New Books in Anthropology
2,049 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 2 months ago - ★★★★ - 38 ratingsInterviews with Anthropologists about their New Books
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Episodes
Marielle Risse, "Houseways in Southern Oman" (Routledge, 2022)
June 15, 2023 08:00 - 54 minutesHouseways in Southern Oman (Routledge, 2022) explores how houses are created, maintained and conceptualized in southern Oman. Based on long-term research in the Dhofar region, it draws on anthropology, sociology, urban studies and architectural history. The chapters consider physical and functional aspects, including regulations governing land use, factors in siting houses, architectural styles and norms for interior and exterior decorating. The volume also reflects on cultural expectations r...
Francis Cody, "The News Event: Popular Sovereignty in the Age of Deep Mediatization" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
June 14, 2023 08:00 - 45 minutesNot merely the act of representing events with words or images, a "news event" is the reciprocal relationship between the events being reported in the news and the event of the news coverage itself. In The News Event: Popular Sovereignty in the Age of Deep Mediatization (U Chicago Press, 2023), Francis Cody focuses on how imaginaries of popular sovereignty have been remade through the production and experience of such events. Political sovereignty is thoroughly mediated by the production of ...
Daniel E. Agbiboa, "They Eat Our Sweat: Transport Labor, Corruption, and Everyday Survival in Urban Nigeria" (Oxford UP, 2023)
June 14, 2023 08:00 - 36 minutesAccounts of corruption in Africa and the Global South are generally overly simplistic and macro-oriented, and commonly disconnect everyday (petty) corruption from political (grand) corruption. In contrast to this tendency, They Eat Our Sweat: Transport Labor, Corruption, and Everyday Survival in Urban Nigeria (Oxford UP, 2023) offers a fresh and engaging look at the corruption complex in Africa through a micro analysis of its informal transport sector, where collusion between state and nonst...
Malini Ranganathan et al., "Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics, and Publics of the Late Capitalist City" (Cornell UP, 2023)
June 13, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourCorruption Plots: Stories, Ethics, and Publics of the Late Capitalist City (Cornell UP, 2023) illuminates how corruption is fundamental to global storytelling about how states and elites abuse entrusted power in late capitalism. The millennial city of the global South is a charged setting for allegations of corruption, with skyscrapers, land grabs, and slum evictions invoking outrage at deepening economic polarization. Drawing on ethnography in Bengaluru and Mumbai and a cross-section of lite...
Maitrayee Chaudhuri and Manish Thakur, "Doing Theory: Locations, Hierarchies and Disjunctions" (Orient Blackswan, 2018)
June 11, 2023 08:00 - 45 minutesWe live in times where theory is often understood as irrelevant in the real world. It appears to have no practical results. This has been further complicated in a post-fact world, where our ‘identities’ and ‘perception’ have become the final judges of truth. Sociology/social anthropology, in contrast, rests on a fundamental distinction between commonsense and theoretically informed knowledge. It teaches us to get rid of ‘perceptions’ and alerts us to go beyond taken-for-granted ideas. The par...
Osman Balkan, "Dying Abroad: The Political Afterlives of Migration in Europe" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
June 10, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourOn any given day, the remains of countless deceased migrants are shipped around the world to be buried in ancestral soils. Others are laid to rest in countries of settlement, sometimes in cemeteries established for religious and ethnic minorities, where available. For immigrants and their descendants, perennial questions about the meaning of home and homeland take on a particular gravitas in death. When the boundaries of a nation and its members are contested, burial decisions are political a...
Graham Harman and Christopher Witmore, "Objects Untimely: Object-Oriented Philosophy and Archaeology" (Polity Press, 2023)
June 10, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourObjects generate time; time does not generate or change objects. That is the central thesis of this book by the philosopher Graham Harman and the archaeologist Christopher Witmore, who defend radical positions in their respective fields. Against a current and pervasive conviction that reality consists of an unceasing flux - a view associated in philosophy with New Materialism - object-oriented ontology asserts that objects of all varieties are the bedrock of reality from which time emerges. A...
