Recent Faculty Publications

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    Standing Up to Colonial Power: The Lives of Henry Roe and Elizabeth Bender Cloud

    Standing Up to Colonial Power: The Lives of Henry Roe and Elizabeth Bender Cloud is the first family-tribal history that focuses on the lives, activism, and intellectual contributions of Henry Cloud (1884–1950), a Ho-Chunk, and Elizabeth Bender Cloud (1887–1965), an Ojibwe.  The Clouds are not just groundbreaking intellectuals of the past, but are also the grandparents of the author, UC Santa Cruz Anthropology Professor Renya K. Ramirez.

    © University of Nebraska Press, 2018

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    Chinook Resilience: Heritage and Cultural Revitalization on the Lower Columbia River

    Chinook Resilience is a collaborative ethnography of how the Chinook Indian Nation, whose land and heritage are under assault, continues to move forward and remain culturally strong and resilient. Professor Jon Daehnke focuses on Chinook participation in archaeological projects and sites of public history as well as the tribe's role in the revitalization of canoe culture in the Pacific Northwest.

    © 2017 University of Washington Press

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    Living Faithfully in an Unjust World: Compassionate Care in Russia

    "How and why do people engage with social problems and injustices?” asks UC Santa Cruz anthropology professor Melissa Caldwell in her new book, Living Faithfully in an Unjust World: Compassionate Care in Russia. “What does it mean to care for or to love another person, especially a complete stranger?” To find answers, Caldwell turned to Russia’s faith-based communities where she met people caring for some of Moscow’s most vulnerable populations. In the absence of state-sponsored welfare programs, Caldwell found that members of faith-based communities have become de facto social workers.

    © University of California Press, 2018

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    We were adivasis: Marriage and Upward Mobility in an Indian Scheduled Tribe

    UC Santa Cruz Professor Megan Moodie examines the Indian state’s relationship to “Scheduled Tribes,” or adivasis—historically oppressed groups that are now entitled to affirmative action quotas in educational and political institutions. Through a deep ethnography of the Dhanka in Jaipur, Moodie brings readers inside the creative imaginative work of these long-marginalized tribal communities.

    © 2015 University of Chicago Press

     

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    The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins

    A tale of diversity within our damaged landscapes, in The Mushroom at the End of the World, Professor Anna Tsing follows one of the strangest commodity chains of our times to explore the unexpected corners of capitalism. Here, we witness the varied and peculiar worlds of matsutake commerce: the worlds of Japanese gourmets, capitalist traders, Hmong jungle fighters, industrial forests, Yi Chinese goat herders, Finnish nature guides, and more. These companions also lead us into fungal ecologies and forest histories to better understand the promise of cohabitation in a time of massive human destruction.

    © 2015 Princeton University Press

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    The Republic Unsettled: Islam, Secularism, and the Future of France

    Based on ten years of ethnographic research, The Republic Unsettled alternates between an analysis of Muslim French religiosity and the contradictions of French secularism that this emergent religiosity precipitated. Professor Mayanthi L. Fernando explores how Muslim French draw on both Islamic and secular-republican traditions to create novel modes of ethical and political life, reconfiguring those traditions to imagine a new future for France.

    © 2014 Duke University Press

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    The Precolonial State in West Africa: Building Power in Dahomey

    Professor J. Cameron Monroe incorporates historical, ethnographic, art historical, and archaeological sources to examine the relationship between the production of space and political order in the West African Kingdom of Dahomey during the tumultuous Atlantic Era. Dahomey, situated in the modern Republic of Bénin, emerged in this period as one of the principle agents in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and an exemplar of West African state formation. Drawing from eight years of ethnohistorical and archaeological fieldwork in the Republic of Bénin, the central thesis of this volume is that Dahomean kings used spatial tactics to project power and mitigate dissent across their territories. 

    © 2014 Cambridge University Press