New Books in Anthropology
2,101 episodes - English - Latest episode: 28 days ago - ★★★★ - 42 ratingsInterviews with Anthropologists about their New Books
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Episodes
Lynn Davidman, “Becoming Un-Orthodox: Stories of Ex-Hasidic Jews” (Oxford University Press, 2015)
May 12, 2016 00:00 - 34 minutesIn Becoming Un-Orthodox: Stories of Ex-Hasidic Jews (Oxford University Press, 2015), Lynn Davidman, Robert M. Beren Distinguished Professor of Modern Jewish Studies at the University of Kansas, utilizes interviews with more than forty individuals who have left their Hasidic communities to vividly document the ways in which these men and women grapple with questions of faith, ritual, and communal authority. In addition to sharing her subjects’ journeys to find themselves and a place within the...
Birgit Meyer, “Sensational Movies: Video, Vision, and Christianity in Ghana” (U of California Press, 2015)
April 30, 2016 13:13 - 1 hourAnthropologist Birgit Meyer‘s most recent book, Sensational Movies: Video, Vision, and Christianity in Ghana (University of California Press, 2015), explores the dynamic process of popular video filmmaking in Ghana as a new medium for the imagination that interweaves technological, economic, social, cultural, and religious aspects. Stepping into the void left by the defunct state film industry, video movies negotiate the imaginaries deployed by state cinema on the one hand and Pentecostal Chr...
Mark Schuller, “Humanitarian Aftershocks in Haiti” (Rutgers UP, 2016)
April 28, 2016 10:39 - 50 minutesThe earthquake that shook Haiti on January 12, 2010 killed and destroyed the homes of hundreds of thousands of people. Mark Schuller‘s book Humanitarian Aftershocks in Haiti (Rutgers University Press, 2016) takes readers into the temporary camps in Port au Prince and offers a searing critique of the NGOs and aid organizations that organized relief efforts. Despite good intentions, the assumptions and practices of many of those organizations all too frequently resulted in the separation of fa...
Rebecca Lemov, “Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity” (Yale University Press, 2015)
April 27, 2016 15:08 - 55 minutesRebecca Lemov‘s beautifully written Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity (Yale University Press, 2015) is at once an exploration of mid-century social science through paths less traveled and the tale of a forgotten future. The book is anchored around the story of Harvard-trained social scientist Bert Kaplan, who embarked on, in her words, a dizzyingly ambitious 1950s-era project to capture peoples dreams in large amounts and store them in an experimental data bank. While uni...
David J. Meltzer, “The Great Paleolithic War: How Science Forged an Understanding of Americas Ice Age Past” (U Chicago Press, 2015)
April 26, 2016 11:58 - 1 hourDavid J. Meltzer‘s new book is a meticulous study of the controversy over human antiquity in America, a dispute that transformed North American archaeology as a practice and discipline, tracing it from 1862-1941. The Great Paleolithic War: How Science Forged an Understanding of Americas Ice Age Past (University of Chicago Press, 2015) traces the heated and multi-disciplinary debates over the existence of a Pleistocene human antiquity in North America. Meltzer’s book is a thick history that in...
David Grazian, “American Zoo: A Sociological Safari” (Princeton UP, 2015)
April 20, 2016 15:18 - 43 minutesUrban zoos are both popular and imperiled. They are sites of contestation, but what are those contests about? In his new book, American Zoo: A Sociological Safari(Princeton, 2015), ethnographer David Grazian tracks the competing missions of zoos as site of education, entertainment, philanthropy, and work. Grazian coins the term nature making to describe the process through which people assert and police an imagined division between nature and culture. On his sociological safari as a dung-shov...
Tran Ngoc Angie, “Ties that Bind: Cultural Identity, Class, and Law in Vietnam’s Labor Resistance” (Cornell UP, 2013)
April 19, 2016 12:45 - 1 hourLabour consciousness is not just class-based; it also emerges out of cultural identities, as Tran Ngoc Angie argues powerfully in Ties that Bind: Cultural Identity, Class, and Law in Vietnam’s Labor Resistance (Cornell University Press, 2013). Vietnamese workers habitually form relationships based on native place, ethnicity, religion and gender. At critical class moments, as Tran calls them, these workers can also succeed in transcending or building on their cultural ties to form larger movem...
