Timothy Mitchell’s Rule of Experts examines the technopolitics of modernity in Egypt from roughly 1892 when the British invaded to the late 20th century. [...]
26 August, 2021
Timothy Mitchell – Rule of Experts
On Barak – Powering Empire
On Barak’s Powering Empire: How Coal Made the Middle East and Sparked Global Carbonization seeks to “decolonize our world” by demystifying “energy”. He [...]
23 August, 2021
Michitake Aso – Rubber and the Making of Vietnam
Michitake Aso’s Rubber and the Making of Vietnam: An Ecological History, 1897-1975 traces the development of Vietnamese rubber plantations from French [...]
23 August, 2021
Michael K. Bess – Routes of Compromise
Michael K. Bess’s Routes of Compromise: Building Roads and Shaping the Nation in Mexico, 1917-1952 is a comparative history of Nuevo León’s and Veracruz’s [...]
23 August, 2021
Marisa Duarte – Network Sovereignty
Marisa Duarte’s Network Sovereignty: Building the Internet Across Indian Country is something of a hybrid between a historically-contextualized sociology [...]
23 August, 2021
Helen Tilley – Africa as Living Laboratory
Helen Tilley’s Africa as Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870-1950 asks three questions: first, “how did [...]
23 August, 2021
Eden Medina – Beyond Imported Magic
Eden Medina, Ivan da Costa Marques, Christina Holmes, Marcos Cueto and their contributors to their edited volume Beyond Imported Magic: Essays on Science, [...]
22 August, 2021
David Edgerton – The Shock of the Old
In Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 David Edgerton puts forward a new paradigm for the historical study of technology: a [...]
22 August, 2021
Sonia Robles – Mexican Waves
Sonia Robles’s Mexican Waves is the story of the development of the regional radio industry in northern Mexico from the 1930s to the 1950s. It seeks to [...]
21 August, 2021
Suzanne Moon – Technology and Ethical Idealism
Suzanne Moon’s Technology and Ethical Idealism: A History of Development in the Netherlands East Indies examines Dutch development efforts in the Indies [...]
21 August, 2021
William Storey – Guns, Race, and Power in Colonial South Africa
William Storey’s Guns, Race, and Power in Colonial South Africa explores, well, just that. I can’t summarize it any more succinctly than its own title [...]
21 August, 2021
Nick Calluther – The Hungry World
Nick Calluther’s The Hungry World details 70 years of food, agriculture, and ancillary development projects in Mexico, Africa, and, most prominently, Asia. [...]
21 August, 2021
David Biggs – Quagmire
David Biggs’s Quagmire is a politico-environmental history of nation-building in the Mekong delta of southern Vietnam from the precolonial Nguyen [...]
21 August, 2021
Shaylih Muehlmann – Where the River Ends
4 – Combining analytic techniques from linguistic and political anthropology, I examine how local people use symbolic and material tools, including [...]
16 August, 2021
Fabiana Li – Unearthing Conflict
3 – Why was it that, in this so-called mining country, extractive activity ended up at the center of controversy and local resistance? How did water [...]
14 August, 2021
Thomas Miller Klubock – La Frontera – Notes
2-3 – This book brings together the social and environmental histories of the southern frontier territory to examine the origins of Chile’s recent [...]
7 August, 2021
Liza Grandia – Enclosed
FOREWARD X – One of the harder things to include in a historical examination of contemporary conflicts is the tension between divergent renderings [...]
28 July, 2021
Seth Garfield – In Search of the Amazon
INTRO 1 – Yet the Amazon enthralls us through more than its physical wonders. Its power is a social product, forged by people and institutions that [...]
24 July, 2021
Molly Doane – Stealing Shining Rivers
Preface – Why the Environment Is Political Vii – The exhibit condenses landscapes and idealizes their elements by, for example, including live [...]
17 July, 2021
Matthew Vitz – A City on a Lake
INTRODUCTION Mexico City is, indeed, a city facing extraordinary social and environmental predicaments. This book helps explain the origins and evolution [...]
13 July, 2021
Emily Wakild – Revolutionary Parks
1 – Rarely have tropical or postcolonial countries had the ability or the ambition to protect nature on a national scale. Why did Mexico? This book [...]
29 June, 2021
The Emergence of Climate History
In my Master’s thesis I snootily described ecosystems as “contingent hybridities of elaborate interdependencies subject to chaotic combinatorics,” which [...]
19 August, 2019
David Edgerton – The Shock of the Old
43 – Creole Technologies – Global Southern adaptations to or modifications of northern-invented technologies – corrugated metal roofing, [...]
2 June, 2019
“Such critiques remain unthinkable because of the real/constructed divide (sometimes formulated as a division between nature and culture), in which many map the knowledge of the real onto the domain of science (equating the constructed with the cultural).” Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 22.
2 April, 2018
Frank C. Miller – Cultural change as Decision-Making: A Tzotzil Example
Frank C. Miller, “Cultural change as Decision-Making: A Tzotzil Example,” Ethnology 4, No. 1 (Jan. 1965), 53-65. Notes 53 – University of [...]
20 March, 2018
Frank Cancian – Stratification and Risk-Taking: A Theory Tested on Agricultural Innovation
Frank Cancian, “Stratification and Risk-Taking: A Theory Tested on Agricultural Innovation,” American Sociological Review 32, No. 6 (Dec. [...]
20 March, 2018
George M. Foster – Limited Good or Limited Goods: Observations on Acheson
George M. Foster, “Limited Good or Limited Goods: Observations on Acheson,” American Anthropologist 76, No. 1 (Mar. 1974), 53-57. Notes 53 [...]
