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
Brooke Schedneck, "Religious Tourism in Northern Thailand: Encounters with Buddhist Monks" (U Washington Press, 2021)
February 01, 2023 09:00 - 48 minutesThe city of Chiang Mai in northern Thailand has become the destination for a growing segment of the international tourism market: religious tourism. International tourists visit Buddhist temples, volunteer as English teachers, discuss Buddhism with student monks, and experiment with meditation. In her new book, Religious Tourism in Northern Thailand: Encounters with Buddhist Monks (University of Washington Press, 2021), Brooke Schedneck examines this growing phenomenon. While such interaction...
David Newheiser, "The Varieties of Atheism: Connecting Religion and Its Critics" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
January 31, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourThe Varieties of Atheism: Connecting Religion and Its Critics (University of Chicago Press, 2022), edited by Professor David Newheiser reveals the diverse nonreligious experiences obscured by the combative intellectualism of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens. In fact, contributors contend that narrowly defining atheism as the belief that there is no god misunderstands religious and nonreligious persons altogether. The essays gathered here show that, just as religion exceed...
Missing: Men at Work
January 31, 2023 09:00 - 51 minutesOver six million prime-age men are neither working nor looking for work; America's low unemployment rate hides the fact that many men have dropped out of the workforce altogether. Our workforce participation rate is on par with that seen during the Great Depression. Why does this problem affect men so acutely? Why is it so specific to America? What are these missing men doing with their time? How do we differentiate between leisure and idleness? Demographer and economist Nicholas Eberstadt, a...
M. R. Sharan, "Last Among Equals: Power, Caste and Politics in Bihar's Villages" (Westland, 2021)
January 30, 2023 09:00 - 45 minutesM. R. Sharan is an Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland, studying questions centred around development economics and political economy. He obtained his PhD from Harvard University in 2020 and was previously at the Delhi School of Economics and Hansraj College. His novel, Blue, was published in 2014. His writings have appeared across various publications, including the Economic and Political Weekly, The Hindu, The Times of India and The Economic Times. He is at www.mrsharan.com an...
Queer Space
January 30, 2023 05:00 - 17 minutesIn this episode of High Theory, Jack Jen Gieseking tells us about queer space. Queer geographies matter alongside queer temporalities. And it turns out that lesbian life in the 1950s cannot be generalized from the specific history of Buffalo, New York. In the episode they reference a number of scholarly books including J. Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (NYU Press, 2005); Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Duk...
Robin Bartram, "Stacked Decks: Building Inspectors and the Reproduction of Urban Inequality" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
January 29, 2023 09:00 - 31 minutesThough we rarely see them at work, building inspectors have the power to significantly shape our lives through their discretionary decisions. The building inspectors of Chicago are at the heart of sociologist Robin Bartram’s analysis of how individuals impact—or attempt to impact—housing inequality. In Stacked Decks: Building Inspectors and the Reproduction of Urban Inequality (U Chicago Press, 2022), she reveals surprising patterns in the judgment calls inspectors make when deciding whom to ...
Shailaja Paik, "The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity in Modern India" (Stanford UP, 2022)
January 28, 2023 04:00 - 1 hourThe Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity in Modern India (Stanford UP, 2022) offers the first social and intellectual history of Dalit performance of Tamasha—a popular form of public, secular, traveling theater in Maharashtra—and places Dalit Tamasha women who represented the desire and disgust of the patriarchal society at the heart of modernization in twentieth century India. Drawing on ethnographies, films, and untapped archival materials, Shailaja Paik illuminates how Tamas...
Myanmar Jewellers in China
January 27, 2023 09:00 - 26 minutesChina re-opened border in a final farewell to its strict zero-COVID policy on the 8th of January, 2023. But in the first few weeks of January, the Myanmar side of the border and the Myanmar immigration authorities refused to open the border for fear of COVID surge. This has continued to affect the livelihood of Myanmar jewellers who used to travel to China to do business. In this episode, Julie Yu-Wen Chen (University of Helsinki) talks to Juliet Zhu from the Research Institute for Languages ...
Batja Mesquita, "Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions" (Norton, 2022)
January 26, 2023 09:00 - 30 minutesToday I talked to Batja Mesquita about her book Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions (Norton, 2022). To a degree sometimes not realized, we discuss emotions through the lens of what have been called WEIRD cultures, i.e. Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic. As a result, the perspective taken tends to be inside/out, privileging one’s private feelings: a Mine approach. Yet in much of the world, more of an Ours approach prevails, with an understanding of emotions as being i...