Eric Dietrich, “Excellent Beauty: The Naturalness of Religion and the Unnaturalness of the World” (Columbia UP, )
April 15, 2016 00:00 - 1 hourAlthough there are many deep criticisms of a scientific view of humanity and the world, a persistent theme is that the scientific worldview eliminates mystery, and in particular, the wonders and mysteries of the world’s religions. In Excellent Beauty: The Naturalness of Religion and the Unnaturalness of the World (Columbia University Press), Eric Dietrich argues that the human thirst for mystery would still be slated even if we explain away the mysteries of religion in scientific, specifical...
Emma Jackson, “Young Homeless People and Urban Space: Fixed in Mobility” (Routledge, 2015)
April 08, 2016 14:00 - 36 minutesWhat is the experience of young homeless people? What does this experience tell us about space, place and society? In Young Homeless People and Urban Space: Fixed in Mobility (Routledge, 2015), Dr. Emma Jackson, a lecturer in the Sociology Department of Goldsmith’s College, University of London, employs an ethnographic approach to understand young people’s experience of homelessness in contemporary London. The book is rich with the stories and experiences of young people, based around a day c...
Heather Kopelson, “Faithful Bodies: Performing Religion and Race in the Puritan Atlantic” (NYU Press, 2014)
April 03, 2016 21:39 - 53 minutesHeather Miyano Kopelson explores how religion, primarily expressed through bodily action, contributed to colonial notions of difference in her recent book Faithful Bodies: Performing Religion and Race in the Puritan Atlantic (NYU Press, 2014). She examines the religious rituals of TaÃno, Algonquian, and West African peoples in the New World, and how they intersected with Puritan theology and expression. By comparing these interactions in both New England and Bermuda, she demonstrates how div...
Brian Epstein, “The Ant Trap: Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences” (Oxford UP, 2015)
March 15, 2016 00:00 - 1 hourThe social sciences are about social entities – things like corporations and traffic jams, mobs and money, parents and war criminals. What is a social entity? What makes something a social entity? Traditional views hold that these things can be fully explained by facts about people – their bodies, their attitudes or some combination of these. In The Ant Trap: Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences (Oxford University Press, 2015), Brian Epstein argues that such views of social facts...
Phillip Penix-Tadsen, “Cultural Code: Video Games and Latin America” (MIT Press, 2016)
March 14, 2016 13:11 - 46 minutesSymbols have meanings that change depending upon the cultural context. But how do we discuss symbols, their meanings, and their cultural contexts without an adequate vocabulary? Phillip Penix-Tadsen, assistant professor of Spanish at the University of Delaware and author of the new book Cultural Code: Video Games and Latin America (MIT Press, 2016), offers insight in to how culture is signified in video games, with a particular emphasis on Latin America. In Cultural Code, Penix-Tadsen examine...
Krista A. Thompson, “Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice” (Duke UP, 2015)
March 04, 2016 14:41 - 44 minutesShine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice (Duke University Press, 2015) is a gorgeous book. It’s about light and the practices of self representation in diasporic and Caribbean communities. Krista A. Thompson looks carefully and sees in the glittery surfaces of contemporary art, photographic and video practices in proms and dancehalls, and the visual culture of hip-hop the generative power of alternative modalities of being. Taking us to New Orleans, Jamaica, ...
Deirdre de la Cruz, “Mother Figured: Marian Apparitions and the Making of a Filipino Universal” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)
March 02, 2016 15:56 - 1 hourThere is no female religious figure so widely known and revered as the Virgin Mary. Filipino Catholics are especially drawn to Mama Mary and have a strong belief in her power, including her ability to appear to her followers. In Mother Figured: Marian Apparitions and the Making of a Filipino Universal (University of Chicago Press, 2015), historical anthropologist Deirdre de la Cruz offers a detailed examination of Filipino interactions with Marian apparitions and miracles. By analyzing the ef...
