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
Mitul Baruah, "Slow Disaster: Political Ecology of Hazards and Everyday Life in the Brahmaputra Valley, Assam" (Routledge, 2022)
April 22, 2023 08:00 - 49 minutesMitul Baruah's Slow Disaster: Political Ecology of Hazards and Everyday Life in the Brahmaputra Valley, Assam (Routledge, 2022) presents a fascinating, ethnographic account of the challenges faced by communities living in Majuli, India, one of the largest river islands in the world, which has experienced immense socio-environmental transformations over the years, processes that are emblematic of the Brahmaputra Valley as a whole. Written in an engaging style, full of the author's insider pers...
Sylvia Ang, "Contesting Chineseness: Nationality, Class, Gender and New Chinese Migrants" (Amsterdam UP, 2022)
April 20, 2023 08:00 - 42 minutesThe question of who is Chinese and how Chineseness as an identity is constituted has been a recurring question, particularly in the context of the extensive Chinese diasporic community. In Contesting Chineseness: Nationality, Class, Gender and New Chinese Migrants (Amsterdam University Press in 2022), Dr Sylvia Ang investigates these questions in the context of Singapore, with a specific focus on unravelling why tensions exist between Singaporean-born Chinese and new Chinese migrants from the...
Joel E. Correia, "Disrupting the Patrón: Indigenous Land Rights and the Fight for Environmental Justice in Paraguay's Chaco" (U California Press, 2023)
April 20, 2023 04:00 - 55 minutesThe Paraguayan Chaco is a settler frontier where cattle ranching and agrarian extractivism drive some of the world's fastest deforestation and most extreme land tenure inequality. Disrupting the Patrón: Indigenous Land Rights and the Fight for Environmental Justice in Paraguay's Chaco (U California Press, 2023) shows that environmental racism cannot be reduced to effects of neoliberalism but stems from long-standing social-spatial relations of power rooted in settler colonialism. Historically...
Barbara Sjoholm, "From Lapland to Sápmi: Collecting and Returning Sámi Craft and Culture" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)
April 19, 2023 08:00 - 58 minutesMaterial objects—things made, used, and treasured—tell the story of a people and place. So it is for the Indigenous Sámi living in Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia, whose story unfolds across borders and centuries, in museums and private collections. As described in From Lapland to Sápmi: Collecting and Returning Sámi Craft and Culture (University of Minnesota, 2023) by Barbara Sjoholm, the objects created by the Sámi for daily and ceremonial use were purchased and taken by Scandinavians a...
Zoha Waseem, "Insecure Guardians: Enforcement, Encounters and Everyday Policing in Postcolonial Karachi" (Oxford UP, 2022)
April 18, 2023 08:00 - 52 minutesThe police force is one of the most distrusted institutions in Pakistan, notorious for its corruption and brutality. In both colonial and postcolonial contexts, directives to confront security threats have empowered law enforcement agents, while the lack of adequate reform has upheld institutional weaknesses. This exploration of policing in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city and financial capital, reveals many colonial continuities. Both civilian and military regimes continue to ensure the supp...
A. J. Faas, "In the Shadow of Tungurahua: Disaster Politics in Highland Ecuador" (Rutgers UP, 2023)
April 18, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn the Shadow of Tungurahua: Disaster Politics in Highland Ecuador (Rutgers University Press, 2023) relates the stories of the people of Penipe, Ecuador living in and between several villages around the volcano Tungurahua and two resettlement communities built for people displaced by government operations following volcanic eruptions in 1999 and 2006. The stories take shape in ways that influence prevailing ideas about how disasters are produced and reproduced, in this case by shifting assemb...
Mina Roces, "Gender in Southeast Asia" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
April 15, 2023 08:00 - 29 minutesGender in Southeast Asia (Cambridge UP, 2022) examines how gender norms are constructed and contested in a region the book describes as ‘a fertile place for analysing gender differences that both defy and modify dominant paradigms that emanate from the Western world’ (p.1). In less than 100 pages, Professor Mina Roces provides a clear and compelling summary of pioneering work on gender studies in the region, identifies the contradictory discourses of gender ideals that shape historical and co...