Stephanie C. Kane, "Just One Rain Away: The Ethnography of River-City Flood Control" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022)
January 25, 2023 09:00 - 44 minutesNot long ago it seemed flood control experts were close to mastering the unruly flows funnelling toward Hudson Bay and the Prairie city of Winnipeg. But as more intense and out-of-synch flood events occur, wary cities like Winnipeg continue to depend on systems and specifications that will soon be out of date. Rivers have impulses that defy many of the basic human assumptions underpinning otherwise sophisticated technologies. This is the river-city expression of climate change. In Just One R...
Gillian Tan, "Pastures of Change: Contemporary Adaptations and Transformations among Nomadic Pastoralists of Eastern Tibet" (Springer, 2018)
January 24, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourTibetan nomads have developed a way of life that is dependent in multiple ways on their animals and shaped by the phenomenological experience of mobility. These pastoralists have adapted to many changes in their social, political and environmental contexts over time. From the earliest historically recorded systems of segmentary lineage to the incorporation first into local fiefdoms and then into the Chinese state (of both Nationalist and Communist governments), Tibetan pastoralists have maint...
Lois Presser, "Unsaid: Analyzing Harmful Silences" (U California Press, 2022)
January 24, 2023 09:00 - 42 minutesHarm takes shape in and through what is suppressed, left out, or taken for granted. Unsaid: Unsaid: Analyzing Harmful Silences (U California Press, 2022) is a guide to understanding and uncovering what is left unsaid—whether concealed or silenced, presupposed or excluded. Drawing on a variety of real-world examples, narrative criminologist Lois Presser outlines how to determine what or who is excluded from textual materials. With strategies that can be added to the tool kits of social researc...
Elizabeth Farfán-Santos, "Undocumented Motherhood: Conversations on Love, Trauma, and Border Crossing" (U Texas Press, 2022)
January 24, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourClaudia Garcia crossed the border because her toddler, Natalia, could not hear. Leaving behind everything she knew in Mexico, Claudia recounts the terror of migrating alone with her toddler and the incredible challenges she faced advocating for her daughter's health in the United States. When she arrived in Texas, Claudia discovered that being undocumented would mean more than just an immigration status—it would be a way of living, of mothering, and of being discarded by even those institutio...
Namita Vijay Dharia, "The Industrial Ephemeral: Labor and Love in Indian Architecture and Construction" (U California Press, 2022)
January 22, 2023 09:00 - 53 minutesWhat transformative effects does a multimillion-dollar industry have on those who work within it? The Industrial Ephemeral presents the untold stories of the people, politics, and production chains behind architecture, real estate, and construction in areas surrounding New Delhi, India. In The Industrial Ephemeral: Labor and Love in Indian Architecture and Construction (U California Press, 2022), the personal histories of those in India's large laboring classes are brought to life as Namita ...
David Collier and Gerardo L. Munck, "Critical Junctures and Historical Legacies: Insights and Methods for Comparative Social Science" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022)
January 21, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourOver the past 50 years, scholars across the social sciences have employed critical juncture analysis to understand how social orders are created, become entrenched, and change. In this book, leading scholars from several disciplines offer the first coordinated effort to define this field of research, assess its theoretical and methodological foundations, and use a critical assessment of current practices as a basis for guiding its future. Contributors include stars in this field who have writ...
Hil Malatino, "Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad" (U Minnesota Press, 2022)
January 20, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourFatigue, disorientation, numbness, envy, rage, burnout. What good could come from thinking about trans experience and these bad feelings? In Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), Hil Malatino theorizes the centrality of bad feelings in a world of quotidian and spectacular anti-trans misrecognition, hostility, and violence. He does so not only to understand how bad feelings arise and how they can be hard to survive, but also what they can make poss...
Surviving the State: Struggles for Land and Democracy in Myanmar
January 20, 2023 04:00 - 18 minutesHow do farmers struggle for land and democracy in Myanmar’s hybrid political system? How might a feminist approach to this question look like and enable novel findings? In which ways can researchers make the most of ethnographic methods to understand ordinary people’s survival strategies? And do experiences from rural Myanmar reflect the wider changing landscape of development in the Global South? In this episode, Dr. Hilary Faxon, a Marie Curie Fellow in the Department of Food and Resource E...