Christopher Bondy, “Voice, Silence, and Self: Negotiations of Buraku Identity in Contemporary Japan” (Harvard Asia Center, 2015)
March 01, 2016 12:39 - 1 hour“You are a member of a minority group but do not know it. How is this possible?” Christopher Bondy’s new book explores this question in a study of the making of burakumin identity in the schools and communities of young people in modern Japan. Voice, Silence, and Self: Negotiations of Buraku Identity in Contemporary Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2015) pays special attention to the ways that young people negotiate the silences around the issue in two communities, examining how these ...
Agnieszka Joniak-Luthi, “The Han: China’s Diverse Majority” (U of Washington Press, 2015)
February 16, 2016 11:37 - 57 minutesAgnieszka Joniak-Luthi‘s new book opens with a series of questions that animate the study. They include but are not limited to: What does being Han mean to those classified as Hanzu? What are the narratives of Han-ness today? What other collective identities matter to the Hanzu? What are their roles and meanings? How do they relate to one another and to minzu identity? Is the Han minzu an ethnic group? How can Hanzu seem so united in their Han-ness but at the same time be so fragmented and di...
Sara Shneiderman, “Rituals of Ethnicity: Thangmi Identities Between Nepal and India” (U Pennsylvania Press, 2015)
February 03, 2016 13:59 - 59 minutesRituals of Ethnicity: Thangmi Identities Between Nepal and India (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) by Sara Shneiderman is the first comprehensive ethnography of the Thangmi, a Himalayan community who move between Nepal, India and the Tibetan Autonomous Region of China. Through a careful and rich analysis of orality, funerary rituals, the practices of gurus and circular migration (to name just a few of the topics covered) the book makes a forceful case for ethnicity as something people ...
David Wright, “Understanding Cultural Taste: Sensation, Skill and Sensibility,” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)
February 03, 2016 13:08 - 38 minutesWhat is cultural taste? How is it formed, imagined and patterned? In Understanding Cultural Taste: Sensation, Skill and Sensibility (Palgrave MacMillan, 2015), David Wright, Associate Professor at the University of Warwick, explores the theories and practices framing cultural taste in contemporary society in order to account for the social role of cultural taste. The book explains how taste is made knowable, through quantification and measurement, moves through an explanation of differing cul...
Tam Ngo and Justine B. Quijada, eds., “Atheist Secularism and its Discontents: A Study of Religion and Communism in Eurasia” (Palgrave, 2015)
February 03, 2016 12:13 - 1 hourSecularism has emerged as a central category of twenty-first century political thought and critical theory. Following the lead of anthropologist Talal Asad, there is a growing literature that traces the complicated relationship between state policies on religion and emergent epistemologies of the secular in modernity. Most studies have focused on India and the Islamic world (Turkey, Egypt, etc.) or looked at France and the USA. The communist world has been largely left out of the picture, whi...
Annette Miae Kim, “Sidewalk City: Remapping Public Space in Ho Chi Minh City” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)
January 20, 2016 07:03 - 57 minutesSidewalk City: Remapping Public Space in Ho Chi Minh City (University of Chicago Press, 2015) is a remarkable book about overlooked yet ubiquitous urban spaces, and the people and things that occupy them. Drawing on the resources of property rights theory, spatial ethnography and critical cartography Annette Miae Kim rethinks public space and re-maps the sidewalks of Vietnam’s southern metropolis. Combining a powerful aesthetic sensibility with excellent scholarship, her book is of rare quali...
Ulla Berg, “Mobile Selves: Race, Migration, and Belonging in Peru and the U.S.” (NYU Press, 2015)
January 18, 2016 09:00 - 1 hourUlla Berg’s new book Mobile Selves: Race, Migration, and Belonging in Peru and the U.S. (New York University Press, 2015) highlights the deeply historical and central role of migration as a strategy for social mobility, as well as its affect on the formation of identity, in the lived experiences of migrants from the central highlands of Peru. Documenting the aspirational, material, and moral forces that undergird the decision to enter the transnational labor stream, Dr. Berg examines the barr...
