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
Paul A. Christensen, “Japan, Alcoholism, and Masculinity: Suffering Sobriety in Tokyo” (Lexington Books, 2014)
August 19, 2015 08:29 - 1 hourPaul A. Christensen‘s new book is a thoughtful ethnography of drinking, drunkenness, and male sociability in modern urban Japan. Focusing on two major alcohol sobriety support groups in Japan, Alcoholics Anonymous and Danshukai, Japan, Alcoholism, and Masculinity: Suffering Sobriety in Tokyo (Lexington Books, 2014) explores the ways that admitting to and living with alcoholism in Japan challenges prevailing norms of masculinity and sociability, and looks carefully at its profound consequenc...
Donald M. Nonini, “‘Getting By’: Class and State Formation Among Chinese in Malaysia” (Cornell UP, 2015)
July 31, 2015 14:06 - 1 hour“Getting By”: Class and State Formation Among Chinese in Malaysia (Cornell University Press, 2015) is a powerful and multilayered book that upbraids overseas Chinese studies for their neglect of class. Bringing class struggle and identity firmly to the centre of his analysis, Donald Nonini argues that scholars of the overseas Chinese have not accounted for class and its role in state formation adequately. Instead, an abiding concern for articulating an imagined essential “Chinese culture” cau...
Asya Pereltsvaig and Martin Lewis, “The Indo-European Controversy: Facts and Fallacies in Historical Linguistics” (Cambridge UP, 2015)
July 21, 2015 12:47 - 1 hourWho were the Indo-Europeans? Were they all-conquering heroes? Aggressive patriarchal Kurgan horsemen, sweeping aside the peaceful civilizations of Old Europe? Weed-smoking drug dealers rolling across Eurasia in a cannabis-induced haze? Or slow-moving but inexorable farmers from Anatolia? These are just some of the many possibilities discussed in the scholarly literature. But in 2012, a New York Times article announced that the problem had been solved, by a team of innovative biologists apply...
Joyce B. Flueckiger, “When the World Becomes Female: Guises of a South Indian Goddess” (Indiana UP, 2013)
July 03, 2015 14:13 - 59 minutesJoyce B. Flueckiger‘s new bookWhen the World Becomes Female: Guises of a South Indian Goddess (Indiana University Press, 2013) is a rich and colorful analysis of the goddess Gangamma’s festival and her devotees. During the festival men take on female guises, whilst women intensify the rituals that they perform throughout the year. The books explores the excess of the goddess and the lives of those who bear her. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show...
J. Laurence Hare, “Excavating Nations: Archaeology, Museums, and the German-Danish Borderlands” (U of Toronto Press, 2015)
June 28, 2015 15:19 - 52 minutesA recent book review I read began with the line “borderlands are back.” It’s certainly true that more and more historians have used borderland regions as the stage for some excellent work on the construction of national identities (or indifference to them) in recent years. J. Laurence Hare, Associate Professor of History at the University of Arkansas, makes a novel and highly compelling contribution to that literature with Excavating Nations: Archaeology, Museums, and the German-Danish Border...
Gary Wilder, “Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World” (Duke UP, 2015)
June 28, 2015 11:56 - 1 hourGary Wilder‘s new book, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Duke University Press, 2015) builds upon the work he began in The French Imperial Nation State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (University of Chicago Press, 2005). Freedom Time considers the politics and poetics of Aimee Casaire and Leopold Senghor during the period 1945-1960, “thinking with” and “working through” the ways these figures anticipated a post-imperial world. T...
Allison Truitt, “Dreaming of Money in Ho Chi Minh City” (U of Washington Press, 2013)
June 15, 2015 06:00 - 1 hourThere’s a lot more to money than its exchange value, as Allison Truitt reveals in her smartly written and lively study, Dreaming of Money in Ho Chi Minh City (University of Washington Press, 2013)about how people in Vietnam’s largest city negotiate relations with one another, the state, the global marketplace and the spirit world through dollars and dong, On the streets of Ho Chi Minh City, remitted greenbacks cease to be the stuff of the currency trader or foreign state. Here, they take on ...
