# One hundred indispensable works for thinking in our times

Luisa Steur, Nicolas Jaoul

► To cite this version:

Luisa Steur, Nicolas Jaoul. One hundred indispensable works for thinking in our times. Focaal - Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, 2024, 2024 (100), pp.97-126. 10.3167/fcl.2024.1000108. hal-04871405

HAL Id: hal-04871405

https://hal.science/hal-04871405v1

Submitted on 7 Jan 2025

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access
archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-
entific research documents, whether they are pub-
lished or not. The documents may come from
teaching and research institutions in France or
abroad, or from public or private research centers.

L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est
destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents
scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non,
émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de
recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires
publics ou privés.

<figure><img src="image_1.png" /></figure>

Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
# The Focaal 100

## One hundred indispensable works for thinking in our times

The Editors

To suggest that a new humility is necessary for the Left is to insist that our texts are indispensable but not sacred.

—China Miéville, *A Spectre, Haunting*

On the occasion of the one hundredth issue of *Focaal—Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology* the editors have created the Focaal 100, a list of one hundred works that we consider indispensable. True to the epigraphic quote, we do not consider these to be sacred texts. Rather, each of us chose several that are signposts for how to think about the ways that history, power, and social relations at all scales shape the places we study, the lives that are lived there, and the paths for transformation. Not sacred texts but certainly valuable ones. We would expect that editors one hundred issues from now would select different ones, useful for the struggles and conditions they will confront in that future.

The hundred entries are not meant as conventional reviews. These are very brief (150 words) texts that are about conveying some key insights these works generated, and the inspiration they sparked for novel or deepened research directions, methodological experimentation, theoretization, or engaged scholarship. In an academic era of “publish or perish,” time

for reading monographs often suffers from the pressure to write, and reading can become very narrowly focused. We hope these short texts are an invitation to stroll off your own beaten path and turn to works from the Focaal 100 that might offer new connections and conversations with the reader's own research endeavors.

The Focaal 100 is a collective work in line with *Focaal's* collective approach to editing the journal. The list of entries emerged almost spontaneously, with minimal coordination to prevent overlap and caveats, and blurb authors are mentioned in square brackets behind each entry. The collection includes classic studies from some decades ago, but also more recent “classics,” as well as lesser-known treasures that deserve attention.

The list goes beyond scholarly anthropological work to include also a couple of novels, documentaries, and movies that are anthropological and/or critical in spirit. In line with *Focaal's* nature, the list offers a rich representation of studies on accumulation, capitalism, empire, and dying colonialism, the construction of race and racial inequality, gendered inequality, worker movements, actually existing socialism, revolts, and ecological conflicts, in all their mutual imbrications and with a firm historical grounding and genuine global outlook.

<figure><img src="image_2.png" /></figure>
Our hope and purpose in compiling this list, marking *Focaal*'s issue 100, is that it engages the deeply problematic global capitalist relations that continue to require our study more urgently than ever.

1. Allen, John, Doreen B. Massey, and Allan Cochrane, with Julie Charlesworth, Gill Court, Nick Henry, and Phil Sarre. 1998. *Rethinking the region*. Routledge.
[Alina-Sandra Cucu]

Written by a group of leftist radical human geographers, *Rethinking the region* should be required reading in any ethnography class. At its time, it completely changed the way in which we understand space and place, as well as how we analyze economic growth and “success.” While most critics of the deregulation turn in the 1980s focus on the impact neoliberal policies had on the most destitute parts of the world, this is an analysis of the inherently uneven, unequal, and classed character of neoliberalism in one of its most successful strongholds: England’s south-east. Instead of taking for granted the existence of the south-east as a growth region, the authors reconstitute it as an outcome of a historically contingent intersection between dynamics, mechanism, and axes of growth. The region comes thus not at the beginning but at the end of a process of understanding spatialized social relations and narratives about them.

2. Armstrong, Jesse. 2018–2023. *Succession*. HBO series. [Anne-Christine Trémon]

No spoiler alert, only the subliminal message will be revealed . . . This series is about those who could be called “billionaire queens” (in response to “welfare queens”). It is a sickening depiction of the characters’ struggle to inherit their father’s waning empire—and the managers’ battle to keep the golden parachutes they hope for in reward for constant humiliation. They all are variously classist, racist, sexist, hopelessly egocentric, and arrogant. For anthropologists, it offers textbook scenes of the entanglements of sentiment and interest, worth and value, agency

and constraint. Most important and structuring
is the mounting populism and the descent into
fascism that the Roy family gambles with. Reas-
suringly, despite it all, there is no place for mor-
als: no one deserves to inherit the company, and
anyway, no one believes in what it produces.
The subliminal message: take down sharehold-
ing capitalism, and give companies back to the
workers.

3. Arrighi, Giovanni. 1994. *The long twentieth century: Money, power and the origins of our times*. Verso. [Patrick Neveling]

Ever wondered why you are so bored with the
United States? This book offers a compelling an-
swer. Arrighi's masterpiece vivisects hegemonic
transitions in the world system over a series of
long centuries, controlled in sequence by Ital-
ian city-states, Dutch city-states squeezed into
an early nation-state, the British Empire, and
finally the United States. Not only the quality
of cuisines spiraled downward from *haute* to
McDonald's in hegemonic succession. Arrighi
shows that hegemonic transition was overdue
in the 1980s already. Forty years later we are still
waiting, yet the US-hegemon seems too thick to
notice they have overstayed their welcome. *The
long twentieth century* was published in 1994
at the vertex of historical materialist critiques
of capitalism's fateful longue durée. With the
1990s postmodernist sofa surfers who crashed
the wave of anti-capitalist academic analysis
now out of fashion, Arrighi is crucial again.

4. Asad, Talal, ed. 1995. *Anthropology and the colonial encounter*. Rowman & Littlefield. [Geoff Aung]

Asad’s landmark edited volume rewards reread-
ing many decades later. By the early 1970s, it
was not new to suggest anthropology had been
(or even remained) a tool of colonial rule. What
was new was Asad’s insistence—in his intro-
duction and his own chapter—that anthropol-
ogy’s “ideological” character was itself formed
by colonialism and its power relations (that, as
he put it, “anthropology does not only appre-
hend the world in which it is located, but that the world also determines how it will apprehend it”). Decisively locating anthropological knowledge within, not beyond, colonialism’s historical and ideological relations of power, Asad laid the foundations for the later postcolonial critique of the knowledge-power relation. At the same time, he presciently asked what must become of anthropology in a world defined by decolonization. Anthropology, quite simply, has never been the same.

5. Atkins, Keletso E. 1993. *The moon is dead! Give us our money!: The cultural origins of an African work ethic, Natal, South Africa, 1843–1900*. Heinemann/James Currey. [Christopher Krupa]

The big question undergirding Atkins's cultural history of colonial Natal is how a fledgling colony secures the labor its settler population expects to work its plantations, farms, mines, ports, and homes when it cannot rely on slavery, debt bondage, land seizure, etc. to round up that labor. *The moon is dead* is, in part, an ethnographic history of colonial hubris, a chronicle of how British settlers' blindness to the cultural peculiarity of capitalist rationality and arrogant labor moralizations made them completely unable to resolve colonial Natal's chronic labor problem. Northern Nguni speakers had their own practical and theoretical relations to work—rooted in sophisticated conceptions of time, rigid age-set distinctions, enduring guild specializations, etc.—that gave them latitude in deciding when and how their labor-power would be sold and conviction in their selective rejections of colonial philanthropy and law. This is a marvelous and detailed African-centered exposé of the routine and consequential frustrations of colonial accumulation.

6. Banarji, Jairus. 2010. *Theory as history: Essays on modes of production and exploitation*. Brill. [Alina-Sandra Cucu]

A synthesis of Jairus Banarji’s lifelong work on modes of production, the book calls for

“vigorous iconoclasm” and for a renewal of historical materialism. It moves with ease between historical cases covering a period ranging from late antiquity in the Roman Empire to nineteenth-century industrial capitalism. This tour de force is employed against what Banarji calls “bad theory,” the replacement of rigorous historical research with theoretical strings of abstractions (an explicit attack against Perry Anderson). Banarji strips “modes of production” of any trace of evolutionism and advocates for complex historical trajectories in which totalities of forces and relations of production get articulated (and dissolve) by subsuming actually existing local forms and class dynamics. The book is a crucial complement to the thinking on modes of production coming from historical anthropologists like William Roseberry and Eric Wolf.

7. Besky, Sarah. 2014. *The Darjeeling distinction: Labor and justice on fair-trade tea plantations in India*. University of California Press. [Charlotte Bruckermann]

“Something is better than nothing,” is a phrase often applied to fair trade tea labels. Undermining such claims, Besky demonstrates that in seeking justice within the market, we do not fill a void of “nothing” but substitute one “something” for another. And in this “market for justice,” certain ideas dominate others. Her ethnography of Darjeeling tea plantations examines how workers view competing justice claims in three movements. The Ghorkaland movement champions Indian Nepali laborers’ sovereignty without critiquing plantation business models. Darjeeling tea’s luxury status and WTO Geographical Indication obscure environmental and social harms in producing the “champagne of teas.” Fair trade labels, despite promising solidarity, enrich owners over workers. These movements fail to enact substantial change because they try to improve plantation life without addressing its colonial legacies and capitalist continuities. Besky thereby reminds us that solutions to injustice require disman-
tling systems of exploitation and extraction, not
tweaking markets.

8. Bing, Wang. 2002. *Tie Xi Qu* [West of the tracks]. [Documentary; Geoff Aung]

Released in 2002, Wang Bing's monumental trilogy tracks the decline of heavy industry in China's northeast in the 1990s. Over more than nine hours, the first part follows groups of workers in three state-run factories; the second, the family lives of workers in a state housing block; and the third, a father and son who survive by scavenging railway parts to resell. Although it can feel like Wang's focus is the social worlds of Chinese factory workers, Wang has said his subject is the factory itself and the production process more broadly—in which, no doubt, workers appear as mere appendages of machines (in Marx's memorable phrasing). More specifically, however, Wang is also capturing the passing of a historical moment that was long integral to Third World politics: the pursuit of socialist construction through state-backed industrialization. (The factories of Tiexi, Wang once said, “have an attractive force like that of a person's past ideals.”) If that historical project is over, what do Third World socialist futures look like now? This is the difficult question Wang leaves for us. Decades later, it is one that many of us continue to grapple with.

9. Blok, Anton. 1988. *Mafia of a Sicilian village, 1860–1960*. Waveland Press. [Mathijs Pelkmans]

Unusual for anthropological works, *The Mafia of a Sicilian village* features actual years in its title, thus revealing its ambition to explain the Mafia as a historical phenomenon. Based on meticulous documentation, Blok traces how land shortages, the decline of the *latifondo*, the unification of Italy, and the extension of the state system produced a fertile environment for “violent peasant entrepreneurs,” who operated as true brokers connecting yet keeping apart peasants, landowners, the urban middle class, and state representatives. By attaching his findings

to an analytical framework indebted to Norbert Elias and Eric Wolf, the book shows how local mafia activity and broader political economic processes interlocked to produce a forward momentum that explains the rise and eventual decline of the Sicilian mafia. And yet, surface transformation might coexist with deeper continuation, or as Blok puts it in the epilogue: “Before it was mafia; today it is politics” (1988: 213).