Barry Brown and Oskar Juhlin, “Enjoying Machines” (MIT 2015)
January 06, 2016 06:00 - 34 minutesWhen we consider the television, we think not only about how it’s used, but also it’s impact on culture. The television, tv, telly, or tube, became popular in the West in the late 1940s and early 1950s and was seen as a form of entertainment and enjoyment for the family. Other “technology” that assists with leisure include things like rubber-soled shoes, books, and other digital devices. In their new book, Enjoying Machines (MIT 2015), Barry Brown and Oskar Juhlin, both scholars in the Stockh...
Sean McCloud, “American Possessions: Fighting Demons in the Contemporary United States” (Oxford UP, 2015)
January 05, 2016 18:34 - 48 minutesExorcisms and demons. In his new book American Possessions: Fighting Demons in the Contemporary United States (Oxford University Press, 2015), Sean McCloud argues that not only have such phenomena been on the rise in the last 30 or so years, they also reveal prominent tropes within the contemporary American religious landscape. More precisely, readers are introduced to the first in-depth study of demon fighting in the so-called “spiritual warfare” of Third Wave evangelical and Pentecostal Chr...
Carla Freeman, “Entrepreneurial Selves: Neoliberal Respectability and the Making of a Caribbean Middle Class” (Duke University Press, 2014)
January 05, 2016 09:07 - 52 minutesThis marvelous ethnography traces one of the surprising outcomes of shifting neoliberal regimes in Barbados. As women find themselves leading entrepreneurial lives, they also find themselves engaging in a new range of emotions, both at work and at home. Carla Freeman‘s Entrepreneurial Selves: Neoliberal Respectability and the Making of a Caribbean Middle Class (Duke University Press, 2014) follows the lives of a number of male and female Barbadians and finds that the demands of the twenty-fir...
Sujey Vega, “Latino Heartland: Of Borders and Belonging in the Midwest” (NYU Press, 2015)
December 30, 2015 19:11 - 1 hourIn Latino Heartland: Of Borders and Belonging in the Midwest (New York University Press, 2015), Sujey Vega Assistant Professor of Women and Gender Studies at Arizona State University, traces the way Latina/o Hoosiers established community and belonging in Central Indiana amongst the sharp rise in anti-immigrant/Mexican sentiment after the passage of the Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005 (H.R. 4437). Dr. Vega foregrounds her analysis by illuminating ...
Natasha Myers, “Rendering Life Molecular: Models, Modelers, and Excitable Matter” (Duke UP, 2015)
December 21, 2015 09:22 - 1 hourAfter reading Natasha Myers’s new book, the world begins to dance in new ways. Rendering Life Molecular: Models, Modelers, and Excitable Matter (Duke University Press, 2015) is a sensory ethnography of protein crystallographers that is based on five years of fieldwork conducted between 2003-2008 at a research university on the East Coast of the US. “Protein modelers are the scientists to watch in order to see what forms of life and what materialities are coming to matter in the twenty-first-c...
Marcia C. Inhorn, “The New Arab Man: Emergent Masculinities, Technologies, and Islam in the Middle East” (Princeton UP, 2012)
December 18, 2015 18:56 - 57 minutesWinner of the 2015 American Anthropological Associations Robert B. Textor and Family Prize for Excellence in Anticipatory Anthropology and the 2014 JMEWS Book Award of the Association for Middle East Womens Studies, The New Arab Man: Emergent Masculinities, Technologies, and Islam in the Middle East (Princeton University Press, 2012) by Marcia C. Inhorn challenges the Western stereotypical image of the Arab man as terrorist, religious zealot, and brutal oppressor of women. Through stories of ...
Michael Kimmel, “Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era” (Nation Books, 2013)
December 18, 2015 06:00 - 46 minutesMichael Kimmel is the Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at Stony Brook University. He is also executive director of the Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities. His book Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era (Nation Books, 2013) is an engaging and eye-opening book about the lives and attitudes of white men who are expressing rage and feelings of “aggrieved entitlement” in a new age of gender relations. In the vast social, economy and political ...
