Events are "generative moments" in at least three senses: events are created by and condense larger-scale social structures; as moments, they spark and give rise to new social processes; in themselves, events may also serve to analyze social situations and relationships. Based on ethnographic studies from around the world-varying from rituals and meetings over protests and conflicts to natural disasters and management-this volume analyzes generative moments through events that hold the key to understanding larger social situations. These events-including the Ashura ritual in Bahrain, social cleavages in South Africa, a Buddhist cave in Nepal, drought in Burkina Faso, an earthquake in Pakistan, the cartoon crisis in Denmark, corporate management at Bang & Olufsen, protest meetings in Europe, and flooding and urban citizenship in Mozambique-are not simply destructive disasters, crises, and conflicts, but also generative and constitutive of the social.

Examining how people alter or customize various dimensions of their temporal experience, this volume discovers how we resist external sources of temporal constraint or structure. These ethnographic studies are international in scope and look at many different countries and continents. They come to the overall conclusion that people construct their own circumstances with the intention to modify their experience of time.

Expanding our understanding of contagion beyond the typical notions of infection and pandemics, this book widens the field to include the concept of biosocial epidemics. The chapters propose varied and detailed answers to questions about epidemics and their contagious potential for specific infections and non-infectious conditions. Together they explore how inseparable social and biological processes configure co-existing influences, which create epidemics, and in doing so stress the role of social inequality in these processes. The authors compellingly show that epidemics do not spread evenly in populations or through simple coincidental biological contagion: they are biosocially structured and selective, and happen under specific economic, political and environmental conditions. This volume illustrates that an understanding of biosocial factors is vital for ensuring effective strategies for the containment of epidemics.

Although violent conflict has declined in northern Uganda, tensions and mistrust concerning land have increased. Residents try to deal with acquisitions by investors and exclusions from forests and wildlife reserves. Land wrangles among neighbours and relatives are widespread. The growing commodification of land challenges ideals of entrustment for future generations. Using extended case studies, collaborating researchers analyze the principles and practices that shape access to land. Contributors examine the multiplicity of land claims, the nature of transactions and the management of conflicts. They show how access to land is governed through intimate relations of gender, generation and belonging.

A volume in Education Policy in Practice: Critical Cultural Studies Series Editors Bradley A. U. Levinson, and Margaret Sutton, Indiana University Hopes in Friction offers a vivid portrait of life and the implementation of Universal Primary Education in Eastern Uganda, based on longterm fieldwork following a group of children as they grow up. The book considers how the actions and hopes of these children and families, to attain what they perceive as 'a good life', are crosscut by political aspirations and projects of schooling and health education.When hopes are in friction inspiration as well as disappointment occur. Policy makers in Uganda and in international organisations expect health improvements as one of the bonuses of education programs. Families in Eastern Uganda also hope for and experience health - in the local sense of a good life - as part of schooling. Lotte Meinert explores the taken for granted effect of schooling on health and focuses a careful eye on how boys and girls appropriate and negotiate ideas and moralities about health in the context of what is possible ethically, materially and experientially. Endorsement: Hope in Friction gives us first-hand insight into the aspirations and ideals of Ugandan schoolchildren. Meinert shows us how local communities shape and reshape health education policies. Like two sticks rubbed together, top-down programs and bottom-up perceptions of wellbeing grate to produce sparks of hope. This work makes an important contribution to a growing literature on schooling in contemporary Africa. [Amy Stambach, author of Lessons from Mount Kilimanjaro: Schooling, Community, and Gender in east Africa] Amy Stambach, University of Wisconsin-Madison What do we learn when we go to school? Among other things, Lotte Meinert reminds us, children learn the bodily techniques of a hierarchical modernity: standing in lines, singing during parades, bending to be caned, sitting at desks. Within this frame, formal abstractions about health care in the eastern Ugandan primary school curriculum are not translated into domestic practice. Yet this lively and insightful book holds further surprises. School children do use their education-for example, to mediate for their parents with disrespectful health professionals. Hopes in Friction exemplifies the power of the anthropological gaze to move us outside the narrow confines of educational policy debates, allowing us to re-examine both the dead-ends and promises of schooling. Anna Tsing, University of California, Santa Cruz.

Imagistic Care explores ethnographically how images function in our concepts, our writing, our fieldwork, and our lives. With contributions from anthropologists, philosophers and an artist, the volume asks: How can imagistic inquiries help us understand the complex entanglements of self and other, dependence and independency, frailty and charisma, notions of good and bad aging, and norms and practices of care in old age? And how can imagistic inquiries offer grounds for critique? Cutting between ethnography, phenomenology and art, this volume offers a powerful contribution to understandings of growing old. The images created in words and drawings are used to complicate rather than simplify the world. The contributors advance an understanding of care, and of aging itself, marked by alterity, spectral presences and uncertainty. Contributors: Rasmus Dyring, Harmandeep Kaur Gill, Lone Gron, Maria Louw, Cheryl Mattingly, Lotte Meinert, Maria Speyer, Helle S. Wentzer, Susan Reynolds Whyte

Examining how people alter or customize various dimensions of their temporal experience, this volume discovers how we resist external sources of temporal constraint or structure. These ethnographic studies are international in scope and look at many different countries and continents. They come to the overall conclusion that people construct their own circumstances with the intention to modify their experience of time.

