New Books in Anthropology
2,049 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 1 month ago - ★★★★ - 38 ratingsInterviews with Anthropologists about their New Books
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Episodes
Michael Roper, "Afterlives of War: A Descendants' History" (Manchester UP, 2023)
August 09, 2023 08:00 - 55 minutesAfterlives of War: A Descendants' History (Manchester University Press, 2023) by Dr. Michael Roper documents the lives and historical pursuits of the generations who grew up in Australia, Britain and Germany after the First World War. Although they were not direct witnesses to the conflict, they experienced its effects from their earliest years. Based on ninety oral history interviews and observation during the First World War Centenary, this pioneering study reveals the contribution of desce...
Traditional Medicine in Laos (with Elizabeth Elliott and Ounkham Souksavanh)
August 08, 2023 08:00 - 49 minutesDr. Pierce Salguero sits down with two guests, Ounkham Souksavanh and Elizabeth Elliott, to talk about community engagement and community health in Laos. They discuss how Elizabeth as a medical anthropologist, and Ounkham as a physician, work together to build trust and improve healthcare access across an ethnically and religiously diverse landscape. Along the way, we learn about Elizabeth’s experience of foraging for herbs and Ounkham’s memories of growing up with traditional medicine in his...
Bianca Vienni-Baptista et al., "Foundations of Interdisciplinary and Transdisciplinary Research" (Bristol UP, 2023)
August 05, 2023 08:00 - 41 minutesBianca Vienni-Baptista, Isabel Fletcher, and Catherine Lyall's Foundations of Interdisciplinary and Transdisciplinary Research (Bristol University Press, 2023) is a groundbreaking reader designed to lower the barriers to interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity in research. Edited by experienced researchers from a range of different fields whose work grows out of the SHAPE-ID consortium, it paves the way for future scholarship and effective research collaborations across disciplines. For m...
Olga Fedorenko, "Flower of Capitalism: South Korean Advertising at a Crossroads" (U Hawaii Press, 2022)
August 05, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourAn ethnography of advertising in postmillennial South Korea, Flower of Capitalism: South Korean Advertising at a Crossroads (U Hawaii Press, 2022) details contests over advertising freedoms and obligations among divergent vested interests while positing far-reaching questions about the social contract that governs advertising in late-capitalist societies. The term "flower of capitalism" is a clichéd metaphor for advertising in South Korea, bringing resolutely positive connotations, which down...
Tamara J. Walker, "Beyond the Shores: A History of African Americans Abroad" (Crown, 2023)
August 04, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourPart historical exploration, part travel memoir, Beyond the Shores: A History of African Americans Abroad (Crown, 2023) reveals poignant histories of a diverse group of African Americans who have left the United States over the course of the past century. Together, the interwoven stories highlight African Americans’ complicated relationship to the United States and the world at large. Beyond the Shores is not just about where African Americans stayed or where they ate when they traveled but a...
Elizabeth Carpenter-Song, "Families on the Edge: Experiences of Homelessness and Care in Rural New England" (MIT Press, 2023)
August 04, 2023 08:00 - 36 minutesAn intimate account of rural New England families living on the edge of homelessness, as well as the practices and policies of care that fail them. Families on the Edge: Experiences of Homelessness and Care in Rural New England (MIT Press, 2023) is an ethnographic portrait of families in rural and small-town New England who are often undercut by the very systems that are set up to help them. In this book, author and medical anthropologist Elizabeth Carpenter-Song draws on a decade of ethnogr...
Thurka Sangaramoorthy, "Landscapes of Care: Immigration and Health in Rural America" (UNC Press, 2023)
August 03, 2023 08:00 - 57 minutesLandscapes of Care: Immigration and Health in Rural America (UNC Press, 2023) examines the ways immigrants, mainly from Latin America and the Caribbean, navigate the healthcare system in the United States. Since 1990, immigration to the United States has risen sharply, and rural areas have seen the highest increases. Thurka Sangaramoorthy reveals that the corporatization of healthcare delivery and immigration policies are deeply connected in rural America. Drawing from fieldwork that centers ...
