New Books in Anthropology
2,089 episodes - English - Latest episode: 10 days ago - ★★★★ - 42 ratingsInterviews with Anthropologists about their New Books
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Episodes
NBN Classic: Rosalind Fredericks, "Garbage Citizenship: Vital Infrastructures of Labor in Dakar, Senegal" (Duke UP, 2018)
October 02, 2022 10:00 - 51 minutesThis episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time. The production and removal of garbage, as a key element of the daily infrastructure of urban life, is deeply embedded in social, moral, and political contexts. In her book Garbage Citizenship: Vital Infrastructures of Labor in Dakar, Senegal (Duke University Press, 2018) Dr. Rosalind Fredericks illuminates the history of state-citizen relations and economic and political res...
Johanna O. Zulueta, "Okinawan Women's Stories of Migration: From War Brides to Issei" (Routledge, 2022)
September 30, 2022 08:00 - 46 minutesThe phenomenon of “war brides” from Japan moving to the West has been quite widely discussed, but this book tells the stories of women whose lives followed a rather different path after they married foreign occupiers. During Okinawa’s Occupation by the Allies from 1945 to 1972, many Okinawan women met and had relationships with non-Western men who were stationed in Okinawa as soldiers and base employees. Most of these men were from the Philippines. In Okinawan Women's Stories of Migration: F...
Waleed Ziad, "Hidden Caliphate: Sufi Saints Beyond the Oxus and Indus" (Harvard UP, 2021)
September 30, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourToday, we speak with Waleed Ziad, about his book Hidden Caliphate: Sufi Saints beyond the Oxus and Indus, published in 2021 with Harvard University Press. Ziad is an assistant professor of Religion at UNC Chapel Hill and holds a PhD from Yale. In Hidden Caliphate, Ziad offers an incredibly rich, fascinating, and detailed study of Sufi networks. These are expansive networks that span a wide array of geography, from Afghanistan to China to Siberia. Challenging dominant and often simplistic narr...
Merrick Daniel Pilling, "Queer and Trans Madness: Struggles for Social Justice" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)
September 29, 2022 08:00 - 40 minutesIn Queer and Trans Madness: Struggles for Social Justice (Palgrave Macmillan), Merrick D. Pilling urges those invested in social justice for 2SLGBTQ people to interrogate the biomedical model of mental illness beyond the diagnoses that specifically target gender and sexual dissidence. In this first comprehensive application of Mad Studies to queer and trans experiences of mental distress, Pilling advances a broad critique of the biomedical model of mental illness as it pertains to 2SLGBTQ peo...
Zachary Levenson, "Delivery As Dispossession: Land Occupation and Eviction in the Postapartheid City" (Oxford UP, 2022)
September 28, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn Dispossession as Delivery: Land Occupation and Eviction in the Postapartheid City (Oxford University Press; 2022), Zachary Levenson explains why post-Apartheid South Africa continues to evict land occupations. Levenson shows that the government does this in the name of preserving the order they imagine is necessary to deliver housing to its citizens. Based upon a decade of participant observation in two land occupations in Cape Town, this book provides a novel, relational understanding abo...
Wendy Simonds, "Hospital Land USA: Sociological Adventures in Medicalization" (Routledge, 2016)
September 28, 2022 08:00 - 42 minutesIn Hospital Land USA: Sociological Adventures in Medicalization (Routledge, 2016), Wendy Simonds analyzes the wide-reaching powers of medicalization: the dynamic processes by which medical authorities, institutions, and ideologies impact our everyday experiences, culture, and social life. Simonds documents her own Hospital Land adventures and draws on a wide range of U.S. cultural representations — from memoirs to medical mail, from hospital signs to disaster movies — in order to urge critica...
Andreas Hackl, "The Invisible Palestinians: The Hidden Struggle for Inclusion in Jewish Tel Aviv" (Indiana UP, 2022)
September 27, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourThe city of Tel Aviv presents itself as a bastion of liberal values, tolerance, and ultimately of freedom. But like many self-definitions, there is something of a gap between this description and the reality of everyday life. In this gap resides a hidden reality—Palestinians who work, study, and live as an unseen minority, to some degree denied full benefits of equal urban citizenship. Much of the discourse concerning this descriptive gap focuses on attempts to preserve or contextualise the c...
Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt, "Franz Boas: The Emergence of the Anthropologist" (U Nebraska Press, 2019)
September 27, 2022 08:00 - 55 minutesFranz Boas is remembered today as one of the most important figures in the history of anthropology. In the United States, he is widely created with creating the modern field of anthropology or at least being one of the key people involved in its creation. And yet despite this fact, no biography of the life of Franz Boas has ever been written -- until now. In the first volume of what will be a two-volume work, Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt tracks Boas's life from his birth in 1858 to his permanent app...
The History and Ethnography of Indigenous Peoples in the Canadian Northwest
September 27, 2022 08:00 - 39 minutesGreg Marchildon interviews historian and ethnographer Jennifer Brown on her two most recent books. The first, Ojibwe Stories from the Upper Berens River: A Irving Hallowell and Adam Bigmouth in Conversation (U of Nebraska Press, 2018) concerns the interactions of American anthropologist A. Irving Hallowell with the Berens River band on the east side of Lake Winnipeg. The second book, An Ethnohistorian in Rupert’s Land: Unfinished Conversations (Athabasca UP, 2017), is a compilation of Profess...
Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas and Mérida M. Rúa, "Critical Dialogues in Latinx Studies: A Reader" (NYU Press, 2021)
September 26, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourLatinx Studies has long been overdue for a revamp – a different orientation to the questions with which we concern ourselves. Critical Dialogues in Latinx Studies: A Reader (New York University Press, 2021) is a leap toward this direction by offering the field nine distinct díalogos around which various established and junior scholars from different disciplines present their own writings to these conversations. Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas and Mérida M. Rúa, the co-editors of the anthology, ground the ...
Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, "The Quantified Scholar: How Research Evaluations Transformed the British Social Sciences" (Columbia UP, 2022)
September 26, 2022 08:00 - 43 minutesHow do metrics and quantification shape social science? In The Quantified Scholar: How Research Evaluations Transformed the British Social Sciences (Columbia UP, 2022), Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, an Associate Professor in sociology at the University of California, San Diego, explores this question using a case study of British academia. The book combines a rich array of quantitative and qualitative analysis, demonstrating the transformation of working conditions, institutional contexts, and res...
NBN Classic: Tania Li, "Land’s End: Capitalist Relations on an Indigenous Frontier" (Duke UP, 2014)
September 25, 2022 10:00 - 1 hourThis episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time. If you want to read just one book to properly understand capitalism, let it be Tania Li’s award-winning 2014 book Land’s End: Capitalist Relations on an Indigenous Frontier (Duke University Press, 2014). This might seem like a strange choice: how can a study of a faraway and possibly exotic indigenous place shed light on “our” own global realities of jobless growth and risin...
NBN Classic: Josh Reno, "Military Waste: The Unexpected Consequences of Permanent War Readiness" (U California Press, 2019)
September 25, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourThis episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time. Seven decades of military spending during the cold war and war on terror have created a vast excess of military hardware – what happens to all of this military waste when it has served its purpose and what does it tell us about militarism in American culture? Josh Reno’s Military Waste: The Unexpected Consequences of Permanent War Readiness (University of California Press, 2...
NBN Classic: Charles King, "Gods of the Upper Air: How A Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century" (Doubleday, 2019)
September 24, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourThis episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time. American anthropologists consider Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead to be foundational figures, but outside the academy few people know the details of their ideas. In this new volume, Charles King provides a carefully-researched and beautifully-written history of the Boas Circle that everyone will enjoy reading. King covers the period from Boas's birth to the publ...
