West Rules—for Now examines the evolution and future of human values. Most people in the world today think democracy and gender equality are good, and that violence and wealth inequality are bad. But most people who lived during the 10,000 years before the nineteenth century thought just the opposite. Drawing on archaeology, anthropology, biology, and history, Ian Morris explains why. Fundamental long-term changes in values, Morris argues, are driven by the most basic force of all: energy.

This groundbreaking book chronicles the history of sickle cell anemia in the United States, tracing its transformation from an "invisible" malady to a powerful, yet contested, cultural symbol of African American pain and suffering. Set in Memphis, home of one of the nation's first sickle cell clinics, Dying in the City of the Blues reveals how the recognition, treatment, social understanding, and symbolism of the disease evolved in the twentieth century, shaped by the politics of race, region, health care, and biomedicine.

Fleeing the murderous Pol Pot regime, Cambodian refugees arrive in America as at once the victims and the heroes of America's misadventures in Southeast Asia; and their encounters with American citizenship are contradictory as well. Service providers, bureaucrats, and employers exhort them to be self-reliant, individualistic, and free, even as the system and the culture constrain them within terms of ethnicity, race, and class. Buddha Is Hiding tells the story of Cambodian Americans experiencing American citizenship from the bottom-up.

This impressive array of essays considers the contingent and shifting meanings of gender and the body in contemporary Southeast Asia. By analyzing femininity and masculinity as fluid processes rather than social or biological givens, the authors provide new ways of understanding how gender intersects with local, national, and transnational forms of knowledge and power. Contributors cut across disciplinary boundaries and draw on fresh fieldwork and textual analysis, including newspaper accounts, radio reports, and feminist writing.

In February 2003, an undocumented immigrant teen from Mexico lay dying in a prominent American hospital due to a stunning medical oversight—she had received a heart-lung transplantation of the wrong blood type.

Men in all stages of transition have come and gone from my life, and each one has been entirely different. It's difficult to feel as if you fail at being a man when you know there isn't a singular "right" way to be one. In this illuminating and radically honest book, Ezra Woodger interviews trans men and transmasculine people to interrogate what masculinity is and what it means to be a man.

New edition of Aihwa Ong's classic ethnographic study of Malay women factory workers. In the two decades since its original publication, Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline has become an ethnographic classic in the fields of anthropology, labor studies, and gender and globalization studies.

"Digital Memory Agents in Canada" explores memory performances and representations with different cultural and spatial relationships to Canada. It moves from discourses on place to focus on the digital or virtual space and on how certain cultures, subjectivities, or positionalities use digital media to document or represent their recollections. Embracing interdisciplinary approaches, the contributors investigate how digital media, like memories, can transcend space and time to impact individuals and communities.