Michael Baltutis, "The Festival of Indra: Innovation, Archaism, and Revival in a South Asian Performance" (SUNY Press, 2023)
August 03, 2023 08:00 - 51 minutesMichael Baltutis' book The Festival of Indra: Innovation, Archaism, and Revival in a South Asian Performance (SUNY Press, 2023) details the textual and performative history of an important South Asian festival and its role in the development of classical Hinduism. Drawing on various genres of Sanskrit textual sources--especially the epic Mahābhārata--the book highlights the innovative ways that this annual public festival has supported the stable royal power responsible for the sponsorship of...
Courtney Adams Wooten, "Childfree and Happy: Transforming the Rhetoric of Women's Reproductive Choices" (Utah State UP, 2023)
August 02, 2023 08:00 - 43 minutesChildfree and Happy: Transforming the Rhetoric of Womens' Reproductive Choices (Utah State University Press, 2023) examines how millennia of reproductive beliefs (or doxa) have positioned women who choose not to have children as deviant or outside the norm. Considering affect and emotion alongside the lived experiences of women who have chosen not to have children, Courtney Adams Wooten offers a new theoretical lens to feminist rhetorical scholars’ examinations of reproductive rhetorics and h...
Jae DiBello Takeuchi, "Language Ideologies and L2 Speaker Legitimacy: Native Speaker Bias in Japan" (Mulitlingual Matters, 2023)
August 01, 2023 08:00 - 58 minutesJae DiBello Takeuchi's Language Ideologies and L2 Speaker Legitimacy: Native Speaker Bias in Japan (Mulitlingual Matters, 2023) examines dilemmas faced by second language (L2) Japanese speakers as a result of persistent challenges to their legitimacy as speakers of Japanese. Based on an ethnographic interview study with L2-Japanese speakers and their L1-Japanese-speaking friends, co-workers and significant others, the book examines ideologies linked to three core speech styles of Japanese – k...
Omolade Adunbi, "Enclaves of Exception: Special Economic Zones and Extractive Practices in Nigeria" (Indiana UP, 2022)
July 31, 2023 08:00 - 41 minutesHow do we measure and truly grasp the sweeping social and environmental effects of an oil-based economy? Focusing on the special economic zones resulting from China's trading partnership with Nigeria, Enclaves of Exception: Special Economic Zones and Extractive Practices in Nigeria (Indiana UP, 2022) offers a new approach to exploring the relationship between oil and technologies of extraction and their interrelatedness to local livelihoods and environmental practices. In this groundbreaking...
Shaul Shenhav, "Analyzing Social Narratives" (Routledge, 2015)
July 31, 2023 08:00 - 52 minutesAnalyzing Social Narratives (Routledge, 2015) is one of the concise and informative volumes in the Routledge Series on Interpretive Methods, whose titles we have been featuring on New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science. Its author, Shaul Shenhav, organizes the book’s contents around four concepts: story, text, narration and multiplicity, each of which we discuss in this episode. Reflecting on his early experiences of learning about narrative through the love of literature, he ...
Mayur R. Suresh, "Terror Trials: Life and Law in Delhi's Courts" (Fordham UP, 2022)
July 30, 2023 08:00 - 49 minutesIn Terror Trials: Life and Law in Delhi's Courts (Fordham UP, 2022), Mayur Suresh shows how legal procedures and technicalities become the modes through which courtrooms are made habitable. Where India’s terror trials have come to be understood by way of the expansion of the security state and displays of Hindu nationalism, Suresh elaborates how they are experienced by defendants in a quite different way, through a minute engagement with legal technicalities. Amidst the grinding terror trials...
Sarah E. Vaughn, "Engineering Vulnerability: In Pursuit of Climate Adaptation" (Duke UP, 2022)
July 29, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourSarah E. Vaughn’s Engineering Vulnerability: In Pursuit of Climate Adaptation (Duke UP, 2022) examines climate adaptation strategies that upend the neat divisions of linear temporality separate the past, present, and the future, and shows how multiple temporalities co-exist in the pressing sense of crisis that engulfs coastal spaces vulnerable to flooding. Her ethnographic account takes us to Guyana in the aftermath of the 2005 catastrophic floods that ravaged the country’s Atlantic coastal p...