Freddy Foks, "Participant Observers: Anthropology, Colonial Development, and the Reinvention of Society in Britain" (U California Press, 2023)
April 14, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourFreddy Foks's Participant Observers: Anthropology, Colonial Development, and the Reinvention of Society in Britain (U California Press, 2023) is a novel new history of the role of social anthropology in British society from the 1920s to the 1970s. Foks follows the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski and his students from the seminar room and field and out into the broader world, describing how their brand of 'social anthropology' interacted with British debates debates about colonialism, marr...
Slum Tourism and Affective Economy in Delhi, India
April 14, 2023 08:00 - 28 minutesIn Delhi, former street children guide visiting tourists around the streets that they used to inhabit and show how the NGO they work for tries to resocialise the current street children. What social, cultural and economic structures are in the backdrop of slum tourism in Delhi? Why are emotions and personal stories important to understand in slum tours? In this episode, Dosol Nissi Lee is joined by Dr. Tore Holst to discuss slum tourism and affective economies in Delhi, focusing particularly ...
Cinegogía: An Open Access Resource for Teaching and Studying Latin American Cinema
April 14, 2023 08:00 - 57 minutesCinegogía is an open-access website devoted to the teaching and study of Latin American cinemas. Bridget Franco, an associate professor of Spanish at College of the Holy Cross, founded and coordinates the website. Cinegogía contains a database of Latin American film as well as resources for teaching and researching film. Teaching resources include syllabi, teaching activities and assignments, and film guides. Cinegogía has a considerable selection of films by and about Black and Indigenous co...
David Baumeister, "Kant on the Human Animal: Anthropology, Ethics, Race" (Northwestern UP, 2022)
April 12, 2023 08:00 - 44 minutesWhile Immanuel Kant’s account of human reason is well known and celebrated, his account of human animality (Thierheit) is virtually unknown. Animality and reason, as pillars of Kant’s vision of human nature, are original and ineradicable. And yet, the relation between them is fraught: at times tense and violent, at other times complementary, even harmonious. Kant on the Human Animal (Northwestern UP, 2022) offers the first systematic analysis of this central but neglected dimension of Kant’s...
Akiko Takeyama, "Staged Seduction: Selling Dreams in a Tokyo Host Club" (Stanford UP, 2016)
April 11, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourWelcome to Tokyo's Kabuki-chō red-light district, where Professor Akiko Takeyama started her 'affective ethnographic' fieldwork to explore the host clubs in which ambitious young men seek their fortunes by selling love, romance, companionship, and female clients look for self-satisfaction. Her book Staged Seduction: Selling Dreams in a Tokyo Host Club (Stanford UP, 2016) facilitates an intimate look at this mysterious love business, providing an insightful window into the lives of hosts, clie...
Catherine Wanner, "Everyday Religiosity and the Politics of Belonging in Ukraine" (Cornell UP, 2022)
April 11, 2023 08:00 - 53 minutesEveryday Religiosity and the Politics of Belonging in Ukraine (Cornell UP, 2022) reveals how and why religion has become a pivotal political force in a society struggling to overcome the legacy of its entangled past with Russia and chart a new future. If Ukraine is “ground zero” in the tensions between Russia and the West, religion is an arena where the consequences of conflicts between Russia and Ukraine keenly play out. Vibrant forms of everyday religiosity pave the way for religion to be w...
Dimitris Xygalatas, "Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living" (Little, Brown Spark, 2022)
April 10, 2023 08:00 - 38 minutesRitual is one of the oldest, and certainly most enigmatic, threads in the history of human culture. It presents a profound paradox: people ascribe the utmost importance to their rituals, but few can explain why they are so important. Apparently pointless ceremonies pervade every documented society, from handshakes to hexes, hazings to parades. Before we ever learned to farm, we were gathering in giant stone temples to perform elaborate rites and ceremonies. And yet, though rituals exist in ev...
