"With this book, anthropology takes its place in the world: breaking innovative ground, creating new sensibilities, offering academic inspiration to a crisis."--Carolyn Nordstrom, professor of anthropology, University of Notre Dame "Engaged Observer includes rich ethnographic insights into the personal and social aspects of suffering and represents a significant contribution to debates on anthropological ethics and the place of advocacy in scholarship."--Richard A. Wilson, author of The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa "This engaging and compelling volume uses a wide range...

Strange Trade tells the compelling stories of Mary, a Liberian drug courier with a college education, and Pauline, a Ugandan wife, mother, and drug cartel boss. A leading expert on women and organized crime, Asale Angel-Ajani spent years interviewing these women in Italy's notorious Rebibbia Prisonand gained unprecedented access into the narcotics trade. Herself the daughter of a drug trafficker, Angel-Ajani brings a wrenching, deeply personal perspective to the account of these women's lives, and offers a nuanced understanding of the global context within which African women are...