Irina Carlota Silber, "After Stories: Transnational Intimacies of Postwar El Salvador" (Stanford UP, 2022)
July 29, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourAfter Stories: Transnational Intimacies of Postwar El Salvador (Stanford UP, 2022) builds upon Irina Carlota [Lotti] Silber's nearly 25 years of ethnographic research centered in Chalatenango, El Salvador, to follow the trajectories—geographic, temporal, storied—of several extended Salvadoran families. Traveling back and forth in time and across borders, Silber narrates the everyday unfolding of diasporic lives rich with acts of labor, love, and renewed calls for memory, truth, and accountabi...
Melissa Gatter, "Time and Power in Azraq Refugee Camp: A Nine-to-Five Emergency" (American University in Cairo Press, 2023)
July 28, 2023 08:00 - 57 minutesAzraq refugee camp, built in 2014 and host to forty thousand refugees, is one of two official humanitarian refugee camps for Syrian refugees in Jordan. Time and Power in Azraq Refugee Camp: A Nine-To-Five Emergency (American University of Cairo Press, 2023) by Dr. Melissa Gatter investigates the relationship between time and power in Azraq, asking how a politics of time shapes, limits, or enables everyday life for the displaced and for aid workers. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, carried out...
Brenda E. F. Beck, "Hidden Paradigms: Comparing Epic Themes, Characters, and Plot Structures" (U Toronto Press, 2022)
July 27, 2023 08:00 - 47 minutesBrenda Beck discusses her lifelong work on a Tamil folk legend, resulting in a graphic novel, an English translation and Hidden Paradigms: Comparing Epic Themes, Characters, and Plot Structures (U Toronto Press, 2022) which identifies important symbolic patterns connecting this tale to other epic stories. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. ...
Syed Ali and Margaret M. Chin, "The Peer Effect: How Your Peers Shape Who You Are and Who You Will Become" (NYU Press, 2023)
July 26, 2023 08:00 - 53 minutesFor decades, parents across America have asked their kids, “If your friends jumped off a bridge, would you?” The answer is, “Duh, yes.” Peers, as parents well know, have a tremendous impact on who their kids are and what they will become. And even while they insist otherwise, parents know that they’re largely powerless to change this. But the effect of peers is not just a story about kids; peers can also affect adult behavior—they affect what we do and who we are well into old age. Noted soci...
Rahil Roodsaz, "Sexual Self-Fashioning: Iranian Dutch Narratives of Sexuality and Belonging" (Berghahn Books, 2022)
July 26, 2023 08:00 - 36 minutesSexuality and gender have come to serve as measures for cultural belonging in discussions of the position of Muslim immigrants in multicultural Western societies. While the acceptance of assumed local norms such as sexual liberty and gender equality is seen as successful integration, rejecting them is regarded as a sign of failed citizenship. Focusing on premarital sex, homosexuality, and cohabitation outside marriage, Sexual Self-Fashioning: Iranian Dutch Narratives of Sexuality and Belongin...
Anthony Russell Jerry, "Blackness in Mexico: Afro-Mexican Recognition and the Production of Citizenship in the Costa Chica" (UP of Florida, 2023)
July 26, 2023 08:00 - 47 minutesThrough historical and ethnographic research, Blackness in Mexico: Afro-Mexican Recognition and the Production of Citizenship in the Costa Chica (UP of Florida, 2023) delves into the ongoing movement toward recognizing Black Mexicans as a cultural group within a nation that has long viewed the non-Black mestizo as the archetypal citizen. Anthony Jerry focuses on this process in Mexico's Costa Chica region in order to explore the relational aspects of citizenship and the place of Black people ...
Vincanne Adams, "Glyphosate and the Swirl: An Agroindustrial Chemical on the Move" (Duke UP, 2023)
July 25, 2023 08:00 - 57 minutesVincanne Adams's book Glyphosate and the Swirl: An Agroindustrial Chemical on the Move (Duke UP, 2023) is part of a broader trend in anthropology that is developing new methods and techniques to study our increasingly polluted and toxic world. Adams takes Glyphosate as a case study and follows this chemical as it moves from the past to the present, from the lab to the dinner table, from outside our bodies, to within our cells to grapple with what it is to live in such an entangled world. Ad...
