The University of Arizona Press

In Loreto, Baja California Sur, Mexico, artisanal fishing families and staff of Loreto Bay National Park face an array of choices as tourism, environmental concerns, and economic precarity challenge livelihoods and natural resource availability. In Net Values, Nicole D. Peterson offers a critical examination of how the idea of “choice” is understood, and what it means for policies, planning, and programs to ignore the social, political, economic, and cultural contexts surrounding these choices.

Through storytelling, ethnography, and interviews, Heritage in the Body examines the links between health and heritage in times of change. Using a series of case studies, anthropologist Kristina Baines tells the intimate stories of how Indigenous Maya and Garifuna Belizeans—both in Belize and in the United States—navigate macro-level processes such as economic development, climate change, political shifts, and global health crises in the context of changes in their own lives.

Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez’s latest work, The Rise of Necro/Narco Citizenship investigates the intricate and often harrowing dynamics that define the borderlands between the United States, Mexico, and beyond. This groundbreaking book provides a comprehensive cultural, economic, social, and political-ecological analysis, illustrating how various forms of violence and militarization have reshaped the daily lives and identities of the region’s inhabitants.

Harnessing a myriad of methodologies and research spanning multiple continents, Embodying Biodiversity, edited by Terese Gagnon, delves into the power of everyday forms of biodiversity conservation, motivated by sensory and embodied engagement with plants. Through an array of interdisciplinary contributions, the authors argue that the vast majority of biodiversity conservation worldwide is carried out not by large-scale, hierarchical initiatives but by ordinary people who cultivate sensory-motivated, place-based bonds with plants.

Hopis and the Counterculture addresses how the Hopi became icons of the followers of alternative spiritualities and reveals one of the major pathways for the explosive appropriation of Indigenous identities in the 1960s. Author Brian Haley reveals a largely unknown network of Native, non-Indian, and neo-Indian actors who spread misrepresentations of the Hopi that they created through interactions with the Hopi Traditionalist faction of the 1940s through 1980s.

Based on anthropological research in Rajasthan, Cookstove Chronicles: Social Life of a Women’s Technology in India, argues that the supposedly obsolete chulha persists because it offers women control over the tools needed to feed their families. Author Meena Khandelwal shows that the continued use of old stoves alongside the new is not a failure to embrace new technologies but instead a strategy to maximize flexibility and autonomy. The chulha is neither the villain nor hero of this story.