NBN Classic: Jaime Alves, "Anti-Black City: Police Terror and Black Urban Life in Brazil (U Minnesota Press, 2018)
September 24, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourThis episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time. The 2018 election of far-right president Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil has brought the issues of police violence, racial discrimination, and misogyny to the fore. Jaime Alves’s book the Anti-Black City: Police Terror and Black Urban Life in Brazil (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) shows that, from the perspective of Black Brazilians, these forces have deep roots in the nation...
Yarimar Bonilla ed. et al., "Trouillot Remixed: The Michel-Rolph Trouillot Reader" (Duke UP, 2021)
September 23, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourThroughout his career, the internationally renowned Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot unsettled key concepts in anthropology, history, postcolonial studies, Black studies, Caribbean studies, and beyond. From his early critique of the West to the ongoing challenges he leveled at disciplinary and intellectual boundaries and formations, Trouillot centered the Caribbean as a site both foundational to the development of Western thought and critical to its undoing. Trouillot Remixed: T...
Jamie Barnes, "Stories, Senses and the Charismatic Relation: A Reflexive Ethnography of Christian Experience" (Routledge, 2020)
September 23, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourStories, Senses and the Charismatic Relation: A Reflexive Ethnography of Christian Experience (Routledge, 2020) offers a uniquely intimate and auto-ethnographic exploration of Christian experience, rendering a deep, phenomenological account of how devotional worlds become real – how they are experienced, shaped, constituted and performed by those who live them. The book starts from a reflexive exploration of the author’s own experiences of the divine, considers the spiritual journeys of famil...
Dario Miccoli, "A Sephardi Sea: Jewish Memories Across the Modern Mediterranean" (Indiana UP, 2022)
September 22, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourA Sephardi Sea: Jewish Memories Across the Modern Mediterranean (Indiana UP, 2022) tells the story of Jews from the southern shore of the Mediterranean who, between the late 1940s and the mid-1960s, migrated from their country of birth for Europe, Israel, and beyond. It is a story that explores their contrasting memories of and feelings for a Sephardi Jewish world in North Africa and Egypt that is lost forever but whose echoes many still hear. Surely, some of these Jewish migrants were alread...
Olúfemi Táíwò, "Against Decolonization: Taking African Agency Seriously" (Hurst, 2022)
September 22, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourDecolonisation has lost its way. Originally a struggle to escape the West’s direct political and economic control, it has become a catch-all idea, often for performing ‘morality’ or ‘authenticity’. In Against Decolonization: Taking African Agency Seriously (Hurst, 2022), Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò fiercely rejects the indiscriminate application of ‘decolonisation’ to everything from literature, language and philosophy to sociology, psychology and medicine. Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez abo...
Andrea Ballestero, "A Future History of Water" (Duke UP, 2019)
September 22, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourBased on fieldwork among state officials, NGOs, politicians, and activists in Costa Rica and Brazil, A Future History of Water (Duke UP, 2019) traces the unspectacular work necessary to make water access a human right and a human right something different from a commodity. Andrea Ballestero shows how these ephemeral distinctions are made through four technolegal devices—formula, index, list and pact. She argues that what is at stake in these devices is not the making of a distinct future but ...
Andrew Grant, "The Concrete Plateau: Urban Tibetans and the Chinese Civilizing Machine" (Cornell UP, 2022)
September 21, 2022 08:00 - 46 minutesIn The Concrete Plateau: Urban Tibetans and the Chinese Civilizing Machine (Cornell UP, 2022), Grant examines how China’s urban development policies of frontier cities like Xining (Tib. zi ling) accompanied civilizational projects that deployed various discursive and non-discursive practices aimed at creating ideologically homogeneous and modern places. Xining or Ziling is the capital of Qinghai (Tib. mtsho sngon) province and it is the largest city on the Tibetan Plateau and home to over 200...
John Richens, "Tik Merauke: An Epidemic Like No Other" (Melbourne UP, 2022)
September 21, 2022 08:00 - 55 minutesA medical doctor with an inquisitive mind and a traveling spirit, John Richens thought he had hit upon an exemplary public health case study – the story of donovanosis among the Marind people of early-twentieth-century New Guinea. The rare, sexually transmitted disease, locally known as “tik Merauke,” rose to epidemic level after the ruling Dutch moved to quash the Marind practice of headhunting. The intensive treatment campaign that followed was successful, at least insofar as curing the inf...