20 March, 2018
James M. Acheson – New Directions in Economic Anthropology? A Comment on Kunkel
James M. Acheson, “New Directions in Economic Anthropology? A Comment on Kunkel,” American Anthropologist 78, no. 2 (Jun. 1976), 331-335. Notes [...]
20 March, 2018
John H. Kunkel – Opportunity, Economics, and Behavior: A Comment on Acheson and Foster
John H. Kunkel, “Opportunity, Economics, and Behavior: A Comment on Acheson and Foster,” American Anthropologist 78, no. 2 (Jun. 1976), [...]
19 March, 2018
James M. Acheson – Limited Good or Limited Goods? Response to Economic Opportunity in a Tarascan Pueblo
James M. Acheson, “Limited Good or Limited Goods? Response to Economic Opportunity in a Tarascan Pueblo,” American Anthropologist 74, no. 5 [...]
19 March, 2018
David L. Clawson – Intravillage Wealth and Peasant Agricultural Innovation
David L. Clawson, “Intravillage Wealth and Peasant Agricultural Innovation,” The Journal of Developing Areas 12, no. 3 (Apr. 1978), 323-336. [...]
19 March, 2018
Susan W. Almy – Anthropologists and Development Agencies
Susan W. Almy, “Anthropologists and Development Agencies,”American Anthropologist 79, no. 2 (Jun. 1977), 280-292. Notes 280 – Has worked [...]
19 March, 2018
Larissa Lomnitz – Anthropology and Development in Latin America
Larissa Lomnitz, “Anthropology and Development in Latin America,” Human Organization 38, no. 3 (Fall 1979), 313-317. A Latin American [...]
16 March, 2018
Robert Evenson – The ‘Green Revolution’ in Recent Development Experience
Robert Evenson, “The ‘Green Revolution’ in Recent Development Experience,” American Journal of Agricultural Economics 56, no. 2 [...]
16 March, 2018
Geo-Climate Region Research in Cereal Grain Production
15 March, 2018
E. Walter Coward and Wayne A. Schutjer – The Green Revolution: Initiating and Sustaining Change
E. Walter Coward and Wayne A. Schutjer, “The Green Revolution: Initiating and Sustaining Change,” Civilisations 20, no. 4 (1970), 473-484. [...]
15 March, 2018
Billie R. DeWalt – Inequalities in Wealth, Adoption of Technology, and Production in a Mexican Ejido
Billie R. DeWalt, “Inequalities in Wealth, Adoption of Technology, and Production in a Mexican Ejido,” American Ethnologist 2, no. 1 (Feb. [...]
14 March, 2018
Robert D. Stevens – Three Rural Development Models for Small-Farm Agricultural Areas in Low-Income Nations
Robert D. Stevens, “Three Rural Development Models for Small-Farm Agricultural Areas in Low-Income Nations,” The Journal of Developing Areas 8, [...]
12 March, 2018
Christina H. Gladwin – Cognitive Strategies and Adoption Decisions: A Case Study of Nonadoption of an Agronomic Recommendation
Christina H. Gladwin, “Cognitive Strategies and Adoption Decisions: A Case Study of Nonadoption of an Agronomic Recommendation,” Economic [...]
12 March, 2018
Christina H. Gladwin – Production Functions and Decision Models: Complementary Models
Christina H. Gladwin, “Production Functions and Decision Models: Complementary Models,” American Ethnologist 6, no. 4 (Nov. 1979), 653-674. [...]
12 March, 2018
Common criticisms against the Green Revolution programs in Mexico include: it was initially designed to be successful for farmers with irrigation or who could afford to implement irrigation infrastructure (excluding rain-fed farms, correlates to socioeconomic class) it is only successful for farmers who can get access to credit (correlates to socioeconomic class) it is only […]
11 March, 2018
Theodore W. Schultz – Knowledge, Agriculture and Welfare
Theodore W. Schultz, “Knowledge, Agriculture and Welfare,” Science Studies 2, no. 4 (Oct. 1972), 361-368. Notes 361-2 – “The main reasons [...]
11 March, 2018
Rodolfo Stavenhagen – Decolonializing Applied Social Sciences
Rodolfo Stavenhagen, “Decolonializing Applied Social Sciences,” Human Organization 30, no. 4 (Winter 1971), 333-344. Summary and description of [...]
10 March, 2018
Frank C. Miller – Knowledge and Power: Anthropology, Policy Research, and the Green Revolution
Frank C. Miller, “Knowledge and Power: Anthropology, Policy Research, and the Green Revolution,” American Ethnologist 4, no. 1 (Feb. 1977), [...]
9 March, 2018
Edgardo Moscardi and Alain de Janvry – Attitudes Toward Risk among Peasants: An Econometric Approach
Edgardo Moscardi and Alain de Janvry, “Attitudes Toward Risk among Peasants: An Econometric Approach,” American Journal of Agricultural [...]
8 March, 2018
Christina H. Gladwin – A View of the Plan Puebla: An Application of Hierarchical Decision Models
Christina H. Gladwin, “A View of the Plan Puebla: An Application of Hierarchical Decision Models,” American Journal of Agricultural Economics 58, no. 5 [...]
8 March, 2018
Billie R. DeWalt – Appropriate Technology in Rural Mexico: Antecedents and Consequences of an Indigenous Peasant Innovation
Billie R. DeWalt, “Appropriate Technology in Rural Mexico: Antecedents and Consequences of an Indigenous Peasant Innovation,” Technology and [...]
8 March, 2018