Lisa Mitchell, "Hailing the State: Indian Democracy Between Elections" (Duke UP, 2023)
July 25, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn Hailing the State: Indian Democracy Between Elections (Duke UP, 2023), Lisa Mitchell explores the methods of collective assembly that people in India use to hold elected officials and government administrators accountable, demand inclusion in decision making, and stage informal referendums. Mitchell traces the colonial and postcolonial lineages of collective forms of assembly, in which—rather than rejecting state authority—participants mobilize with expectations that officials will uphold ...
Lea Taragin-Zeller, "The State of Desire: Religion and Reproductive Politics in the Promised Land" (NYU Press, 2023)
July 24, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn recent years, Israeli state policies have attempted to dissuade Orthodox Jews from creating large families, an objective that flies in the face of traditional practices in their community. As state desires to cultivate a high-income, tech-centered nation come into greater conflict with common Orthodox familial practices, Jewish couples are finding it increasingly difficult to actualize their reproductive aims and communal expectations. In The State of Desire: Religion and Reproductive Poli...
Scott E. Simon, "Truly Human: Indigeneity and Indigenous Resurgence on Formosa" (U Toronto Press, 2023)
July 20, 2023 08:00 - 44 minutesSimilar to countries like the US and Canada, Taiwan also has indigenous peoples who've existed before the arrival of colonizers, and continue to grapple with the legacy of colonialism to this day. Scott Simon's Truly Human: Indigeneity and Indigenous Resurgence on Formosa (U Toronto Press, 2023) explores lifeworlds, traditions, and political relationships in two of Taiwan's indigenous communities—the Sediq and Truku. Simon is a Professor of Sociological and Anthropological Studies at the Uni...
António Tomás, "In the Skin of the City: Spatial Transformation in Luanda" (Duke UP, 2022)
July 19, 2023 08:00 - 42 minutesIn his book, In the Skin of the City: Spatial Transformation in Luanda (Duke UP, 2022), António Tomás traces the history and transformation of Luanda, Angola, the nation’s capital as well as one of the oldest settlements founded by the European colonial powers in the Southern Hemisphere. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research alongside his own experiences growing up in Luanda, Tomás shows how the city’s physical and social boundaries—its skin—constitute porous and shifting interfaces b...
Monica Liu, "Seeking Western Men: Email-Order Brides Under China's Global Rise" (Stanford UP, 2022)
July 19, 2023 08:00 - 48 minutesCommercial dating agencies that facilitate marriages across national borders comprise a $2.5 billion global industry. Ideas about the industry are rife with stereotypes-younger, more physically attractive brides from non-Western countries being paired with older Western men. These ideas are more myth than fact, Monica Liu finds in Seeking Western Men: Email-Order Brides Under China's Global Rise (Stanford UP, 2022). Her study of China's email-order bride industry offers stories of Chinese wo...
Margareta von Oswald and Jonas Tinius, "Awkward Archives: Ethnographic Drafts for a Modular Curriculum" (Archive Books, 2022)
July 18, 2023 08:00 - 50 minutesAwkward Archives: Ethnographic Drafts for a Modular Curriculum (Archive Books, 2022) proposes a manual for academic teaching and learning contexts. An ethnographic research approach is confronted with the demands of archival research as both disciplines challenge their inner logics and epistemologies. Through fieldwork and ethnographic tools and methods, both analogue and digital, the editors take various contemporary archival sites in Berlin as case studies to elaborate on controversial conc...
Victor Luckerson, "Built from the Fire: The Epic Story of Tulsa's Greenwood District, America's Black Wall Street" (Random House, 2023)
July 17, 2023 08:00 - 58 minutesWhen Ed Goodwin moved with his parents to Greenwood, Tulsa, in 1914, his family joined a growing community on the cusp of becoming a national center of black life. But, just seven years later, on May 31, 1921, the teenaged Ed hid in a bathtub as a white mob descended on his neighborhood, laying waste to thirty-five blocks and murdering as many as three hundred people. The Tulsa Race Massacre was one of the most brutal acts of racist violence in U.S. history, a ruthless attempt to smother a sp...