10. Breman, Jan. 2013. *At work in the informal economy of India*. Oxford University Press. [Stephen Campbell]

Jan Breman has since the 1970s produced a prodigious body of scholarship on low-waged labor in Asia. *At work in the informal economy of India* provides a restatement of Breman's key interventions on informal labor and serves as a useful entry point for students wishing to engage the author's extensive body of work. Of especial importance is Breman's critique of the formal-informal dichotomy. Informal labor, Breman argues, denotes not a distinct economic “sector,” nor is it “outside” of formal capitalist production. Informal labor is instead thoroughly imbricated in formal capitalist processes, such as where registered companies disregard labor laws, rendering their employees informal in practice, or outsource parts of the production process to “self-employed” workers not covered by labor protection legislation.

11. Burawoy, Michael. 2009. *The extended case method: Four countries, four decades, four great transformations, and one theoretical tradition*. University of California Press. [Don Kalb]

In *The extended case method*, Michael Burawoy crisply, bluntly, and beautifully looks back at his intellectual and academic trajectory, explaining why he felt he had to become the sparkling provocateur in the ethnographic social sciences that we know him for, what sorts of methodological positions this required, and to which sequence of theoretical notions his “global ethnography” became wedded. Set on
15. Césaire, Aimé. (1950) 2001. "Discourse on colonialism." *Monthly Review Press*. [Stephen Campbell]

Aimé Césaire published *Discourse on colonialism*, his searing polemic against a dying colonial order, at a pivotal moment in the history of anti-imperialist struggle. What cemented the book's canonical stature was its incisive critique of the colonial relation. In a dialectical reversal, Césaire exposed how the violent enforcement of colonial rule had “decivilized” the ostensibly “civilizing” European; the colonizer, in his brutality, had brutalized himself. Césaire argued, too, that European fascism was not sui generis, as postwar European liberals claimed. It was instead an application, within Europe, of violent practices of racial ordering that “until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa.” It was thus hypocritical for European liberals to oppose fascism within Europe without opposing colonialism abroad. Amid today’s resurgent fascism, in the geopolitical West and elsewhere, the argument retains its relevance.

16. Chen, Kuan-Hsing. 2010. *Asia as method: Toward deimperialization*. Duke University Press. [Geoff Aung]

Kuan-Hsing Chen's *Asia as method* arguably redefined the study of empire in Asia for the twenty-first century. Building on the pioneering Inter-Asia Cultural Studies project (and journal) that Chen launched in the 1990s, Chen argues that Cold War power relations stalled decolonization across much of Asia. US-backed anti-Communist regimes gained political and economic power, while US hegemony came to shape political imaginations and cultural life in profound ways. Chen's demand is not quite to reclaim decolonization—a project lost in the wreckage of last century, he suggests. He articulates, rather, a call for de-imperialization: a reckoning with ongoing US empire in a post-Cold War age of shifting imperial power in Asia. Chen recast anti-colonial, anti-imperial

critique—asking what “Asia” even means, for whom, to whom, by what means, to what ends—just as the US “pivot to Asia” began to deepen only the latest cycle of imperial extraction and confrontation across Asia.

17. Cherkaev, Xenia A. 2023. *Gleaning for communism: The Soviet Socialist household in theory and practice*. Cornell University Press. [Lois Kalb]

An exciting retelling of Soviet history, centered around customary use-rights and socialist ethics in actually existing socialism. Cherkaev's interlocutors tell heroic stories about the Soviet past, in which they glean materials from enterprises and distribute them for the common good, which was seen as legal and “normal” under really existing socialism. They counterpose these tales with the 1990s, when people stole things out of private greed. They continue to refer to the years after 1990 as “perestroika,” even though this was long after Gorbachev's reforms. To explain this, Cherkaev takes us on an ethnographic journey through the changing property laws from Stalin onward. The thought-provoking argument she makes is that Stalin created a “socialist commons” and Gorbachev destroyed it. Cherkaev debunks commonly accepted liberal and conservative Soviet history, finds new differences and similarities between capitalism and socialism, and revisits pertinent and radical questions about how to arrange a society and the role of property regimes therein.

18. Chuang 1-2 (https://chuangcn.org/journal) or *Endnotes* (Endnotes.org.uk) [Geoff Aung]

Chuang is an anonymous communist research collective focused on China. Their journal examines, in their words, the ongoing development of capitalism in China, its historical roots, and the revolts, importantly, of those crushed beneath it. Though little known beyond left-wing circles in East and Southeast Asia, Chuang's main project in recent years is deeply ambitious: writing the history of China's transition to capital-
ism—from revolutionary upheaval to socialist industrialization to capitalist integration. Their account of this transition, unfolding over two volumes thus far, owes important debts to value form theory, the Neue Marx-Lektüre, and the ultra-left tradition carried forth in the Anglophone world by *Endnotes*, in particular, another anonymous communist journal. Chuang manages to translate this complex genealogy into refreshingly nonsectarian and empirical research on capitalism in China, with clear implications for political organization and struggle. In short, Chuang’s journal is essential reading for anyone grappling with capitalism, value, and revolt in Asia.

19. Clapp, Jennifer, and S. Ryan Isakson. 2018. *Speculative harvests: Financialization, food and agriculture*. Agrarian change and peasant studies series, Fernwood Publishing/Practical Action Publishing. [Oane Visser]

Wall Street bankers becoming farmland owners, aggressive speculation with food commodities following the Russian invasion in Ukraine, hedge fund managers pressing for a merger of agrochemical giants Dow and DuPont. These are all incarnations of the growing coupling of the global food system and the world of finance. *Speculative harvests* gives an insightful analysis of these complex interactions, through the lens of financialization. It discusses the manifold risks of financialization, the challenge of taming the big walls of money entering farming, and how financialization also tends to undermine collective action to resist it. The publication is part of the small book series, which provides concise overviews of the state of the art in agrarian and peasant studies.

20. Coulthard, Glenn. 2014. *Red skin, white masks: Rejecting the colonial politics of recognition*. University of Minnesota Press [Gavin Smith]

Coulthard’s intervention is especially relevant across a broad canvas at a time when extraction via property conjoins exploitation via labor.

He writes, “Colonial-capitalist development required first and foremost land, and only secondarily the surplus value afforded by cheap, Indigenous labor.” Inspired by Fanon, he argues against the compartmentalization of the structural determination of political economy and the formation of colonial subjectivity. Fanon “challenges colonized peoples to transcend the fantasy that the settler-state apparatus . . . is somehow capable of producing liberatory effects.” This means that if the struggle is over land, then recognition means both its materiality and a “system of reciprocal relations and obligations,” what he calls “grounded normativity.” This stands against “liberal recognition politics [that] can subtly reproduce nonmutual and unfree relations rather than free and mutual ones.” He argues for “Indigenous peoples empowering themselves through cultural practices of individual and collective self-fashioning that seek to prefigure radical alternatives to the structural and subjective dimensions of colonial power. . . I call this a resurgent politics of recognition.”

21. Cowen, Deborah. 2014. *The deadly life of logistics: Mapping violence in global trade*. University of Minnesota Press. [Geoff Aung]

*The deadly life of logistics* remains arguably the defining contribution to the resurgent study of logistics in recent decades. Moving between battlefields and boardrooms, shipping lanes and airports, Cowen shows how capitalism and violence rely on each other historically and today, not least through the securitization of supply chains and commodity flows that have never been more vital to valorization at the scale of the world market. The rise of container shipping looms large in this story. So too do total cost analyses that grasped, in postwar America, transportation itself as a site for adding value within business operations. All of this, Cowen makes clear, would make securing transport and distribution channels critical to capitalism's expanded reproduction in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. At stake is the ongoing entanglement of war and trade: cir-
culation has become the lifeblood of capitalism, while requiring force to secure it.

22. Crehan, Kate. 2002. *Gramsci, culture and anthropology*. University of California Press. [Stephen Campbell]

Critics of Antonio Gramsci's conception of hegemony have often misconstrued the term to mean ideological domination, as though Gramsci were arguing that subaltern populations are effectively duped by ruling-class self-justifications. In *Gramsci, culture and anthropology*, Kate Crehan exposes that claim as a mischaracterization of Gramsci's argument—a reduction of hegemony to a one-dimensionally idealist concept. Instead, “hegemony,” Crehan writes, “refuses to privilege either ideas or material realities, seeing these as always entangled, always interacting with each other.” Beyond its elucidation of hegemony, *Gramsci, culture and anthropology* is an extremely clear and easy to follow introduction to Gramsci's ideas. As such, the book is an excellent entry point to Gramsci for students at all levels.

23. Cucu, Alina-Sandra. 2019. *Planning labour: Time and the foundations of industrial Socialism in Romania*. Berghahn Books. [Aaron Kappeler]

Alina Cucu's study of socialist planning in twentieth-century Romania tells the story of how the country succeeded in achieving rapid growth of industry and relative security for workers but also how socialist construction was marked by abiding tensions between visible progress, exploitation of labor, and inequalities of distribution. She argues that central planning was “performative” in that it strove to “synchronize” disparate temporalities and logics of accumulation while mitigating the contradictions of economic transition. Yet central plans did not always directly reflect what was occurring on the factory floor. Cucu persuasively shows that the “social contracts” forged among workers and managers involved in this synchronization process had a force of their own and that such tacit agreements could be referred to in times of

friction to settle disputes. Anyone interested in the history of labor, the political economy of socialism, or the struggle for concrete alternatives to capitalism should read this book.

24. Davis, Angela. 1981. *Women, race and class*. Vintage Books. [Stephen Campbell]

Angela Davis's *Women, race and class* exposes the interconnections between class exploitation and racial and gender oppression. Significantly, Davis's book came out almost a decade before Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality,” which has similarities with Davis's analysis. Yet, the intersectionality metaphor has been critiqued for conveying an undialectical notion of discreet, preexisting identities that subsequently intersect. Davis, by contrast, who studied under Frankfurt School theorists Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno, adopts an explicitly dialectical analysis wherein class exploitation and racial and gender oppression are always already co-constituted. Surveying nineteenth-century US history, for example, Davis argues, “The enslavement of Black people in the South, the economic exploitation of Northern workers, and the social oppression of women [were] systematically related.”

25. Deere, Carmen Diana. 1990. *Household and class relations: Peasants and landlords in Northern Peru*. University of California Press. [Christopher Krupa]

Deere's book offers one of the most comprehensive overviews of twentieth-century Marxist writing in agrarian political economy ever produced. It also provides one of the most interesting and data-heavy reconfigurations of it. The book is framed as a longitudinal study of the Cajamarcan (Peru) peasantry from 1900 to the 1980s that asks how the productive organization and gender relations of peasant households shifted as the “feudal” hacienda system underwent capitalization. Social reproduction is foregrounded, as the internal class dynamics of the peasant household and their links with extra-household networks are shown to
be gendered to the core. Especially interesting is Deere's complex application of the UMass group's attention to how agentive and multiple class processes complicate seemingly stable class relations. Peasant households are here constituted by shifting and often contradictory class dynamics. Deere attributes the increasing weight of wage labor in these dynamics less to the success of grand proletarianization initiatives than to the successive small failures of noncapitalist class processes to realize simple reproduction under these initiatives.

26. Diamond, Stanley. 1974. *In search of the primitive: A critique of civilization*. Transaction Books. [Don Nonini]

The appearance of *In search of the primitive* de-
ceives! In the guise of investigating “primitive”
societies on the peripheries of industrial cap-
italist empires, it both anticipates neoliberal
globalized capitalism and demonstrates the in-
capacity of Marxist analyses to confront their
own theoretical limits. Moving beyond while
presupposing these analyses, it inventories
the pathologies of capitalist “civilization”—its
bureaucratized alienations; class, racial, and
gender violences; “rages to consume”; its in-
dustrialized warfare—and contrasts them with
primitive kin-based communal sociality; non-
alienated labor; care of children, elders, and na-
ture; and individuated violence. Interrogating
the latter illuminates the emancipatory poten-
tials for resistance to capital within everyday
social reproduction, expressive cultures, reli-
gion, and movements from below for reparative
justice. Read in conjunction: Diamond’s “The
Marxist tradition as a dialectical anthropology,”
founding statement, *Dialectical Anthropology*
1(1) (1975): 1–5.