Julie Billaud, “Kabul Carnival: Gender Politics in Postwar Afghanistan” (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2015)
June 10, 2015 11:59 - 48 minutesKabul Carnival: Gender Politics in Postwar Afghanistan (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) by Julie Billaud is a fascinating account of women and the state and ongoing ‘reconstruction’ projects in post-war Afghanistan. The book moves through places such as gender empowerment training programmes and women’s dormitories, and analyses such topics as the law and veiling in public. Subtle and engaging, Kabul Carnival is a rare and much needed anthropological insight into women’s lives in Afgh...
Kevin O’Neill, “Secure the Soul: Christian Piety and Gang Prevention in Guatemala” (U of California Press, 2015)
June 02, 2015 13:10 - 50 minutesKevin O’Neill‘s fascinating book Secure the Soul: Christian Piety and Gang Prevention in Guatemala (University of California Press, 2015) traces the efforts of multi-million dollar programs aimed at state security through gang prevention in Guatemala. O’Neill is most interested in the ways that Christianity and ideas about piety, salvation, redemption, and transformation guide and shape a variety of programs in prisons, rehabilitation centers, and, perhaps surprisingly, reality television and...
Joseph Webster, “The Anthropology of Protestantism: Faith and Crisis among Scottish Fishermen” (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013)
May 29, 2015 12:16 - 58 minutesIn The Anthropology of Protestantism:Faith and Crisis among Scottish Fishermen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), anthropologist Joseph Webster takes readers deep into the lives of fishermen in Gamrie, a village perched above the sea in northeastern Scotland. It’s a place of great wealth and also poverty, a place of staunch Protestantism among many of the older people and reckless abandon or religious unconcern among the young and “incomers” – that is, new arrivals in the village. By tracing the mil...
Todd Meyers, “The Clinic and Elsewhere: Addiction, Adolescents, and the Afterlife of Therapy” (U of Washington Press, 2013)
May 22, 2015 13:59 - 1 hourTodd Meyers‘ The Clinic and Elsewhere: Addiction, Adolescents, and the Afterlife of Therapy (University of Washington Press, 2013) is many things, all of them compelling and fully realized. Most directly, the book is an ethnography of drug dependence and treatment among adolescents in Baltimore between 2005-2008. Meyers traces twelve people through their treatment in the clinic and beyond, into what he calls “the afterlife of therapy.” The group of adolescents was diverse–their economic and f...
Nicholas B. Dirks, “Autobiography of an Archive : A Scholar’s Passage to India” (Columbia UP, 2015)
May 18, 2015 12:19 - 53 minutesNicholas B. Dirks‘ Autobiography of an Archive: A Scholar’s Passage to India (Columbia University Press, 2015) is a wonderful collection of essays, loosely arranged along the line’s of the author’s scholarly life. The chapters touch upon themes such as empire and the politics of knowledge, as well as the experience of archival research. Illuminating, lucid and always challenging, Autobiography of an Archive is a stimulating and pleasurable read. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit mega...
Eben Kirksey, “The Multispecies Salon” (Duke University Press, 2014)
May 10, 2015 22:31 - 1 hourEben Kirksey‘s wonderful new volume is an inspiring introduction to a kind of multispecies ethnography where artists, anthropologists, and others collaborate to create objects and experiences of great thoughtfulness and beauty. Growing out of a traveling art exhibit of the same name, The Multispecies Salon (Duke University Press, 2014) curates a collection of works that explore three major questions: “Which beings flourish, and which fail, when natural and cultural worlds intermingle and coll...
Ritu G. Khanduri, “Caricaturing Culture in India: Cartoons and History in the Modern World” (Cambridge UP, 2014)
April 20, 2015 17:38 - 34 minutesCaricaturing Culture in India: Cartoons and History in the Modern World (Cambridge University Press, 2014) is a wonderful piece of visual anthropology by Ritu Gairola Khanduri, which uses the history of cartoons, from colonial to current times, to talk about various aspects of Indian society from the state, to political society to modernity. Through archival material and fascinating discussions with cartoonists, the book reveals the various ways in which cartoons talk in India, past and prese...