Gwen Burnyeat, "The Face of Peace: Government Pedagogy Amid Disinformation in Colombia" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
April 09, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourColombia’s 2016 peace agreement with the FARC guerrillas sought to end fifty years of war and won President Juan Manuel Santos the Nobel Peace Prize. Yet Colombian society rejected it in a polarizing referendum, amid an emotive disinformation campaign. Gwen Burnyeat joined the Office of the High Commissioner for Peace, the government institution responsible for peace negotiations, to observe and participate in an innovative “peace pedagogy” strategy to explain the agreement to Colombian socie...
Jennifer Lynn Kelly, "Invited to Witness: Solidarity Tourism Across Occupied Palestine" (Duke UP, 2023)
April 09, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn Invited to Witness: Solidarity Tourism Across Occupied Palestine (Duke UP, 2023), Jennifer Lynn Kelly explores the significance of contemporary solidarity tourism across Occupied Palestine. Examining the relationships among race, colonialism, and movement-building in spaces where tourism and military occupation operate in tandem, Kelly argues that solidarity tourism in Palestine functions as both political strategy and emergent industry. She draws from fieldwork on solidarity tours in Pale...
Frenchy Lunning, "Cosplay: The Fictional Mode of Existence" (U Minnesota Press, 2022)
April 04, 2023 08:00 - 55 minutesCosplay, a portmanteau of “costume” and “play,” emerged from geeky Japanese subcultures to become a popular hobby, and even profession, around the world. Frenchy Lunning dives into the reasons why people cosplay through interviews, pictures, and her own firsthand experience of cosplay events in America and Japan. She distills the essence of cosplay to performance and the negotiation of identity, a pair of concepts that she interrogates in part by contrasting cosplay practices in America and J...
Brian Villmoare, "The Evolution of Everything: The Patterns and Causes of Big History" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
April 03, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourBig History seeks to retell the human story in light of scientific advances by such methods as radiocarbon dating and genetic analysis. Brian Villmoare's book The Evolution of Everything: The Patterns and Causes of Big History (Cambridge UP, 2023) provides a deep, causal view of the forces that have shaped the universe, the earth, and humanity. Starting with the Big Bang and the formation of the earth, it traces the evolutionary history of the world, focusing on humanity's origins. It also ex...
Alexa Hagerty, "Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains" (Crown, 2023)
April 02, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains (Crown, 2023), anthropologist Alexa Hagerty learns to see the dead body with a forensic eye. She examines bones for marks of torture and fatal wounds—hands bound by rope, machete cuts—and also for signs of identity: how life shapes us down to the bone. A weaver is recognized from the tiny bones of the toes, molded by kneeling before a loom; a girl is identified alongside her pet dog. In the tenderness of understanding these bones...
Eli Elinoff, "Citizen Designs: City-Making and Democracy in Northeastern Thailand" (U Hawaii Press, 2021)
April 01, 2023 08:00 - 43 minutesWhat does it mean to design democratic cities and democratic citizens in a time of mass urbanization and volatile political transformation? Citizen Designs: City-Making and Democracy in Northeastern Thailand (U Hawaii Press, 2021) addresses this question by exploring the ways that democratic urban planning projects intersect with emerging political aspirations among squatters living in the northeastern Thai city of Khon Kaen. Based on ethnographic and historical research conducted since 2007...
Ioannis Gaitanidis, "Spirituality and Alternativity in Contemporary Japan: Beyond Religion?" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
March 31, 2023 08:00 - 50 minutesIoannis Gaitanidis' book Spirituality and Alternativity in Contemporary Japan: Beyond Religion? (Bloomsbury, 2022) critically examines the spirituality phenomenon in contemporary Japan by looking at the main actors involved in the discourse: spiritual therapists as practitioners, scholars of spirituality studies, and the people in the publishing industry. Ioannis Gaitanidis challenges the common understanding of spirituality as simply a new emergent form of “religion” by considering alternati...
The Good Enough Life
March 30, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourToday’s book is: The Good-Enough Life (Princeton UP, 2022) by Avram Alpert. We live in a world oriented toward greatness, one in which we feel compelled to be among the wealthiest, most powerful, and most famous. This book explains why no one truly benefits from this competitive social order, and reveals how another way of life is possible—a good-enough life for all. Dr. Alpert shows how our obsession with greatness results in stress and anxiety, damage to our relationships, widespread politi...