Elusive Adulthoods examines why, within the past decade, complaints about an inability to achieve adulthood have been heard around the world. By exploring the changing meaning of adulthood in Botswana, China, Sudan, Papua New Guinea, Russia, Sri Lanka, Uganda, and the United States, contributors to this volume pose the problem of "What is adulthood?" and examine how the field of anthropology has come to overlook this meaningful stage in its studies. Through these case studies we discover different means of recognizing the achievement of adulthood, such as through negotiated relationships with others, including grown children, and as a form of upward class mobility. We also encounter the difficulties that come from a sense of having missed full adulthood, instead jumping directly into old age in the course of rapid social change, or a reluctance to embrace the stability of adulthood and necessary subordination to job and family. In all cases, the contributors demonstrate how changing political and economic factors form the background for generational experience and understanding of adulthood, which is a major focus of concern for people around the globe as they negotiate changing ways of living.

Elusive Adulthoods examines why, within the past decade, complaints about an inability to achieve adulthood have been heard around the world. By exploring the changing meaning of adulthood in Botswana, China, Sudan, Papua New Guinea, Russia, Sri Lanka, Uganda, and the United States, contributors to this volume pose the problem of "What is adulthood?" and examine how the field of anthropology has come to overlook this meaningful stage in its studies. Through these case studies we discover different means of recognizing the achievement of adulthood, such as through negotiated relationships with others, including grown children, and as a form of upward class mobility. We also encounter the difficulties that come from a sense of having missed full adulthood, instead jumping directly into old age in the course of rapid social change, or a reluctance to embrace the stability of adulthood and necessary subordination to job and family. In all cases, the contributors demonstrate how changing political and economic factors form the background for generational experience and understanding of adulthood, which is a major focus of concern for people around the globe as they negotiate changing ways of living.

As we experience and manipulate time-be it as boredom or impatience-it becomes an object: something materialized and social, something that affects perception, or something that may motivate reconsideration and change. The editors and contributors to this important new book, Ethnographies of Youth and Temporality, have provided a diverse collection of ethnographic studies and theoretical explorations of youth experiencing time in a variety of contemporary socio-cultural settings. The essays in this volume focus on time as an external and often troubling factor in young people's lives, and shows how emotional unrest and violence but also creativity and hope are responses to troubling times. The chapters discuss notions of time and its and its "objectification" in diverse locales including the Georgian Republic, Brazil, Denmark and Uganda. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, the essays in Ethnographies of Youth and Temporality use youth as a prism to understand time and its subjective experience. In the series Global Youth, edited by Craig Jeffrey and Jane Dyson

Imagistic Care explores ethnographically how images function in our concepts, our writing, our fieldwork, and our lives. With contributions from anthropologists, philosophers and an artist, the volume asks: How can imagistic inquiries help us understand the complex entanglements of self and other, dependence and independency, frailty and charisma, notions of good and bad aging, and norms and practices of care in old age? And how can imagistic inquiries offer grounds for critique? Cutting between ethnography, phenomenology and art, this volume offers a powerful contribution to understandings of growing old. The images created in words and drawings are used to complicate rather than simplify the world. The contributors advance an understanding of care, and of aging itself, marked by alterity, spectral presences and uncertainty. Contributors: Rasmus Dyring, Harmandeep Kaur Gill, Lone Grøn, Maria Louw, Cheryl Mattingly, Lotte Meinert, Maria Speyer, Helle S. Wentzer, Susan Reynolds Whyte

A volume in Education Policy in Practice: Critical Cultural Studies Series Editors Bradley A. U. Levinson, and Margaret Sutton, Indiana University Hopes in Friction offers a vivid portrait of life and the implementation of Universal Primary Education in Eastern Uganda, based on longterm fieldwork following a group of children as they grow up. The book considers how the actions and hopes of these children and families, to attain what they perceive as 'a good life', are crosscut by political aspirations and projects of schooling and health education.When hopes are in friction inspiration as well as disappointment occur. Policy makers in Uganda and in international organisations expect health improvements as one of the bonuses of education programs. Families in Eastern Uganda also hope for and experience health - in the local sense of a good life - as part of schooling. Lotte Meinert explores the taken for granted effect of schooling on health and focuses a careful eye on how boys and girls appropriate and negotiate ideas and moralities about health in the context of what is possible ethically, materially and experientially. Endorsement: Hope in Friction gives us first-hand insight into the aspirations and ideals of Ugandan schoolchildren. Meinert shows us how local communities shape and reshape health education policies. Like two sticks rubbed together, top-down programs and bottom-up perceptions of wellbeing grate to produce sparks of hope. This work makes an important contribution to a growing literature on schooling in contemporary Africa. [Amy Stambach, author of Lessons from Mount Kilimanjaro: Schooling, Community, and Gender in east Africa] Amy Stambach, University of Wisconsin-Madison What do we learn when we go to school? Among other things, Lotte Meinert reminds us, children learn the bodily techniques of a hierarchical modernity: standing in lines, singing during parades, bending to be caned, sitting at desks. Within this frame, formal abstractions about health care in the eastern Ugandan primary school curriculum are not translated into domestic practice. Yet this lively and insightful book holds further surprises. School children do use their education-for example, to mediate for their parents with disrespectful health professionals. Hopes in Friction exemplifies the power of the anthropological gaze to move us outside the narrow confines of educational policy debates, allowing us to re-examine both the dead-ends and promises of schooling. Anna Tsing, University of California, Santa Cruz.