Brianna Holt, "In Our Shoes: On Being a Young Black Woman in Not-So 'Post-Racial' America" (Plume Books, 2023)
July 16, 2023 08:00 - 43 minutesPart memoir, part cultural critique, In Our Shoes: On Being a Young Black Woman in Not-So 'Post-Racial' America (Plume Books, 2023) uses pop culture and author Brianna Holt’s own lived experience to dissect the stereotypes and preconceived notions that young Black women must overcome in America today. In this fresh exploration of cultural appropriation, wokeness, tone policing, and more, Holt carefully dismantles myths about Black womanhood, allowing readers to assess their biases while exami...
Jenna Grant, "Fixing the Image: Ultrasound and the Visuality of Care in Phnom Penh" (U Washington Press, 2022)
July 15, 2023 08:00 - 44 minutesJenna Grant is a cultural anthropologist from the University of Washington and author of Fixing the Image: Ultrasound and the Visuality of Care in Phnom Penh, published by University of Washington Press in 2022. Introduced in Phnom Penh around 1990, at the twilight of socialism and after two decades of conflict and upheaval, ultrasound took root in humanitarian and then privatized medicine. Services have since multiplied, promising diagnostic information and better prenatal and general healt...
Roluah Puia, "Nationalism in the Vernacular: State, Tribes, and Politics of Peace in Northeast India" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
July 15, 2023 08:00 - 46 minutesRoluah Puia's book Nationalism in the Vernacular: State, Tribes, and Politics of Peace in Northeast India (Cambridge UP, 2023) illuminates our understanding of the relationship between orality and nationalist politics. In doing so, it provides a new angle to the understanding of nationalism by looking at the popular support and participation of ordinary people in the construction of Mizo nationalism, in short, the vernacularisation of nationalism. Nationalism in the Vernacular examines this ...
Sarah Federman and Ronald Niezen, "Narratives of Mass Atrocity: Victims and Perpetrators in the Aftermath" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
July 14, 2023 08:00 - 40 minutesIndividuals can assume—and be assigned—multiple roles throughout a conflict: perpetrators can be victims, and vice versa; heroes can be reassessed as complicit and compromised. However, accepting this more accurate representation of the narrativized identities of violence presents a conundrum for accountability and justice mechanisms premised on clear roles. This book considers these complex, sometimes overlapping roles, as people respond to mass violence in various contexts, from internation...
Jacqueline Kinghan, "Lawyers, Networks and Progressive Social Change: Lawyers Changing Lives" (Bloomsbury, 2021)
July 11, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourWritten by a lawyer who works at the intersection between legal education and practice in access to justice and human rights, this book locates, describes and defines a collective identity for social justice lawyering in the UK. Underpinned by theories of cause lawyering and legal mobilisation, the book argues that it is vital to understand the positions that progressive lawyers collectively take in order to frame the connections they make between their personal and professional lives, the to...
Jessica P. Cerdeña, "Pressing Onward: The Imperative Resilience of Latina Migrant Mothers" (U California Press, 2023)
July 10, 2023 08:00 - 58 minutesPressing Onward: The Imperative Resilience of Latina Migrant Mothers (U California Press, 2023) centers the stories of mothers who migrated from Latin America, settled in New Haven, Connecticut, and overcame trauma and ongoing adversity to build futures for their children. These migrant mothers enact imperative resilience, engaging cognitive and social strategies to resist racial, economic, and gender-based oppression to seguir adelante, or press onward. Both a contemporary view of the impact...
Stephen Davies, "Adornment: What Self-Decoration Tells Us About Who We Are" (Bloomsbury, 2020)
July 10, 2023 08:00 - 31 minutesElaborating the history, variety, pervasiveness, and function of the adornments and ornaments with which we beautify ourselves, Stephen Davies's Adornment: What Self-Decoration Tells Us About Who We Are (Bloomsbury, 2020) takes in human prehistory, ancient civilizations, hunter-foragers, and present-day industrial societies to tell a captivating story of hair, skin, and make-up practices across times and cultures. From the decline of the hat, the function of jewelry and popularity of tattooin...