Peter Gottschalk, “Religion, Science, and Empire: Classifying Hinduism and Islam in British India” (Oxford UP, 2012)
April 13, 2015 18:01 - 1 hourWhen did religion begin in South Asia? Many would argue that it was not until the colonial encounter that South Asians began to understand themselves as religious. In Religion, Science, and Empire: Classifying Hinduism and Islam in British India (Oxford University Press, 2012), Peter Gottschalk, Professor of Religion at Wesleyan University, outlines the contingent and mutual coalescence of science and religion as they were cultivated within the structures of empire. He demonstrates how the ca...
Jie Li, “Shanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Life” (Columbia UP, 2015)
March 30, 2015 11:43 - 1 hourWhat’s not to love about Jie Li‘s new book? Shanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Life (Columbia University Press, 2015) explores the history and culture of Shanghai alleyway homes by focusing on two physical spaces, both built in the early twentieth century by Japanese and British companies, and both located in the industrial Yangshupu district in the eastern part of what was the International Settlement in Shanghai. An old house, here, is a palimpsest: Li excavates the archaeology of Shan...
Abdelwahab El-Affendi, “Genocidal Nightmares” (Bloomsbury, 2014)
March 25, 2015 14:41 - 58 minutesGenocide studies is one of the few academic fields with which I’m acquainted which is truly interdisciplinary in approach and composition. Today’s guest Abdelwahab El-Affendi, and the book he has edited, Genocidal Nightmares: Narratives of Insecurity and the Logic of Mass Atrocities (Bloomsbury Academic 2014), is an excellent example of how this works out in practice. The question this book addresses is not that unusual: How it is that societies and individuals come to a place where they fee...
Mukulika Banerjee, “Why India Votes?” (Routledge, 2014)
March 18, 2015 13:22 - 51 minutesWhy India Votes? (Routledge, 2014) is the latest book by Mukulika Banerjee and is a deep, engaging and continually surprising account of elections in India. Weaving together ethnographic research in field sites across the country, the book privileges the voice of ordinary voters as they experience the campaign, play with language and enter the polling booth. The answer to Why India Votes? is as complex as it is fascinating and the book will be of interest to scholars of South Asia and democra...
Lisa Stevenson, “Life Beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic” (University of California Press, 2014)
March 05, 2015 18:16 - 1 hourLisa Stevenson‘s new book opens with two throat-singing women and one listening king. Whether we hear them sitting down to a normal night’s dinner (as the women) or stalking the pages of a short story from Italo Calvino’s Under the Jaguar Sun (as the king), listening to these voices can potentially transform our notion of listening itself, as well as our understanding of what a “self” is and could be. Life Beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic (University of California Press, 2...
Cabeiri Robinson, “Body of Victim, Body of Warrior: Refugee Families and the Making of Kashmiri Jihadists” (University of California Press, 2013)
February 19, 2015 12:59 - 1 hourThe idea of jihad is among the most keenly discussed yet one of the least understood concepts in Islam. In her brilliant new book Body of Victim, Body of Warrior: Refugee Families and the Making of Kashmiri Jihadists (University of California Press, 2013), Cabeiri Robinson, Associate Professor of International Studies and South Asian Studies at the University of Washington engages the question of what might an anthropology of jihad look like. By shifting the focus from theological and doctrin...
Rita Denny and Patricia Sunderland, “Handbook of Anthropology in Business” (Left Coast Press, 2014)
January 16, 2015 16:41 - 38 minutesRita Denny and Patricia Sunderland‘s bookHandbook of Anthropology in Business (Left Coast Press, 2014) isa groundbreaking collection of essays all related to Business Anthropology. As with all interdisciplinary subjects, business anthropology has been infiltrated by other social scientists, designers and marketers. Denny and Sunderland made sure to also include those perspectives among the 60 plus authors that are featured in the handbook. This is a great reference for any anthropologist in p...