Laurah E. Klepinger, "Transnational Yoga at Work: Spiritual Tourism and Its Blind Spots" (Lexington Books, 2022)
March 30, 2023 08:00 - 39 minutesTransnational Yoga at Work: Spiritual Tourism and Its Blind Spots (Lexington Books, 2022) is an ethnography about local wageworkers in the Indian branches of a transnational yoga institution and about yoga practitioners and spiritual tourists who visualize peace through yoga. Practitioners' aspirations for peace situate them at the heart of an international movement that has captured the imagination of cosmopolitans the world over, with its purported benefits to mind, body, and spirit. Yoga i...
Antonius C. G. M. Robben and Alex Hinton, "Perpetrators: Encountering Humanity's Dark Side" (Stanford UP, 2023)
March 29, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourPerpetrators of mass violence are commonly regarded as evil. Their violent nature is believed to make them commit heinous crimes as members of state agencies, insurgencies, terrorist organizations, or racist and supremacist groups. Upon close examination, however, perpetrators are contradictory human beings who often lead unsettlingly ordinary and uneventful lives. Drawing on decades of on-the-ground research with perpetrators of genocide, mass violence, and enforced disappearances in Cambod...
Jeffrey G. Snodgrass, "The Avatar Faculty: Ecstatic Transformations in Religion and Video Games" (U California Press, 2023)
March 28, 2023 08:00 - 56 minutesThe Avatar Faculty: Ecstatic Transformations in Religion and Video Games (University of California Press, 2023) creatively examines the parallels between spiritual and digital activities to explore the roles that symbolic second selves—avatars—can play in our lives. The use of avatars can allow for what anthropologists call ecstasy, from the Greek ekstasis, meaning "standing outside oneself." The archaic techniques of promoting spiritual ecstasy, which remain central to religious healing trad...
Heidi J. Larson, "Stuck: How Vaccine Rumors Start--and Why They Don't Go Away" (Oxford UP, 2020)
March 27, 2023 08:00 - 51 minutesVaccine reluctance and refusal are no longer limited to the margins of society. Debates around vaccines' necessity -- along with questions around their side effects -- have gone mainstream, blending with geopolitical conflicts, political campaigns, celebrity causes, and "natural" lifestyles to win a growing number of hearts and minds. Today's anti-vaccine positions find audiences where they've never existed previously. Stuck: How Vaccine Rumors Start--and Why They Don't Go Away (Oxford UP, 20...
Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd, "Southern Beauty: Race, Ritual, and Memory in the Modern South" (U Georgia Press, 2022)
March 27, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourElizabeth Bronwyn Boyd's book Southern Beauty: Race, Ritual, and Memory in the Modern South (U Georgia Press, 2022) explains a curiosity: why a feminine ideal rooted in the nineteenth century continues to enjoy currency well into the twenty-first. Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd examines how the continuation of certain gender rituals in the American South has served to perpetuate racism, sexism, and classism. In a trio of popular gender rituals—sorority rush, beauty pageants, and the Confederate Pagea...
Uddipana Goswami, "Gendering Peace in Violent Peripheries: Marginality, Masculinity, and Feminist Agency" (Routledge, 2022)
March 26, 2023 08:00 - 57 minutesGendering Peace in Violent Peripheries: Marginality, Masculinity, and Feminist Agency (Routledge, 2022) forward Assam (and Northeast India) as a specific location for studying operations of gendered power in multi-ethnic, conflict-habituated geopolitical peripheries globally. In the shifting and relational margins of such peripheral societies, power and agency are constantly negotiated and in flux. Notions of masculinity are redefined in an interlaced environment of militarization, hyper-masc...