Han Yu, "The Curious Human Knee" (Columbia UP, 2023)
June 09, 2023 08:00 - 57 minutesWhere would we be without the knee? This down-to-earth joint connecting the thigh and the lower leg doesn’t receive the attention it deserves. Yet, as The Curious Human Knee (Columbia UP, 2023) reveals, it is crucial to countless facets of science, medicine, culture, and history—and even what makes us human. The science writer Han Yu provides an informative, surprising, and entertaining exploration of the human knee across time and place. She begins with our earliest ancestors, emphasizing th...
Andrew Snyder, "Critical Brass: Street Carnival and Musical Activism in Olympic Rio de Janeiro" (Wesleyan UP, 2022)
June 09, 2023 08:00 - 58 minutesCritical Brass: Street Carnival and Musical Activism in Olympic Rio de Janeiro (Wesleyan University Press, 2022) tells the story of neofanfarrismo, an explosive carnival brass band community turned activist musical movement in Rio de Janeiro, as Brazil shifted from a country on the rise in the 2000s to one beset by various crises in the 2010s. Though predominantly middle-class, neofanfarristas have creatively adapted the critical theories of carnival to militate for a more democratic city. Il...
Marius Wamsiedel, "The Moral Evaluation of Emergency Department Patients: An Ethnography of Triage Work in Romania" (Lexington, 2023)
June 08, 2023 08:00 - 59 minutesMarius Wamsiedel's book The Moral Evaluation of Emergency Department Patients: An Ethnography of Triage Work in Romania (Lexington, 2023) is an ethnography of the social process by which healthcare workers ration and rationalize the provision of care. Examining the social categorization of patients, this work documents the interactional production of exclusion at two emergency departments in Romania. Roland Clark is a Reader in Modern European History at the University of Liverpool, a Senior ...
Tessa Farmer, "Well Connected: Everyday Water Practices in Cairo" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023)
June 08, 2023 08:00 - 42 minutesWho is responsible for ensuring access to clean potable water? In an urbanizing planet beset by climate change, cities are facing increasingly arid conditions and a precarious water future. In Well Connected: Everyday Water Practices in Cairo (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023), anthropologist Tessa Farmer details how one community in Cairo, Egypt, has worked collaboratively to adapt the many systems required to facilitate clean water in their homes and neighborhoods. As a community that was originally ...
Arseli Dokumaci, "Activist Affordances: How Disabled People Improvise More Habitable Worlds" (Duke UP, 2023)
June 07, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourFor people who are living with disability, including various forms of chronic diseases and chronic pain, daily tasks like lifting a glass of water or taking off clothes can be difficult if not impossible. In Activist Affordances: How Disabled People Improvise More Habitable Worlds (Duke UP, 2023), Arseli Dokumacı draws on ethnographic work with differently disabled people whose ingenuity, labor, and artfulness allow them to achieve these seemingly simple tasks. Dokumacı shows how they use imp...
Hiking Trails, Sustainable Tourism, and Bedouin Heritage
June 07, 2023 08:00 - 43 minutesBen Hoffler is the co-founder of several hiking trails in the Middle East, including the Sinai Trail, the Red Sea Mountain Trail, the Wadi Rum Trail, and the Bedouin Trail, which aim to boost and promote sustainable tourism and help conserve the endangered heritage of the Bedouin tribes who historically live in these regions and manage the trails today. In this episode, we discuss tourism as heritage preservation, overcoming negative stereotypes of regions like the Sinai, and how historically...
Amanda Apgar, "The Disabled Child: Memoirs of a Normal Future" (U Michigan Press, 2023)
June 06, 2023 08:00 - 39 minutesWhen children are born with disabilities or become disabled in childhood, parents often experience bewilderment: they find themselves unexpectedly in another world, without a roadmap, without community, and without narratives to make sense of their experiences. Amanda Apgar's book The Disabled Child: Memoirs of a Normal Future (U Michigan Press, 2023) tracks the narratives that have emerged from the community of parent-memoirists who, since the 1980s, have written in resistance of their child...
