Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States

Medical Anthropology Quarterly 1 (1), “The Mindful Body: A Prolegomenon to Future Work in Medical Anthropology” by Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock (1987)

In this article, the authors advocate for the idea that the body is an important vehicle for understanding the philosophical underpinnings of the discipline of anthropology as well as substantive work in medical anthropology specifically.

American Ethnologist 15 (2), “Conjugated Oppression: Class and Ethnicity among Guaymi and Kuna Banana Plantation Workers” by Philippe Bourgois (1988)

In this paper, Bourgois explores the relationship between class and ethnicity—and, more broadly, between ideology and material reality—by comparing the integration of two groups of workers into the labor force of a Central America banana plantation.

An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology by Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant (1992)

This overview of social theorist Pierre Bourdieu’s imaginative and provocative work interprets its logic and details the thematic and methodological principles that underlie his ideas.

The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception by Michel Foucault, trans. by A. M. Sheridan Smith (1994)

In presenting the emergence of la clinique, or the teaching hospital, as a medical institution, this book identifies and describes the concept of le regard médical (“the medical gaze”), which prioritizes objective measures over subjective ones.

Sensuous Scholarship by Paul Stoller (1997)

This book challenges contemporary social theorists and cultural critics who consider the body as a text that can be read and analyzed; Stoller argues that this attitude is Eurocentric and inappropriate for anthropologists.

Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology, ed. Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois (2003), “Making Sense of Violence” by Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois

This piece explores violence in human history and includes sections on conquest and colonialism, the Holocaust, politics and communal violence, why people kill, state violence and “dirty wars,” violence and political resistance, crime in times of peace (“everyday violence”), gendered violence, torture, witnessing and documenting violence, and aftermaths.

Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology, ed. Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois (2003), “Gender and Symbolic Violence” by Pierre Bourdieu

In this piece, Bourdieu explores the effects of symbolic violence—a type of nonphysical violence that the naturalization of power dynamics between social groups unconsciously manifests—on gender relations.

Qualitative Sociology 28 (4), “Carnal Connections: On Embodiment, Apprenticeship, and Membership” by Loïc Wacquant (2005)

This article addresses several topics, including social acceptance and membership; the dynamics of embodiment and the structural, interactional, and dispositional roles of race; and apprenticeship as a mode of transmitting knowledge and a technique for social inquiry.

Prison Notebooks by Antonio Gramsci, trans. by Joseph Buttigieg (2011)

In these hand-written notes (published posthumously), one of the 20th century’s most innovative Marxist thinkers captured his ideas on a wide range of topics—including force and hegemony, coercion and consent, class politics and political economy in civil society, and passive revolution—while held in Fascist prisons between 1929 and 1935.