Arlene Davila, “Latinos, Inc.: The Marketing and Making of a People” (U California Press, 2012)
December 11, 2015 11:40 - 1 hourIn Latinos Inc.: The Marketing and Making of a People (University of California Press, updated ed. 2012) Arlene Davila, Professor of Anthropology at New York University, questions the profound influence of the Hispanic-Latina/o marketing industry in defining notions of Latina/o identity and culture. Providing an ethnography of the industry’s founders, key intellectuals, as well as its position within corporate America, Dr. Davila critiques the “sanitization” of Latinidad by Hispanic ad agenci...
Erica Weiss, “Conscientious Objectors in Israel: Citizenship, Sacrifice, Trials of Fealty” (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2014)
December 10, 2015 15:22 - 30 minutesIn Conscientious Objectors in Israel: Citizenship, Sacrifice, Trials of Fealty (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), Erica Weiss, assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University, examines the lives and choices Israeli conscientious objectors, those who have refused to perform military service for reasons of conscience. As an ethnographer, Weiss takes us into the the lives of two generations of conscientious objectors in a state that valorizes wha...
Yarimar Bonilla, “Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)
December 10, 2015 15:03 - 46 minutesAs overseas departments of France, the islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique are frequently described as anomalies within the postcolonial Caribbean. Yet in reality, as Yarimar Bonilla argues in her new book Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment (University of Chicago Press, 2015), the majority of Caribbean states are in fact non-sovereign. Moreover, even for those nations that are nominally independent, their sovereignty is nonetheless continually comp...
Anna L. Tsing, “The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins” (Princeton UP, 2015)
December 06, 2015 12:16 - 1 hourAnna L. Tsing‘s new book is on my new (as of this post) list of Must-Read-Books-That-All-Humans-Who-Can-Read-Should-Read-And-That-Nonhumans-Should-Find-A-Way-To-Somehow-Engage-Even-If-Reading-Is-Not-Their-Thing. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton University Press, 2015) joyfully bursts forth in a “riot of short chapters” that collectively open out into a mushroom-focused exploration of what Tsing refers to as a “third nature,” or “w...
Angelique V. Nixon, “Resisting Paradise: Tourism, Diaspora, and Sexuality in Caribbean Culture” (U Press of Mississippi, 2015)
December 02, 2015 13:04 - 46 minutesIt’s easy to conjure images of paradise when thinking of the Caribbean. The region is know for its lovely beaches, temperate weather, and gorgeous landscapes. For the people who live there, however, living in paradise means dealing with tourists, inequality, exploitation, and corruption. While many scholars have published critiques of Caribbean tourism ranging from measured to withering, the voices of Caribbean people, living in the region or abroad, are rarely evident. Angelique V. Nixon‘s R...
Philip Roscoe, “A Richer Life: How Economics Can Change the Way We Think and Feel” (Penguin, 2015)
November 19, 2015 14:44 - 38 minutesSo many of our social questions are now the subject of analysis from economics. In A Richer Life: How Economics can Change the Way We Think and Feel (Penguin, 2015), Phillip Roscoe, a reader at the University of St Andrew’s School of Management, offers a critique of the long march of economics into social life. The book covers a vast range of social examples, including dating, organ transplantation, and education, alongside accessible engagements with historical and contemporary economic theo...
Anderson Blanton, “Hittin’ the Prayer Bones: Materiality of Spirit in the Pentecostal South” (UNC Press, 2015)
November 12, 2015 17:44 - 1 hourAnderson Blanton‘s Hittin’ the Prayer Bones: Materiality of Spirit in the Pentecostal South (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), illuminates how prayer, faith, and healing are intertwined with technologies of sound reproduction and material culture in the charismatic Christian worship of southern Appalachia. Drawing on two years of field work in church congregations and small independent radio studios, Hittin the Prayer Bones explores radio prayers, curative faith cloths, and the poeti...
Adam Rosenblatt, “Digging for the Disappeared: Forensic Science After Atrocity” (Stanford UP, 2015)
October 09, 2015 16:14 - 1 hourDo dead bodies have human rights? This is one of many fascinating questions Adam Rosenblatt asks in his compelling new book Digging for the Disappeared: Forensic Science After Atrocity (Stanford University Press, 2015) Rosenblatt, a faculty member at Haverford College, doesn’t try to recount the emergence of forensic science in investigating mass violence. Instead, he’s really interested in examining the political, ethical and philosophical questions that surround the study of dead bodies...
