Publications
Now showing items 1-80 of 607
Hydrohumanities
(2021)
From drought to deluge, climate extremes are mobilizing humanities scholars to reimagine water discourse, which has until now largely focused on human power over water. This volume unites preeminent and emerging voices ...
Novel Palestine
(2023)
Palestinian writing imagines the nation not as a nation-in-waiting but as a living, changing structure that joins people, place, and time into distinct formations. Novel Palestine examines these imaginative structures so ...
Writing Self, Writing Empire
(2015)
Writing Self, Writing Empire examines the life, career, and writings of the Mughal state secretary, or munshi, Chandar Bhan Brahman (d. ca. 1670), one of the great Indo-Persian poets and prose stylists of early modern South ...
High-Tech Trash
(2019)
High-Tech Trash analyzes creative strategies in glitch, noise, and error to chart the development of an aesthetic paradigm rooted in failure. Carolyn L. Kane explores how technologically influenced creative practices, ...
Hydrohumanities
(2021)
A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org.
Discourse about water and power in the modern era have largely focused on human power over water: who gets to own and control a ...
Creating the Intellectual
(2019)
This book offers a new analysis of the intellectual and the Chinese socialist revolution. Under the Chinese Communist Party, the intellectual was never simply an outspoken scholar, a browbeaten artist, a supportive official, ...
Migration and Hybrid Political Regimes
(2020)
While migration has become a vital issue worldwide, mainstream literature on migrants’ legal adaptation and integration has focused on cases in Western-style democracies. We know relatively little about how migrants adapt ...
Anthropologies of Revolution
(2020)
"What can anthropological thinking contribute to the study of revolutions? The first book-length anthropological approach to revolutions, Anthropologies of Revolution proposes that revolutions should be seen as concerted ...
Cinematic Independence
(2022)
Cinematic Independence traces the emergence, demise, and rebirth of big-screen film exhibition in Nigeria. Film companies flocked to Nigeria in the years following independence, beginning a long history of interventions ...
Constructed Movements
(2024)
At once theoretically sophisticated and poignantly written, Constructed Movements centers stories from communities in Mexico profoundly affected by emigration to the United States to show how migration extracts resources ...
Translating Wisdom
(2020)
During the height of Muslim power in South Asia, Muslim nobles of the Mughal Empire (1526-1857) patronized the translation of a large body of Hindu Sanskrit texts into the Persian language, including the Upaniṣads, the ...
The Practice of Texts
(2022)
The Practice of Texts examines the uses of the Sanskrit medical classics in two educational institutions of India’s classical life science, Ayurveda: the college and the gurukula. In this interdisciplinary study, Anthony ...
Documenting Death
(2020)
"Documenting Death is a gripping ethnographic account of the deaths of pregnant women in a hospital in a low-resource setting in Tanzania. Through an exploration of everyday ethics and care practices on a local maternity ...
Afghanistan’s Islam
(2016)
This book provides the first overview of the history and development of Islam in Afghanistan. Written by leading international experts, chapters cover every era from the conversion of Afghanistan through the medieval period ...
Finding Jerusalem: Archaeology between Science and Ideology
(2017)
Archaeological discoveries in Jerusalem capture worldwide attention in various media outlets. The continuing quest to discover the city’s physical remains is not simply an attempt to define Israel’s past or determine its ...
Between Household and State
(2024)
Between Household and State departs from dynastic narrations of the Mughal past to highlight the role of elite households and familial networks in peninsular India, the only region of the subcontinent never fully incorporated ...
Acquired Alterity
(2022)
A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org.
This is the first book-length study in English of the Japanese-language literary activities of early Japanese migrants to Brazil. ...
Keys to Play: Music as a Ludic Medium from Apollo to Nintendo
(2016)
How do keyboards make music playable? Drawing on theories of media, systems, and cultural techniques, Keys to Play spans Greek myth and contemporary Japanese digital games to chart a genealogy of musical play and its ...
Creating the Qur’an
(2022)
A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org.Creating the Qur’an presents the first systematic historical-critical study of the Qur’an’s origins, drawing on methods and perspectives ...
Instruments for New Music
(2015)
Player pianos, radio-electric circuits, gramophone records, and optical sound film—these were the cutting-edge acoustic technologies of the early twentieth century, and for many musicians and artists of the time, these ...
Language, Nation, Race
(2021)
A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org.
Language, Nation, Race explores the various language reforms at the onset of Japanese modernity, a time when a “national language” ...