Malini Ambach et al., "Temples, Texts, and Networks: South Indian Perspectives" (HASP, 2022)
January 19, 2023 09:00 - 42 minutesFor many centuries, Hindu temples and shrines have been of great importance to South Indian religious, social and political life. Aside from being places of worship, they are also pilgrimage destinations, centres of learning, political hotspots, and foci of economic activities. In these temples, not only the human and the divine interact, but they are also meeting places of different members of the communities, be they local or coming from afar. Hindu temples do not exist in isolation, but st...
James C. Rhoads et al., "Cultivating Q Methodology: Essays Honoring Steven R. Brown" (Bookbaby, 2022)
January 18, 2023 09:00 - 48 minutesCultivating Q Methodology is a collection of essays is in honor of Professor Steven R. Brown, the preeminent scholar of Q methodology. Q methodology, innovated by the British physicist/psychologist William Stephenson (1902-1989), Q methodology is a conceptual framework and set of procedures to systematically and scientifically study the subjective. Professor Brown has dedicated his academic life, more than 50 years and counting, to advancing the methodology and Stephenson's profound ideas. Ea...
The Ideology of Innovation in India
January 17, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourScience and Technologies scholar Lilly Irani talks her book, Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India, with Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel. Irani’s work examines the ideological role that ideas of “innovation” and “entrepreneurship” have played in India and the people who are left behind by such visions. Irani and Vinsel also discuss her other work and activism focusing on the politics of the Bay Area in California, including organization against the digital techn...
Paulina Laura Alberto et al., "Voices of the Race: Black Newspapers in Latin America, 1870-1960" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
January 17, 2023 09:00 - 53 minutesVoices of the Race: Black Newspapers in Latin America, 1870-1960 (Cambridge University Press, 2022) offers English translations of more than one hundred articles published in Black newspapers in Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, and Uruguay from 1870 to 1960. Those publications were as important in Black community and intellectual life in Latin America as African American newspapers were in the United States, yet they are almost completely unknown to English-language readers. Expertly curated, the art...
Marlene Schäfers, "Voices That Matter: Kurdish Women at the Limits of Representation in Contemporary Turkey" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
January 16, 2023 09:00 - 39 minutes“Raise your voice!” and “Speak up!” are familiar refrains that assume, all too easily, that gaining voice will lead to empowerment, healing, and inclusion for marginalized subjects. Marlene Schäfers’s Voices That Matter: Kurdish Women at the Limits of Representation in Contemporary Turkey (U Chicago Press, 2022) reveals where such assumptions fall short, demonstrating that “raising one’s voice” is no straightforward path to emancipation but fraught with anxieties, dilemmas, and contradictions...
Eric A. Stanley, "Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable" (Duke UP, 2021)
January 16, 2023 09:00 - 52 minutesContent note: This episode contains discussions of suicide, as well as allusions to graphic anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-Black violence Advances in LGBTQ rights in the recent past—marriage equality, the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and the expansion of hate crimes legislation—have been accompanied by a rise in attacks against trans, queer and/or gender-nonconforming people of color. In Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable (Duke UP, 2021), theorist and o...
Benjamin Hegarty, "The Made-Up State: Technology, Trans Femininity, and Citizenship in Indonesia" (Cornell UP, 2022)
January 15, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIn The Made-Up State: Technology, Trans Femininity, and Citizenship in Indonesia (Cornell UP, 2022), Benjamin Hegarty contends that warias, one of Indonesia's trans feminine populations, have cultivated a distinctive way of captivating the affective, material, and spatial experiences of belonging to a modern public sphere. Combining historical and ethnographic research, Hegarty traces the participation of warias in visual and bodily technologies, ranging from psychiatry and medical transsexua...
Xiang Biao and Wu Qi, "Self as Method: Thinking Through China and the World" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)
January 15, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourToday I had the pleasure of talking to Professor Xiang Biao on his new book, Self as Method: Thinking Through China and the World, which was originally written and published in Chinese. The English translation has just come out with Palgrave Macmillan. Self as Method provides a manifesto of intellectual activism that counsels China’s young people to think by themselves and for themselves. Consisting of three conversations between Xiang Biao, a social anthropologist, and Wu Qi, a rising journa...