27. Donham, Donald. (1990) 1999. *History, power, ideology: Central issues in Marxism & anthropology*. University of California Press. [Christopher Krupa]

A high point of the late-Cold War boom in ef-
forts to theorize the intersections of Marxism

and anthropology, Donham's book draws from
research among the Maale in southern Ethiopia
to develop a far-reaching analysis of the ways
cultural categories and meaning systems nat-
uralize productive inequalities through time.
Tarrying constantly with Marx, the book of-
fers a rigorous upsetting of base/superstructure
and economic/non-economic distinctions that
leads to a total reconceptualization of culture
as a kind of ether surrounding and stabilizing
ideologies that reproduce unequal access to the
material sources of power (political, economic)
in a given society—a rather strong rebuttal to
the sort of cultural critique American anthro-
pology was generating at the time. The book
culminates in an ethnographic masterclass in
anthrohistorical method, showing how Maale
gender and kinship ideologies continued to le-
gitimate stark inequalities in wealth and status
amid massive transformations in the structural
forms enabling them.

28. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1920) 1969. "Of work and wealth." *Darkwater: Voices from within the veil*, 47–63. Schocken. [Sharryn Kasmir]

In 1917 in East St. Louis, Illinois, a burgeoning
industrial center sparked by World War I pro-
duction, whites set violently upon Blacks. Du-
Bois's reflection on the riot foretells some of the
most urgent theoretical problems of our time:
Initial efforts at organizing diverse immigrant
workers—African Americans from the US south,
Eastern Europeans, and Italians—were gaining
ground, when employers crushed the union and
turned the not-quite-white European laborers
against their Black comrades. The psychological
wage afforded the low-paid white workers pres-
ages the notion of white privilege that is now
central to analyses of racial capitalism. For Du-
Bois, white privilege has a definite psychological
dimension, but its origins are squarely in capi-
talist divisions of labor and in state repression
of worker solidarity. This essay is indispensable
for Marxist thinking about global labor, because
it traces the tendency toward racial division
while insisting upon the dialectical possibility
of working-class solidarity.

29. Edelman, Marc. 2024. *Peasant politics of the twenty-first century: Transnational movements and agrarian change*. Cornell University Press. [Don Kalb]

Edelman is self-conscious: this selection of his research essays over the last twenty-five years is about peasant politics after Eric Wolf's peasant wars, and after the subsequent petering out of the national-popular, revolutionary, and reformist decolonial regimes that came out of those wars. Edelman follows his (mainly Central American) peasant activists into the transnational NGO world of the 2000s, such as Via Campesina, and into places like the Palais des Nations in Geneva or the offices of the EU in Brussels, demanding peasant rights and mobilizing around issues like food security. Critically supportive, Edelman's voice is subtly discerning, aware of the big Left-Right ambivalences that the peasant world in ongoing twenty-first-century transformation carries.

30. Estes, Nick. 2023. *Our history is the future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the long tradition of Indigenous resistance*. Verso. [Zoltan Glück]

Nick Estes's *Our history is the future* is a model of what is possible when ethnography, history, and radical politics come together. Embedded deeply within the resistance movement against the Dakota Access Pipeline (#NoDAPL), Estes's ethnography narrates the protests and encampment at Standing Rock within a broader and sweeping history of Indigenous resistance. Drawing upon oral history, family stories, and deep historical research into the region, Estes work traces the struggle in the longue durée, dialectically laying out how the logics of repression, containment, and elimination at the heart of the US/American settler colonial project have at every turn been met by dynamic and visionary forms of indigenous resistance. Threaded throughout is a keen attention to the ecological

dimensions of settler colonial violence, on the
one hand, and the fight for a viable environmen-
tal future, on the other. This is indeed a “his-
tory” that foretells the stakes and contours of
“the future” for us all.

31. Fanon, Frantz. 1959. *A dying colonialism*. Grove Press. [Stephen Campbell]

Less widely read than *The wretched of the earth* and *Black skin, white masks*, Fanon's *A dying colonialism* is nonetheless a critically important analysis of how revolutionary struggle catalyzes social transformation. Pertinent to contemporary anthropological debates around decolonization, Fanon shows that colonized Algerians neither blanketly rejected nor uncritically embraced European ideas and technology. And when they did reject the latter, this rejection was not determined by any primordialist cultural commitments. It was instead a political decision based on recognition of how French colonizers employed certain ideas and technologies of European provenance to secure colonial domination. The book also includes, as an appendix, a moving testimony by an Algerian-born French youth who came to abjure the colonial order before joining the armed Algerian liberation movement.

32. Federici, Silvia. 2004. *Caliban and the witch: Women, the body and primitive accumulation*. Autonomedia. [Sharryn Kasmir]

Federici argues that the emergence of capital-
ist social relations in sixteenth-century Europe
was a ruling class reaction to widespread protest
and proletarian solidarity that raised wages and
tore asunder feudal ties. In Europe, systematic
misogyny, violently expressed in witch trials,
solidified a gender division of labor, devalued
social reproduction, and controlled women's
bodies, while colonialism oppressed racialized
labor forces. Federici's prehistory of capitalism
foregrounds the making of difference: the accu-
mulation of capital and labor is the accumula-
tion of differences. Writing against worldwide
neoliberal dispossessions of the late twentieth
and early twenty-first centuries, Federici understands “primitive accumulation” not as a one-time event (as in Marx’s telling in *Capital*) but as an ongoing process, always involving the making of social divisions among laborers. This intervention is indispensable for an account of global capitalism that puts race and gender as well as labor formation, organization, and disorganization at the center of analysis.

33. Franquesa, Jaume. 2018. *Power struggles: Dignity, value, and the renewable energy frontier in Spain*. Indiana University Press. [Luisa Steur]

Rarely has a book succeeded so well in demonstrating that to arrive at a deep understanding of the changing and contradictory entanglements of the everyday life of particular people—in this case Catalonian peasants or *pagès*—with the abstract space and time of capitalism, neither history, nor geography, nor ecology, nor political economy can be left out of the analysis. All four are deeply analytically connected and brought together through an ethnographic exploration of value theory that provides a captivating story of agrarian livelihoods and of “dignity” as resistance in Southern Catalonia, a region that precisely in the process of becoming ever more central to capitalist energy production (hydro and nuclear power, now also renewable wind energy), becomes seemingly ever more peripheral—a space into which the disorder and conflict inherent in energy transitions as power-laden, social-ecological processes are exported.

34. Fraser, Nancy. 2022. *Cannibal capitalism: How our system is devouring democracy, care, and the planet—and what we can do about it*. Verso. [Don Kalb]

Capitalism is not an economy, Fraser brilliantly argues in this little book that summarizes a wealth of recent radical thinking in just 150 pages. The book claims that we urgently need to expand our conception of capitalism beyond “the economy,” “labor,” and “production,” but

also beyond the life of commodities. Capitalism, instead, is a type of society that is organized to systematically dispossess and exploit the forms of our social reproduction on behalf of the accumulation of capital. It involves structural degradation of social care, public goods and the commons; subdues and ultimately empties democracy and politics; racializes populations as it sets them up for dispossession; and destroys the earth by consuming it as a free resource and an all-purpose sink. Only an anti-capitalist politics that seeks to unify and align beyond these seemingly separate institutional fields—ecology, feminism, antiracism, labor—will ever be successful. Anthropologists may find Fraser’s elegant tour de force perhaps US-centric and overly schematic, but she shows in any case that we know a lot about it, that we have a wealth of historical experience with it, and that it is a profoundly structural, legally anchored, and deeply embedded set of social forces, not just a contingent and cultural phenomenon, as leading anthropologists these days sometimes seem to think.

35. Gates, Hill. 1996. *China's motor: A thousand years of petty capitalism*. Cornell University Press. [Anne-Christine Trémon]

*China's motor* analyses historical and ethnographic material on a thousand years of Chinese history from a Marxian non-Eurocentric perspective. Hill Gates argues that from the Song Dynasty's commercial revolution to China's early reform period, tributary and petty capitalist modes of production coexisted in mutual tension. The first remained hegemonic and kept the second in check: the tendency toward accumulation was turned to tributary purposes, a transfer of surplus to officials. Gates lends attention to gender, kinship and popular religion, and she shows how people made choices and compromises between kinship forms and values that coexisted in tension with one another. Her work is important to anthropologists in that it offers a tool for accounting for real-life situational
tions while remaining committed to histori-
cized theory.

36. Gill, Lesley. 2016. *A century of violence in a red city: Popular struggle, counterinsurgency, and human rights in Colombia*. Duke University Press. [Patrick Neveling]

This is a wild ride through the violent twentieth-
century political economy of the region around
Barrancabermeja in Colombia. We join Leslie
Gill as she first visits the city, is greeted by a local
trade union leader at the airport, and is driven
across town to the union headquarters in a
high-security SUV with armed guards. Gill does
not waste time on suspense; we soon learn that
trade unionists in the 2000s are lone survivors of
a once proud working class, victimized and mas-
sacred by the eponymous century of violence
in the red city. Neither does she waste time on
moralism. The chapters unravel with great em-
pirical and analytical care how the Colombian
state, in cahoots with and in service of local and
international capitalist corporations, quashed
successive waves of working-class struggles. This
is an ethnographic hymn to a once powerful and
proud working-class movement.

37. Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. 2007. *Golden Gulag: Prisons, surplus, crisis, and opposition in globalizing California*. University of California Press. [Geoff Aung]

*Golden Gulag* examines the rise of mass incarceration in the United States since the 1970s, as well as grounded opposition to this explosion of prisons and prison populations. A core contribution to the field of carceral geography, as well as to abolitionist thought and Black radicalism more generally, Gilmore's story shows how prison expansion has everything to do with the production and management of surplus—surplus capital, certainly, but also surplus land, labor, and state capacity as financialization took off and the Keynesian state withered. Focusing on California in particular, where the prison population spiked by some 500 percent between 1982 and 2000, Gilmore not only teaches us that mass in-

carceration articulates with much wider political
economies, but she also illuminates how oppo-
sitional movements—organizations of mothers,
for instance, whose children are lost to the prison
system—are fighting for alternative futures,
grounded in decarceration, prison abolition, and
the overturning of racial capitalism itself.

38. Gluckman, Max. 1940. "An analysis of a social situation in Modern Zululand." *Bantu Studies* 14(1): 1-30. [Ida Susser]

This classic article, first published in 1940 and
often known as “the Bridge article,” framed a
new anthropology of process and politics. The
article emphasizes the interaction and inter-
dependence of the rural and the urban under
capitalism and imperialism, in direct oppo-
sition to the static models of Max Gluckman’s
contemporary, Robert Redfield. It combined an
analysis of history and conflict, the Zulu/Brit-
ish wars, Blood River, and colonialism, with the
structure of an established colonial state and
the ongoing violence of government hierarchy,
class, and racism. Gluckman’s strategy, which
he later termed “situational analysis,” initiated a
fluid political anthropology that analyzed daily
events as they revealed contemporary cultural,
class and racialized conflicts within the history
and changing context of African tribal law as
well as capitalist processes.

