Subject: Social Science / Anthropology / General

Subject: Social Science / Anthropology / General

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Conjuring the State

|9780822947820|Public Health Encounters in Highland Ecuador, 1908-1945|The Ecuadorian Public Health Service was founded in 1908 in response to the arrival of bubonic plague to the country. A. Kim Clark uses this as a point of departure to explore questions of social history and public health by tracing how the service extended the reach of its broader programs across the national landscape and into domestic spaces. Delving into health conditions in the country—especially in the highlands—and efforts to combat disease, she shows how citizens’ encounters with public health officials helped make abstract ideas of state government tangible. By using public health…

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Rhetoric in American Anthropology

|9780822962953|Gender, Genre, and Science| In the early twentieth century, the field of anthropology transformed itself from the “welcoming science,” uniquely open to women, people of color, and amateurs, into a professional science of culture. The new field grew in rigor and prestige but excluded practitioners and methods that no longer fit a narrow standard of scientific legitimacy. In Rhetoric in American Anthropology, Risa Applegarth traces the “rhetorical archeology” of this transformation in the writings of early women anthropologists. Applegarth examines the crucial role of ethnographic genres in determining scientific status and recovers the work of marginalized anthropologists who developed alternative…

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Undoing Multiculturalism

|9780822946632|Resource Extraction and Indigenous Rights in Ecuador|President Rafael Correa (2007-2017) led the Ecuadoran Citizens’ Revolution that claimed to challenge the tenets of neoliberalism and the legacies of colonialism. The Correa administration promised to advance Indigenous and Afro-descendant rights and redistribute resources to the most vulnerable. In many cases, these promises proved to be hollow. Using two decades of ethnographic research, Undoing Multiculturalism examines why these intentions did not become a reality, and how the Correa administration undermined the progress of Indigenous people. A main complication was pursuing independence from multilateral organizations in the context of skyrocketing commodity prices, which caused…

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