The Pitfalls of Protection
(2017)
Since the 2001 overthrow of the Taliban government in Afghanistan, violence against women has emerged as the single most important issue for Afghan gender politics. The Pitfalls of Protection, based on research conducted ...
The Clarion of Syria
(2019)
When “The Clarion of Syria” was penned, between September 1860 and April 1861, its anonymous author—identified only as “a patriot”—had just witnessed his homeland undergo unprecedented violence in what many today consider ...
Citizen Outsider
(2017)
While portrayals of immigrants and their descendants in France and throughout Europe often center on burning cars and radical Islam, Citizen Outsider: Children of North African Immigrants in France paints a different ...
Migrating into Financial Markets
(2015)
We understand very little about the billions of dollars that flow throughout the world from migrants back to their home countries. In this rigorous and illuminating work, Matt Bakker, an economic sociologist, examines how ...
The Monastery Rules
(2018)
"The Monastery Rules discusses the position of monks and monasteries in pre-1950s Tibetan Buddhist societies. Using the monastic guidelines (bca’ yig) as primary sources, this book examines the impact of Buddhist monastic ...
Instruments for New Music: Sound, Technology, and Modernism
(2015)
Player pianos, radio-electric circuits, gramophone records, and optical sound film—these were the cutting-edge acoustic technologies of the early twentieth century, and for many musicians and artists of the time, these ...
The Eternal Dissident
(2018)
The Eternal Dissident offers rare insight into one of the most inspiring and thought-provoking Reform rabbis of the twentieth century, Leonard Beerman, who was renowned both for his eloquent and challenging sermons and for ...
Language Between God and the Poets
(2018)
How does language work? How does language produce truth and beauty? Eleventh-century Arabic scholarship has detailed answers to these universal questions. Language Between God and the Poets reads the theory of four major ...
Rethinking Statehood in Palestine
(2021)
The quest for an inclusive and independent state has been at the center of the Palestinian national struggle for a very long time. This book critically explores the meaning of Palestinian statehood and the challenges that ...
Public Debt, Inequality, and Power
(2016)
Who are the dominant owners of US public debt? Is it widely held, or concentrated in the hands of a few? Does ownership of public debt give these bondholders power over our government? What do we make of the fact that ...
Maverick Movies
(2024)
Maverick Movies tells the improbable story of New Line Cinema, a company that cut a remarkable path through the American film industry and movie culture. Founded in 1967 as an art film distributor, New Line made a small ...
Palestinian Chicago
(2020)
Chicago is home to one of the largest, most politically active Palestinian immigrant communities in the United States. For decades, secular nationalism held sway as the dominant political ideology, but since the 1990s, its ...
Manhua Modernity
(2020)
From fashion sketches of Shanghai dandies in the 1920s, to phantasmagoric imagery of war in the 1930s and 1940s, to panoramic pictures of anti-American propaganda rallies in the 1950s, the cartoon-style art known as manhua ...
Voices of Labor
(2017)
Motion pictures are made, not mass produced, requiring a remarkable collection of skills, self-discipline, and sociality—all of which are sources of enormous pride among Hollywood’s craft and creative workers. The interviews ...
The Prison of Democracy
(2019)
The Prison of Democracy uses a prison designed as a replica of the U.S. capitol building as a prism for understanding the relationship between prisons and democracy. As a historical and archival study of the federal prison ...
Polemics and Patronage in the City of Victory: Vyasatirtha, Hindu Sectarianism, and the Sixteenth-Century Vijayanagara Court
(2016)
How did the patronage activities of India’s Vijayanagara Empire (c. 1346–1565) influence Hindu sectarian identities? Although the empire has been commonly viewed as a Hindu bulwark against Islamic incursion from the north ...
What Is a Family?
(2019)
What is a family? The essays gathered here explore disparate family histories in early modern Japan, attending variously to the samurai elite, agrarian villagers, urban merchants, communities of outcastes, and the circles ...
Aspects of Kinship in Ancient Iran
(2023)
Originally delivered in 2020 as the Biennial Ehsan Yarshater Lectures, Aspects of Kinship in Ancient Iran is an exploration of kinship in the archaeological and historical record of Iran’s most ancient civilizations. D. ...
The Pitfalls of Protection: Gender, Violence, and Power in Afghanistan
(2017)
Since the 2001 overthrow of the Taliban government in Afghanistan, violence against women has emerged as the single most important issue for Afghan gender politics. The Pitfalls of Protection, based on research conducted ...
Pandemic Genres
(2025)
As HIV/AIDS emerged as a public health crisis across sub-Saharan Africa, it became the subject of international interest that was at once prurient, benevolent, and interventionist. Meanwhile, the experience of living with ...