39. Gough, Kathleen. 1968. "New proposals for anthropologists." *Current Anthropology* 9(5: part 1). [Gavin Smith]

The US war on Southeast Asia (1955–1973) threw a few anthropologists into deep liberal angst, lots of hand-wringing and talk of “intellectual responsibility.” Gough was not one of them. She noted that the default position for anthropologists when doing ethnography never entertained the possibility of revolution, instead there was an “assumption that counter-revolution [is always] the best answer.” Not only do anthropologists fail to study imperialism, they even fail to study its effects on the people they study. For many, people like Boas were a model.
"I would argue that [he] ... did not systematically explore the relationship of race prejudice to the world-wide historical and structural development of White nations' imperialism." Had he done so he might have concluded that a shift in power relations between "Whites and colored races would be necessary rather than concluding ... that the solution lay mainly in the liberal education of White people." Gough was hounded from Brandeis, Illinois, and finally Simon Fraser Universities as a result of her failure to be part of the liberal counterrevolution that was especially focused on Vietnam at the time. The setting today may be more dispersed but the stakes have not changed. Current anthropologists may comfort themselves that their texts include the term "imperialism" while failing to acknowledge the extent to which their scholarly writing colludes in the multiple forms of "counterrevolution."

40. Gramsci, Antonio. (1929–1935) 2011.
*Prison notebooks*. Columbia University
Press. [Gavin Smith]

The critique of “political economy” has come to be associated with studies by theorists interested in identifying frameworks and crises. As a result, Gramsci is often dismissed as being entirely concerned with culture and politics narrowly defined. But because he did not start from this academic perspective, it is more useful to think of Gramsci’s Marxism as a philosophy very specifically of praxis. His project of critique therefore was always addressed to issues of effective mobilization: what he would call the formation of subaltern (as opposed to bourgeois) hegemony. This required a disciplined understanding of political economy in terms of the conditions of possibility thrown up in different historical epochs that provided the opportunity for socialist revolution or its side-tracking through passive revolution or authoritarian force: Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis and political economy. Anthropologists might be well positioned to start their enquiries and priorities from just such a perspective.

41. Grant, Bruce. 1995. *In the Soviet house of culture: A century of Perestroikas*. Princeton University Press. [Mathijs Pelkmans]

During fieldwork among the Nivkhi of Sakhalin Island, Grant came to realize that significant parts of their life and history could be studied “almost anywhere but there.” This realization explodes this small-scale ethnographic study, to also trace how the Nivkhi were constructed in distant centers of power, ambiguously so. While presented as “noble savages” stuck in time, the Nivkhi were also heralded for their leap to Soviet modernity. Both narratives, however, came crashing down with the end of state socialism. Soviet modernity had no future left, but a return to “tradition” was impossible after seven decades of modernization. Emerging from the ruins of the Soviet collapse, the Nivkhi chart new but uncertain histories into the future. Remarkable for its historical scope and attention to the politics of representation, *In the Soviet house of culture* shows what it meant to rebuild collective identity in the age of perestroika.

42. Hall, Stuart. 2018. *Familiar stranger: A life between two islands*. Penguin Books. [Zoltan Glück]

Stuart Hall is indispensable. From his seminal analyses of policing, crises, Thatcherism/neoliberalism, culture, and media to his essential contributions on theorizing race through a Marxian materialist lens (particularly, “Gramsci’s relevance for the study of race and ethnicity” and “Race, articulation and societies structured in dominance”) one cannot overstate his importance for the analysis of racial capitalism in general and the contemporary conjuncture in particular. His posthumously published memoir, *Familiar stranger*, is no less indispensable for understanding his life and work. Bending the conventions of memoir and autobiography, Hall’s text shifts registers seamlessly from early memories and stories of politicization during his childhood in Jamaica in the 1940s, student days at Oxford in the 1950s, and the emergence of the “new left” in the 1960s to more theoretical
(if biographically grounded) reflections on diaspora, identity, history, time, and empire. The book is an intellectual feast.

43. Harvey, David. 1997. *Justice, nature and the geography of difference*. Blackwell Publishing. [Natalia Buier]

If you ever tried to engage with many of the trite accusations against David Harvey (not Marxist enough, too Marxist, too workerist, too capital-centric, social-democrat, transhistorical, too historical, developmentalist, unconcerned with multiple axes of domination) but were unsure where to begin, this is probably the best place to start. This volume should provide the antidote to all but the worst intended readers. Bringing together work on scale and political action, the categorical development of “nature” and “environment,” and the production of difference and its political appraisal, it is a demonstration of why radical politics and radical epistemologies remain indissolubly linked. For the disciplinarily self-conscious, it is also a wonderful answer to “why the just production of just geographical differences” is a matter of historical and anthropological investigation. A poem by Adrienne Rich, “An Atlas of the Difficult World,” stands in as a prologue. A fitting choice for a true atlas of the difficult questions.

44. Hobsbawm, Eric. 1959. *Primitive rebels: Studies in archaic forms of social movement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries*. The University Press. [Gavin Smith]

In three key chapters Hobsbawm studies rural rebellions in Italy and Spain that occurred from the end of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. His project is to learn about the kind of political agency that is irrevocably tied to the need for an entirely rearranged world. He makes the case that “modern” socialist politics loses these kinds of visions at its peril. Indeed when connected to contemporary movements, they “can not only become politically effective, but [also] may do so without the loss of that zeal, that burning confidence in a new world, and

that generosity of emotion which characterizes [them].” It is important then to stress that taking seriously the submerged, emergent, or actual energies of failed insurgent movements such as these means rethinking our assumptions that they are necessarily distinct from those movements dialectically entangled directly with the rhythms and relations of capital. This challenge is especially great insofar as we need to address the question of the dialectical combination of movements of refusal such as these with those negotiating their politics within and against the exploitative labor/capital relation.

45. Humphrey, Caroline. 2002. *The unmaking of Soviet life: Everyday economies after Socialism*. Cornell University Press. [Mathijs Pelksmans]

The ten essays that make up *The unmaking of Soviet life* were written during the 1990s, not long after the end of the USSR. Having served as guiding light for a generation of anthropologists working in post-Soviet Eurasia, the essays continue to be relevant more than two decades later. In part this is because of the vivid examples presented, ranging from shamans in Siberian cities to the aesthetics of the “new Russians.” But even more importantly, the book continues to resonate because of its emphasis on the complexities of “unmaking.” Pushing beyond the usual vocabulary of collapse and disintegration, Humphrey analyzes what emerges after some layers are peeled back: protection rackets, local citizen regimes, forms of spirituality. The focus on “unmaking” draws attention to what has persisted or festered below the surface. The new orderings are sometimes only fleeting, but always generative of subsequent transformations across the former Soviet world.

46. Ishchenko, Volodymyr. 2024. *Towards the abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to war*. London: Verso. [Don Kalb]

Ishchenko is one of the few scholars who has persistently dared to present a class perspective on nationalism and war in the post-Soviet
space. In both Ukraine and Russia ethnona-
tionalism emerged as the fragile glue of polit-
ical alliances after “deficient revolutions” left
post-Soviet societies stagnating, highly unequal,
without a future to believe in, and without much
of popular regime legitimacy. The Ukraine war
in Ishchenko’s account is a geopolitical post-
Soviet civil war between opposing and never
successfully hegemonic class fractions of “polit-
ical capitalists” and “Western oriented compra-
dor bourgeoisies cum civil societies,” with the
working classes as mostly demobilized bystand-
ers. While this sounds abstract, Ishchenko’s book
is a step by step empirical account, written while
it was happening, of developments between the
Maidan rising of 2014 and the first months of
the war in 2022, a contingent chronology of un-
derlying structure in action. A cogent argument
offering an urgent alternative to the dominant
accounts of the warmakers in West and East and
their celebration of civilizational identity politics
that all but decapacitates our brains.

47. James, C. L. R. (1938) 2012. *A history of Pan-African revolt*. Oakland: PM Press.
[Zoltan Glück]

C. L. R James is essential to any Marxist an-
thropology and, indeed, to revolutionary the-
ory more broadly. His *Black Jacobins* nearly
single-handedly rewrote our understanding of
modernity and the “age of revolutions,” placing
the story of the Haitian Revolution as a central
turning point in the emergence of the modern
world order. Less widely read is the shorter
(and no less important) *A history of Pan-
African revolt* that was published the same year.
This book provides a broader analysis of the
revolts, rebellions and revolutions carried out
by Africans (on the continent and in the dias-
pora) from the eighteenth to the early twenti-
eth century. Emerging out of his conversations
with Pan-Africanist revolutionaries in Europe,
Africa, and the Americas (George Padmore,
Kwame Nkrumah, among others) the work
influenced several generations of anti-colonial
struggles. It remains a powerful text and helps

place disparate and heterogenous events into an
overarching narrative of revolutionary strug-
gle and resistance against (racialized) capitalist
oppression.

48. Kalb, Don. 1997. *Expanding class: Power and everyday politics in industrial communities, The Netherlands 1850–1950*. Duke University Press. [Patrick Neveling]

In this book, Don Kalb goes where few anthro-
pologists dare to go; home, to Eindhoven and
the Brabant region of the Netherlands where
the labor-control politics of the Boston-based
United Shoe Manufacturing Corporation and
the Dutch industrial megacorporation Philips
shaped domestic life from the 1850s to the
1950s. And he does what few anthropologists
dare to do: bring the skeletons out of the clos-
ets. What thus emerges is the “singular rhythm”
beating across seemingly distinct working-class
professions, their households, and their strug-
gles for making a living and dreaming of bet-
ter times, as influxes of capital incorporated an
impoverished, peripheral region with low wages
into the core of the capitalist world system.
Published in 1998, *Expanding class* has been a
bulwark against the “intellectual deforestation”
of anthropology’s neoliberal turn, a reminder
that the singularity of systemic incorporation
triggers irregular movements of class forma-
tion, the research and analysis of which we call
anthropology.

49. Kasmir, Sharryn, and August Carbonella. 2014. *Blood and fire: Toward a global anthropology of labor*. Berghahn Books. [Luisa Steur]

The edited volume *Blood and fire*—named after Marx’s sanguinary and incendiary image of the origins of capitalism—powerfully represents the complex, longer timeframe of the struggles, histories and social relations, involved in the making and unmaking of local working classes. Each of the six chapters—on such struggles in Colombia, the United States, India, Spain, and Poland—is truly substantive and in-depth. Key
overarching questions include why social labor
has become “everywhere diminished” and the
link between labor demands and the greater good
broken (replaced by the idea that “what is good
for capital is good for all”). Though concrete an-
swers differ per case, the book also demonstrates
the hidden histories of connection and the sup-
pressed histories of universalism of movements
of the dispossessed and disenfranchised around
the world. This is processual and relational analy-
sis at its best, demonstrating that understandings
of “class” always tend to outlast actual class for-
mations under capitalism’s continuous dialectic
of dispossession and incorporation.

50. Khalidi, Rashid. 2020. *The hundred years' war on Palestine: A history of settler colonial conquest and resistance*. Profile Books. [Don Kalb]

A superbly balanced, radical people's history
of the Palestinians, told by an insider with a
wealth of private and professional experience
with international diplomacy and its apparently
inescapable and ongoing conceits. Khalidi tells
the story of the settler colonialist project driven
by Zionism and persistently supported by first
Britain and then the United States. The Palestin-
ians are among the largest recently dispossessed
and broadly criminalized populations on earth,
factually living under apartheid, largely with-
out any civil or political rights, let alone resti-
tution and repair, and pushed into the care of
the United Nations, who are now openly crimi-
nalized and dispossessed by contagion, too. The
book is written before the present genocidal
war, but that war hovers over its chapters as a
visible horizon. Khalidi tells an intimate as well
as a dispassionate story and leaves no doubt that
without mutual recognition as nations with a
right to exist on the land "in between the river
and the sea," and without repair, the cycle of vi-
olence cannot end. His hope is vested in swiftly
shifting Western public opinion and the dwin-
dling of illusions about an increasingly self-
obsessed and right-wing Zionist Israeli state.