Gladys L. Mitchell-Walthour, "The Politics of Survival: Black Women Social Welfare Beneficiaries in Brazil and the United States" (Columbia UP, 2023)
June 04, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourPoor Black women who benefit from social welfare are marginalized in a number of ways by interlocking systemic racism, sexism, and classism. The media renders them invisible or casts them as racialized and undeserving "welfare queens" who exploit social safety nets. Even when Black women voters are celebrated, the voices of the poorest too often go unheard. How do Afro-descendant women in former slave-holding societies survive amid multifaceted oppression? In The Politics of Survival: Black ...
César Ernesto Abadía-Barrero, "Health in Ruins: The Capitalist Destruction of Medical Care at a Colombian Maternity Hospital" (Duke UP, 2022)
June 03, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn Health in Ruins: The Capitalist Destruction of Medical Care at a Colombian Maternity Hospital (Duke UP, 2022), César Ernesto Abadía-Barrero chronicles the story of El Materno—Colombia’s oldest maternity and neonatal health center and teaching hospital—over several decades as it faced constant threats of government shutdown. Using team-based and collaborative ethnography to analyze the social life of neoliberal health policy, Abadía-Barrero details the everyday dynamics around teaching, lea...
Patrick Jory, "A History of Manners and Civility in Thailand" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
June 02, 2023 08:00 - 48 minutesIf you’ve visited Thailand even for a short time you’ve probably been given, or have come across, some basic instructions on dos and don’ts — where to put, or not to put, your hands and feet, what to wear or not to wear to a temple, why not to get angry in public, that sort of thing. Perhaps you’ve wondered about the pedagogies that give these social practices their durability. And whether you’ve been to the country or not you might have seen news reports showing prime ministers and army gene...
Elizabeth Reddy, "¡Alerta!: Engineering on Shaky Ground" (MIT Press, 2023)
June 02, 2023 08:00 - 52 minutesThe Sistema de Alerta Sísmica Mexicano is the world’s oldest public earthquake early warning system. Given the unpredictability of earthquakes, the technology was designed to give the people of Mexico City more than a minute to prepare before the next big quake hits. How does this kind of environmental monitoring technology get built in the first place? How does its life-saving promise align with reality? And who shapes modern risk mitigation? In ¡Alerta!: Engineering on Shaky Ground (MIT Pr...
Michael Jackson, "Friendship" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023)
May 31, 2023 08:00 - 29 minutesIn Friendship (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023), renowned anthropologist Michael Jackson draws on philosophy, biography, ethnography, and literature to explore the meanings and affordances of friendship—a relationship just as significant as, yet somehow different from, kinship and love. Beginning with Aristotle’s accounts of friendship as a political virtue and Montaigne’s famous essay on friendship as a form of love, Jackson examines the tension between the political and personal reso...
Tazeen M. Ali, "The Women’s Mosque of America: Authority and Community in US Islam" (NYU Press, 2022)
May 28, 2023 08:00 - 33 minutesThe Women’s Mosque of America (WMA), a multiracial, women-only mosque in Los Angeles, is the first of its kind in the United States. Since 2015, the WMA has provided a space for Muslim women to build inclusive communities committed to gender and social justice, challenging the dominant mosque culture that has historically marginalized them through inadequate prayer spaces, exclusion from leadership, and limited access to religious learning. In The Women’s Mosque of America: Authority and Comm...
Beatriz Dujovne, "'Don't Be Sad When I'm Gone': A Memoir of Loss and Healing in Buenos Aires" (Toplight Books, 2020)
May 26, 2023 08:00 - 52 minutesThe monumental sense of dislocation we experience after losing a loved one can be life-altering. There is no script for grieving–each individual passes through their own phases of mourning. In Don't Be Sad When I'm Gone': A Memoir of Loss and Healing in Buenos Aires (Toplight Books, 2020), psychologist Beatriz Dujovne documents how she grieved the loss of her husband and sought therapy during an extended stay in her hometown of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Recounting her healing process day-to-da...
Party
May 24, 2023 08:00 - 17 minutesSheila Liming talks about the party, social gatherings that occasion joy and dread and various emotions in between. The party is both a pause and an acceleration in the life-work continuum, it can deaden political motivation and engender fresh politics. We discuss the horrible parties in The Office and the wonderful parties in Small Axe, among other things. Sheila Liming is Associate Professor at Champlain College in Burlington, VT, where she teaches classes in American literature, writing, a...