Adam Michael Auerbach and Tariq Thachil, "Migrants and Machine Politics: How India's Urban Poor Seek Representation and Responsiveness" (Princeton UP, 2023)
March 24, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourHow poor migrants shape city politics during urbanization As the Global South rapidly urbanizes, millions of people have migrated from the countryside to urban slums, which now house one billion people worldwide. The transformative potential of urbanization hinges on whether and how poor migrants are integrated into city politics. Popular and scholarly accounts paint migrant slums as exhausted by dispossession, subdued by local dons, bought off by wily politicians, or polarized by ethnic appe...
Todd McGowan, "Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets" (Columbia UP, 2016)
March 23, 2023 08:00 - 43 minutesIf you have ever gotten excited over buying a new object only to feel let down once you acquire it, then today’s discussion will be relevant to you. My guest is Todd McGowan, author of the book Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets (2016, Columbia University Press). We discuss his critique of capitalism as a system that encourages us to forever chase satisfactions that never come. And we explore his suggestion that true satisfaction lies in the wanting, not the acquiring. It...
Andrea Acri and Paolo E. Rosati, "Tantra, Magic, and Vernacular Religions in Monsoon Asia: Texts, Practices, and Practitioners from the Margins" (Routledge, 2022)
March 23, 2023 08:00 - 47 minutesTantra, Magic, and Vernacular Religions in Monsoon Asia: Texts, Practices, and Practitioners from the Margins (Routledge, 2022) explores the cross- and trans-cultural dialectic between Tantra and intersecting 'magical' and 'shamanic' practices associated with vernacular religions across Monsoon Asia. With a chronological frame going from the mediaeval Indic period up to the present, a wide geographical framework, and through the dialogue between various disciplines, it presents a coherent enq...
The Future of Genes and Equality: A Discussion with Kathryn Paige Harden
March 22, 2023 08:00 - 40 minutesIf your genes make you better suited to succeed, is that fair? And if not, can anything be done about it? Kathryn Paige Harden – professor psychology at University of Texas in Austin – tells Owen Bennett Jones that we should acknowledge the difference in our genetic make ups and then set about thinking about how to make a fairer society in the light of this differences. Harden is the author of The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality (Princeton UP, 2021). Owen Bennett-Jones i...
Julia Kowalski, "Counseling Women: Kinship Against Violence in India" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022)
March 22, 2023 08:00 - 36 minutesWomen’s rights activists around the world have commonly understood gendered violence as the product of so-called traditional family structures, from which women must be liberated. Counseling Women: Kinship Against Violence in India (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022) contends that this perspective overlooks the social and cultural contexts in which women understand and navigate their relationships with kin. This book follows frontline workers in India, called family counselors, as they support women...
David Houston Jones, "Visual Culture and the Forensic: Culture, Memory, Ethics" (Routledge, 2022)
March 22, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThe relationship between images and truth has a complicated history. In the Western tradition, the Kantian settlement on aesthetic judgment as detached from external interests gave rise to artistic production of images that were read with epistemic authority. But the advent of modernity has at once shaken this certainty and reinforced it. No sooner than we reckoned with the singular history painting and illustrated magazines, we have landed in a mass-media world where any possible image can a...
Juwen Zhang, "Oral Traditions in Contemporary China: Healing a Nation" (Lexington Books, 2022)
March 22, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourOral Traditions in Contemporary China: Healing a Nation (Lexington Books, 2022) is the newest monograph from Professor Juwen Zhang of Willamette College. Through a historical survey and analyses of oral traditions like fairy tales, proverbs, and ballads, among others, that are still in vigorous practice in China today, this informative and stimulating book proposes a theoretical framework for interpreting how and why traditions continue or discontinue in any culture. Recently winning the pres...
Gediminas Lesutis, "The Politics of Precarity: Spaces of Extractivism, Violence, and Suffering" (Routledge, 2021)
March 21, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourBased on critical theory and ethnographic research, Gediminas Lesutis' book The Politics of Precarity: Spaces of Extractivism, Violence, and Suffering (Routledge, 2021) explores how intensifying geographies of extractive capitalism shape human lives and transformative politics in marginal areas of the global economy. Engaging the work of Judith Butler, Henri Lefebvre, and Jacques Rancière with ethnographic research on social and political effects of mining-induced dispossession in Mozambique,...