51. Khosravi, Shahram. 2010. “Illegal” *traveller* *eller: An auto-ethnography of borders*. Palgrave McMillan. [Matthijs Pelkmans]

If the success of auto-ethnographies hinges on
getting the balance between self-revelation and
situational analysis right, then “Illegal” *traveller*
offers a powerful model. In captivating chapters,
the reader joins the author on his dangerous
migration from Iran to Afghanistan, Pakistan,
India, and ultimately to Sweden. By linking his
own experiences to those of others and with a
keen eye for social dynamics and power rela-
tions, the chapters manage to capture the reality
of crossing borders, of engaging with smug-
glers, bureaucrats, and xenophobes. In doing
so, Khosravi not only dissects the complexities
of clandestine migration, but also the dynamics
of exclusion that made him feel “I was indistin-
guishable from the border; I was the border”
(2010: 98). By reflecting on how structural mar-
ginalization encounters agentive alienation, the
book demonstrates how the state of exception
operates, and how “illegality” is produced, cate-
gorically and affectively.

52. Krupa, Christopher. 2022. *A feast of flow-
ers: Race, labor and postcolonial capitalism
in Ecuador*. University of Pennsylvania
Press. [Oane Visser]

This monograph provides intricate insights in
global capitalism, through an ethnography of
an export-oriented agro-industrial hub in the
Global South. Among others it offers a fasci-
nating account of the role of global finance in
driving Ecuador’s flower boom. The description
of local bankers lingering in the central park of
Cayambe trying to push credit onto potential
flower growers, almost as drug dealers, cap-
tures the imagination. Krupa uses it as a start-
ing point for a lively written and well-composed
discovery journey into the bewildering circuits
of global finance and speculation: not from Wall
Street or London’s city, but from the periphery;
as a modern history of global finance written
from the Global South.
53. Kundnani, Arun. 2023. *What is anti-racism? And why it means anti-capitalism.* Verso. [Luisa Steur]

Part of a breakthrough in class-versus-identity debates in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, Arun Kundnani’s powerful intervention leaves no doubt that the “structure” in structural racism is capitalism. Arguing that capitalism is *always* “racial capitalism,” his theorizing follows the “darker red” tradition of anti-imperialist Marxist activism and writing found in the journal *Race and Class*. This yields a properly historicized definition of racial capitalism as first theorized in the anti-apartheid struggle. It also yields crucial insights into how older structures of racism—destabilized in the wake of decolonization in the Third World and Black struggles in the United States—were actively reconfigured in the neoliberal era. With Palestine at their center, these structures function to strip radical movements opposing neoliberal market values of their political meanings, remove them from the histories that gave them shape, and see them as mere “outbursts” of “lesser peoples.”

54. Lampland, Martha. 1995. *The object of labor: Commodification in Socialist Hungary*. University of Chicago Press. [Aaron Kappeler]

In *The object of labor*, Lampland tells a story of “rich soils and poor people” in the village of Sárosd, where Hungary’s postwar socialist land reform ironically extended the logic of commodification. In her analysis of this diverse farming community brought under the aegis of a central plan, Lampland shows the complex processes by which labor activities that had long been “the moral purpose of village life” came to be regarded as “the tangible property of individuals,” with time as the natural measure of their value. By adopting a longer historical view, Lampland is able to reveal important social continuities missed by other writers, including how economic ideas inculcated through cash cropping

or wage-work on estates before the war reached their apotheosis in the regulated market. This book upends much of the conventional wisdom about labor and agriculture under socialism and forces us to question Cold War mythologies.

55. Lazar, Sian. 2023. *How we struggle: A political anthropology of labor*. Pluto Press. [Don Kalb]

The fruit of three decades of exciting growth in the anthropology of labor, Sian Lazar’s global narrative of transformations in capitalist production and reproduction and the ensuing forms of workers’ struggle is a boon for the discipline and an ideal text for teaching. She formulates an adroit position in between more structural and cultural approaches, leaves twentieth-century Fordist certainties behind, and shows in a cunningly structured way that how we struggle for fairness and a better life, and how visible, public, or private, and formal or informal, such struggles are, depends on where and how we are located in an ever-widening array of global/local value chains and the myriad and shifting operational forms in which capital is realized. Underlined, too, by Sharryn Kasmir and Lesley Gill’s (eds.) *Handbook* (2022), the anthropology of labor has definitely come of age.

56. Leacock, Eleanor Burke. 1981. *Myths of male dominance: Collected articles on women cross-culturally*. Monthly Review Press. [Sharryn Kasmir]

Eleanor Leacock fought two battles within US anthropology in the mid-twentieth century. First, that male dominance was not biologically determined, as ethnographic evidence from gathering-hunting societies proved. Second, the “world historical defeat of the female sex” via patriarchy went hand in glove with the emergence of private property. Leacock undertook fieldwork among the Montagnais-Naskapi of Labrador and showed that Jesuit documents warped the ethnohistorical record. Where communal territory and kin-based rights prevailed,
Europeans saw private property. Where gender egalitarianism obtained, they saw male dominance. Leacock gives lie to these myths. A resolute feminist and Marxist—it is imperative to underscore the bravery and sacrifice this required in the Cold War United States—Leacock authored the introduction to Engel's reissued (1972) *The origin of the family, private property and the state*. This volume attests to the significance of the ethnographic record for producing a Marxist understanding of world history, and for envisioning social equality.

57. Lee, Ching Kwan. 2007. *Against the law: Labor protests in China's Rustbelt and Sunbelt*. University of California Press. [Charlotte Bruckermann]

Why do some workers take to the streets in protest while others pursue bureaucratic channels and legal redress? Comparing labor struggles in China to answer this question, Lee delves into the lived experiences of workers across generations and regions. She transcends the familiar focus on the young, migrant workforce in the factories of the southeast, contrasting their experiences with the long-standing laborers in the north's heavy industries, who witnessed a profound shift from being Mao's vanguard to remnants of a fading industrial age in the face of market reforms. By transforming abstract labor theories into vivid, real-world narratives through interviews and events, the book presents the deeply human side of China's economic engine—workers navigating the tumultuous transition from social to legal contracts, and the moral claims these entail, all struggling to survive the challenges of global capitalism.

58. Le Guin, Ursula. 1976. *The word for world is forest*. Berkley Books. [Novel; Zoltan Glück]

Ursula Le Guin is arguably the most “anthropological” novelist one can read. Her parents, the Kroebers (Alfred and Theodora) and her childhood exposure to ethnography deeply affected many of her best novels (from *The left hand of

darkness to R Canon's world) which could aptly be called “speculative anthropologies.” In *The word for world is forest*, Le Guin offers a powerful parable of colonialism, capitalism, ecological destruction, and anti-colonial resistance. A capitalist logging company sets up shop on the planet of Athshe, a forest world, where nonviolent natives who have never known war are brutally subjugated and enslaved. The ongoing destruction of their world leads the native Athsheans to take up arms and use revolutionary violence (as well as storytelling as a tool for movement building) to fight the colonists and heal their world. This work, alongside Le Guin’s other anti-capitalist novels (particularly *The possessed*) are stunning and crucial texts for expanding our political imagination today.

59. Lem, Winnie. 1999. *Cultivating dissent: Work, identity, and praxis in rural Languedoc*. State University of New York Press. [Christopher Krupa]

Focusing on table wine producers in the Languedoc region of southern France, *Cultivating dissent’s* core question is how small-scale family-run farms persist amid the aggressive modernization agendas of advanced capitalist states. Lem shows how a defensive praxis emerged among beleaguered farmers, who drew on communist traditions, regional pride, and ideological investments in the family enterprise to press back against state and market threats to smallholder viability. Dissent and livelihood intermingle in political action but also in labor exchanges, equipment sharing, and resource pooling which, Lem skillfully shows, evidences both noncommodified investments in the collectivity and the penetration of market calculation into domestic realms. Equally nuanced is Lem’s analysis of how landowning petty producers awkwardly identify as members of the exploited working class and her masterful deconstruction of the hegemonic weight of the “common family project” ideology that disguises women’s class exploitation within the household, domesticates their political practice, and increasingly alienates them from
the productive relations meant to form the crux
of their collective identity.

60. Liu, Petrus. 2023. *The specter of materialism: Queer theory and Marxism in the age of the Beijing consensus*. Duke University Press. [Geoff Aung]

*The specter of materialism* aims to reconstruct queer theory through Marxist thought at a time when global capitalism thoroughly depends on China (its holdings of US public debt, its productive capacity, its rate of savings). A leading theorist of queer Marxism, Liu's approach, extended from his earlier work, is admirably clear: Marxism promises a materialist horizon for queer emancipation beyond Western liberalism's abstract commitments to queer inclusion, tolerance, and diversity. Here, Liu traces how contemporary Chinese economic power presents a form of capital accumulation that systematically dispossesses nonnormative gender and sexual subjects. This conjuncture, in turn, demonstrates that a materialist perspective is vital for queer theory after its long and limiting association with the linguistic turn of decades past. At stake is a reminder of how capitalism reproduces by subsuming variously situated forms of difference—racialized, gendered, sexual, and otherwise—that haunt liberal notions of inclusion with much more radical emancipatory visions.

61. Lowe, Lisa. 2015. *The intimacies of four continents*. Duke University Press. [Zoltan Glück]

Lowe's *The intimacies of four continents* is a powerful synthesis of scholarship and theory across geographical and disciplinary divides. Drawing together histories of slavery, colonialism, revolt, repression, accumulation, labor discipline, and what she calls the “archives of liberalism” from Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas, this is the type of work that helps us rethink capitalism across sites and processes within the world system. Lowe sheds particular light on how “colonial divisions of humanity” and overlapping

forms of racialization were intimately woven
into capitalist accumulation and liberal human-
ism from its inception—what is now often theo-
rized as “racial capitalism.”

62. Mamdani, Mahmood. 1996. *Citizen and subject: Contemporary Africa and the legacy of late colonialism*. Princeton University Press. [Stephen Campbell]

In *Citizen and subject*, Mahmood Mamdani provides a critical historical analysis that upends anthropological presumptions about preexisting, bounded cultural difference. Focusing on Africa, Mamdani shows how British, and subsequently French, colonial powers introduced indirect rule as a way to hedge against native demands for political rights as citizens of the empire. Specifically, European colonial rulers constructed antidemocratic political structures under the legitimating guise of “native custom.” Mamdani calls the arrangement “decentralized despotism.” Consequently, under indirect rule, “non-Western tradition” marked not a site outside of coloniality but instead an alternative mobility of colonial rule. Mamdani’s argument is worth considering amid contemporary anthropological discussions around decolonization. His analysis also sheds light on postindependence neocolonialism as a variant of indirect colonial rule.

63. Mariátegui, José Carlos. (1928) 1971. *Seven interpretive essays on Peruvian reality*. Translated by Marjory Urquidi. Introduction by Jorge Basadre. University of Texas Press. [Christopher Krupa]

Journalist, newspaper editor, and union ac-
tivist José Carlos Mariátegui (1894–1930) was
thirty-three years old when he published *Seven
essays* in 1928, the same year he founded the
Peruvian Socialist Party. The essays, all revered
classics of Latin American leftist thought, are
at once diagnostic and prescriptive. While ex-
posing the colonial residues deeply entrenched
in the country’s land imbalances, Indigenous
improvement missions, literary canons, reli-
gious traditions, education policies, and state
decentralization projects, they together build
a uniquely Americanist historical materialism
designed to achieve Mariátegui's "avowed and
resolute ambition . . . to assist in the creation
of Peruvian socialism." For this he exposes the
bourgeois orthodoxy of Peru's liberal intelli-
gentsia and their watered-down populist-left
critique, showing the failure of things like cul-
ture, racism, education, or trade imbalances
to explain or solve problems rooted in historic
structures of resource hoarding and labor ex-
ploitation—colonial inheritances flourishing un-
der the capitalist expansion of the interwar years.