Kenneth H. Kolb, "Retail Inequality: Reframing the Food Desert Debate" (U California Press, 2021)
September 20, 2022 08:00 - 38 minutesRetail Inequality: Reframing the Food Desert Debate (U California Press, 2021) examines the failure of recent efforts to improve Americans' diets by increasing access to healthy food. Based on exhaustive research, this book by Kenneth H. Kolb documents the struggles of two Black neighborhoods in Greenville, South Carolina. For decades, outsiders ignored residents' complaints about the unsavory retail options on their side of town—until the well-intentioned but flawed "food desert" concept too...
Raúl Pérez, "The Souls of White Jokes: How Racist Humor Fuels White Supremacy" (Stanford UP, 2022)
September 19, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourHaving a "good" sense of humor generally means being able to take a joke without getting offended—laughing even at a taboo thought or at another's expense. The insinuation is that laughter eases social tension and creates solidarity in an overly politicized social world. But do the stakes change when the jokes are racist? In The Souls of White Jokes: How Racist Humor Fuels White Supremacy (Stanford UP, 2022), Raúl Pérez argues that we must genuinely confront this unsettling question in order ...
Michael O. Johnston, "Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest" (Lexington Books, 2022)
September 16, 2022 08:00 - 26 minutesCommunity Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest (Lexington Books, 2022) explores an annual interstate tug-of-war between two small towns along the Mississippi River. In this book, Johnston examines how media shapes place and identity of people at this festival. In writing this book, he conducted analysis of a ten year period of media coverage, and found that the experience people have while attending Tug Fest is quite different than what is said in classic novels about life ...
Manuela Ciotti, "Retro-modern India: Forging the Low Caste Self" (Routledge, 2020)
September 16, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourManuela Ciotti's Retro-modern India: Forging the Low Caste Self (Routledge, 2020) is interesting engagement with Chamar identity and understanding it through the lens of modernity. Through a rich ethnographic engagement the book has looked into what Modernity meant for Chamar community and also the dialectical relationship such identity formation had with the discourse of Modernity. Kalyani Kalyani is a sociologist and currently teaches at School of Arts and Sciences in Azim Premji Universit...
Eldritch Priest, "Earworm and Event: Music, Daydreams, and Other Imaginary Refrains" (Duke UP, 2022)
September 15, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn Earworm and Event: Music, Daydreams, and Other Imaginary Refrains (Duke UP, 2022) Eldritch Priest questions the nature of the imagination in contemporary culture through the phenomenon of the earworm: those reveries that hijack our attention, the shivers that run down our spines, and the songs that stick in our heads. Through a series of meditations on music, animal mentality, abstraction, and metaphor, Priest uses the earworm and the states of daydreaming, mind-wandering, and delusion it ...
On Victor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning"
September 14, 2022 08:00 - 26 minutesVictor Frankl was a leader in 20th century psychiatry. In 1942, Frankl was sent to a concentration camp in the Czech Republic. Frankl was already influential in the field of psychiatry by the time World War II started, but his experiences in the camps would come to define his work. When the war ended, he returned back to Vienna, where he wrote his best-selling book, Man’s Search for Meaning, a reflection on his time in the concentration camps. Arthur Kleinman is an anthropologist and a psychi...
Ellie D. Hernández et al., "Transmovimientos: Latinx Queer Migrations, Bodies, and Spaces" (U Nebraska Press, 2021)
September 13, 2022 08:00 - 39 minutesEdited by Ellie D. Hernandez, Eddy Francisco Alvarez Jr., and Magda García, Transmovimientos: Latinx Queer Migrations, Bodies, and Space (University of Nebraska Press, 2021) focuses on queer, trans, and gender nonconforming communities of immigrants and social dissidents who reflect on and write about diaspora and migratory movements while navigating geographical and embodied spaces across gendered and racialized contexts. It forms a nuanced conversation between scholarship and social activis...