Cat Button and Gerald Taylor Aiken, "Over Researched Places: Towards a Critical and Reflexive Approach" (Routledge, 2022)
May 24, 2023 08:00 - 33 minutesCat Button and Gerald Taylor Aiken's Over Researched Places: Towards a Critical and Reflexive Approach (Routledge, 2022) explores the implications that research-density has on the people and places researched, on the researchers, on the data collected and knowledge produced, and on the theories that are developed. It examines the effects that research-density has on the people and places researched, on the researchers, on the data collected and knowledge produced, and on the theories that are...
Daniel Martin Varisco, "Seasonal Knowledge and the Almanac Tradition in the Arab Gulf" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)
May 23, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourSeasonal Knowledge and the Almanac Tradition in the Arab Gulf (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) is the first in English to survey indigenous knowledge of seasonal, astronomical, and agricultural information in Arab Gulf almanacs. It provides an extensive analysis of the traditional information available, based on local almanacs, Arabic texts and poetry by Gulf individuals, ethnographic interviews, and online forums. A major feature of the book is tracing the history of terms and concepts in the loca...
Selcen Küçüküstel, "Embracing Landscape: Living with Reindeer and Hunting among Spirits in South Siberia" (Berghahn, 2021)
May 22, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourExamining human-animal relations among the reindeer hunting and herding Dukha community in northern Mongolia, Embracing Landscape: Living with Reindeer and Hunting among Spirits in South Siberia (Berghahn Books, 2021), focuses on concepts of domestication and wildness from an indigenous perspective. Examining subsistence methods and lifestyle practices like hunting rituals and herding techniques in detail, Selcen Küçüküstel’s ethnographic account of contemporary lifeways and belief systems am...
Samantha Nogueira Joyce, "Afro-Brazilians in Telenovelas: Social, Political, and Economic Realities" (Lexington Books, 2022)
May 22, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn Afro-Brazilians in Telenovelas: Social, Political, and Economic Realities (Lexington Books, 2022), Samantha Nogueira Joyce examines representations of Blackness on Brazilian TV, interrogating the role of mass media in developing racial equality and social change. Nogueira Joyce challenges assumptions that place the inclusion of Afro-Brazilians in mass media as a step towards racial progress while contextualizing media representation with the social, political, and economic realities of the...
Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, "We Have Always Been Cyborgs: Digital Data, Gene Technologies, and an Ethics of Transhumanism" (Bristol UP, 2023)
May 21, 2023 08:00 - 45 minutesThe concept of transhumanism emerged in the middle of the 20th century, and has influenced discussions around AI, brain–computer interfaces, genetic technologies and life extension. Despite its enduring influence in the public imagination, a fully developed philosophy of transhumanism has not yet been presented. In We Have Always Been Cyborgs: Digital Data, Gene Technologies, and an Ethics of Transhumanism (Bristol UP, 2023), leading philosopher Stefan Lorenz Sorgner explores the critical iss...
Waqas Butt, "Life Beyond Waste: Work and Infrastructure in Urban Pakistan" (Stanford UP, 2023)
May 21, 2023 08:00 - 55 minutesOver the last several decades, life in Lahore has been undergoing profound transformations, from rapid and uneven urbanization to expanding state institutions and informal economies. What do these transformations look like if viewed from the lens of waste materials and the lives of those who toil with them? In Lahore, like in many parts of Pakistan and South Asia, waste workers—whether municipal employees or informal laborers—are drawn from low- or noncaste (Dalit) groups and dispose the coll...
Nerina Weiss et al., "The Entanglements of Ethnographic Fieldwork in a Violent World" (Routledge, 2022)
May 14, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourNerina Weiss. Erella Grassiani, and Linda Green's book The Entanglements of Ethnographic Fieldwork in a Violent World (Routledge, 2022) focuses on the emotional hazards of conducting fieldwork about or within contexts of violence and provides a forum for field-based researchers to tell their stories. Increasingly novice and seasoned ethnographers alike, whether by choice or chance, are working in situations where multidimensional forms of violence, conflict and war are facets of everyday life...