64. Marshall, John. 2003. *A Kalahari family* (five parts: “A far country”—90 min.; “End of the road”—60 min.; “Real water”—60 min.; “Standing tall”—60 min.; and “Death by myth”—90 min.). Documentary Educational Resources, Kalfam. Productions: Watertown, MA. [Luisa Steur]

This six-hour-long documentary, spanning half a
century (!) and portraying the turbulent lives of
a family of Ju'/hoansi, remains an unsurpassed
anthropological classic. While much anthropo-
logical work on the Ju'/hoansi has been marked
by a fascination with "difference," this film is
based on connection. It shows how Ju'/hoansi
lives, including in the 1950s when they were
still living as hunter-gatherers, are always de-
termined by wider postcolonial Namibian and
global history, and all the more so in instances
where Ju'/hoansi are forced to perform as "peo-
ple without history"—as sentinels of nature—in
interactions with government agencies, West-
ern NGOs, and the film industry. But it also
shows connection in terms of the strong iden-
tification of John Marshall with the Ju'/hoansi
family in question, the organic emergence of
collaborative filmmaking, and the active—even
if not always successful—political involvement
of Marshall in Ju'/hoansi struggles.

65. Martínez Alier, Joan. 2002. *The environmentalism of the poor: A study of ecologi-*.

*cal conflicts and valuation*. Edward Elgar.
*[Oane Visser]*

In the 1990s studies of environmental move-
ments increasingly took on a global dimen-
sion with the study of emerging transnational
movements. Yet, case studies on movements
arising from the Global South remained scarce.
This book was one of the publications that
sparked a growing literature on environmen-
tal justice movements beyond the West. Re-
search by scholars like Marc Edelman and Jun
Borras, on the rise of La Via Campesina as the
largest movement in the world, constituted an-
other trigger. Currently the wide array of en-
vironmental justice movements in the Global
South—for example, against mining, industrial
pollution, and land grabbing—are studied. For
the less political and open forms of environ-
mentalism in the (semi)periphery, Smith and
Jehlička’s “Quiet sustainability” (see list), pro-
vides another concept to understand subaltern
forms of environmentalism.

66. Meillassoux, Claude. 1981. *Maidens, meal and money: Capitalism and the domestic community*. Cambridge University Press. Originally published in 1975 as *Femmes, greniers et capitaux*. Maspero. [Anne-Christine Trémon]

*Maidens, meals and capital* is based on research
in Ivory Coast in the 1960s among noncapitalist
farming communities—patrilineages who own
collective land. Intergenerational solidarity is
ensured by elderly men's control both over the
distribution of fertile women across kinship
units and over the product of juniors' unpaid
labor. However, young men increasingly leave
to work momentarily on colonial plantations or
in Europe. Such revolving migration outsources
the costs of reproduction to the communities of
origin. Not all of his conclusions are redeemable,
but his most provocative, which Claude Meil-
lassoux was one of the first to draw, certainly is:
namely that “primitive accumulation,” the trans-
fer of value from a noncapitalist to a capitalist
mode of production, is an ongoing process.
67. Mezzadra, Sandro, and Brett Neilson. 2013. *Border as method, or, the multiplication of labor*. Duke University Press. [Geoff Aung]

In *Border as method*, the border is not only a place or an object. It is a whole episteme for re-thinking migration, capitalism, and the political in the wake of “globalization.” Arguing that intensified primitive accumulation has produced not a borderless world but a proliferation of borders of all kinds, Mezzadra and Neilson explore borderlands and border struggles across multiple spaces and scales—from Fortress Europe to South Asia, from Palestine to New York. Throughout, the border appears and reappears as a defining feature of global capitalism’s deepening heterogeneity, raising the question of how variously situated political struggles must work across forms of difference in order to reclaim social futures beyond capitalism. Unusually economic for a work of broadly Euro-Marxist political theory, *Border as method* draws widely for instance from literature, postcolonial theory, and sociocultural anthropology, asking how to reorient political life through the episteme of the border.

68. Mintz, Sidney. 1974. *Worker in the cane: A Puerto Rican life history*. W. W. Norton & Company. [Mathijs Pelkmans]

*Worker in the cane* modestly promises “the story of a man’s life.” This story is powerfully presented, gripping the reader as they learn of Taso’s fatherless upbringing, romantic involvements, and many odd jobs, and listen to his reflections on life in the cane. Mintz’s person-centered approach enables an empathetic depiction of rural change, showing how the industrialization of sugar production left workers increasingly vulnerable and isolated. But beyond illustration, Mintz also offers a penetrating analysis of how structural change and personal experience interlock, in a nondeterministic way. This is especially true for Taso’s conversion to Pentecostal Christianity, which was informed by earlier experiences in life but also remained

a puzzling twist of events, certainly to Mintz. But it is precisely this lack of predictability that prompts analytic reflections on how macro and micro converge, presented by Mintz as “history within history.”

69. Mitchell, Timothy. 2013. *Carbon democracy: Political power in the age of oil*. Verso. [Theodora Vetta]

*Carbon democracy* epitomizes what a relational approach to resources can contribute to our understanding of global capitalism and democracy. Taking the transition from coal to oil as his starting point, Mitchell traces the rise and historic defeat of labor, through worker's diminishing ability to “sabotage” energy supply. Whereas oil and its intentional “scarcity” was a central element of geopolitical restructuring after the demise of the Ottoman Empire, it brought “home” postwar imaginaries of infinite growth and Keynesian economics. Mitchell masterfully unpacks the energy crisis of the 1970s, connecting corporate power and US hegemony to the construction of the Middle East as a “national security” interest, sustained by authoritarian politics, a blossoming arms industry, and the Global South’s heavy indebtedness.

70. Moon, David. 2020. *The American steppes: The unexpected Russian roots of Great Plains agriculture, 1870s–1930s*. Cambridge University Press. [Oane Visser]

This environmental history of America’s Great Plains reminds one at times of Wolf’s *Europe and the people without history* but focused on two regions. It also discerns unexpected global flows and connections that unsettle the unidirectionality of the West influencing the rest. The book meticulously maps how, with the migration of Russian Mennonites to the United States, a range of Russian plants, seeds, and ideas came in that changed prairie agriculture until today. They include the hardened Russian wheat varieties that facilitated opening up the prairies, the introduction of shelterbelts, and the influence of pioneering Russian soil science on US soil
sciences. One more evil “character” also figures
in this story, the invasive tumbleweed that fol-
lowed in the slipstream of the great wheat vari-
eties, to conquer the prairies.

71. Munif, Abdul Rahman. 1987. *Cities of salt*. Random House. [Novel; Geoff Aung]

Unlike much of the Anthropocene, eco-criticism,
and environmental humanities scholarship, this
classic of petrofiction, first published in Beirut
in 1984, contains a clear critique of capitalism,
imperialism, and comprador elites. Born in Jor-
dan in 1933, Abdul Rahman Munif worked in
the oil industry in Syria and Iraq before build-
ing a literary career crowned by *Cities of salt*. A
biting portrayal of the oil boom on the Arabian
peninsula, the novel stages the encounter be-
tween an American oil company, Bedouin social
worlds, and the Arab ruling classes. Eventually,
the Americans' casual dismissals of Arab work-
ers sparks widespread unrest in the shadows of
the company's dystopian, vampiric oil infra-
structures. A masterful chronicler of class con-
flict and imperial extraction, Munif had gained
Saudi Arabian citizenship but had it revoked
and his books banned. He died in Damascus in
2004, a fierce critic of both Saddam Hussein and
the American invasion of Iraq.

72. Narotzky, Susana. 1997. *New directions in economic anthropology*. Pluto Press. [Natalia Buier]

Published in 1997 and hidden under the de-
ceptive title *New directions in economic anthro-
pology*, this is a book whose insights have only
become more urgent. While the title suggests a
textbook-like overview of developments in an-
thropology, the volume matches a penetrating
reconstruction of fundamental analytical chal-
lenges with theoretical developments for which
the word “cutting-edge” would have been right
(were it not for it being emptied of meaning by
the routine acts of academic survival). *New di-
rections in economic anthropology* reveals con-
nections and works its way through political/
epistemological tensions and in the process

generates meaningful synergies without falling
into eclecticism. The final two chapters, on social
reproduction and local culture and economic
models (the latter analyzed through the case of
Catalan nationalism), remain not only one of the
clearest statements of the need for a unitary anal-
ysis of the mental and the material but also an
enviable demonstration of how that can be done.

73. Nash, June. 1979. *We eat the mines and the mines eat us: Dependency and exploitation in Bolivian tin mines*. Columbia University Press. [Sharryn Kasmir]

For those skeptical of the value of ethnography
for understanding global-scale processes (for its
localism, empiricism, and overemphasis on par-
ticularity), Nash's study of Quechua and Aymara
tin miners in Bolivia inspires reevaluation. The
monograph records how twentieth-century anti-
colonial movements took culturally specific
forms, and it memorializes the reciprocal in-
fluence of Marxism and Indigenous worldviews
and shows their combination. Those liberation
movements were defeated by military coups and
state violence, U.S. imperialism, proxy wars, and
neocolonial dependency, yet their annals re-
mind that Marxism was a tool for popular liber-
ation, never used of whole cloth and always
shaped by concrete struggles. Anthropologists
studying social movements can learn from Nash's
commitment to ethnography, especially the
chapter on belief and ritual as systems of mean-
ing and resources for collective resistance, and
from her surety that Marxist theory (exploita-
tion, uneven development, and the world sys-
tem) is indispensable for making sense of local
lifeworlds.

74. Patwardhan, Anand. 2012. *Jai Bhim Comrade*. Motion Picture. [Documentary; Luisa Steur]

Anand Patwardhan is a legendary Indian revo-
lutionary filmmaker. In India his films are of-
ten censored and screened clandestinely, while
they win major prizes internationally. *Jhai Bhim
Comrade* is particularly powerful, as it portrays
the vibrancy of the Dalit Panther movement in
Mumbai and its charismatic organic intellectu-
als who deliver their messages not only through
rousing speeches but also through radical po-
etry, song, and theater. But the documentary
also intimately portrays the steady eclipsing of
that movement through the rise of Hindu fas-
cism. In the end, it is incredibly painful to see
that the paved lanes and television sets that now
give a slightly less poverty-stricken appearance
to the Dalit slum have come at the price of Dalit
children being made ignorant of the slum's rev-
olutionary history and reproducing fascist lies
that add the violence of historical erasure to the
physical violence their parents endured.

75. Pun, Ngai. 2005. *Made in China: Women factory workers in a global workplace*. Duke University Press / Hong Kong University Press. [Charlotte Bruckermann]

Pun's landmark ethnography explores the strug-
gles and hopes of “dagongmei,” young female
migrant workers in China's Shenzhen Special
Economic Zone. The term marks a departure
from Maoist class rhetoric that honored “work-
ers” (gongren), to a new reality where “little
sisters” (mei) are “selling their labor” (dagong)—
poised between devaluation and aspiration.
Contrary to Western patterns of proletarization,
collective action is scarce; these women navigate
a transient phase of life, moving from rural vil-
lages to urban factories with the goal of making
money before marriage. They pursue “everyday
tactics” to survive grueling labor conditions and
strive for selfhood that connects their native
place networks and kinship ties with the prom-
ise of modern subjectivities. Working alongside
these women in an electronics factory by day
and sharing their dormitory at night, Pun pro-
vides an intimate, yet harrowing, insight into
workers’ screams and dreams within a global
factory made in China.