Eric H. Cline, “1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed” (Princeton University Press, 2014)
October 07, 2015 10:31 - 1 hourIt quickly sold out in hardback, and then, within a matter of days, sold out in paperback. Available again as a 2nd edition hardback, and soon in the 10th edition paperback with a new Afterword by the author, Eric H. Cline‘s 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (Princeton University Press, 2015) is THE must have, must read book of 2014, and 2015. Why? Because it’s serious archaeology, history and anthropology, but it reads like a mystery novel. The prose is superb; so good that it’s har...
Kate Pahl, “Materializing Literacies in Communities: The Uses of Literacy Revisited” (Bloomsbury, 2014)
October 06, 2015 13:46 - 37 minutesLiterary practices are often associated with specific social groups in particular social settings. Kate Pahl‘s Materializing Literacies in Communities: The Uses of Literacy Revisited (Bloomsbury, 2014) challenges these assumptions by showing the varieties of literary practice in Rotherham, England. The book engages with the locally particular to draw out a variety of general findings, relevant to methodological reflection and material culture debates. The book draws on a wealth of projects fr...
Sanjay Srivastava, “Entangled Urbanism: Slum, Gated Community and Shopping Mall in Delhi and Gurgaon” (Oxford UP, 2015)
October 02, 2015 14:48 - 45 minutesEntangled Urbanism: Slum, Gated Community and Shopping Mall in Delhi and Gurgaon (Oxford University Press, 2015) is the latest book by Sanjay Srivastava. A wonderfully readable piece of urban anthropology, the book explores the ways spaces and processes are interconnected in the city. From temples that resemble shopping malls, through the gates of luxury apartments and into the electricity supply networks of slums, the book pulls together the threads that entangle city dwellers with one anoth...
Jonathyne Briggs, “Sounds French: Globalization, Cultural Communities, and Pop Music, 1958-1980” (Oxford UP, 2015)
September 30, 2015 14:48 - 1 hour“Pop pop pop pop musik” -M Jonathyne Briggs‘ new book, Sounds French: Globalization, Cultural Communities, and Pop Music, 1958-1980(Oxford University Press, 2015) makes music the historical focus of the Fifth Republic’s first two decades. What made certain sounds “French,” and how did different cultural communities come together, expressing themselves in a variety of musical forms? From Francoise Hardy to Serge Gainsbourg, to the sounds of free jazz, Brittany folk, and punk, the book conside...
Amanda Lucia, “Reflections of Amma: Devotees in a Global Embrace” (University of California Press, 2014)
September 26, 2015 19:50 - 57 minutesWaiting several hours in line for a hug is well worth it for thousands of people, the devotees of the Guru, Amma, Mata Amritanandamayi. In Reflections of Amma: Devotees in a Global Embrace (University of California Press, 2014), Amanda Lucia, Associate Professor of Religion at UC Riverside, provides a rich ethnographic account of Amma’s American followers and convincingly argues that there is much to learn here about gender, interpretation, and contemporary American religiosity. Amma’s devote...
Kimberly Arkin, “Rhinestones, Religion, and the Republic: Fashioning Jewishness in France” (Stanford UP, 2013)
September 24, 2015 17:57 - 33 minutesIn Fictions of Conversion: Jews, Christians, and Cultures of Change in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), Jeffrey S. Shoulson, the Doris and Simon Konover Chair in Judaic Studies and the Director of the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life at the University of Connecticut, argues that the promise and peril of conversion was projected onto the figure of the Jew, the ultimate religious “other” in English society. Shoulson looks at English writings o...
Neha Vora, “Impossible Citizens: Dubai’s Indian Diaspora” (Duke UP, 2013)
September 22, 2015 06:00 - 54 minutesNeha Vora‘s Impossible Citizens: Dubai’s Indian Diaspora (Duke University Press, 2013) is a wonderfully rich and engaging account of middle class Indians who live and work, supposedly temporarily, in Dubai. Through an analysis of these perpetual outsiders, that are crucial to the Emirati economy, Vora sheds new light on our understanding of citizenship, belonging and Dubai itself. In the finest tradition of anthropology, the book is simultaneously minutely detailed in its descriptions and glo...