Sebanti Chatterjee, "Choral Voices: Ethnographic Imaginations of Sound and Sacrality" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
May 14, 2023 08:00 - 55 minutesSebanti Chatterjee's book Choral Voices: Ethnographic Imaginations of Sound and Sacrality (Bloomsbury, 2023) is about sacred and secular choirs in Goa and Shillong across churches, seminaries, schools, auditoriums, classrooms, reality TV shows, and festivals. Voice and genre emerge as social objects annotated by tradition, nostalgia, and innovation. Piety literally and metaphorically shapes the Christian lifeworld, predominantly those belonging to the Presbyterian and Catholic denominations. ...
Allison Christine Meier, "Grave" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
May 14, 2023 08:00 - 50 minutesGrave (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Allison C. Meier takes a ground-level view of how burial sites have transformed over time and how they continue to change. As a cemetery tour guide, Meier has spent more time walking among tombstones than most. Even for her, the grave has largely been invisible, an out of the way and unobtrusive marker of death. However, graves turn out to be not always so subtle, reverent, or permanent. While the indigent and unidentified have frequently been interred in mass grav...
Claudia Liebelt, "Istanbul Appearances: Beauty and the Making of Middle-Class Femininities in Urban Turkey" (Syracuse UP, 2023)
May 14, 2023 04:00 - 31 minutesIn the past two decades, the consumption of beauty services and cosmetic surgery in Turkey has developed from an elite phenomenon to an increasingly common practice, especially among younger and middle-aged women. Turkey now ranks among the top countries worldwide with the highest number of cosmetic procedures, and with its cultural and economic capital, Istanbul has become a regional center for the beauty and fashion industries. Istanbul Appearances: Beauty and the Making of Middle-Class Fem...
Daniel Ruiz-Serna, "When Forests Run Amok: War and Its Afterlives in Indigenous and Afro-Colombian Territories" (Duke UP, 2023)
May 13, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn When Forests Run Amok: War and Its Afterlives in Indigenous and Afro-Colombian Territories (Duke University Press, 2023) Daniel Ruiz-Serna follows the afterlives of war, showing how they affect the variety of human and nonhuman beings that compose the region of Bajo Atrato: the traditional land of Indigenous and Afro-Colombian peoples. Attending to Colombia’s armed conflict as an experience that resounds in the lives and deaths of people, animals, trees, rivers, and spirits, Ruiz-Serna tra...
Leyla Jagiella, "Among the Eunuchs: A Muslim Transgender Journey" (Hurst, 2022)
May 12, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn the powerful book Among the Eunuchs: A Muslim Transgender Journey (Hurst Publishers, 2022), Leyla Jagiella reflects on her story as a trans Muslim living among a third-gender community known as Khwajasira in Pakistan and hijra in India. Throughout the book, we learn about this community, the ways they forge relationships with each other and with the mainstream community, the roles they play, the challenges they face, all told from an inviting, loving perspective. Jagiella’s academic backgr...
Colin Hoag, "The Fluvial Imagination: On Lesotho’s Water-Export Economy" (U California Press, 2022)
May 10, 2023 08:00 - 59 minutesLandlocked and surrounded by South Africa on all sides, the mountain kingdom of Lesotho became the world's first "water-exporting country" when it signed a 1986 treaty with its powerful neighbor. An elaborate network of dams and tunnels now carries water to Johannesburg, the subcontinent's water-stressed economic epicenter. Hopes that receipts from water sales could improve Lesotho's fortunes, however, have clashed with fears that soil erosion from overgrazing livestock could fill its reservo...
Sarah Riccardi-Swartz, "Between Heaven and Russia: Religious Conversion and Political Apostasy in Appalachia" (Fordham UP, 2022)
May 08, 2023 08:00 - 57 minutesHow is religious conversion transforming American democracy? In one corner of Appalachia, a group of American citizens has embraced the Russian Orthodox Church and through it Putin’s New Russia. Historically a minority immigrant faith in the United States, Russian Orthodoxy is attracting Americans who look to Russian religion and politics for answers to Western secularism and the loss of traditional family values in the face of accelerating progressivism. Sarah Riccardi-Swartz's Between Heav...