Steven Shaviro, “The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism” (University of Minnesota Press, 2014)
January 16, 2015 14:05 - 1 hourSteven Shaviro‘s new book is a wonderfully engaging study of speculative realism, new materialism, and the ways in which those fields can speak to and be informed by the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. While The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) will satisfy even advanced scholars working on “object-oriented ontology” and related issues, it’s also a fantastic introduction for readers who have never heard of “correlationism” or panpsychism, ...
S. Lochlann Jain, “Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us” (U of California Press, 2013)
January 14, 2015 18:45 - 33 minutesCancer pervades American bodies–and also habits of mind. Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us (University of California Press, 2013) is a sharp, adventurous book by the established legal anthropologist, S. Lochlann Jain. The book simultaneously complicates and clarifies the multiple ways in which cancer and patient-hood gets appropriated, embodied and reproduced through seemingly quotidian activities–from opening an insurance bill to enjoying yoga class. Jain shows, in other words, exactly how an...
Matt Tomlinson, “Ritual Textuality: Pattern and Motion in Performance” (Oxford UP, 2014)
January 06, 2015 12:31 - 1 hourReligious ritual has been a staple of anthropological study. In his latest monograph, Ritual Textuality: Pattern and Motion in Performance (Oxford University Press 2014), cultural anthropologist Matt Tomlinson takes up the topic anew through a set of four case studies drawn from his fieldwork in Fiji. Each one illustrates a component of what Tomlinson calls ritual entextualization, the process by which discourse becomes texts that are detachable from their original contexts and thus replicabl...
Joseph D. Hankins, “Working Skin: Making Leather, Making a Multicultural Japan” (U of California Press, 2014)
December 31, 2014 15:45 - 1 hourJoseph D. Hankins‘s marvelous new ethnography of the contemporary Buraku people looks at the labor involved in “identifying, dismantling, and reproducing” the Buraku situation in Japan and beyond. Taking readers on a journey from Lubbock, Texas to Tokyo, India, and back again, Working Skin: Making Leather, Making a Multicultural Japan (University of California Press, 2014) brings a diverse range of ethnographic experiences to bear on understanding the conception, management, recognition, and ...
Alex Nading, “Mosquito Trails: Ecology, Health and the Politics of Entanglement” (University of California Press, 2014)
December 18, 2014 12:39 - 55 minutesDengue fever is on the rise globally. Since it is transmitted by mosquitoes which reside and reproduce in human environments, eradication efforts involve households and the people who keep them clean as well as moral and persuasive campaigns of surveillance and invigilation. In his new book Mosquito Trails: Ecology, Health and the Politics of Entanglement (University of California Press, 2014), Alex Nading follows the trails of garbage collectors and recyclers, local health care workers, and ...
Daniel Cloud, “The Domestication of Language” (Columbia UP, 2014)
December 16, 2014 18:35 - 56 minutesOne of the most puzzling things about humans is their ability to manipulate symbols and create artifacts. Our nearest relatives in the animal kingdom–apes–have only the rudiments of these abilities: chimps don’t have language and, if they have culture, it’s extraordinarily primitive in comparison to the human form. What we have between apes and humans is not really a continuum; it’s a break. So how did this break occur? The answer, of course, is evolutionarily. It stands to Darwinian reason t...
Thom Scott-Phillips, “Speaking Our Minds” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)
December 13, 2014 21:31 - 56 minutesI hope I’m not being species-centric when I say that the emergence of human language is a big deal. John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary rate it as one of the “major transitions in evolution”, placing it in exalted company alongside the evolution of multicellularity, sociality, sexual reproduction, and various other preoccupations of ours. But the nature of the transition is hotly disputed: is there a sudden shift involving the emergence of complex syntax, or is the process more gradual and ...
Jamie Cross, “Dream Zones: Anticipating Capitalism and Development in India” (Pluto Books,
December 12, 2014 11:54 - 53 minutesDream Zones: Anticipating Capitalism and Development in India (Pluto Press, 2014), the excellent new book by Jamie Cross, explores the ways in which dreams of the future shape the present. Centring in and around a large Special Economic Zone in south India, the book analyses anticipation amongst politicians, managers, workers, land-owners and activists. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supp...