76. Pynchon, Thomas. 2013. *Gravity's rainbow*. Vintage Classics. [Fiction book; Patrick Neveling]

The climax of this one and only written work of postmodernist Marxism has its lead character, Tyrone Slothrop (an anagram for “Sloth” and “Entropy,” according to the online “Pynchon Wiki: Gravity’s Rainbow”), caught between a rock (paranoia, everything is connected) and a harder place (anti-paranoia, nothing is connected). Racing across Europe in the period between late summer 1944 and late summer 1945, hundreds of characters representing dozens of, often overlapping, international corporations, governments, clandestine groups, secret services, ex-colonial troops, Nazis, Communists, Capitalists, Pavlovians, and research units of obscure making scramble to find a dystopian holy grail; the *Schwarzgerät*, a black device that activates the mother of all military rockets, model number 00000. As the novel concludes, the possibility of isolated events collapses as the punters of the Orpheus Movie Theatre in California, watching the final scenes of the novel’s movie adaptation, are spared the impact of the 00000 rocket. We are led to believe the *Schwarzgerät* morphed into a blackout device.

77. Rodney, Walter. 1974. *How Europe underdeveloped Africa*. Howard University Press. [Geoff Aung]

First published in 1972, Walter Rodney's *How Europe underdeveloped Africa* remains a classic of anti-colonial, anti-imperial thought, a book of masterful scholarship but also enduring value for radicals the world over. It stands apart for the clarity of its core argument: that underdevelopment in Africa, far from being natural, timeless, or in any way apolitical, stems directly from European imperialism—from slavery to colonialism and beyond. Rodney's magnum opus reconstructs conditions in Africa prior to European expansion; how European extraction in Africa contributed to capitalist development in Europe; how Africa's contributions to European development produced underdevelopment in Africa; and how the supposed benefits of colonialism in Africa pale against Europe's destructive historical record across the con-
tinent. Still deeply persuasive today, Rodney makes the case inter alia for a revolutionary de-colonization that must be anti-capitalist—that must “cut” the comprador class’s reproduction of imperial extraction in the aftermath of Euro-pean colonial rule.

78. Roseberry, William. 1989. *Anthropologies and histories: Essays in culture, history and political economy*. Rutgers University Press. [Stephen Campbell]

William Roseberry played a key role in bolstering the disciplinary stature of anthropological political economy. In the essays collected in *Anthropologies and histories*, he critically engages some of the most prominent figures (at the time) in anthropology and cognate disciplines, employing historical materialism to advance an immanent critique of their ideas. He exposes, for example, Clifford Geertz’s neglect of power in the latter’s study of the Balinese cockfight. And he shows how James Scott’s idealization of “traditional” peasant culture left the latter unable to adequately grasp the contradictions of peasant life. It is significant that many of the arguments that Roseberry exposed in the book as one-dimensional endure to this day within contemporary culturalist anthropology—the enduring conceptual bifurcation of moral economy and political economy being one example.

79. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1992. *Death without weeping: The violence of everyday life in Brazil*. University of California Press. [Alina-Sandra Cucu]

Nancy Scheper-Hughes wrote a courageous book, which explores one of the most sensitive topics out there: the tragedy of infant death. Drawing on her long-term ethnographic engagement with a poor neighborhood in northeast Brazil, she argues that extreme scarcity, hunger, thirst, political abandonment, dependency on sugar plantations, fragility of everyday life, and high infant mortality are foundations for a pervasive “social production

of indifference to child death.” Against the idea that maternal love is universally wired in our genes—a true dogma at the time for evolutionary biologists, developmental psychologists, and cultural feminists alike—this social indifference includes the mother, for whom the low expectancy of child survival makes babies in their first year of life disposable. Women cannot be understood as mothers without being seen as workers, political beings, neighbors, daughters, sisters, or erotic partners, and motherhood cannot be separated from “a political economic order that reproduces sickness and death at its very base.”

80. Sekula, Allan, and Noël Burch. 2010. *The forgotten space*. Doc. Eye. [Film essay; Geoff Aung]

This magisterial documentary examines the place of the ocean in global capitalism, tackling the ocean’s paradox: it is at once essential yet almost invisible—forgotten, that is, despite some 90 percent of global trade being seaborne—within late capitalism’s reliance on circulation for the extraction of surplus value. The social worlds of container shipping lie at the center of this story, which builds on Sekula’s earlier project *Fish story* (1995). The film follows container ships across oceans and through ports, like those of Rotterdam, Los Angeles, and Hong Kong. Labor and dispossession are crucial themes. We meet port workers for whom automation has meant deskilling and marginalization, as well as farmers displaced by port redevelopment and tent city residents living in California. Like so much of Sekula’s pathbreaking “critical realism,” apparent in his photography, filmmaking, and criticism since the 1970s, *The forgotten space* practices what he once called “counterforensics”: tactical research oriented against class warfare from above. Indeed, Sekula’s abiding interest in container shipping’s uprooted proletarians has little to do with contemplative pity and everything to do with the need to overturn late capitalism’s seaborne regime of class power.
81. Sider, Gerald M. 1988. *Culture and class in anthropology and history: A Newfoundland illustration*. Cambridge University Press. [Don Kalb]

For anyone today in anthropology who understands the importance of writing against both the economic and culturalist reductionisms that trouble our visions and politics, Gerald Sider's book remains a classic. The book is set within seminal 1970s Marxist discussions about agency, interests (class), and experience (culture). At the end of the book, those concepts have evaporated. Sider has soaked them deeply into the social textures of the crudely contradictory social relationships that come with the merchant capitalism of the Hudson Bay Company, thoroughly shaping the Newfoundland outpost communities that catch the fish. At the end of the book, the communities, proud and idiosyncratic, and poetically described by Sider, are willing to collectively vote against themselves and disband in the context of Canada's resettlement policies.

82. Simon, David, and Ed Burns. 2002–2008. *The wire*. HBO. [Series; Oana Mateescu]

Fictional though it may be, *The wire* has struck viewers, critics and academics alike as an uncommonly authentic portrayal of the contemporary American city. Based on the writers' intimate knowledge of Baltimore, the series recomposes urban life from a different perspective in each season—the drug trade, the port, the city bureaucracy, public schools, and the print media. Relentless in its exploration of moral nuance and political compromise, the show casts the same acerbic sociological eye on drug dealers, police officers, union leaders, and city officials. In the words of David Simon: "*The Wire* is making an argument about what institutions—bureaucracies, criminal enterprises, the cultures of addiction, raw capitalism even—do to individuals. It is not designed purely as entertainment. It is, I'm afraid, a somewhat angry show." The result is a complex and unforgettable story of urban inequality, class, capitalism, and

politics. A superb introduction to contemporary urban anthropology.

83. Smith, Gavin. 1989. *Livelihood and resistance: Peasants and the politics of land in Peru*. University of California Press. [Christopher Krupa]

Younger scholars may not know how important the interdisciplinary field of peasant studies was to the intellectual and political work of Marxist scholars throughout the Cold War and what a space of refuge it became for anthropologists of the Left during the lost decade of the 1980s. This was perhaps most true for radical scholars of Latin America, where politically active peasants were being slaughtered en masse by terrorist states and neo-aristocratic landowners. Smith's first monograph offered an expanded way of thinking peasant politics in such contexts, setting a still-unrivaled benchmark for this vibrant field. Part of *Livelihood's* brilliance, in its focus on the Huasicancha community's historic antagonisms with a neighboring hacienda in highland Peru, rests on Smith's demonstration of the inextricable interplay between economic and political struggle in the ways people become historical actors crafting their tomorrows. Smith's analysis of how unified oppositional consciousness grows up through, not in spite of, the structural malleability of heterogenous (household) units, assemblages, and external linkages offers an incisive lesson in academic and activist method.

84. Smith, Joe, and Petr Jehlička. 2013. "Quiet sustainability: Fertile lessons from Europe's productive gardeners." *Journal of Rural Sociology* 38: 148–157. [Oane Visser]

The literature on sustainable food initiatives and alternative food networks tends to focus on the more vocal, ideologically outspoken ones. This groundbreaking article instead brings to the fore the often unintentional, yet very real, sustainability effects of food self-provisioning of allotment gardeners in Central and Eastern
Europe. While these practices have remained under the radar, they are widespread (including across income groups), with a large share of the population cultivating part of their own food in an environmentally sound way. This publication is a much-needed correction to the extremely persistent assumption that sustainability efforts always start from environmental awareness and convictions.

85. Steedman, Carolyn Kay. 1987. *Landscape for a good woman: A story of two lives*. New Rutgers University Press. [Alina-Sandra Cucu]

This is my favorite book. Almost ritually, I return to it once a year. Carolyn Steedman wrote this wonderful little book as a way of “working through” her own working-class childhood in South London in the 1950s, a past inescapably bound up with her mother’s working-class life. Drawing theoretically on Marxist and post-Freudian psychoanalytic thinking (even formally preserving elements of the psychoanalytic case study), Steedman shows that class consciousness flows through structures of feeling, which translate into historically contingent structures of desire. In 1950s South London, these were articulated around envy, endless want, bitter comparisons, and maternal coldness. Moving and sobering, this “story of two lives” shows how class can be the crux of our closest relationships, including the maternal bond.

86. Steur, Luisa. 2017. *Indigenist mobilization: Confronting electoral Communism and precarious livelihoods in post-reform Kerala*. Berghahn Books. [Don Kalb]

Luisa Steur’s *Indigenist Mobilization* is a brilliant historical ethnographic unpacking of identity as a contemporary master concept, and of indigeneity as the ultimate outside to capital. It also eloquently rejects the surfeit of contingency and empiricism that remains *en vogue* among some critical anthropology, such as the GENS manifesto. Here, India and Kerala are studied as profound, specific, and identifiable

critical junctions in a dynamic capitalist world of exploitation, dispossession, as well as signification. Its shifting parameters in the last 25 years have enabled the emergence of a sprawling Adivasi movement confronting Kerala communism. And yet, Steur insists, this is not a case of from class to culture and identity. In her thorough analysis, it is a continuation under new circumstances of emancipatory will among dispossessed people and its organic intellectuals, categorized by the post-colonial state and its earlier imperialist overlords as indigenous. What is read as indigenous identity these days is convincingly revealed as a political practice with deep historical roots acting within and against the shifting composite oppressions and exploitations of class and caste. Indigeneity as the outside to capital? Not here, nor elsewhere, in Steur’s rendering.

87. Striffler, Steve. 2005. *Chicken: The dangerous transformation of America's favorite food*. Yale University Press. [Christopher Krupa]

Sandwiched between his brilliant study of Ecuador's banana industry and a series of pathbreaking works on transnational labor solidarities, Striffler's *Chicken* is the gold standard for writing smart, purposeful anthropology that everybody can—and should—read. The book tells the century-long story of how Americans came to produce and consume so much chicken, long regarded as a lowly substitute for beef. Through chicken, readers track the rise of mega-industrial agriculture, ruthless corporate takeovers, and the invention of brand marketing, vertical integration, and value-added processing. Half-way through, the book morphs into a study of undervalued labor—the labor process ethnography of Striffler working the line at a chicken processing plant is not to be missed—and immigration, showing how small towns in the U.S. south became the preferred destination for Latino labor migrants in the mid-1990s. While cheap chicken is the product of demeaning, dangerous, and body-destroying work, Striffler
shows that improvements in food quality for consumers can only come about through improvements in the working conditions of those who produce it.

