More money now flows into developing countries from the remittances of labor migrants than from official foreign aid. To make use of these crucial inflows, migrants rely upon transnational livelihoods strategies to allocate remittances. Remittance practices support individual needs and communal reciprocities by engaging a site of inter-household collaboration. While recent theories of transnational migration situate households prominently within these practices, ethnographic research in Kyrgyzstan reveals that households do not make use of remittances on their own. Communal practices span households by employing relations of debt, reciprocity, and trust. This article seeks to bridge the development literature focused on transnational livelihoods with an anthropological attunement to the social reciprocity of remittances. The resulting assemblages require constant upkeep while exposing social obligations to distortion and normative change.

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Yael Navaro-Yashin's theoretically rich and empirically grounded monograph explores how various objects (such as bureaucratic documents, abandoned homes, decrepit barricades, etc.) reveal the reverberations of a long-standing conflict that had bifurcated the island of Cyprus. The product of a decade of ethnographic engagement amidst the homes, coffee shops and administrative offices of the "made-up state" (p. 6) of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus [TRNC], this book breaks important theoretical ground -particularly for scholars probing the intersection of subjectivity and society. Navaro-Yashin insists that the tensions between state and subject are not borne solely by the mind but are freighted by objects as well. Thus, elements of the non-human environment mediate political and historical processes because they allow their effects, such as violence and trauma, to be internalized. Using the exceptional status of the TRNC as a case study of governing writ large, Navaro-Yashin explores how maintaining mass belief requires not only collusion with the practices of the 'make-believe,' such as administration and bureaucracy, but an affective engagement with the 'ephemeral objects' that are generated (p. 116). Like the objects that she studies, the theoretical conclusions tend to posit a middle ground between divergent intellectual lineages. Presented with clarity throughout, Navaro-Yashin's conceptually innovative use of affect and space will offer lasting benefit to cultural and psychological inquiries into statecraft and the law.