Melanie Heath, "Forbidden Intimacies: Polygamies at the Limits of Western Tolerance" (Stanford UP, 2023)
March 21, 2023 08:00 - 48 minutesIn the past thirty years, polygamy has become a flashpoint of conflict as Western governments attempt to regulate certain cultural and religious practices that challenge seemingly central principles of family and justice. In Forbidden Intimacies: Polygamies at the Limits of Western Tolerance (Stanford UP, 2023), Melanie Heath comparatively investigates the regulation of polygamy in the United States, Canada, France, and Mayotte. Drawing on a wealth of ethnographic and archival sources, Heath ...
Erin Raffety, "Families We Need: Disability, Abandonment, and Foster Care's Resistance in Contemporary China" (Rutgers UP, 2022)
March 21, 2023 08:00 - 43 minutesSet in the remote, mountainous Guangxi Autonomous Region and based on ethnographic fieldwork, Families We Need: Disability, Abandonment, and Foster Care's Resistance in Contemporary China (Rutgers UP, 2022) traces the movement of three Chinese foster children, Dengrong, Pei Pei, and Meili, from the state orphanage into the humble, foster homes of Auntie Li, Auntie Ma, and Auntie Huang. Traversing the geography of Guangxi, from the modern capital Nanning where Pei Pei and Meili reside, to the ...
Patrick L. Schmidt, "Harvard's Quixotic Pursuit of a New Science: The Rise and Fall of the Department of Social Relations" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022)
March 19, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourHarvard's Department of Social Relations made history in the 1950s and 1960s as the most ambitious program in social science in the United States. Dedicated to a synthesis of sociology, anthropology, psychology, and other disciplines, the scope of its ambitions were matched only by the scope of its failures. Patrick Schmidt's new volume Harvard's Quixotic Pursuit of a New Science: The Rise and Fall of the Department of Social Relations (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022) documents the history of S...
Kate Sylvester, "Women and Martial Art in Japan" (Routledge, 2022)
March 18, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourKate Sylvester’s Women and Martial Art in Japan (Routledge 2023) examines sport, gender, and society in Japan through the author’s extensive experience and ethnographic research as a kendo practitioner both at elite international levels and in Japan. Sylvester focuses on kendo as a university sport, placing her experiences as a veteran (foreign) competitor working within the hierarchies of that system in the context of the ideologies and lived realities of gender in contemporary Japan. In doi...
Felicity Hwee-Hwa Chan, "Tensions in Diversity: Spaces for Collective Life in Los Angeles" (U Toronto Press, 2022)
March 18, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourUrban landscapes are complex spaces of sociocultural diversity, characterized by narratives of both conviviality and conflict. As people with multiple ethnicities and nationalities find their common destinies in thriving globalizing cities, social cohesiveness becomes more precarious as different beliefs, practices, ambitions, values, and affiliations intersect in close proximity, producing social tensions. Felicity Hwee-Hwa Chan's Tensions in Diversity: Spaces for Collective Life in Los Ang...
Rethinking Community in Myanmar: Practices of We-Formation Among Muslims and Hindus in Urban Yangon
March 18, 2023 04:00 - 27 minutesWhere does the concept of “community” come from? How does it shape the lives of Hindus and Muslims in metropolitan Yangon? And how do these people navigate between their ethno-religious and other cosmopolitan identities? In this episode, Prof. Judith Beyer, a Professor of Social and Political Anthropology at the University of Konstanz, joins Dr. Mai Van Tran, a postdoc at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, to discuss her latest book Rethinking Community in Myanmar: Practices of We-Formati...
Academic Chat: Reflecting on Hu Tai-li’s Indigenous Ethnographic Work in Taiwan
March 17, 2023 08:00 - 11 minutesIn this episode, our host, Niki Alsford, invites Prof Scott Simon, the Chair of Taiwan Studies at the University of Ottawa, to share his thoughts and reflections on Prof Hu Tai-li 胡台麗, who pioneered documentary ethnography in Taiwan. Prof Simon talks about how he considers Hu's contributions and influence in academia, especially on the subject of ethnic relations in Taiwan. He further shares his insights on Hu’s documentary, The Voices of Orchid Island, and he further addresses the nuclear wa...