Tina Shrestha, "Surviving the Sanctuary City: Asylum-Seeking Work in Nepali New York" (U Washington Press, 2023)
July 09, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourOver the past several decades, the vibrant, multiethnic borough of Queens has seen growth in the community of Nepali migrants, many of whom are navigating the challenging bureaucratic process of asylum legalization. Surviving the Sanctuary City: Asylum-Seeking Work in Nepali New York (U Washington Press, 2023) follows them through the institutional spaces of asylum offices, law firms, and human rights agencies to document the labor of seeking asylum. As an interpreter and a volunteer at a gr...
Linda J. Seligmann, "Quinoa: Food Politics and Agrarian Life in the Andean Highlands" (U Illinois Press, 2022)
July 08, 2023 08:00 - 44 minutesQuinoa's new status as a superfood has altered the economic fortunes of Quechua farmers in the Andean highlands. Linda J. Seligmann journeys to the Huanoquite region of Peru to track the mixed blessings brought about by the surging worldwide popularity of this "exquisite grain." Focusing on how Indigenous communities have confronted globalization, Seligmann examines the influence of food politics, development initiatives, and the region's agrarian history on present-day quinoa production amon...
Dinah Hannaford, "Aid and the Help: International Development and the Transnational Extraction of Care" (Stanford UP, 2023)
July 07, 2023 08:00 - 52 minutesHiring domestic workers is a routine part of the expat development lifestyle. Whether working for the United Nations, governmental aid agencies, or NGOs such as Oxfam, Save the Children, or World Vision, expatriate aid workers in the developing world employ maids, nannies, security guards, gardeners and chauffeurs. Though nearly every expat aid worker in the developing world has local people working within the intimate sphere of their homes, these relationships are seldom, if ever, discussed ...
Apostolos Andrikopoulos, "Argonauts of West Africa: Unauthorized Migration and Kinship Dynamics in a Changing Europe" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
July 05, 2023 08:00 - 47 minutesIn rapidly changing and highly precarious contexts, unauthorized African migrants turn to kinship in search of security, stability, and predictability. Through the exchange of identity documents between “siblings,” assistance in obtaining such documentation through kinship networks, and marriages that provide access to citizenship, new assemblages of kinship are continually made and remade to navigate the shifting demands of European states. These new kinship relations, however, often prove u...
Sarah L. Hall, "Sown in the Stars: Planting by the Signs" (UP of Kentucky, 2023)
July 03, 2023 08:00 - 54 minutes"To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted."—Ecclesiastes 3:1–2 The Appalachian region is deeply rooted in customs that have been handed down for generations. "Planting by the signs," a practice predicated on the belief that moon phases and astrological signs exert a powerful influence on the growth and well-being of crops, is deemed superstitious by some bu...
Daniel R. Smith, "The Fall and Rise of the English Upper Class: Houses, Kinship and Capital Since 1945" (Manchester UP, 2023)
June 28, 2023 08:00 - 48 minutesWho are the English upper class? In The Fall and Rise of the English Upper Class: Houses, Kinship and Capital Since 1945 (Manchester UP, 2023) Daniel Smith, a lecturer in sociology at Cardiff University, offers an analysis of the role and power of the upper class in English society. Drawing on, and critiquing, sociology, anthropology, literary and cultural studies, and psychoanalysis, the book uses a vast range of methods and examples to tell the story of the continued dominance of English el...
Markus Virgil Höhne, "Between Somaliland and Puntland: Marginalization, Militarization and Conflicting Political Vision" (Rift Valley Institute, 2023)
June 28, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourOn February 6, 2023, fighting erupted around Las Anod, a city in the eastern parts of the de facto independent state of Somaliland. This still-ongoing conflict has been subject to recent scrutiny from the United Nations, IGAD, US State Department, and others. Markus Hoehne, a Research Associate at the Institute of Social Anthropology in the University of Leipzig, has extensive knowledge about this conflict, which has already been simmering for decades before this year's latest eruption. In 20...
Tom Higham, "The World Before Us: The New Science Behind Our Human Origins" (Yale UP, 2021)
June 24, 2023 08:00 - 41 minutesFifty thousand years ago, Homo sapiens was not the only species of humans in the world. There were also Neanderthals in what is now Europe, the Near East, and parts of Eurasia; Hobbits (H. floresiensis) on the island of Flores in Indonesia; Denisovans in Siberia and eastern Eurasia; and H. luzonensis in the Philippines. Tom Higham investigates what we know about these other human species and explores what can be learned from the genetic links between them and us. He also looks at whether H. e...
