Weiss explores the dynamic relation of specific local, regional, and global understandings of value as manifested in the coffee of rural Haya communities. His investigation offers critical insight into the significance of colonial and postcolonial encounters in this region of Africa.

"Provides new insights into how enslaved and freed Africans in the New World navigated racialized landscapes while honoring the memories of their dead."--Laurie A. Wilkie, coauthor of Sampling Many Pots: An Archaeology of Memory and Tradition at a Bahamian Plantation "Turner's unique hybrid approach makes this book a valuable resource in the study of the African diaspora."--Rosalyn Howard, author of Black Seminoles in the Bahamas The Anglican Church established St. Matthew's Parish on the eastern side of Nassau to accommodate a population increase after British Loyalists migrated to the Bahamas in the 1780s. The parish had three separate cemeteries: the churchyard cemetery and Centre Burial Ground were for whites, but the Northern Burial Ground was officially consecrated for nonwhites in 1826 by the Bishop of Jamaica. In Honoring Ancestors in Sacred Space, Grace Turner posits that the African-Bahamian community intentionally established this separate cemetery in order to observe non-European burial customs. Analyzing the landscape and artifacts found at the site, Turner shows how the community used this space to maintain a sense of social and cultural belonging despite the power of white planters and the colonial government. Although the Northern Burial Ground was covered by storm surges in the 1920s, and later a sidewalk was built through the site, Turner's fieldwork reveals a wealth of material culture. She points to the cemetery's location near water, trees planted at the heads of graves, personal items left with the dead, and remnants of food offerings as evidence of mortuary practices originating in West and Central Africa. According to Turner, these African-influenced ways of memorializing the dead illustrate W. E. B. Du Bois's idea of "double consciousness"--the experience of existing in two irreconcilable cultures at the same time. Comparing the burial ground with others in Great Britain and the American colonies, Turner demonstrates how Africans in the Atlantic diaspora did not always adopt European customs but often created a separate, parallel world for themselves. A volume in the Florida Museum of Natural History: Ripley P. Bullen Series

For more than a century, skin lighteners have been a ubiquitous feature of global popular culture—embraced by consumers even as they were fiercely opposed by medical professionals, consumer health advocates, and antiracist thinkers and activists. In Beneath the Surface, Lynn M. Thomas constructs a transnational history of skin lighteners in South Africa and beyond. Analyzing a wide range of archival, popular culture, and oral history sources, Thomas traces the changing meanings of skin color from precolonial times to the postcolonial present. From indigenous skin-brightening practices and the rapid spread of lighteners in South African consumer culture during the 1940s and 1950s to the growth of a billion-dollar global lightener industry, Thomas shows how the use of skin lighteners and experiences of skin color have been shaped by slavery, colonialism, and segregation as well as by consumer capitalism, visual media, notions of beauty, and protest politics. In teasing out lighteners’ layered history, Thomas theorizes skin as a site for antiracist struggle and lighteners as a technology of visibility that both challenges and entrenches racial and gender hierarchies.

We are told that simply by sipping our morning cup of organic, fair-trade coffee we are encouraging environmentally friendly agricultural methods, community development, fair prices, and shortened commodity chains. But what is the reality for producers, intermediaries, and consumers? This ethnographic analysis of fair-trade coffee analyzes the collective action and combined efforts of fair-trade network participants to construct a new economic reality. Focusing on La Voz Que Clama en el Desierto-a cooperative in San Juan la Laguna, Guatemala-and its relationships with coffee roasters, importers, and certifiers in the United States, Coffee and Community argues that while fair trade does benefit small coffee-farming communities, it is more flawed than advocates and scholars have acknowledged. However, through detailed ethnographic fieldwork with the farmers and by following the product, fair trade can be understood and modified to be more equitable. This book will be of interest to students and academics in anthropology, ethnology, Latin American studies, and labor studies, as well as economists, social scientists, policy makers, fair-trade advocates, and anyone interested in globalization and the realities of fair trade.

This collection of essays addresses the inclusion and exclusion of peoples, populations and regions in an era of global economic and social integration. Although many publications have discussed the way in which globalization has changed the nature of boundaries, space and the movement of peoples, there is a wide gap in a literature that rarely addresses the reaction of local communities and inclusion for some stakeholders in decision making while excluding others, particularly in regard to global integration of industry, the legislation of planning, and trade. This gap has often led to narrow and sometimes misleading ways of presenting the results of globalizing processes. This collection aims to bridge this gap by providing on-the ground case studies that lead to alternative ways of viewing current conceptual frameworks of globalization and its consequences. This collection is an elaboration of a special issue of Urban Anthropology that contained essays by June Nash, Jack Goody, Helen Safa and Max Kirsch. The special issue addressed concerns that have become prominent not only in anthropology but in the wider social sciences and humanities. The reader focuses on the conceptual divisions among the constructs of space and place, indigenous strategies for autonomy, polity and global planning mechanisms, and the role of trans-national corporations in community disintegrations and resistance.

Forests have been at the fault lines of contact between African peasant communities in the Tanzanian coastal hinterland and outsiders for almost two centuries. In recent decades, a global call for biodiversity preservation has been the main challenge to Tanzanians and their forests. Thaddeus Sunseri uses the lens of forest history to explore some of the most profound transformations in Tanzania from the nineteenth century to the present. He explores anticolonial rebellions, the world wars, the depression, the Cold War, oil shocks, and nationalism through their intersections with and impacts on Tanzania’s coastal forests and woodlands. In Wielding the Ax, forest history becomes a microcosm of the origins, nature, and demise of colonial rule in East Africa and of the first fitful decades of independence. Wielding the Ax is a story of changing constellations of power over forests, beginning with African chiefs and forest spirits, both known as “ax–wielders,” and ending with international conservation experts who wield scientific knowledge as a means to controlling forest access. The modern international concern over tropical deforestation cannot be understood without an awareness of the long–term history of these forest struggles.

The world of trade is changing rapidly, from the 'rise of the South' to the growth of unconventional projects like fair trade and carbon trading. Beyond Free Trade advances alternative ways for understanding these new dynamics, based on historical, political, or sociological methods that go beyond the limitations of conventional trade economics.

We humans have an extraordinary capacity for compassion—much of it in response to the atrocities we inflict on the planet, its animals, and each other. The popular explanation for this paradox is that we evolved as carnivorous “killer apes,” who gradually curbed our lust for violence (with frequent exceptions) by implementing humane social norms. This explanation is so well worn, especially in the American psyche, that it epitomizes cliché. So, we could be forgiven for believing it, when nearly every word is fiction. Current research shows that our original biological and social programming is nonviolent. So, what changed? What turned us from goddess-worshiping, plant-eating peacemakers into god-worshiping, animal-eating warmongers? Find out in this fresh, avant-garde nonfiction, The Red Planet: Gendered Landscapes and Violent Inequalities, and learn how our intrinsically feminine predilection for peace may yet save us.

Every person has seen a tree and maybe planted or climbed one! In all world religions, various trees are considered sacred. Trees have the ability to help us reach wholeness if we learn their wisdom and integrate it into our lives. This abecedarian--a book whose contents are in alphabetical order--explores the spiritual growth that is possible by reflecting on the wisdom of woody plants, which help humans experience the divine. In these pages you can explore trees from Acacia to Zaqqum. For each of the forty entries, the author presents a text identifying the tree, a reflective study, a question for journaling or personal meditation, and a concluding prayer. Some trees you may have heard about, and some may be new to you. The spiritual life is enhanced by the trees that surround and share the earth with us while also disclosing the divine to us.