On Émile Durkheim's "The Elementary Forms of Religious Life" (1912)
January 15, 2023 09:00 - 59 minutesToday I talked to Steven Lukes about Émile Durkheim's classic The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912). Lukes is the author of Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work: A Historical and Critical Study among many other works. In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), Emile Durkheim sets himself the task of discovering the enduring source of human social identity. He investigates what he considered to be the simplest form of documented religion - totemism among the Aborigines of Australia...
Chris Bilton et al., "Creativities: The What, How, Where, Who and Why of the Creative Process" (Edward Elgar, 2022)
January 15, 2023 09:00 - 40 minutesHow does creativity work? In Creativities: The What, How, Where, Who and Why of the Creative Process (Edward Elgar, 2022), Chris Bilton, a Reader at University of Warwick’s Centre for Cultural and Media Policy Studies, Stephen Cummings, Professor of Strategy and Innovation at Victoria University Wellington, and dt ogilvie, Professor of Urban Entrepreneurship at the Rochester Institute of Technology, use a combination of theoretical analysis and detailed case studies to explain creativity. Usi...
Carwil Bjork-James, "The Sovereign Street: Making Revolution in Urban Bolivia" (U Arizona Press, 2020)
January 15, 2023 09:00 - 56 minutesIn the early twenty-first century Bolivian social movements made streets, plazas, and highways into the decisively important spaces for acting politically, rivaling and at times exceeding voting booths and halls of government. The Sovereign Street documents this important period, showing how indigenous-led mass movements reconfigured the politics and racial order of Bolivia from 1999 to 2011. Drawing on interviews with protest participants, on-the-ground observation, and documentary research...
Consumed: The Myth and Reality of Cannibalism
January 14, 2023 09:00 - 24 minutesCannibalism has been used for centuries to define the lowest form of humanity, but the story isn't as straightforward as it may seem. Turns out, there may be a logic - or even a love - to eating people. Guests Emily Anderson, Curator of “Cannibalism: Myth & Reality” Bill Schutt, Author of Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology
Tanya Katerí Hernández, "Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality" (Beacon Press, 2022)
January 14, 2023 09:00 - 59 minutesRacial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality (Beacon Press, 2022) will challenge what you thought about racism and bias and demonstrate that it’s possible for a historically marginalized group to experience discrimination and also be discriminatory. Racism is deeply complex, and law professor and comparative race relations expert Tanya Katerí Hernández exposes “the Latino racial innocence cloak” that often veils Latino complicity in racism. As Latinos are t...
Eternity Now: Talking about Mysticism with the Apostle to the Gangs of LA
January 14, 2023 09:00 - 49 minutesJesuit Father Greg Boyle is the founder of Homeboy Industries in East LA, the world’s largest and most successful gang intervention and rehabilitation program. He talks about this ministry and his “therapeutic mysticism” which has trained him to see God and God’s people. Father Greg (“Father G”) has no interest in categories and the games of exclusion that we humans often play; he says, “gang violence is about a lethal absence of hope.” His mission to the homies, therefore, is filled with fai...
Harald Koberg, "Free Play: Digital Gaming and the Longing for Effectiveness" (Büchner-Verlag, 2021)
January 13, 2023 09:00 - 59 minutesWhat needs are satisfied in digital gaming? And what does the shift of these need satisfactions into the digital space say about the social realities in which they are embedded? Harald Koberg lets gamers themselves have their say and follows their traces of the described fascinations and passions in his latest book Free Play: Digital Gaming and the Longing for Effectiveness (Freies Spiel: Digitales Spielen und die Sehnsucht nach Wirkmächtigkeit). The answers found aim at experiences of effica...
The Future of Inequality: A Discussion with Mike Savage
January 13, 2023 09:00 - 42 minutesMost people in developed countries think inequality is increasing. And most would also agree that in terms of the global poor, the last 20 years have seen vast improvements with hundreds of millions living much better lives than their parents. These are some of the themes Professor Mike Savage addresses in his book The Return of Inequality: Social change and the Weight of the Past (Harvard UP, 2021). Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and prese...
Forbidden Fruit: Religious Fervor about Food
January 12, 2023 09:00 - 29 minutesContemporary diet culture is only the latest manifestation of a long history of religious fervor about food. Guests Isabel Foxen Duke, health coach Alan Levinovitz, Professor of Religious Studies at James Madison University Corrie Norman, Associate Director, Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology
Christopher Loperena, "The Ends of Paradise: Race, Extraction, and the Struggle for Black Life in Honduras" (Stanford UP, 2022)
January 09, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourThe future of Honduras begins and ends on the white sand beaches of Tela Bay on the country's northeastern coast where Garifuna, a Black Indigenous people, have resided for over two hundred years. In The Ends of Paradise: Race, Extraction, and the Struggle for Black Life in Honduras (Stanford UP, 2022), Christopher A. Loperena examines the Garifuna struggle for life and collective autonomy, and demonstrates how this struggle challenges concerted efforts by the state and multilateral instituti...