Amy Tooth Murphy et al., "New Directions in Queer Oral History: Archives of Disruption" (Routledge, 2022)
June 23, 2023 08:00 - 52 minutesNew Directions in Queer Oral History, edited by Amy Tooth Murphy, Clare Summerskill, and Emma Vickers (Routledge, 2022) is a comprehensive international collection that reflects on the practice, purpose, and functionality of queer oral history, and in doing so demonstrates the vibrancy and innovation of this rapidly evolving field. Drawing on the roots of oral history’s original commitment to "history from below" queer oral history has become an indispensable methodology at the heart of queer...
The Human Advantage: A New Understanding of How Our Brain Became Remarkable
June 20, 2023 12:52 - 7 minutesHumans are awesome. Our brains are gigantic, seven times larger than they should be for the size of our bodies. The human brain uses 25% of all the energy the body requires each day. And it became enormous in a very short amount of time in evolution, allowing us to leave our cousins, the great apes, behind. So the human brain is special, right? Wrong, according to Suzana Herculano-Houzel. Humans have developed cognitive abilities that outstrip those of all other animals, but not because we ar...
Prehension: The Hand and the Emergence of Humanity
June 19, 2023 19:41 - 20 minutesPrehension is a hymn to the hand. In Prehension, Colin McGinn links questions from science to philosophical concerns to consider something that we take for granted: the importance of the hand in everything we do. Drawing on evolutionary biology, anatomy, archaeology, linguistics, psychology, and philosophy, among other disciplines, McGinn examines the role of the hand in shaping human evolution. He finds that the development of our capacity to grasp, to grip, to take hold (also known as prehe...
Reading the Comments: Likers, Haters, and Manipulators at the Bottom of the Web
June 19, 2023 19:28 - 18 minutesOnline comment can be informative or misleading, entertaining or maddening. Haters and manipulators often seem to monopolize the conversation. Some comments are off-topic, or even topic-less. In Reading the Comments, Joseph Reagle urges us to read the comments. Conversations "on the bottom half of the Internet," he argues, can tell us much about human nature and social behavior. Reagle visits communities of Amazon reviewers, fan fiction authors, online learners, scammers, freethinkers, and me...
Orit Avishai, "Queer Judaism: LGBT Activism and the Remaking of Jewish Orthodoxy in Israel" (NYU Press, 2023)
June 18, 2023 08:00 - 52 minutesUntil fairly recently, Orthodox people in Israel could not imagine embracing their LGBT sexual or gender identity and staying within the Orthodox fold. But within the span of about a decade and a half, Orthodox LGBT people have forged social circles and communities and become much more visible. This has been a remarkable shift in a relatively short time span. Queer Judaism offers the compelling story of how Jewish LGBT persons in Israel created an effective social movement. Drawing on more th...
Leela Fernandes, "Governing Water in India: Inequality, Reform, and the State" (U Washington Press, 2022)
June 17, 2023 08:00 - 37 minutesIntensifying droughts and competing pressures on water resources foreground water scarcity as an urgent concern of the global climate change crisis. In India, individual, industrial, and agricultural water demands exacerbate inequities of access and expose the failures of state governance to regulate use. State policies and institutions influenced by global models of reform produce and magnify socio-economic injustice in this "water bureaucracy." Drawing on historical records, an analysis of ...
Daniel E Agbiboa, "Mobility, Mobilization, and Counter/Insurgency: The Routes of Terror in an African Context" (U Michigan Press, 2022)
June 17, 2023 08:00 - 52 minutesIn Mobility, Mobilization, and Counter/Insurgency: The Routes of Terror in an African Context (U Michigan Press, 2022), Daniel Agbiboa takes African insurgencies back to their routes by providing a transdisciplinary perspective on the centrality of mobility to the strategies of insurgents, state security forces, and civilian populations caught in conflict. Drawing on one of the world’s deadliest insurgencies, the Boko Haram insurgency in northeast Nigeria and the Lake Chad region, this well-c...