Issues of Globalization: Case Studies in Contemporary Anthropology

Burning at Europe’s Borders invites readers inside the lives of the world’s largest population of migrants and refugees — the hundreds of thousands who are trapped in hidden forest camps and forgotten detention centers at Europe’s southernmost borders in North Africa. “Hrig,” the Arabic term for “illegal immigration,” translates to “burning.” It signifies a migrant’s decision to bu...

In homes and brothels around the world, migrant women are selling a unique commodity: care. Care for Sale is an in-depth ethnography of a group middle-class women from Latin America who exchange care and intimacy for money while working as domestic and sex workers in London. Illuminating the complexities of care work, the proposed book is a detailed study of women’s lives and working conditions. It considers how their experience of migratio...

Indebted examines the economic and political factors that led to the Greek debt crisis, investigating the effects of financial pressures from international lenders, unregulated spending by the Greek government, predatory bank loans, and rising unemployment. The book looks closely at the cultural dimensions of the crisis—how middle class urbanites experienced the shock of a global collapse, managed societal instability, and worked to sustain their...

Labor and Legality is an ethnographic account of the lives of ten undocumented workers in Chicago, originally published in 2010. The book seeks to push past one-dimensional rhetoric and show that undocumented workers are neither mere victims nor criminals, but complicated people engaged in workaday struggles to make their lives better. The book follows these men through their daily routines and records their efforts to improve their fortunes and ...

Low Wage in High Tech focuses on the lives and livelihoods of housekeepers, drivers, and security guards who work in India's multinational technology firms. These call centers and software firms are housed in gleaming corporate towers within lavish special economic zones; spaces which have become symbolic of new, sanitized, technology-driven development regimes. However little is known about the workers who are responsible for the daily maintenan...

Marriage After Migration is a compelling ethnography centered around the stories of five women in rural Mexico as they work to keep their communities and families together when their spouses migrate abroad. Through rich and highly readable narratives about the lives of these women, author Nora Haenn explores how international migration affects kinship ties and rewrites gender roles. Haenn's research illuminates aspects of migration and globalizat...

Generational anxieties over what will happen to the young are unfolding starkly in Sierra Leone, where the civil war that raged between 1991 and 2002-characterized by the extreme youthfulness of the rebel movement-triggered mass fear of that generation being "lost." Even now, fifteen years later with these children grown into young adults, "children of the war" are regarded with suspicion. These fears stem largely from young people's easy embrace...

Waste and Wealth examines questions of value, labor, and morality underlining the translocal waste networks in Spring District, Vietnam. Engaging with waste as an economic category of global significance, this book provides an account of migrant laborers' complex negotiations with political economic forces to build their economic, social, and moral life from their marginalized position. It thereby makes visible how women and men seek to construct...