Gerard Russell, “Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys Into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East” (Basic Books, 2014)
September 21, 2015 11:32 - 46 minutesIn this interview Gerard Russell talks about his vivid and timely new book Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys Into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East (Basic Books, 2014). Russell’s experience as a British diplomat in a rapidly changing region gives the book remarkable breadth, providing a valuable insight into the lives of minority communities from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border to Egypt: Mandaeans, Yazidis, Zoroastrians, Druze, Samaritans, Copts and Kalasha. Russell’s account ...
Brett Hendrickson, “Border Medicine: A Transcultural History of Mexican American Curanderismo” (NYU Press, 2014)
September 17, 2015 11:46 - 47 minutesMexican American religious healing – often called curanderismo – is a vital component of life in the US-Mexican borderlands. In his book Border Medicine: A Transcultural History of Mexican American Curanderismo (New York University Press, 2014) – Brett Hendrickson tracks healers going back to the nineteenth century and even before. He argues that these healing practices were never only Mexican American nor were they a sign of an inability to develop modern bio-medicine. They have in fact been...
Bruce A. Bradley, et al., “Clovis Technology” (International Monographs in Prehistory, 2010)
September 12, 2015 11:52 - 1 hour13,000-years ago, the people of the first identifiable culture in North America were hunting mammoth and mastodon, bison, and anything else they could launch their darts and spears at, and undoubtedly, most assuredly, they themselves were being hunted by gigantic short-faced bears, America lions and saber-toothed cats. Thus, in order to survive life in the Pleistocene, Clovis people developed a sophisticated tool and weapon technology. Clovis Technology (International Monographs in Prehistory...
Kristin Peterson, “Speculative Markets: Drug Circuits and Derivative Life in Nigeria” (Duke UP, 2015)
September 10, 2015 12:59 - 1 hourKristin Peterson‘s new ethnography looks carefully at the Nigerian pharmaceutical market, paying special attention to the ways that the drug trade links West Africa within a larger global economy. Speculative Markets: Drug Circuits and Derivative Life in Nigeria (Duke University Press, 2015) takes reads into a story that is part medical anthropology, part careful analysis of global economy, and shows that understanding one is vital to understanding the other in the modern West African pharmac...
Liz McFall, “Devising Consumption Cultural Economies of Insurance, Credit and Spending” (Routledge, 2014)
September 02, 2015 17:56 - 46 minutesThe role of financial services in individuals’ and communities’ everyday lives is more important than ever. In Devising Consumption: Cultural Economies of Insurance, Credit and Spending (Routledge, 2014), Liz McFall charts the rise of one particular element of financial services, door-to-door sales, to understand the role of insurance and credit in society. In doing so McFall aims to ‘ventriloquise the lives and consumption practices of the silent poor’, as well as charting a the history of a...
Douglas B. Bamforth et al., “The Allen Site: A Paleoindian Camp in Southwestern Nebraska” (U of New Mexico Press, 2015)
August 25, 2015 14:58 - 1 hourIn this episode of New Books in Archaeology we talk with Douglas B. Bamforth about his new book The Allen Site: A Paleoindian Camp in Southwestern Nebraska (University of New Mexico Press, 2015). Bamforth focuses primarily on Paleoindian land use represented by the Allen Site and the adjacent smaller sites collectively known as the Medicine Creek Paleoindian sites. The Medicine Creek sites, located in the central Great Plains, highlight aspects of early Native American lifeways that are obscu...
Stefan Ecks, “Eating Drugs: Psychopharmaceutical Pluralism in India” (NYU Press, 2013)
August 19, 2015 11:24 - 1 hourDrugs exist that are meant to help people feel better. The doctors who prescribe them might believe that they work, while their patients do not. In explaining the drugs to their patients, should those doctors use the medical terminology they themselves use – which might not be immediately understandable to their patients – or should they translate the description into terms more comfortable and familiar to the patient? And what are the practical and ethical consequences of each decision? Stef...