Lisa L. Gezon, “Drug Effects: Khat in Biocultural and Socioeconomic Perspective” (Left Coast Press, 2012)
November 28, 2014 18:25 - 8 minutesKhat, the fresh leaves of the plant Catha edulis, is a mild psycho-stimulant. It has been consumed in Yemen, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia for over one thousand years. Khat consumption is an important part of Yemeni social and political life. During the early part of the twentieth century, Yemeni dockworkers brought khat to Madagascar, where other members of the Malagasy population have adopted its use. In her excellent book Drug Effects: Khat in Biocultural and Socioeconomic Perspect...
Pamela Klassen, “Spirits of Protestantism: Medicine, Healing, and Liberal Christianity” (University of California Press, 2011)
November 21, 2014 14:34 - 52 minutesLiberal Protestants are often dismissed as reflecting nothing more than a therapeutic culture or viewed as a measuring rod for the decline of Christian orthodoxy. Rarely have they been the subjects of anthropological inquiry. Pamela Klassen, Professor of Religion at the University of Toronto, wants to change that. Her recent book, Spirits of Protestantism: Medicine, Healing, and Liberal Christianity (University of California Press, 2011), charts a transition in liberal Protestant self-underst...
Amrita Pande, “Wombs in Labor: Transnational Commercial Surrogacy in India” (Columbia UP, 2014)
November 04, 2014 15:22 - 1 hourAmrita Pande‘s Wombs in Labor: Transnational Commercial Surrogacy in India (Columbia University Press 2014) is a beautiful and rich ethnography of a surrogacy clinic. The book details the surrogacy process from start to finish, exploring the intersection of production and reproduction, complicating and deepening our understanding of this particular form of labour. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetw...
Marcia Ochoa, “Queen for a Day: Transformistas, Beauty Queens, and the Performance of Femininity in Venezuela” (Duke UP, 2014)
October 30, 2014 14:27 - 1 hourMarcia Ochoa‘s book Queen for a Day: Transformistas, Beauty Queens, and the Performance of Femininity in Venezuela (Duke University Press, 2014) is a detailed ethnography of Venezuelan modernity and nationhood that brings two kinds of feminine performances into the same analytical frame. Her focus on transformistas and beauty queens allows her to draw relationships among power, beauty, violence, and space. The book uses different orders of magnitude, moving from the national and transnational...
Amy Evrard, “The Moroccan Women’s Rights Movement” (Syracuse University Press, 2014)
October 30, 2014 13:01 - 1 hourAmy Evrard‘s first book, The Moroccan Women’s Rights Movement (Syracuse University Press, 2014), examines women’s attempts to change their patriarchal society via their movement for equality and rights. At the center of Evrard’s book is the 2004 reform of the Family Code known as the Mudawwana, in which Moroccan women made important gains in marriage, divorce, and custody rights. Combining historical analysis of legal codes, nuanced surveys of the complicated political arena, and richly devel...
Barbara Harriss-White, “Dalits and Adivasis in India’s Business Economy” (Three Essays Collective, 2013)
October 23, 2014 12:29 - 1 hourDalits and Adivasis in India’s Business Economy: Three Essays and an Atlas (Three Essay Collective, 2013) is a wonderful new book by Barbara Harriss-White and small team of collaborators – Elisabetta Basile, Anita Dixit, Pinaki Joddar, Aseem Prakash and Kaushal Vidyarthee – published by the Three Essays Collective. The book explores the ways in which economic liberalisation interacts with caste, specifically in reference to scheduled castes and scheduled tribes, otherwise known as Dalits and...
