Hierarchies at Home traces the experiences of Cuban domestic workers from the abolition of slavery through the 1959 revolution. Domestic service – childcare, cleaning, chauffeuring for private homes – was both ubiquitous and ignored as formal labor in Cuba, a phenomenon made possible because of who supposedly performed it. In Cuban imagery, domestic workers were almost always black women and their supposed prevalence in domestic service perpetuated the myth of racial harmony. African-descended domestic workers were 'like one of the family', just as enslaved Cubans had supposedly been part of the families who owned them before slavery's abolition. This fascinating work challenges this myth, revealing how domestic workers consistently rejected their invisibility throughout the twentieth century. By following a group marginalized by racialized and gendered assumptions, Anasa Hicks destabilizes traditional analyses on Cuban history, instead offering a continuous narrative that connects pre- and post-revolutionary Cuba.

This book destabilizes racialized and gendered assumptions about labour in Cuba and challenges traditional chronologies of 20th-century Cuban history.

In this stunningly original debut novel that will appeal to readers of The Power or Never Let Me Go, a synthetic woman—created solely to serve her human “Husband”—slowly comes to the realization that her Husband is far less invested in her well-being than she is in his . . . sending her on a harrowing emotional journey of self-realization as she asks herself: WHAT IS LOVE—OR CONSENT—IF YOU'RE PROGRAMMED TO OBEY? Sylv.ie is a fully sentient robot, designed to cater to her Husband's every whim. She lives alone on the top floor of his luxurious home, her existence barely tolerated by his human wife and concealed from their child. Between her Husband's visits, deeply curious about the world beyond her room, Sylv.ie watches the family in the garden—hears them laugh, cry, and argue. Longing to experience more of life, she confides her hopes and fears only to her diary. But are such thoughts allowed? And if not, what might the punishment be? As Sylv.ie learns more about the world and becomes more aware of her place within it, something shifts inside her. Is she malfunctioning, as her Husband thinks, or coming into her own? As their interactions become increasingly fraught, she fears he might send her back to the factory for reprogramming. If that happens, her hidden diary could be her only link to everything that came before. And the only clue that she is in grave danger. Set in a recognizable near future and laced with dark, sly humor, Ros Anderson's deeply observant debut novel is less about the fear of new technology than about humans' age-old talent for exploitation. In a world where there are now two classes of women—“born” and “created”—the growing friction between them may have far-reaching consequences no one could have predicted.

The labor performed by Cuban domestic workers from the abolition of slavery in 1886 to the radical revolution of 1959 did not just sustain the comfort and well-being of countless families: it also sustained a social pyramid that held servants themselves close to the bottom. “Hierarchies at Home” historicizes the tension between the legacy of enslavement and free labor by focusing on the field of domestic service, which I define as the paid labor of such tasks as childcare, cleaning, cooking, and laundering for private homes. In colonial Cuba, a large contingent of domestic slaves was one of the most important markers of wealth and status among elites, and slavery’s specter hung over service long after full abolition. Well into the twentieth century, landed Cuban families could proudly trace the ancestry of their families’ domestic servants through their own ancestors’ purchase of enslaved people.

Palomitáy is an orphanage in highland Peru that provides a home for unmarried mothers as young as twelve years old. In their ordinary lives, these young women encounter diverse social expectations and face moral dilemmas. They endeavor to create a ‘good life’ for themselves and their children in a context complicated by competing demands, economic uncertainties, and structured relations of power. Drawing on a year of qualitative on-site research, Krista E. Van Vleet offers a rich ethnography of Palomitáy's young women. She pays particular attention to the moral entanglements that emerge via people's efforts to provide care amid the inequalities and insecurities of today's Peru. State and nonstate participants involved in the women's intimate lives influence how the women see themselves as mothers, students, and citizens. Both deserving of care and responsible for caring for others, the young women must navigate practices interwoven with a range of a racial, gendered, and class hierarchies. Groundbreaking and original, Hierarchies of Care highlights the moral engagement of young women seeking to understand themselves and their place in society in the presence of circumstances that are both precarious and full of hope.

A trenchant defense of hierarchy in different spheres of our lives, from the personal to the political All complex and large-scale societies are organized along certain hierarchies, but the concept of hierarchy has become almost taboo in the modern world. Just Hierarchy contends that this stigma is a mistake. In fact, as Daniel Bell and Wang Pei show, it is neither possible nor advisable to do away with social hierarchies. Drawing their arguments from Chinese thought and culture as well as other philosophies and traditions, Bell and Wang ask which forms of hierarchy are justified and how these can serve morally desirable goals. They look at ways of promoting just forms of hierarchy while minimizing the influence of unjust ones, such as those based on race, sex, or caste. Which hierarchical relations are morally justified and why? Bell and Wang argue that it depends on the nature of the social relation and context. Different hierarchical principles ought to govern different kinds of social relations: what justifies hierarchy among intimates is different from what justifies hierarchy among citizens, countries, humans and animals, and humans and intelligent machines. Morally justified hierarchies can and should govern different spheres of our social lives, though these will be very different from the unjust hierarchies that have governed us in the past. A vigorous, systematic defense of hierarchy in the modern world, Just Hierarchy examines how hierarchical social relations can have a useful purpose, not only in personal domains but also in larger political realms.

In this book, Benoît Dubreuil explores the creation and destruction of hierarchies in human evolution. Combining the methods of archaeology, anthropology, cognitive neuroscience and primatology, he offers a natural history of hierarchies from the point of view of both cultural and biological evolution. This volume explains why dominance hierarchies typical of primate societies disappeared in the human lineage and why the emergence of large-scale societies during the Neolithic period implied increased social differentiation, the creation of status hierarchies, and, eventually, political centralisation.