Ami Harbin, "Fearing Together: Ethics for Insecurity" (Oxford UP, 2023)
May 07, 2023 08:00 - 40 minutesIn Fearing Together: Ethics for Insecurity (Oxford UP, 2023), Ami Harbin explores how fearing is a central part of how we relate to each other and the unpredictable world. Fearing badly is a key part of many of our moral failures, and fearing better a central part of our moral repair. We might think that fearing is undesirable and should be avoided whenever possible. In fact, Fearing Together shows that the avoidance of fear causes some of our greatest threats. This book brings together philo...
Rupal Oza, "Semiotics of Rape: Sexual Subjectivity and Violation in Rural India" (Duke UP, 2022)
May 06, 2023 08:00 - 49 minutesIn Semiotics of Rape: Sexual Subjectivity and Violation in Rural India (Duke UP, 2022), Rupal Oza follows the social life of rape in rural northwest India to reveal how rape is not only a violation of the body but a language through which a range of issues—including caste and gender hierarchies, control over land and labor, and the shape of justice—are contested. Rather than focus on the laws governing rape, Oza closely examines rape charges to show how the victims and survivors of rape recla...
Brian Valente-Quinn, "Senegalese Stagecraft: Decolonizing Theater-Making in Francophone Africa" (Northwestern UP, 2021)
May 06, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourBrian Valente-Quinn is an Associate Professor of Francophone African studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. His book, Senegalese Stagecraft: Decolonizing Theater-Making in Francophone Africa, was published at Northwestern University Press in 2021. Senegalese Stagecraft explores the theatrical stage in Senegal as a site of poetic expression, political activism, and community engagement. In their responses to the country’s colonial heritage, as well as through their innovations on the c...
Shenila Khoja-Moolji, "Rebuilding Community: Displaced Women and the Making of a Shia Ismaili Muslim Sociality" (Oxford UP, 2023)
May 05, 2023 08:00 - 39 minutesIn her moving, sophisticated, and analytically groundbreaking new book Rebuilding Community: Displaced Women and the Making of a Shia Ismaili Muslim Sociality (Oxford UP, 2023), Shenila Khoja-Moolji recounts and engages critical narratives of displacement and migration to examine the formation of religious communities. A central theme of this book is the idea of an Isma‘ili ethics of care, as Khoja-Moolji documents with meticulous care the powerful manifestations and consequences of everyday ...
Jan Ke-Schutte, "Angloscene: Compromised Personhood in Afro-Chinese Translations" (U California Press, 2023)
May 03, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourToday I had the pleasure of talking to Jay Ke-Schutte on his just released book, Angloscene: Compromised Personhood in Afro-Chinese Translations (U California Press, 2023). Angloscene examines Afro-Chinese interactions within Beijing's aspirationally cosmopolitan student class. Jay Ke-Schutte explores the ways in which many contemporary interactions between Chinese and African university students are mediated through complex intersectional relationships with whiteness, the English language, a...
Susan Hartman, "City of Refugees: The Story of Three Newcomers Who Breathed Life into a Dying American Town" (Beacon Press, 2022)
May 02, 2023 08:00 - 43 minutesHow can scholars employ the practices and techniques of investigative journalism? Susan Hartman provides an answer in her intimate look at refugee experience in the United States. In City of Refugees: The Story of Three Newcomers Who Breathed Life Into A Dying American Town (Beacon Press 2022), Hartman introduces readers to Utica, a small Rust Belt city located in upstate New York, just 250 miles north of Manhattan. The city provides the backdrop as Hartman examines the lives of three refugee...
Mauro Porto, "Mirrors of Whiteness: Media, Middle-Class Resentment, and the Rise of the Far Right in Brazil" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2023)
May 01, 2023 08:00 - 55 minutesIn Mirrors of Whiteness: Media, Middle-Class Resentment, and the Rise of the Far Right in Brazil (U Pittsburgh Press, 2023), Mauro P. Porto examines the conservative revolt of Brazil's white middle class, which culminated with the 2018 election of far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro. He identifies the rise of a significant status panic among middle-class publics following the relative economic and social ascension of mostly Black and brown low-income laborers. The book highlights the role of t...
