"In the first decade of the 21st century, Peru reduced its official poverty rate from 50% of the population to 20%. In the "extreme poverty zones" of Lima, though, most residents still consider themselves poor. This book argues that poverty is not an objective condition, but a context-specific "assemblage" and subjective experience that is critically connected to particular life stages and family forms. Despite Peru's efforts to deploy the accepted "best practices" for fighting poverty, the formalization of things like business licenses, property deeds, and household census categories actually perpetuate urban sprawl, deepen discrimination against single mothers, and undermine Peruvians' faith in public officials as well as one another. The introduction stakes out the geographical and theoretical territory of the book. Subsequent chapters are more ethnographic, getting into why residents of the shantytown where the author's research takes place believe poverty is everywhere--but also believe looks can be deceiving. She explores questions like, Is that woman really a single mother or is she living with another man who provides, making her less-deserving of aid even as she endures the stigma of being a single mother? There's a chapter about Mother's Clubs, and how they seek official recognition as social aid groups, despite the irony that the laborious bureaucracy of official recognition takes club members away from their families. A similar bureaucracy tries to identify poor children through their parents, further marginalizing single mothers. These mothers are usually seen as the most deserving of assistance, even as they are castigated for leaving their kids at home all day in order to work. A late chapter shows how shantytowns play a role in the poverty equation. Although these communities do not necessarily have official recognition, they can still provide a kind of safety net. As the author writes, "Plans change, relationships fall apart, and shantytown homes play an important role in Peruvians' efforts to pull things back together." A conclusion reflects on the long-term possibilities raised by the book's findings, which leads to an epilogue that reports on the people and programs featured in the book since the conclusion of the author's fieldwork"--

Living on a damaged planet challenges who we are and where we live. This timely anthology calls on twenty eminent humanists and scientists to revitalize curiosity, observation, and transdisciplinary conversation about life on earth. As human-induced environmental change threatens multispecies livability, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet puts forward a bold proposal: entangled histories, situated narratives, and thick descriptions offer urgent “arts of living.” Included are essays by scholars in anthropology, ecology, science studies, art, literature, and bioinformatics who posit critical and creative tools for collaborative survival in a more-than-human Anthropocene. The essays are organized around two key figures that also serve as the publication’s two openings: Ghosts, or landscapes haunted by the violences of modernity; and Monsters, or interspecies and intraspecies sociality. Ghosts and Monsters are tentacular, windy, and arboreal arts that invite readers to encounter ants, lichen, rocks, electrons, flying foxes, salmon, chestnut trees, mud volcanoes, border zones, graves, radioactive waste—in short, the wonders and terrors of an unintended epoch. Contributors: Karen Barad, U of California, Santa Cruz; Kate Brown, U of Maryland, Baltimore; Carla Freccero, U of California, Santa Cruz; Peter Funch, Aarhus U; Scott F. Gilbert, Swarthmore College; Deborah M. Gordon, Stanford U; Donna J. Haraway, U of California, Santa Cruz; Andreas Hejnol, U of Bergen, Norway; Ursula K. Le Guin; Marianne Elisabeth Lien, U of Oslo; Andrew Mathews, U of California, Santa Cruz; Margaret McFall-Ngai, U of Hawaii, Manoa; Ingrid M. Parker, U of California, Santa Cruz; Mary Louise Pratt, NYU; Anne Pringle, U of Wisconsin, Madison; Deborah Bird Rose, U of New South Wales, Sydney; Dorion Sagan; Lesley Stern, U of California, San Diego; Jens-Christian Svenning, Aarhus U.

The text argues that cities are open to many forms of order and disorder both from within the city and outside. They represent cities potentials as well as their problems. It challenges the assumption that cities are threatened by disorder from below and that they might be ruled by 'order' imposed from above.

This is an innovative and original socio-cultural study of the history of electricity during the late Victorian and Edward periods. Gooday shows how technology, authority and gender interacted in pre-World War I Britain. The rapid take-up of electrical light and domestic appliances on both sides of the Atlantic had a wide-ranging effect on consumer habits and the division of labour within the home. Electricity was viewed by non-experts as potential threat to domestic order and welfare. This broadly interdisciplinary study relates to a website developed by the author on the history of electricity.

This book explores the ways in which the study of the domestic and the international, far from being separate spheres, are in fact woven together in multiple ways. The chapters in this volume seek to question this traditional domestic/international binary and approach their entanglement through a range of different empirical settings and methodological approaches. Inspired by a recent turn towards recognising the importance of the home, the intimate, and the everyday in the construction of geopolitical worlds, this book captures a broad range of agents, practices, objects, performativities and discourses that contribute to how geopolitics is rendered familiar, sanitised, embodied and enacted, and the ways in which ‘the home’ and the ‘traditional’ terrain of the geopolitical (the international sphere) are in fact folded into each other in multiple ways. Domesticating Geopolitics will be of great use to students and researchers interested in geography and politics including popular geopolitics and human geography. This book was originally published as a special issue of Geopolitics.