Tyler Bradway and Elizabeth Freeman, "Queer Kinship: Race, Sex, Belonging, Form" (Duke UP, 2022)
September 12, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourThe contributors to Queer Kinship: Race, Sex, Belonging, Form (Duke UP, 2022) assert the importance of queer kinship to queer and trans theory and to kinship theory. In a contemporary moment marked by the rising tides of neoliberalism, fascism, xenophobia, and homo- and cis-nationalism, they approach kinship as both a horizon and a source of violence and possibility. The contributors challenge dominant theories of kinship that ignore the devastating impacts of chattel slavery, settler colonia...
Sarah Lamb, "Successful Aging as a Contemporary Obsession" (Rutgers UP, 2017)
September 09, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn recent decades, the North American public has pursued an inspirational vision of successful aging—striving through medical technique and individual effort to eradicate the declines, vulnerabilities, and dependencies previously commonly associated with old age. On the face of it, this bold new vision of successful, healthy, and active aging is highly appealing. But it also rests on a deep cultural discomfort with aging and being old. The contributors to Sarah Lamb's Successful Aging as a Co...
L. L. Wynn and Angel M. Foster, "Sex in the Middle East and North Africa" (Vanderbilt UP, 2022)
September 08, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourL. L. Wynn and Angel M. Foster,'s edited volume Sex in the Middle East and North Africa (Vanderbilt UP, 2022) examines the sexual practices, politics, and complexities of the modern Arab world. Short chapters feature a variety of experts in anthropology, sociology, health science, and cultural studies. Many of the chapters are based on original ethnographic and interview work with subjects involved in these practices and include their voices. The book is organized into three sections: Single ...
Julia Margaret Zulver, "High-Risk Feminism in Colombia: Women's Mobilization in Violent Contexts" (Rutgers UP, 2022)
September 08, 2022 08:00 - 59 minutesIn High-Risk Feminism in Colombia: Women's Mobilization in Violent Contexts (Rutgers University Press, 2022), Dr. Julia Zulver documents the experiences of grassroots women’s organizations that united to demand gender justice during and in the aftermath of Colombia’s armed conflict. In doing so, she illustrates a little-studied phenomenon: women whose experiences with violence catalyze them to mobilize and resist as feminists, even in the face of grave danger. Despite a well-established tradi...
Ugo Corte, "Dangerous Fun: The Social Lives of Big Wave Surfers" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
September 07, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourStraight from the beaches of Hawaii comes an exciting new ethnography of a community of big-wave surfers. Oahu’s Waimea Bay attracts the world’s best big wave surfers—men and women who come to test their physical strength, courage, style, knowledge of the water, and love of the ocean. Sociologist Ugo Corte sees their fun as the outcome of social interaction within a community. Both as participant and observer, he examines how mentors, novices, and peers interact to create episodes of collecti...
Jerry C. Zee, "Continent in Dust: Experiments in a Chinese Weather System" (U California Press, 2022)
September 05, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourToday Julia Keblinska and I had the pleasure of talking to Assistant Professor Jerry Zee about his book, Continent in Dust: Experiments in a Chinese Weather System, published by University of California Press in 2022. Continent in Dust offers a political anthropological account of strange weather. It is an ethnography of China’s meteorological contemporary - the transformed weather patterns whose formations and fallouts have accompanied decades of breakneck economic development. Focusing on i...
Justin Grimmer et al., "Text as Data: A New Framework for Machine Learning and the Social Sciences" (Princeton UP, 2022)
September 05, 2022 08:00 - 56 minutesFrom social media posts and text messages to digital government documents and archives, researchers are bombarded with a deluge of text reflecting the social world. This textual data gives unprecedented insights into fundamental questions in the social sciences, humanities, and industry. Meanwhile new machine learning tools are rapidly transforming the way science and business are conducted. Text as Data shows how to combine new sources of data, machine learning tools, and social science rese...