K. N. Sunandan, "Caste, Knowledge, and Power: Ways of Knowing in Twentieth Century Malabar" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
April 30, 2023 08:00 - 53 minutesCaste, Knowledge, and Power: Ways of Knowing in Twentieth-Century Malabar (Cambridge UP, 2023) investigates the transformations of caste practices in twentieth century India and the role of knowledge in this transformation and in the continuing of these oppressive practices. The author situates the domination and subordination in the domain of knowledge production in India not just in the emergence of colonial modernity but in the formation of colonial–Brahminical modernity. It engages less w...
Macs Smith, "Paris and the Parasite: Noise, Health, and Politics in the Media City" (MIT Press, 2021)
April 29, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThe social consequences of anti-parasitic urbanism, as efforts to expunge supposedly biological parasites penalize those viewed as social parasites. According to French philosopher Michel Serres, ordered systems are founded on the pathologization of parasites, which can never be fully expelled. In Paris and the Parasite: Noise, Health, and Politics in the Media City (MIT Press, 2021), Macs Smith extends Serres's approach to Paris as a mediatic city, asking what organisms, people, and forms o...
Aspired Communities, Contested Futures: Long-Term Recovery after the 3.11 Disaster in Japan
April 28, 2023 08:00 - 31 minutesOn March 11, 2011, a 9.1 magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of northeastern Japan triggering a massive tsunami and shifting the earth on its axis. Nearly 20,000 residents in the Tōhoku region lost their lives, with many hundreds of thousands more injured, displaced, and left with horrific loss. Dr. Pilvi Posio shares her PhD research based on eight months of fieldwork in the town of Yamamoto in Miyagi prefecture, where 635 residents lost their lives. She began her research on long-term...
David Shulman and Heike Oberlin, "Two Masterpieces of Kuttiyattam: Mantrankam and Anguliyankam" (Oxford UP, 2019)
April 27, 2023 08:00 - 56 minutesKūṭiyāṭṭam, India’s only living traditional Sanskrit theatre, has been continually performed in Kerala for at least a thousand years. David Shulman and Heike Oberlin's Two Masterpieces of Kuttiyattam: Mantrankam and Anguliyankam (Oxford UP, 2019) focuses on Mantrāṅkam and Aṅgulīyāṅkam, the two great masterpieces of Kūṭiyāṭṭam. It provides fundamental general remarks and relates them to pan-Indian reflections on aesthetics, philology, ritual studies, and history. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of S...
Lucien van Liere and Erik Meinema, "Material Perspectives on Religion, Conflict, and Violence: Things of Conflict" (Brill, 2022)
April 25, 2023 08:00 - 43 minutesHow do objects become contested in settings characterized by (violent) conflict? Why are some things contested by religious actors? How do religious actors mobilize things in conflict situations, and how are conflict and violence experienced by religious groups? Lucien van Liere and Erik Meinema's book Material Perspectives on Religion, Conflict, and Violence: Things of Conflict (Brill, 2022) explores relations between materiality, religion, and violence by drawing upon two fields of scholars...
Susan Stryker and Dylan McCarthy Blackston, "The Transgender Studies Reader Remix" (Routledge, 2022)
April 24, 2023 08:00 - 59 minutesHello, this is Eric LeMay, a host on the New Books Network. Today I interview Susan Stryker and Dylan McCarthy Blackston about The Transgender Studies Reader Remix (Routledge, 2023). This is a book that’s as big as it is rich. It brings together 50 previously published articles that track both the history and the current directions in the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies. The reader shows the conversations taking place not only within transgender studies but also between transge...
Nicole Constable, "Passport Entanglements: Protection, Care, and Precarious Migrations" (U California Press, 2022)
April 23, 2023 08:00 - 58 minutesPassport Entanglements examines the problems with documents issued to Indonesian migrant workers in Hong Kong and explores the larger role that passports and other types of documentation play in gendered migration, precarious labor, and bureaucracy. Focusing on the politics and inequalities embedded in passports, anthropologist Nicole Constable considers how these instruments determine legal status and dictate rights. Constable finds that new biometric technologies and surveillance do not lea...