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The Eternal Dissident offers rare insight into one of the most inspiring and thought-provoking Reform rabbis of the twentieth century, Leonard Beerman, who was renowned both for his eloquent and challenging sermons and for his unrelenting commitment to social action. Beerman was a man of powerful word and action—a probing intellectual and stirring orator, as well as a nationally known opponent of McCarthyism, racial injustice, and Israeli policy in the occupied territories. The shared source of Beerman’s thought and activism was the moral imperative of the Hebrew prophets, which he believed bestowed upon the Jewish people their role as the “eternal dissident.” This volume brings Beerman to life through a selection of his most powerful writings, followed by commentaries from notable scholars, rabbis, and public personalities that speak to the quality and ongoing relevance of Beerman’s work.

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Landlocked and surrounded by South Africa on all sides, the mountain kingdom of Lesotho became the world’s first “water-exporting country” when it signed a 1986 treaty with its powerful neighbor. An elaborate network of dams and tunnels now carries water to Johannesburg, the subcontinent’s water-stressed economic epicenter. Hopes that proceeds from water sales could improve Lesotho’s fortunes, however, have clashed with fears that soil erosion from overgrazing livestock could fill its reservoirs with sediment. In this wide-ranging and deeply researched book, Colin Hoag shows how producing water commodities incites a fluvial imagination: a sense for how water flows. As we enter our planet’s water-export era, Lesotho exposes the possibilities and perils ahead. “Colin Hoag’s keen ethnographic eye shows how the Basotho’s beloved pula (rain) was transformed into exportable and commodified ‘water,’ demonstrating how dams are entangled with a host of thorny social and political issues.” — James Ferguson, author of Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution “A rich account of the ecological, political, and economic contradictions produced through Lesotho’s water-export economy. The work is engaging and well-written, based on long-term fieldwork in Lesotho’s grazing communities, where lives and livelihoods are bound by the state’s management of water.” — Laura A. Ogden, author of Swamplife: People, Gators, and Mangroves Entangled in the Everglades “A beautifully written and thoroughly interdisciplinary book that shows why and how it is necessary to engage histories of racialization and commoditization in scientific practice, on the one hand, and natural scientific practices in the social sciences, on the other. In describing the ongoing histories and infrastructures that make water and empire durable forces, Hoag’s work is a wonderful and timely contribution.” — Nikhil Anand, author of Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai

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Based on more than a decade of ethnographic research, The Fourth Invasion examines an Ixil Maya community’s movement against the construction of one of the largest hydroelectric plants in Guatemala. The arrival of the Palo Viejo hydroelectric plant (built by the Italian corporation Enel Green Power) to the municipality of Cotzal highlighted the ongoing violence inflicted on Ixils by outsiders and the Guatemalan state. Locals referred to the building of the hydroelectric plant as the “fourth invasion” for its similarity to preceding invasions: Spanish colonization, the creation of the plantation economy, and the state-led genocide during the Guatemalan armed conflict. Through a historical account of cyclical waves of invasions and resistance in Cotzal during the four invasions, Giovanni Batz argues that extractivist industries are a continuation of a colonial logic of extraction based on the displacement of Indigenous Peoples and the destruction of their territories and values that has existed since Spanish arrival in 1524. “A wonderfully insightful and powerful book, which vividly captures the continuity of colonialism and the way the past presses on the future. I strongly recommend it.” — Greg Grandin, author of The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America “This extraordinary, detailed account of Maya-Ixil framings of five hundred years of struggle is a remarkable achievement for the author and the Ixil communities with which he collaborates.”— Carlota McAllister, coeditor of War by Other Means: Aftermath in Post-Genocide Guatemala “This brilliant book illuminates how Indigenous world-making ideas shape contemporary resistance to megaprojects. Its deep and careful collaboration with Mayan communities in Guatemala is a model for scholars and activists alike.” — Elizabeth Oglesby, coeditor of The Guatemala Reader: History, Culture, Politics

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A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. In rural China funerals are conducted locally, on village land by village elders. But in urban areas, people have neither land for burials nor elder relatives to conduct funerals. Chinese urbanization, which has increased drastically in recent decades, involves the creation of cemeteries, state-run funeral homes, and small private funerary businesses. The Funeral of Mr. Wang examines social change in urbanizing China through the lens of funerals, the funerary industry, and practices of memorialization. It analyzes changes in family life, patterns of urban sociality, transformations in economic relations, the politics of memorialization, and the echoes of these changes in beliefs about the dead and ghosts.

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The Hegemony of Heritage makes an original and significant contribution to our understanding of how the relationship of architectural objects and societies to the built environment changes over time. Studying two surviving medieval monuments in southern Rajasthan—the Ambikā Temple in Jagat and the Śri Ékliṅgjī Temple Complex in Kailāshpurī—the author looks beyond their divergent sectarian affiliations and patronage structures to underscore many aspects of common practice. This book offers new and extremely valuable insights into these important monuments, illuminating the entangled politics of antiquity and revealing whether a monument’s ritual record is affirmed as continuous and hence hoary or dismissed as discontinuous or reinvented through various strategies. The Hegemony of Heritage enriches theoretical constructs with ethnographic description and asks us to reexamine notions such as archive and text through the filter of sculpture and mantra.

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