Paul A. Silverstein, "Postcolonial France: The Question of Race and the Future of the Republic" (Pluto Press, 2018)
September 02, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourFrance is a bellwether for the postcolonial anxieties and populist politics emerging across the world today. Postcolonial France: The Question of Race and the Future of the Republic (Pluto Press, 2018) explores the dynamics and dilemmas of the present moment of crisis and hope in France, through an exploration of recent moral panics. Taking stock of the tensions as they have emerged over the last quarter of a century, Paul Silverstein looks at urban racial violence, female Islamic dress and m...
Aniket De, "The Boundary of Laughter: Popular Performances Across Borders in South Asia" (Oxford UP, 2022)
September 01, 2022 08:00 - 37 minutesCombining archival research with ethnographic fieldwork, Aniket De's book The Boundary of Laughter: Popular Performances Across Borders in South Asia (Oxford UP, 2022) explores how spaces of popular performance have changed with the emergence of national borders in modern South Asia. The author traces the making of the popular theater form called Gambhira by Hindu and Muslim peasants and laborers in colonial Bengal, and explores the fate of the tradition after the Partition of the region in 1...
Anthony Christian Ocampo, "Brown and Gay in LA: The Lives of Immigrant Sons" (NYU Press, 2022)
August 31, 2022 08:00 - 32 minutesGrowing up in the shadow of Hollywood, the gay sons of immigrants featured in Brown and Gay in LA: The Lives of Immigrant Sons (NYU Press, 2022) could not have felt further removed from a world where queerness was accepted and celebrated. Instead, the men profiled here maneuver through family and friendship circles where masculinity dominates, gay sexuality is unspoken, and heterosexuality is strictly enforced. For these men, the path to sexual freedom often involves chasing the dreams while ...
Leslie Kern, "Gentrification is Inevitable and Other Lies" (Verso, 2022)
August 31, 2022 08:00 - 51 minutesWhat does gentrification look like? Can we even agree that it is a process that replaces one community with another? It is a question of class? Or of economic opportunity? Who does it affect the most? Is there any way to combat it? In Gentrification is Inevitable and Other Lies (Verso, 2022), Leslie Kern travels from Toronto, New York, London, Paris, and San Francisco and scrutinises the myth and lies that surround this most urgent urban crisis of our times. First observed in 1950s London, an...
Kareem Rabie, "Palestine Is Throwing a Party and the Whole World Is Invited: Capital and State Building in the West Bank" (Duke UP, 2021)
August 26, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn 2008, Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad invited international investors to the first-ever Palestine Investment Conference, which was designed to jump-start the process of integrating Palestine into the global economy. As Fayyad described the conference, Palestine is “throwing a party, and the whole world is invited.” In Palestine Is Throwing a Party and the Whole World Is Invited: Capital and State Building in the West Bank (Duke UP, 2021), Kareem Rabie examines how the conference an...
Brahma Prakash, "Cultural Labour: Conceptualizing the 'Folk Performance' in India" (Oxford UP, 2019)
August 26, 2022 08:00 - 56 minutesFolk performances reflect the life-worlds of a vast section of subaltern communities in India. What is the philosophy that drives these performances, the vision that enables as well as enslaves these communities to present what they feel, think, imagine, and want to see? Can such performances challenge social hierarchies and ensure justice in a caste-ridden society? In Cultural Labour: Conceptualizing the 'Folk Performance' in India (Oxford UP, 2019), Brahma Prakash studies bhuiyan puja (land...
Alfie Bown, "Dream Lovers: The Gamification of Relationships" (Pluto Press, 2022)
August 24, 2022 08:00 - 59 minutesWe are in the middle of a 'desirevolution' - a fundamental and political transformation of the way we desire as human beings. Perhaps as always, new technologies - with their associated and inherited political biases - are organising and mapping the future. What we don’t seem to notice is that the primary way in which our lives are being transformed is through the manipulation and control of desire itself. Our very impulses, drives and urges are 'gamified' to suit particular economic and poli...