Visions of Global Environmental Justice
(2025)
Focusing on the lived experiences of Afro-Colombians processing and resisting violence against their ecological communities, Visions of Global Environmental Justice employs accounts of the supernatural narratively and ...
The Small Stuff of Roman Antiquity
(2025)
Why are the small and unimportant relics of Roman antiquity often the most enduring, in material form and in our affections? Through close encounters with minor things such as insects, brief lives, quibbles, irritants, and ...
Manhua Modernity
(2020)
From fashion sketches of smartly dressed Shanghai dandies in the 1920s, to multipanel drawings of refugee urbanites during the war against Japan, to panoramic pictures of anti-American propaganda rallies in the early 1950s, ...
A Vietnamese Moses: Philiphê Bỉnh and the Geographies of Early Modern Catholicism
(2016)
A Vietnamese Moses is the story of Philiphê Bỉnh, a Vietnamese Catholic priest who in 1796 traveled from Tonkin to the Portuguese court in Lisbon to persuade its ruler to appoint a bishop for his community of ex-Jesuits. ...
Sensitive Reading
(2022)
A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org.
What are the pleasures of reading translations of South Asian literature, and what does it take to enjoy a translated text? This ...
Building Green
(2017)
Building Green explores the experience of environmental architects in Mumbai, one of the world’s most populous and population-dense urban areas and a city iconic for its massive informal settlements, extreme wealth ...
Sirens of Modernity
(2022)
By the 1960s, Hindi-language films from Bombay were in high demand, not only for domestic and diasporic audiences, but for sizable non-diasporic audiences across Eastern Europe, Central Asia, the Middle East, and the Indian ...
The Eternal Dissident
(2018)
The Eternal Dissident offers rare insight into one of the most inspiring and thought-provoking Reform rabbis of the twentieth century, Leonard Beerman, who was renowned both for his eloquent and challenging sermons and for ...
Rules of the House
(2019)
Rules of the House examines the transformation of the Korean family during and after Japanese colonial rule. Through in-depth reading of civil litigation records, the book shows how the Japanese colonial legal system ...
Language Between God and the Poets (Volume 2.0)
(2018)
How does language work? How does language produce truth and beauty? Eleventh-century Arabic scholarship has detailed answers to these universal questions. Language Between God and the Poets reads the theory of four major ...
Keys to Play
(2016)
How do keyboards make music playable? Drawing on theories of media, systems, and cultural techniques, Keys to Play spans Greek myth and contemporary Japanese digital games to chart a genealogy of musical play and its ...
Parameters of Disavowal
(2018)
The colonial experience of the early twentieth century shaped Korea’s culture and identity, leaving a troubling past that was subtly reconstructed in South Korean postcolonial cinema. Relating postcolonial discourses to a ...
The Indigenous State
(2017)
In 2005, Bolivians elected their first indigenous president, Evo Morales. Ushering in a new “democratic cultural revolution,” Morales promised to overturn neoliberalism and inaugurate a new decolonized society. In this ...
Child’s Play
(2017)
Few things make Japanese adults feel quite as anxious today as the phenomenon called the “child crisis.” Various media teem with intense debates about bullying in schools, child poverty, child suicides, violent crimes ...
Amphibious Subjects
(2022)
Amphibious Subjects is an ethnographic study of a community of self-identified effeminate men— known in local parlance as sasso—residing in coastal Jamestown, a suburb of Accra, Ghana’s capital. Drawing on the Ghanaian ...
Emergency in Transit
(2024)
Emergency in Transit responds to the crisis framings that dominate migration debates in the global north. Eleanor Paynter reformulates Europe’s so‑called migrant crisis from a sudden disaster to a site of contested witnessing, ...
Dangerous Love
(2022)
The relationships between female sex workers and their noncommercial male partners are often assumed to be coercive and anchored in risk, dismissed as “pimp-prostitute” arrangements by researchers and the general public ...
The Emergence of Modern Hinduism
(2019)
The Emergence of Modern Hinduism argues for the importance of regional, vernacular innovation in processes of Hindu modernization. Scholars usually trace the emergence of modern Hinduism to cosmopolitan reform movements, ...
Art of Fugue
(2015)
Fugue for J. S. Bach was a natural language; he wrote fugues in organ toccatas and voluntaries, in masses and motets, in orchestral and chamber music, and even in his sonatas for violin solo. The more intimate fugues he ...
