The University of Arizona Press
November 18, 2024
The University of Arizona Press will be at the American Anthropological Association meeting this week in Tampa! We hope you’ll stop by booth #308 where we’ll have our new anthropology titles on display, and as a bonus, you can meet Senior Editor, Allyson Carter!
We’re also sharing the conference discount with everyone: use code AZAAA24 for 35% off all titles on our website.
Finally, if you’re an author or editor and you have a project that might be a good fit for The University of Arizona Press, learn more about publishing with us here.
New & Featured Titles
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.
Harnessing a myriad of methodologies and research spanning multiple continents, Embodying Biodiversity 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. Acknowledging the monumental role of everyday champions in tending biodiversity, Terese Gagnon and the contributors argue that this caretaking is crucial to countering ecological harm and global injustice stemming from colonial violence and racial capitalism.
Delving into European political philosophy, comparative politics, and contemporary international law, Savages and Citizens shows how the concept of indigeneity has shaped the development of the modern state. The exclusion of Indigenous people was not a collateral byproduct; it was a political project in its own right. Andrew Canessa and Manuela Lavinas Picq argue that indigeneity is a political identity relational to modern nation-states and that Indigenous politics, although marking the boundary of the state, are co-constitutive of colonial processes of state-making. In showing how indigeneity is central to how the international system of states operates, the book forefronts Indigenous peoples as political actors to reject essentializing views that reduce them to cultural “survivors” rooted in the past.
As an archaeologist, anthropologist, scholar, educator, and program evaluator for the U.S. State Department during the early Cold War era, Dr. Isabel T. Kelly’s (1906–1983) career presents a distinctive vantage point on the evolving landscape of U.S. foreign policy, Mexican rural welfare initiatives, and the discipline of anthropology. Her trajectory illuminates a shift toward pragmatic, culturally sensitive approaches in technical assistance programs for Mexico’s rural areas, departing from traditional U.S.-centric developmental paradigms. In Cold War Anthropologist, Stephanie Baker Opperman skillfully brings to light the previously untold narratives of Isabel Kelly, unveiling her influence on mid-twentieth-century Mexico.
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. Significantly, many non-Hopis involved adopted Indian identities during this time, becoming “neo-Indians.”
Forthcoming Spring 2025
Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez forthcoming 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. Through meticulous ethnographic fieldwork, extensive archival research, and rigorous statistical data, Vélez-Ibáñez exposes the deeply entrenched networks of exploitation and conflict that have emerged in response to global capitalism’s pressures.
Featured Series
Critical Issues in Indigenous Studies anchors intellectual work within an Indigenous framework that reflects Native-centered concerns and objectives. Series titles expand and deepen discussions about Indigenous people beyond nation-state boundaries, and complicate existing notions of Indigenous identity. The series editors are especially interested in works that analyze colonization, land dispossession, and oppression while foregrounding Indigenous peoples’ resistance to these processes.
Global Change/Global Health is a series for scholarly monographs that treat global change and human health as interconnected phenomena. The goals of the series are to advance scholarship across the social and health sciences, contribute to public debates, and inform public policies about the human dimensions of global change.
Biodiversity in small spaces is a series that provides short, to-the-point books that re-examine the conservation of biodiversity in small places and focus on the interplay of memory, identity, and affect in determining what matters, and thus what stays, thereby shaping the fabric of biodiversity in the present and, ultimately, the future. The authors will cover, in an accessible way, the range of marginalities, subjectivities, and chronologies, from indigenous farmers nurturing, defending, or repatriating their traditional crop varieties to college towns re-embedding food production and consumption into the social fabric of their communities.
Critical Green Engagements is a series that critically engages with the growing global advocacy of the “green economy” model for environmental stewardship and puts forth alternatives to discourses that dominate “green” practices. The series explores how different advocates, bystanders, and opponents engage with the changes envisaged by policy directives and environmental visions. It also examines which forms of social movements emerge from these ideologies and how social movement actors connect. The series showcases the rigorous, high-quality research and writing emerging in response to these transformations and channels the energies and skills of an international collection of leading environmental scholars.
Native Peoples of the Americas is an ambitious series whose scope ranges from North to South America and includes Middle America and the Caribbean. Each volume takes unique methodological approaches—archaeological, ethnographic, ecological, and/or ethno-historical—to frame cultural regions. Volumes cover select theoretical approaches that link regions, such as Native responses to conquest and the imposition of authority, environmental degradation, loss of Native lands, and the appropriation of Native knowledge and cosmologies. These books illuminate the strategies that Native Peoples have employed to maintain both their autonomies and identities. The series encourages the participation of Native, well-established, and emerging scholars as authors, contributors, and editors for the books.
For questions or to submit a proposal to any of these series, please contact Allyson Carter at ACarter@uapress.arizona.edu.