Brett Scott, "Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets" (Harper Business, 2022)
August 24, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets (Harper Business, 2022), Brett Scott tells an urgent and revelatory story about how the fusion of Big Finance and Big Tech requires “cloudmoney”—digital money underpinned by the banking sector—to replace physical cash. He dives beneath the surface of the global financial system to uncover a long-established lobbying infrastructure: an alliance of partners waging a covert war on cash. He explains the technical, political, and cult...
Adrienne Edgar, "Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples: Ethnic Mixing in Soviet Central Asia" (Cornell UP, 2022)
August 23, 2022 08:00 - 29 minutesAdrienne Edgar's Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples—Ethnic Mixing in Soviet Central Asia (Cornell University Press, 2021) is an outstanding study of the evolution of intermarriage practices in Kazakhstan and Tajikistan across the Soviet era and beyond. Based on substantive oral history research work, plus extensive engagement with published and unpublished Soviet sources, the book tells an intriguing story, one that delves into the ever intriguing process of ethnic mixing. As a pheno...
Shrayana Bhattacharya, "Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh: India's Lonely Young Women and the Search for Intimacy and Independence" (Harper Collins, 2021)
August 22, 2022 08:00 - 53 minutesIn this path breaking work Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh : India's Lonely Young Women and the Search for Intimacy and Independence (Harper Collins, 2021), Shrayana Bhattacharya maps the economic and personal trajectories – the jobs, desires, prayers, love affairs and rivalries – of a diverse group of women. Divided by class but united in fandom, they remain steadfast in their search for intimacy, independence and fun. Embracing Hindi film idol Shah Rukh Khan allows them a small respite from a...
Nicky Falkof, "Worrier State: Risk, Anxiety and Moral Panic in South Africa" (Manchester UP, 2022)
August 19, 2022 08:00 - 38 minutesWorrier State: Risk, Anxiety and Moral Panic in South Africa (Manchester University Press, 2022) looks at the pervasive culture of fear in South Africa. It reveals how narratives of fear manifest in contemporary media forms and the people they serve, and how these are impacted by race, class, gender, space and identity. Through an interdisciplinary body of work, and using a case-based study approach, media analyst Nicky Falkof investigates how risk, anxiety and moral panic show up in media po...
Carmen Martínez Novo, "Undoing Multiculturalism: Resource Extraction and Indigenous Rights in Ecuador" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2021)
August 18, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourPresident Rafael Correa (2007-2017) led the Ecuadoran Citizens’ Revolution that claimed to challenge the tenets of neoliberalism and the legacies of colonialism. The Correa administration promised to advance Indigenous and Afro-descendant rights and redistribute resources to the most vulnerable. In many cases, these promises proved to be hollow. Using two decades of ethnographic research, Undoing Multiculturalism: Resource Extraction and Indigenous Rights in Ecuador (University of Pittsburgh ...
Caleb Simmons, "Singing the Goddess Into Place: Locality, Myth, and Social Change in Chamundi of the Hill, a Kannada Folk Ballad" (SUNY Press, 2022)
August 18, 2022 08:00 - 49 minutesSinging the Goddess Into Place: Locality, Myth, and Social Change in Chamundi of the Hill, a Kannada Folk Ballad (SUNY Press, 2022) demonstrates how folk narratives reflect local context while also actively working to upend social inequities based on caste and ritual/devotional practices. By delving into this world, the book helps us understand how a landscape is transformed through people's relationship with it and how this relationship helps build meaning for the communities that call it ho...
Fiona Moore, "Global Taiwanese: Asian Skilled Labour Migrants in a Changing World" (U Toronto Press, 2021)
August 17, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn Global Taiwanese: Asian Skilled Labour Migrants in a Changing World (U Toronto Press, 2021), Fiona Moore explores the different ways in which Taiwanese expatriates in London and Toronto, along with professionals living in Taipei, use their shared Taiwanese identities to construct and maintain global and local networks. Based on a three-year-long ethnographic study that incorporates interviews with people from diverse backgrounds, generations, and histories, this book explores what their di...