88. Susser, Ida. 2012. *Norman Street: Poverty and politics in an urban neighborhood*. Oxford University Press. [Anne-Christine Trémon]

This ethnography of a deindustrialized and impoverished New York district just after the city's fiscal crisis in the mid-1970s is much more than a historical record of the transformations that heralded neoliberalization and gentrification. Ida Susser's portrayal of reactions of Greenpoint-Williamsburg's inhabitants to the loss of jobs, the lack of housing, and the cutting of public services is not an enchanted one. Yet although there is a great deal of self-defeating racism, distrust, and resignation, the people are not apathetic, and possibilities for collective action do emerge. Quotidian cooperation between relatives and neighbors around essential resources forms the basis for mobilizations when their provision is endangered, as in the case of the shutdown of the local fire station. Norman Street offers an exemplary anthropological approach to working-class struggles and consciousness.

89. Szombati, Kristóf. 2018. *Revolt of the provinces: Anti-gypsyism and right-wing politics in Hungary*. Berghahn Books. [Don Kalb]

Anthropologists have played a pathbreaking role in analyzing the right-wing nationalist turn in Eastern European politics (in contrast to their role in “the West”). That turn had nothing to do with xenophobia or identity in the classic sense, as often assumed in the West, and everything with transformations of class. Kristof Szombati’s book offers, along with the work of his friend Gábor Scheiring, magnificent insight into the multiscalar relational processes that undergirded the slow and then sudden collapse of social democratic rule in postsocialist Hungary. In an exemplary analysis of Marxian-Polanyian

inspiration, Szombati shows how anti-gypsy mobilizations of the Magyar working poor in northeastern Hungary were cunningly exploited by the emergent radical right-wing Jobbik Party and its ethno-entrepreneurial leaders. He also shows why and how that same party failed in other contexts, such as in the southwest near Balaton, and how Orban took over its agenda for national right-wing transformation. This is top-notch anthropological contemporary history.

90. Teltumbde, Anand. 2008. *Khairlanji, A strange and bitter crop*. Navayana Publishing. [Revised and republished in 2010 under the title *The persistence of caste: The Khairlanji murders and India's hidden apartheid*; Nicolas Jaoul]

With this, his fourth book, Anand Teltumbde—born into a Dalit landless family, now Indian Institute of Technology professor of management—emerged as an outstanding organic intellectual of the anticaste movement. Focusing on the massacre of a Dalit family in the village of Khairlanji in 2006, the book demonstrates that caste cannot be treated as a cultural artifact or a remnant from an archaic past but instead has become the main pillar of neoliberal India. Furthering the Marxist-Ambedkarite intellectual legacy of the Dalit Panthers’ manifesto (1972), the book’s pathbreaking concept of “the political economy of caste” is essential to an anthropological interpretation of modern India. Teltumbde is both a relentless critique of the Dalit movement’s identity politics and of Marxist failures to conceptualize caste. His antifascist perspective on the Modi government cost him dearly: on fake charges, he recently spent thirty-one months in jail (on this see Alpa Shah’s 2024 book *The Incarcerations*).

91. Thompson, E. P. (1975) 2013. *Whigs and hunters: The origin of the Black Act*. Cambridge Stuff Publications. [Tilde Siglev]

*Whigs and hunters* is not only a wonderful example of history from below but also a relational analysis of the role of law and ideology
in the formation of hegemony. In detailing the politics surrounding the passing of the Black Act during the eighteenth-century enclosure movement in England, Thompson teases out the inevitable relationship between capitalist production, property, and the making and governance of nature long before anthropologists' contemporary preoccupation with ecological crisis. While less widely read than his magnum opus *The making of the English working class*, the book remains—perhaps now more than ever—relevant for anyone interested in resource struggles, conservation politics, and political ecology.

92. Tronti, Mario. (1966) 2019. *Workers and capital*. Verso. [Geoff Aung]

While Italian radicals once treated Tronti's writings like sacred texts—as Sylvia Federici has quipped—there remains a good case for taking his work with great seriousness today. Certainly this includes *Workers and capital*, Tronti's legendary contribution to Italian workerism. First published as essays in the journal *Quaderni Rossi* (Red notebooks) in the 1960s, and available in full English translation only in 2019, the writings collected in *Workers and capital* stake out a forceful and provocative argument: that because capital depends so fully on labor for its reproduction, labor holds the most powerful promise of revolt and revolution. Crucially, this requires a subjectivity of living labor that is more than labor's objective reproduction within capitalism. Capitalism must adapt to this autonomous potential or risk being overthrown. For Tronti, then—an insight of enduring value—capitalism's transformations over time are best understood not as neutral, technical processes but as reflections of class struggle.

93. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1997. *Silencing the past: Power and the production of history*. Beacon Press. [Natalia Buier]

"Is it really inconsequential that the history of America is being written in the same world where few little boys want to be Indians?" Since its publication in 1995, the questions raised by

*Silencing the past* have moved up in terms of visibility, yet Trouillot's ability to identify those political and analytical dilemmas that are born out of the friction between history as process and history as narrative remains mostly unmatched. While the case for historical anthropology seems by now largely uncontroversial, the idea that "the overlap and the distance between the two sides of historicity" must be subjected to anthropological analysis is less so. *Silencing the past* is not only an authoritative argument in favor of the latter but also a humbling reminder that the sites of knowledge production hardly match the boundaries of academia.

94. Verdery, Katherine. 2018. *My life as a spy: Investigations in a secret police file*. Duke University Press. [Alina-Sandra Cucu]

The book reconstitutes the encounter between Katherine Verdery and her personal file at the Securitate (the Romanian secret police during the socialist period). The authoritative voice when the anthropology of late socialist and "transition" Romania is concerned, Verdery offers the reader an exquisitely crafted articulation between a profoundly personal, autobiographical account of this encounter and a laser-sharp ethnography of the state, which peels multiple layers of historical change. Although Verdery bears her anger, disappointment, pain, and confusion on her sleeve, she is never self-indulgent, a rare feat in the contemporary "self-reflexive" and narcissistic anthropological landscape. Ultimately, the book functions as a reminder that in the process of becoming anthropologists, our souls could (and maybe should) get in trouble, but our analytic tools will help us throughout.

95. Vogel, Lise. (1983) 2013. *Marxism and the oppression of women: Toward a unitary theory*. Brill. [Anne-Christine Trémon]

A landmark in Marxist feminism, and a firm rejection of dual systems perspectives (on the one hand, class, on the other, patriarchy). Under capitalism, the oppression of women does not originate from outside the system; on the contrary,
it is rooted in their differential position with re-
spect to generational replacement processes that
generally involve some sexual division of labor.
Yet, the reproduction of labor power does not
necessarily rest on generational reproduction
or on the family unit—there are other ways and
loci (immigration, for instance). Vogel at once
denaturalizes women's oppression and opens up
an expanded class perspective that looks at the
gendered and racial dimensions of classed social
reproduction. She avoids functionalism, high-
lighting that what capital often (but not always)
needs, the reproduction of labor power, consti-
tutes a potential break on what capital tends to,
the full subsumption of labor. Her theory keeps
our thinking dialectical.

96. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2011. *The modern world system. Vol. 1: Capitalist agriculture and the origins of the European world economy in the sixteenth century*. University of California Press. [Patrick Neveling]

"Culture is the world system," Immanuel Waller-
stein wrote in 1990 in response to an early
culturalist onslaught on the global historical so-
ciology he had founded with the 1974 opening
salvo to the four volumes of *The modern world
system* (MWS). MWS 1 shifted the goalposts for
the unit of analysis to the global scale. Where
Marx's chapter on "The original accumulation"
in *Capital* vol. 1 insisted on the unevenness of
capitalist development, MWS 1 located that un-
evenness in the fuzzy logic of world systemic
accumulation and its discontents. Some claim
that the MWS unit of analysis obscures the local
as the natural habitat of the ethnographer. Don't
they want to know how human lives are lived
and made in the fleeting shadows of political
units emanating from volatile capitalist accu-
mulation in the period since 1400, often linger-
ing on despite their anachronicity?

97. Williams, Raymond. 1973. "Chapter 16: *Knowable communities*." In *The country and the city*, 165–181. Hogarth Press. [Gavin Smith]

Using this notion, Williams traces the shift to urban modernity from the rural setting in which we know all the people we need to know; no outside observer can “know” this community. So it is known from within and unknowable from without. By contrast, “the growth of towns . . . the increase in the division and complexity of labor . . . altered relations between and within classes: in changes like these any assumptions of a knowable community . . . became harder and harder to sustain.” With the city came “the separated subjectivity of the observer”—for us all—“the middle terms of actual societies are excluded . . . a direct connection is then forged between intense subjectivity and a timeless reality.” The collective consciousness that now appears as lacking, for example, for Thomas Hardy reappears in metaphysical forms and in institutions and movements. “Out of the cities came these two great and transforming modern ideas: myth in its variable forms; revolution in its variable forms. Each offers to convert the other to its own terms.”

98. Wolf, Eric. 1982. *Europe and the people without history*. University of California Press. [Don Kalb]

When Eric Wolf gave his AAA 1989 [sic] Presi-
dential Lecture on “Facing Power,” he basically
summarized the methodological skeleton be-
hind the multiscalar and world systemic ap-
proach to modes of production, capitalism, and
“anthropological subjects” he had developed
in his master work *Europe and the people with-
out history* (1982)—but now with some of the
Marxism left out. By 1990 Wolf had obviously
become somewhat dissatisfied by the shortcom-
ings of 1970s Marxism, including his own. But
would we ever have wished to miss the broad
sweep of five hundred years of global peoples’
history (and histories) under the whip of the
uneven and combined engine of global capi-
talism that Wolf describes and analyzes in this
book? While David Graeber and Jack Goody
have since launched big world historical an-
thropologies of their own, in important respects
Wolf's magnum opus still stands out for its singular combination of world historical vision, conceptual ambition, and ethnographic precision. *Focaal's* mission of global and historical anthropology, as well as current anthropologies of capitalism, class, and labor, probably build on his example more than any other.

99. Worsley, Peter. 1968. *The trumpet shall sound: A study of “cargo” cults in Melanesia*. Schocken Books. [Patrick Neveling]

Anthropologists like to think of their discipline as leftist and progressive. Would Peter Worsley agree? A member of the UK Communist Party, Worsley was denied a field research permit for Papua New Guinea by the Australian government. Forced to research his PhD remotely, he wrote a seminal study on Melanesian cargo cults in the first half of the twentieth century. Immune to the exoticism of his peers, Worsley places these movements that follow messianic leaders and emulate the infrastructure projects of colonial powers in world historical process. Like the Taiping rebellion in 1850s China, Melanesian cults threatened governments without calling for indigenist revival but with a new morality, stirring postcolonial nationalism. Despite a promising career start and support from Max Gluckman, Worsley left anthropology. The MI5 sabotaged postdoctoral research in Africa, and

Edward Evans-Pritchard vetoed anthropology appointments, not least after Worsley called for anthropologists to side with the Kenyan Mau Mau rebellion. A world-leading career in sociology followed.

100. Wright, Richard. (1945) 2007. *Black boy*. HarperCollins. [Autobiography; Luisa Steur]

This gripping autobiography is a raw social history-cum-ethnography of the viciousness of racism in the segregationist US South and of its subtler forms in the North. Wright is eternally in an “insider-outsider position,” especially when he discovers that the one place that offers him a sense of belonging—the John Reed Communist Writers’ Collective, which he joins when escaping to Chicago in the late 1920s—is doomed by contradiction. He dreams of writing the life histories of fellow rank-and-file Black Communists, but the latter remain deeply suspicious of him as an autodidact, famished, far-too-eloquent “bastard intellectual.” Wright wholeheartedly admires Communism as a “communal vision” that takes people out of their “oppressed isolation” and sinks “down into [their] soul” but ultimately finds himself violently expelled from the party for not sufficiently submitting his existential call of writing to it: “writing had to be done in loneliness.”