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Michal Pagis

Western society has never been more interested in interiority. Indeed, it seems more and more people are deliberately looking inward—toward the mind, the body, or both. Michal Pagis’s Inward focuses on one increasingly popular channel for the introverted gaze: vipassana meditation, which has spread from Burma to more than forty countries and counting. Lacing her account with vivid anecdotes and personal stories, Pagis turns our attention not only to the practice of vipassana but to the communities that have sprung up around it. Inward is also a social history of the westward diffusion of Eastern religious practices spurred on by the lingering effects of the British colonial presence in India. At the same time Pagis asks knotty questions about what happens when we continually turn inward, as she investigates the complex relations between physical selves, emotional selves, and our larger social worlds. Her book sheds new light on evergreen topics such as globalization, social psychology, and the place of the human body in the enduring process of self-awareness.

The University of Chicago Press

Fieldwork Encounters and Discoveries

Inward: Vipassana Meditation & the Embodiment of the Self

Alice Goffman

“A remarkable chronicle . . . related with honesty and compassion,” this ethnography reveals “the impact of probation and parole practices on one community” (Publisher Weekly).

The War on Drugs has done almost nothing to prevent drugs from being sold or used, but it has created a little-known surveillance state in America’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods.

Alice Goffman spent six years living in one such neighborhood in Philadelphia, and her observations reveal the effects of this pervasive policing. Goffman introduces us to an unforgettable cast of young African American men who are caught up in this web of warrants and surveillance. All find the net of presumed criminality, built as it is on the very associations and friendships that make up a life, nearly impossible to escape. We watch as the pleasures of summer-evening stoop-sitting are shattered by the arrival of a carful of cops looking to serve a warrant; we watch as teenagers teach their younger siblings and cousins how to run from the police, and we see, over and over, the relentless toll that the presumption of criminality takes on families—and futures.

Through her gripping accounts of daily life in the forgotten neighborhoods of America’s cities, Goffman makes it impossible to ignore the very real human costs of our failed response.

“Extraordinary.” —Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker

“A remarkable feat of reporting. . . . Astonishing—and riveting.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Goffman’s lively prose . . . opens a window into a life where paranoia has become routine.” —Baltimore City Paper

“[Goffman] gives us a subtle analysis and poignant portrait of our fellow citizens who struggle to preserve their sanity and dignity.” —Cornel West, author of Race Matters

On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City