Katherine Frank, “Plays Well in Groups: A Journey Through the World of Group Sex” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2013)
September 15, 2014 10:53 - 32 minutesDr. Katherine Frank‘s book, Plays Well in Groups: A Journey Through the World of Group Sex (Rowman and Littlefield, 2013), is a fascinating look at the taboo of group sex. Her robust research spans historical references to modern day accounts throughout cultures around the world. Dr. Frank used surveys, interviews, and ethnographic research to uncover why people participate in group sex, and what it means to them. Her work also looks at group sex in a violent setting, such as gang rape, and e...
Helene Snee, “A Cosmopolitan Journey: Difference, Distinction and Identity Work in Gap Year Travel” (Ashgate, 2014)
August 12, 2014 14:35 - 41 minutesHelene Snee, a researcher at the University of Manchester, has written an excellent new book that should be essential reading for anyone interested in the modern world. The book uses the example of the ‘gap year’, an important moment in young people’s lives, to deconstruct issues of class, cosmopolitanism and identity. Like many other aspects of contemporary life, common assumptions about travel (as opposed to tourism) or the individual experience (as opposed to patterns in social life) are t...
Shabana Mir, “Muslim American Women on Campus: Undergraduate Social Life and Identity” (UNC, 2014)
August 04, 2014 14:37 - 53 minutesIn the post 9/11 era in which Muslims in America have increasingly felt under the surveillance of the state, media, and the larger society, how have female Muslim students on US college campuses imagined, performed, and negotiated their religious lives and identities? That is the central question that animates Dr. Shabana Mir‘s dazzling new book Muslim American Women on Campus: Undergraduate Social Life and Identity (University of North Carolina Press, 2014). This book was the winner of the O...
Alice Conklin, “In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France, 1850-1950” (Cornell UP, 2013)
July 29, 2014 12:06 - 31 minutesHost Jonathan Judaken and author Alice Conklin discuss the thorny relationship between science, society, and empire at the high water mark of French imperialism and European fascism, as well as this neglected chapter in the international history of the human sciences. In Memphis, and in America generally, we remain haunted by the history of “race” as a concept, and racism as a set of social practices. To gain some perspective on our local history, it is useful to take a step back, both in ti...
Tine M. Gammeltoft, “Haunting Images: A Cultural Account of Selective Reproduction in Vietnam” (University of California Press, 2014)
July 22, 2014 14:18 - 1 hourTine Gammeltoft‘s new book explores the process of reproductive decision making in contemporary Hanoi. Haunting Images: A Cultural Account of Selective Reproduction in Vietnam (University of California Press, 2014) develops an anthropology of belonging, paying special attention to the ways that women and their communities understand and make decisions based on ultrasound imaging technologies. In the course of making life-and-death decisions, the subjects of Gammeltoft’s book confronted ethica...
Kevin Schilbrack, “Philosophy and the Study of Religions: A Manifesto” (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014)
July 18, 2014 15:33 - 1 hourVery often evaluative questions about cultural phenomena are avoided for more descriptive or explanatory goals when approaching religions. Traditionally, this set of concerns has been left to philosophers of religion. In Philosophy and the Study of Religions: A Manifesto (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), Kevin Schilbrack, professor of Religious Studies at Appalachian State University, argues that philosophical approaches to the study of religions plays a central role in our understanding of both relig...
Benjamin Lieberman, “Remaking Identities: God, Nation and Race in World History” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2013)
June 27, 2014 17:17 - 52 minutesWhat do you say to someone who suggests that genocide is not just destructive, but constructive? This is the basic theme of Benjamin Lieberman‘s excellent new book Remaking Identities: God, Nation and Race in World History (Rowman and Littlefield, 2013). The book surveys two thousand years of history to explain how people have used violence to reconstruct identities. This obviously involves death and destruction. But it also involves recasting the identities of survivors. It involves eva...
William Arnal and Russell T. McCutcheon, “The Sacred Is the Profane: The Political Nature of Religion” (Oxford UP, 2013)
June 27, 2014 14:50 - 1 hourWhat brings us together as scholars in Religious Studies? Are the various social phenomena commonly grouped together as religion really that similar? The Sacred Is the Profane: The Political Nature of “Religion” (Oxford University Press, 2012) adds to this ongoing debate over whether ‘religion’ is a useful explanatory term. In general, issues of classification and the constructed nature of the category ‘religion’ are now a repeated themes in many scholars work. William Arnal, Professor of Rel...
