Based on author T.W. Ward's eight and a half years in Los Angeles conducting participant observation with MS-13, Gangsters Without Borders: An Ethnography of a Salvadoran Street Gang takes an inside look at gang life in the United States and in a global context.

Taking us through their journey from their homeland in El Salvador to the mean streets of Los Angeles, Gangsters Without Borders offers a perspective from the point of view of the hard-core members who live this hard, fast, and dangerous life.

A powerful and engaging overview of gang dynamics, Gangsters...

Based on author Bonnie L. Hewlett's ten years of field experience in the Central African Republic, Listen, Here Is a Story: Ethnographic Life Narratives from Aka and Ngandu Women of the Congo Basin offers a fascinating glimpse into the lives of contemporary African women in their own words.
Rendered here are the experiences of four women who Hewlett depicts in their homes, fields, and the forest. The women vividly recall memories, childhood games, dances, folk tales, songs, and drawings from throughout their lives and provide insights and anecdotes from their experiences as children,...

Sacred Rice explores the cultural intricacies through which Jola farmers in West Africa are responding to their environmental and economic conditions given the centrality of a crop--rice--that is the lynchpin for their economic, social, religious, and political worlds.

Based on more than ten years of author Joanna Davidson's ethnographic and historical research on rural Guinea-Bissau, this book looks at the relationship among people, plants, and identity as it explores how a society comes to define itself through the production, consumption, and reverence of rice. It is a...

Based on years of fieldwork, this ethnography of the Bolivian Aymara trading system and its networks and economic strategies examines one of the most up-and-coming forms of indigenous entrepreneurship on the American continent, in a region where the indigenous population is still stigmatized for being associated with poverty and backward ways. In doing so, it illuminates a critical dynamic of globalization that is taking place behind the scenes. By analyzing Aymara economic institutions and networks and their concepts and practices of business management, The Native World-System describes a...

How do media professionals handle the risks of film and television production given market uncertainties, fears of industrial decline, and increasing job insecurity? What does the work of creating spectacle on-screen amid volatile conditions off-screen mean to them? In Haunted: An Ethnography of the Hollywood and Hong Kong Media Industries, Sylvia J. Martin explores these questions about members of the highly commercial film and television industries of Hollywood and Hong Kong (the latter often referred to as the "Hollywood of the East"). Drawing on extensive multi-sited...