Biotraffic
Biotraffic

Author: Christopher Keller Morris

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2024

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 0520404025

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"Biotraffic delves into the complex world of biological resource trade, taking readers inside the contemporary Ciskei region of South Africa, a once-notorious apartheid 'homeland' turned extractive hub for wild medicinal plants. Drawing from in-depth ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, Christopher Morris examines the region's trade in Pelargonium sidoides, revealing the plant's transformation from a contested tuberculosis treatment in early twentieth-century Europe to a modern-day remedy for the common cold. Linking past and present, the story of the pelargonium trade encapsulates a larger tale about colonial legacies and the fraught effects of global environmental governance ambitions. It also teems with a diverse cast of actors, from plant harvesters and pharmaceutical companies to activist NGOs, government officials, and chiefs who have become business partners with multinational drug firms. The book's analysis extends beyond the mere extraction and commercialization of plant resources, offering a critical examination of how demand for these therapeutics intertwines with broader struggles over land and political power in South Africa. In doing so, Biotraffic illuminates the multilayered dynamics of a global trade that not only exploits but also reconfigures the sociopolitical fabric of a region grappling with the afterlives of apartheid and the contemporary challenges of environmental and economic justice"--

Catatonic Smile
Catatonic Smile

Author: Julian Aguirre

Publisher: Fulton Books, Inc.

Published: 2021-10-15

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 1646545397

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Julian Aguirre Most teenagers consider the summer before college to be an epic event. Sebastian Vega is no different. He has been dreaming of this moment since he can remember. He decides to spend it with his eccentric maternal grandmother, Elsa, in suburban Los Angeles. This move leaves Sebastian far outside the realm of parental influence and will alter his life path. In Los Angeles Sebastian meets a host of interesting people, some unscrupulous, who do not have his well-being in mind. While Sebastian navigates the labyrinth, he falls in love. This provokes its own dilemma because love is anything but simple.

Norms and Illegality
Norms and Illegality

Author: Cristiana Panella

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2021-05-06

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 1793646317

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Norms and Illegality: Intimate Ethnographies and Politics explores liminal and illegal practices in relation to political control and cultural normativity. The contributors draw on years of ethnographic experiences in Greece, Guatemala, Hong Kong, Italy, Madagascar, Mali, Philippines, and Thailand to study the contradictions of what is legal and illegal. They explore the production of illegal subjects by the state, the creation of illegal and normative values by liminal and illegal actors, and the mutual entanglements of legal and illegal in the public domains of markets and trade networks. This volume shows that criminalization policies are not necessarily oriented toward erasing crime. Instead, the contributors maintain that opaque spaces ensure the efficacy of control and outwardly conform to the rhetoric and ethics of global neoliberalism. Within these contexts, the contributors shed light on moral economies and frames of value entailed in systems of representation that have been set up by individuals who are deemed illegal, liminal, or deviant in their confrontations with the state. This book is recommended for students and scholars of anthropology, political science, and urban studies.

Girl of New Zealand
Girl of New Zealand

Author: Michelle Erai

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 2020-05-19

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 081653702X

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Girl of New Zealand presents a nuanced insight into the way violence and colonial attitudes shaped the representation of Māori women and girls. Michelle Erai examines more than thirty images of Māori women alongside the records of early missionaries and settlers in Aotearoa, as well as comments by archivists and librarians, to shed light on how race, gender, and sexuality have been ascribed to particular bodies. Viewed through Māori, feminist, queer, and film theories, Erai shows how images such as Girl of New Zealand (1793) and later images, cartoons, and travel advertising created and deployed a colonial optic. Girl of New Zealand reveals how the phantasm of the Māori woman has shown up in historical images, how such images shape our imagination, and how impossible it has become to maintain the delusion of the “innocent eye.” Erai argues that the process of ascribing race, gender, sexuality, and class to imagined bodies can itself be a kind of violence. In the wake of the Me Too movement and other feminist projects, Erai’s timely analysis speaks to the historical foundations of negative attitudes toward Indigenous Māori women in the eyes of colonial “others”—outsiders from elsewhere who reflected their own desires and fears in their representations of the Indigenous inhabitants of Aotearoa, New Zealand. Erai resurrects Māori women from objectification and locates them firmly within Māori whānau and communities.

Global Africa
Global Africa

Author: Dorothy Hodgson

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2017-08-01

Total Pages: 412

ISBN-13: 0520962516

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Global Africa is a striking, original volume that disrupts the dominant narratives that continue to frame our discussion of Africa, complicating conventional views of the region as a place of violence, despair, and victimhood. The volume documents the significant global connections, circulations, and contributions that African people, ideas, and goods have made throughout the world—from the United States and South Asia to Latin America, Europe, and elsewhere. Through succinct and engaging pieces by scholars, policy makers, activists, and journalists, the volume provides a wholly original view of a continent at the center of global historical processes rather than on the periphery. Global Africa offers fresh, complex, and insightful visions of a continent in flux.