Ian Rowen, "One China, Many Taiwans: The Geopolitics of Cross-Strait Tourism" (Cornell UP, 2023)
March 17, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourOne China, Many Taiwans: The Geopolitics of Cross-Strait Tourism (Cornell UP, 2023) shows how tourism performs and transforms territory. In 2008, as the People’s Republic of China pointed over a thousand missiles across the Taiwan Strait, it sent millions of tourists in the same direction with the encouragement of Taiwan’s politicians and businesspeople. Contrary to the PRC’s efforts to use tourism to incorporate Taiwan into an imaginary “One China,” tourism aggravated tensions between the tw...
John Miller, "The Philosophy of Tattoos" (British Library, 2021)
March 17, 2023 08:00 - 53 minutesThe Philosophy of Tattoos (British Library, 2021) by Dr. John Miller presents an impressively broad yet personal account, exploring tattooing as a unique expression of individual, cultural and national identity. Dr. Miller explores tattooing as an innate human impulse throughout history, following its suppression and revival in cultures around the world. A bold and nuanced story of colonial oppression, social deviance and tattooing in the age of social media, the book features original tattoo...
Ezra Rashkow, "The Nature of Endangerment in India: Tigers, 'Tribes', Extermination and Conservation, 1818-2020" (Oxford UP, 2023)
March 16, 2023 08:00 - 48 minutesPerhaps no category of people on earth has been perceived as more endangered, nor subjected to more preservation efforts, than indigenous peoples. And in India, calls for the conservation of Adivasi culture have often reached a fever pitch, especially amongst urban middle-class activists and global civil society groups. But are India’s ‘tribes’ really endangered? Do they face extinction? And is this threat somehow comparable to the threat of extinction facing tigers and other wildlife? Combi...
Rosalynn A. Vega, "Nested Ecologies: A Multilayered Ethnography of Functional Medicine" (U Texas Press, 2023)
March 15, 2023 08:00 - 55 minutesEach body is a system within a system—an ecology within the larger context of social, political, economic, cultural, and environmental factors. This is one of the lessons of epigenetics, whereby structural inequalities are literally encoded in our genes. But our ecological embeddedness extends beyond DNA, for each body also teems with trillions of bacteria, yeast, and fungi, all of them imprints of our individual milieus. Nested Ecologies: A Multilayered Ethnography of Functional Medicine (U ...
Nomadic Pastoralism Among the Mongol Herders
March 14, 2023 08:00 - 50 minutesNomadic Pastoralism among the Mongol Herders: Multispecies and Spatial Ethnography in Mongolia and Transbaikalia (Amsterdam University Press, 2021) is based on anthropological research Charlotte Marchina carried out between 2008 and 2016 to investigate the spatial features of nomadic pastoralism among the Mongol herders of Mongolia and Southern Siberia. In addition to classical survey methods, Charlotte used GPS tracking to analyze the ways in which pastoralists envision and concretely occupy...
Illuminations Episode 3: Divine Technology
March 14, 2023 08:00 - 16 minutesIt’s common to feel that technology removes the magic of the world, but Hindu worshippers in Bangalore have shown that it's all in the approach. Guest Tulasi Srinivas, associate professor of anthropology at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College. Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society and the Indian Sociological Society. Author of Winged Faith: Rethinking Globalization and Religious Pluralism, among other books. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoi...
Katherine Davies, "Siblings and Sociology" (Manchester UP, 2023)
March 13, 2023 08:00 - 40 minutesKatherine Davies' book Siblings and Sociology (Manchester UP, 2023) draws upon innovative qualitative data sources to explore the significance of siblings throughout the life course, demonstrating why sociologists ought to pay attention to siblingship. Focussing on four themes central to the discipline of sociology - self, relationality, imagination and time - the book shows why siblings matter. Grounded in theories of relatedness but spanning theoretical work on generation, life course, emot...