By Jennifer Cearns and Charles Beach

Contraband Cultures presents narratives, representations, practices and imaginaries of smuggling and extra-legal or informal circulation practices, across and between the Latin American region (including the Caribbean) and its diasporas. Countering a fetishizing and hegemonic imaginary (typically stemming from the Global North) of smuggling activity in Latin America as chaotic, lawless, violent and somehow ‘exotic’, this book reframes such activities through the lenses of kinship, political movements, economic exchange and resistance to capitalist state hegemony. The volume comprises a broad range of chapters from scholars across the social sciences and humanities, using various methodological techniques, theoretical traditions and analytic approaches to explore the efficacy and valence of ‘smuggling’ or ‘contraband’ as a lens onto modes of personhood, materiality, statehood and political (dis)connection across Latin America. This material is presented through a combination of historic documentation and contemporary ethnographic research across the region to highlight the genesis and development of these cultural practices whilst grounding them in the capitalist and colonial refashioning of the entire region from the sixteenth century to the present day.

London: UCL Press, 2024. 294p.

By Fernando Forattini

This brief article intends to demonstrate some of the problems with the main theories on corruption and introduce the reader to the new field of Anthropology of Corruption, a type of research that tries to understand one of the most pressing issues nowadays through a nonbinary point of view, but trying to understand the root of corruption, and its multifaceted characteristic, especially through its cultural aspect; and why it is, contemporarily, the most effective political-economic discourse – most at the times used in a populistic fashion, at the expense of democratic institutions. Therefore, we will briefly analyze the three main theoretical strands on corruption and point at some of its faults; then indicate to the reader what are the main goals Anthropology of Corruption, and what questions it seeks to answer; and, finally, the political impact that corruption discourses have on society, and its perils when instrumentalized in populistic discourses.

Edited by Philip C. Parnell and Stephanie C. Kane

The changes that are engulfing the world today - the fall of nation-states and dictatorships, migrations and border crossings, revolution, democratization, and the international spread of capital - call for new approaches to the subject of crime. Anthropologists engage a variety of methods to answer that call in Crime's Power . Their view of crime extends into the intimacies of everyday life as war transforms personal identities, the violence of a serial killer inhabits paintings, and as the feel of imprisonment reveals society's potentials. Moving beyond the fixities of law, this book explores the nature of crime as an expression of power across the spectrum of human differences.

New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. 310p.

Edited by Zeb Tortorici and Neil L. Whitehead.

Ethnopornography collects essays that both develop and critique the concept that gives the book its name. Ethnopornography, a term first coined by British anthropologist Walter Roth in the late nineteenth century, refers to the often eroticized observation—for supposedly scientific or academic purposes—of those deemed “other” by the observer. In Roth’s case, he was concerned that the descriptions and images he recorded of the bodily and sexual practices of the Aboriginal people he studied were inappropriate for lay readers who might find them vulgar—or worse, titillating. The editors of this collection focus on what it is that creates the slippage between the pornographic and the scientific. In particular, they attend to the importance of race within the colonially created and maintained worlds of both research—ethnography in particular—and pornography.

Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2020. 281p.