Kim Gutschow
(Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion, Williams College)
Being a Buddhist Nun: The Struggle for Enlightenment in the Himalayas (Harvard University Press, 2004)

from the publisher's description:
"A richly textured picture of the little known culture of a Buddhist nunnery, the book offers moving narratives of nuns struggling with the Buddhist discipline of detachment. Its analysis of the way in which gender and sexuality construct ritual and social power provides valuable insight into the relationship between women and religion in South Asia today." view table of contents

Gaston R. Gordillo
(Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Sociology, University of British Columbia)
Landscapes of Devils: Tensions of Place and Memory in the Argentinean Chaco (Duke University Press, 2004)
Landscapes of Devils examines the ways in which culturally grounded labor experiences shape the production of places and, in particular, the role of social memory in the making of tense-ridden spatial configurations. Deeply ethnographic as well as historical, the book is based on the experience of the western Toba, an indigenous people in northern Argentina’s Gran Chaco region. In the early twentieth century, the Toba were defeated by the Argentinean army, incorporated into the seasonal labor force of distant sugar plantations, and proselytized by British Anglicans. Gastón Gordillo reveals how the Toba’s memory of these processes is embedded in their experience of “the bush” that dominates the Chaco landscape. Further, he analyzes how the connections between the bush and other places have produced a shifting, unstable, and contradictory geography.

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
(Professor of Anthropology, Univ. of Caliornia at Santa Cruz)
Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection
(Princeton University Press, 2004)

from the publisher's description:
"Challenging the widespread view that globalization invariably signifies a "clash" of cultures, anthropologist Anna Tsing here develops friction in its place as a metaphor for the diverse and conflicting social interactions that make up our contemporary world."
read the book's introduction

Michael M. J. Fischer
(Professor of Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice
(Duke University Press, 2003)
from the publisher's description:
" . . . with Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice, pathbreaking scholar Michael M. J. Fischer moves the discussion to a consideration of the groundwork laid in the 1990s for engagements with the fast-changing worlds of technoscience, telemedia saturation, and the reconstruction of societies after massive trauma. Fischer argues that new methodologies and conceptual tools are necessitated by the fact that cultures of every kind are becoming more complex and differentiated at the same time that globalization and modernization are bringing them into exponentially increased interaction"