Ethnography in Unstable Places

“While the essays present widely different interpretations of and encounters with instability and crisis, together they form a thought-provoking and richly detailed group of essays that address some of the most pressing issues in anthropology today.” - Jennifer Shannon, Political and Legal Anthropology Review

"[A] fine volume. . . . [T]his books is well worth reading. . . ." - David Eaton , Journal of Colonialism & Colonial History

"[A] pathbreaking collection of essays. . . . One of this volume's greatest strengths is its articulation of a challenge to contemporary ethnography....[T]his is a highly cohesive volume that successfully demonstrates the themes and approaches it explores and promotes. . . . [E]xcellent introductory and concluding pieces by the volume's editors. . . . This volume offers valuable material for teaching legal anthropology, culture, and political economy, and any course dealing with societies in transition. It is surely destined to become an important reference for future work on the ethnography of transnationalism, globalization, and the role of the state in social life." - Susan Cook , American Ethnologist

“Ethnography in Unstable Places is a profound exercise in ethnographic reflexivity. It seeks to consider new possibilities, new challenges, new horizons—at once conceptual, political, ethical—for an old anthropological method by taking it precisely where it was not designed to go: into everyday worlds radically transformed by hitherto unimagined
social conditions, unimaginable political circumstances, altered states, economies, subjectivities. Expansive in their scope, provocative in their theoretical implications, even poetic in their treatment of human lives, the essays in this volume show ‘where past has gone, where the future will come from’;the past and future, that is, of both anthropology and the worlds with which it concerns itself.” - John Comaroff, University of Chicago

“Beyond being topical, this groundbreaking collection represents precisely the kind of inquiry that contemporary anthropology should be dedicating itself to—one brave enough to abide, ethnographically and theoretically, in the interstices of knowledge-based and experiential models, in the gaps between individual and collective agency, in realms of historical and cultural contingency.” - Debbora Battaglia, Mount Holyoke College