New Books In Anthropology

Situated between the 1970s Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan and the post-2001 War on Terror, Refugee Cities: How Afghans Changed Urban Pakistan (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022) tells the story of how global wars affect everyday life for Afghans who have been living as refugees in Pakistan. In this thoughtful and extensively researched work, Dr. Sanaa Alimia provides a necessary glimpse of what ordinary life looks like for a long-term refugee population, beyond the headlines of war, terror, or helpless suffering. Refugee Cities reconstructs local micro-histories to chronicle the lives of ordinary people living in low-income neighborhoods in Peshawar and Karachi and the ways in which they have transformed the cities of which they are a part. It also increases our understanding of how cities— rather than the nation—are important sites of identity-making for people of migrant origins. At the same time, the book also makes an important intervention through its documentation of the multiple displaceme