Morris B. Hoffman, “The Punisher’s Brain: The Evolution of Judge and Jury” (Cambridge UP, 2014)
June 11, 2014 12:13 - 1 hourWhy do we feel guilty–and sometimes hurt ourselves–when we harm someone? Why do we become angry–and sometimes violent–when we see other people being harmed? Why do we forgive ourselves and others after a transgression even though “the rules” say we really shouldn’t? In his fascinating book The Punisher’s Brain: The Evolution of Judge and Jury (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Judge Morris B. Hoffman attempts to answer these questions with reference to evolutionary psychology. As a workin...
Cymene Howe, “Intimate Activism: The Struggle for Sexual Rights in Postrevolutionary Nicaragua” (Duke UP, 2013)
June 10, 2014 14:00 - 1 hourWith Intimate Activism: The Struggle for Sexual Rights in Postrevolutionary Nicaragua (Duke University Press, 2013), Cymene Howe offers an ethnography of activism. Woven into Nicaragua’s political history of revolution and U.S. intervention, the struggle for sexual rights there takes place on three stages: in intimate settings of lesbian discussion groups, in the public sphere marked by demonstrations, press conferences and celebrations, and in visual and print media. Howe’s informants (act...
Anne Allison, “Precarious Japan” (Duke University Press, 2013)
May 23, 2014 13:55 - 1 hour“[All] I want to eat is a rice ball.” This was the last entry in the diary of a 52-year-old man who starved to death in an apartment he had occupied for 20 years. His is just one of many voices of the precarity of everyday life and death that populate Anne Allison‘s new ethnography of pain, struggle, and hope in modern Japan. Precarious Japan (Duke University Press, 2013) considers the transformations of the relationship between work and life in Japan that followed its social and economic fa...
Denise Brennan, “Life Interrupted: Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States” (Duke UP, 2014)
May 20, 2014 11:30 - 1 hourDenise Brennan‘s second book, Life Interrupted: Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States (Duke University Press, 2014), examines how individuals who were trafficked into forced labor go about rebuilding their lives afterward. Through her ethnography of lived experience and her analysis of immigration policy, Brennan shows that trafficking and forced labor are common byproducts of our capitalist system that relies on cheap and unregulated labor. Migration patterns are gendered, and t...
Vershawn Young et al., “Other People’s English” (Teacher’s College Press, 2013)
April 15, 2014 17:21 - 53 minutesIn linguistics, we all happily and glibly affirm that there is no “better” or “worse” among languages (or dialects, or varieties), although we freely admit that people have irrational prejudices about them. But what do we do about those prejudices? And what do we think the speakers of low-status varieties of language should do to overcome them? Take the case of African American English. An influential approach, code-switching, advises teachers to help their AAE-speaking students to identify ...
Zareena Grewal, “Islam is a Foreign Country: American Muslims and the Global Crisis of Authority” (NYU Press, 2013)
April 15, 2014 13:20 - 1 hourZareena Grewal‘s monograph Islam is a Foreign Country: American Muslims and the Global Crisis of Authority (NYU Press, 2013), seamlessly interweaves ethnographic research with an in-depth historical perspective in order to yield an unparalleled account of American Muslims and their intellectual and spiritual journeys. Where does knowledge come from? Where does Islam come from? Can Americans find it in California, or must they travel to Egypt, or Syria? How does skin color, religious conversio...
Jon Mooallem, “Wild Ones” (Pengiun, 2013)
March 19, 2014 12:34 - 55 minutesJon Mooallem‘s book Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals In America (Penguin, 2013) is a tour of a few places on the North American continent where animal species are on the very brink of extinction. What emerges is as much a story about creatures clinging on in the Anthropocene as it is a story about humans clinging to their humanity by clinging to disappearing animals. It is a book rich with humor, insight, history, sadness, ...