Witness to Marvels
(2019)
Witness to Marvels traces the development of a unique genre of Sufi-inspired Bengali romances called pir kathas, whose protagonists and plots are wholly fictive. For five centuries these fabulations have parodied indigenous ...
Expanding Verse
(2024)
Expanding Verse explores experimental poetic practice at key moments of transition in Japan’s media landscape from the 1920s to the present. Andrew Campana centers hybrid poetic forms—many of which have never been examined ...
Lived Refuge
(2023)
In a world increasingly shaped by displacement and migration, refuge is both a coveted right and an elusive promise for millions. While conventionally understood as legal protection, it also transcends judicial definitions. ...
A Proximate Remove
(2021)
How might queer theory transform our interpretations of medieval Japanese literature and how might this literature reorient the assumptions, priorities, and critical practices of queer theory? Through a close reading of ...
Child’s Play
(2017)
Few things make Japanese adults feel quite as anxious today as the phenomenon called the “child crisis.” Various media teem with intense debates about bullying in schools, child poverty, child suicides, violent crimes ...
Impersonations
(2019)
Drawing on multisited ethnographic fieldwork and performance analysis, this book centers on an insular community of Smarta brahmin men from the Kuchipudi village in Telugu-speaking South India, who are required to don ...
Christianity, Islam, and Oriṣa Religion: Three Traditions in Comparison and Interaction
(2016)
"The Yoruba of southwestern Nigeria are exceptional for the copresence among them of three religious traditions: Islam, Christianity, and the indigenous oriṣa religion. In this comparative study, at once historical and ...
Huizhou
(2022)
Huizhou studies the construction of local identity through kinship in the prefecture of Huizhou, the most prominent merchant stronghold of Ming China. Employing an array of untapped genealogies and other sources, Qitao Guo ...
Parameters of Disavowal (Volume 1.0)
(2018)
The colonial experience of the early twentieth century shaped Korea’s culture and identity, leaving a troubling past that was subtly reconstructed in South Korean postcolonial cinema. Relating postcolonial discourses to a ...
Hindu Pluralism
(2017)
In Hindu Pluralism, Elaine M. Fisher complicates the traditional scholarly narrative of the unification of Hinduism. By calling into question the colonial categories implicit in the term “sectarianism,” Fisher’s work ...
The Social Question in the Twenty-First Century
(2019)
"Want, disease, ignorance, squalor, and idleness: first recognized together in mid-nineteenth-century Europe, these are the focus of the Social Question. In 1942 William Beveridge called them the “giant evils” while ...
Nakba and Survival
(2022)
Beginning in 1948, Israeli paramilitary forces began violently displacing Palestinian Arabs from Palestine. Nakba and Survival tells the stories of Palestinians in Haifa and the Galilee during, and in the decade after, ...
Law as Reproduction and Revolution
(2021)
This sweeping book details the extent to which the legal revolution emanating from the US has transformed legal hierarchies of power across the globe, while also analyzing the conjoined global histories of law and social ...
Analytic Induction for Social Research
(2023)
This book explores analytic induction, an approach to the analysis of cross-case evidence on qualitative outcomes that has deep roots in sociology. A popular research technique in the early decades of empirical sociology, ...
What Makes a Church Sacred?
(2021)
What is the purpose of a church? Who owns a church? Mary K. Farag persuasively demonstrates that three groups in late antiquity were concerned with these questions: Christian leaders, wealthy laypersons, and lawmakers. ...
Imperial Genus: The Formation and Limits of the Human in Modern Korea and Japan
(2016)
"Imperial Genus begins with the turn to world culture and ideas of the generally human in Japan’s cultural policy in Korea in 1919. How were concepts of the human’s genus‑being operative in the discourses of the Japanese ...
Al-Haq
(2021)
Established in Ramallah in 1979, al-Haq was the first Palestinian human rights organization and one of the first such organizations in the Arab world. This inside history explores how al-Haq initiated methodologies in law ...
The Endurance of Palestinian Political Factions
(2021)
The Endurance of Palestinian Political Factions is an ethnographic study of Palestinian political factions in Lebanon through an immersion in daily home life. Perla Issa asks how political factions remain the center of ...
Luxury and Rubble
(2016)
Luxury and Rubble is the tale of two cities in Ho Chi Minh City. It is the story of two planned, mixed-use residential and commercial developments that are changing the face of Vietnam’s largest city. Since the early 1990s, ...
Inland from Mombasa
(2024)
Over the past few decades, scholars have traced how Indian Ocean merchants forged transregional networks into a world of global connections. East Africa’s crucial role in this Indian Ocean world has primarily been understood ...