This diverse, global, and interdisciplinary volume explores the existing research, practice, and ethical issues pertinent to the field of human-animal interactions (HAIs), interventions, and anthrozoology, focusing on the perceived physical and mental health benefits to humans and the challenges derived from these relationships. The book begins by exploring the basic theoretical principles of anthrozoology and HAI, such as the evolution and history of the field, the importance of language, the economic costs and current perspectives to physical and mental wellbeing, the origins of domestication of animals, anthropomorphism, and how animals fit into human societies. Chapters then move onto practice, covering topics such as how animals help childhood and adulthood development, pet ownership, disability, the roles of pets for people with psychiatric disorders, the links between animal and domestic abuse, and then more widely into the therapeutic roles of animals, animal-assisted therapies, interactions outside the home, working animals, animals in popular culture, and animals in research, for leisure, and food. Including chapters on a wide range of animals, from domesticated pets to wildlife, this collection examines the benefits yet also reveals the complexity, and often dark side, of human-animal relations. Interweaving accessible commentaries with revealing chapters throughout the text, this collection would be of great interest to students and practitioners in the fields of mental health, psychology, veterinary medicine, zoology, biology, social work, history, and sociology.

Why do America’s cities look the way they do? If we want to know the answer, we should start by looking at our relationship with animals. Americans once lived alongside animals. They raised them, worked them, ate them, and lived off their products. This was true not just in rural areas but also in cities, which were crowded with livestock and beasts of burden. But as urban areas grew in the nineteenth century, these relationships changed. Slaughterhouses, dairies, and hog ranches receded into suburbs and hinterlands. Milk and meat increasingly came from stores, while the family cow and pig gave way to the household pet. This great shift, Andrew Robichaud reveals, transformed people’s relationships with animals and nature and radically altered ideas about what it means to be human. As Animal City illustrates, these transformations in human and animal lives were not inevitable results of population growth but rather followed decades of social and political struggles. City officials sought to control urban animal populations and developed sweeping regulatory powers that ushered in new forms of urban life. Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals worked to enhance certain animals’ moral standing in law and culture, in turn inspiring new child welfare laws and spurring other wide-ranging reforms. The animal city is still with us today. The urban landscapes we inhabit are products of the transformations of the nineteenth century. From urban development to environmental inequality, our cities still bear the scars of the domestication of urban America.

One can rightly say of Peter Sloterdijk that each of his essays and lectures is also an unwritten book. That is why the texts presented here, which sketch a philosophical physiognomy of Martin Heidegger, should also be characterized as a collected renunciation of exhaustiveness. In order to situate Heidegger's thought in the history of ideas and problems, Peter Sloterdijk approaches Heidegger's work with questions such as: If Western philosophy emerged from the spirit of the polis, what are we to make of the philosophical suitability of a man who never made a secret of his stubborn attachment to rural life? Is there a provincial truth of which the cosmopolitan city knows nothing? Is there a truth in country roads and cabins that would be able to undermine the universities with their standardized languages and globally influential discourses? From where does this odd professor speak, when from his professorial chair in Freiburg he claims to inquire into what lies beyond the history of Western metaphysics? Sloterdijk also considers several other crucial twentieth-century thinkers who provide some needed contrast for the philosophical physiognomy of Martin Heidegger. A consideration of Niklas Luhmann as a kind of contemporary version of the Devil's Advocate, a provocative critical interpretation of Theodor Adorno's philosophy that focuses on its theological underpinnings and which also includes reflections on the philosophical significance of hyperbole, and a short sketch of the pessimistic thought of Emil Cioran all round out and deepen Sloterdijk's attempts to think with, against, and beyond Heidegger. Finally, in essays such as "Domestication of Being" and the "Rules for the Human Park," which incited an international controversy around the time of its publication and has been translated afresh for this volume, Sloterdijk develops some of his most intriguing and important ideas on anthropogenesis, humanism, technology, and genetic engineering.

Mobile Selves illuminates how transnational communicative practices and forms of exchange produce new forms of kinship, social relations, and subjectivities for global labor migrants. It shows how migrants create and circulate new portrayals of themselves, which work both to challenge the class and racial biases that they had faced in their home country and to shape how they construct and experience their mobility, and reenvision themselves and their communities in the process. In this engaging volume Ulla D. Berg examines the conditions under which racialized Peruvians of rural and working-class origins leave the central highlands of Peru to migrate to the United States, how they fare, and what constrains their movement and their attempts to maintain meaningful social relations across borders. By exploring the ways in which migration is mediated between the Peruvian Andes and the United States-by documents, money, and images and objects in circulation-this book makes a major contribution to the documentation and theorization of the role of technology and, more broadly, of communicative practices in fostering new forms of migrant sociality and subjectivity. In its focus on the forms of person-hood and belonging that these mediations enable, the volume adds to key anthropological debates about affect, subjectivity, and sociality in today's mobile world. It also makes significant contributions to studies of inequality in Latin America, showcasing the intersection of transnational mobility with structures and processes of exclusion in both national and global contexts.