Philippe-Richard Marius, "The Unexceptional Case of Haiti: Race and Class Privilege in Postcolonial Bourgeois Society" (UP of Mississippi, 2022)
January 08, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIn The Unexceptional Case of Haiti: Race and Class Privilege in Postcolonial Bourgeois Society (University Press of Mississippi, 2022), Philippe-Richard Marius recasts the world-historical significance of the Saint-Domingue Revolution to investigate the twinned significance of color/race and class in the reproduction of privilege and inequality in contemporary Haiti. Through his ethnography, class emerges as the principal site of social organization among Haitians, notwithstanding the country...
Bordering the Bedouin
January 07, 2023 21:00 - 1 hourContemporary issues like the refugee crisis, climate refugees, and global restrictions on movement caused by the COVID-19 pandemic have brought into stark relief the extent to which our movements, lives, and worldviews are governed by national borders and boundary-making. But these borders and their associated militarization and security infrastructures are a recent phenomenon, the legacy of 20th-century wars and colonialism. Modern borders are also often the result of complex, disputed negot...
Daniel White, "Administering Affect: Pop-Culture Japan and the Politics of Anxiety" (Stanford UP, 2022)
January 07, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIn Administering Affect: Pop-Culture Japan and the Politics of Anxiety (Stanford UP, 2022), Daniel White draws on extensive fieldwork in government ministries and government-adjacent organizations to explore Japan’s current “politics of anxiety,” the ways in which state administrators have transformed anxieties about Japan’s global geopolitical status into future-oriented programs of national branding and revitalization based on a narrowly defined vision of pop-culture as synecdoche and savio...
Bin Xu, "The Culture of Democracy: A Sociological Approach to Civil Society" (Polity Press, 2022)
January 07, 2023 09:00 - 41 minutesAgainst the bleak backdrop of pressing issues in today’s world, civil societies remain vibrant, animated by people’s belief that they should and can solve such issues and build a better society. Their imagination of a good society, their understanding of their engagement, and the ways they choose to act constitute the cultural aspect of civil society. Central to this cultural aspect of civil society is the “culture of democracy,” including normative values, individual interpretations, and int...
Carlos Alberto Sánchez, "A Sense of Brutality. Philosophy after Narco-Culture" (Amherst College Press, 2020)
January 06, 2023 09:00 - 52 minutesContemporary popular culture is riddled with references to Mexican drug cartels, narcos, and drug trafficking. In the United States, documentary filmmakers, journalists, academics, and politicians have taken note of the increasing threats to our security coming from a subculture that appears to feed on murder and brutality while being fed by a romanticism about power and capital. Carlos Alberto Sánchez uses Mexican narco-culture as a point of departure for thinking about the nature and limit...
Siv B. Lie, "Django Generations: Hearing Ethnorace, Citizenship, and Jazz Manouche in France" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
January 04, 2023 09:00 - 57 minutesDjango Generations: Hearing Ethnorace, Citizenship, and Jazz Manouche in France (U Chicago Press, 2021) shows how relationships between racial identities, jazz, and national belonging become entangled in France. Jazz manouche—a genre known best for its energetic, guitar-centric swing tunes—is among France’s most celebrated musical practices of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It centers on the recorded work of famed guitarist Django Reinhardt and is named for the ethnoracial subgroup...
Regine A. Spector, "Order at the Bazaar: Power and Trade in Central Asia" (Cornell UP, 2017)
January 04, 2023 09:00 - 39 minutesOrder at the Bazaar: Power and Trade in Central Asia (Cornell UP, 2017) delves into the role of bazaars in the political economy and development of Central Asia. Bazaars are the economic bedrock for many throughout the region--they are the entrepreneurial hubs of Central Asia. However, they are often regarded as mafia-governed environments that are largely populated by the dispossessed. By immersing herself in the bazaars of Kyrgyzstan, Regine A. Spector learned that some are rather best char...
Joel Robbins, "Theology and the Anthropology of Christian Life" (Oxford UP, 2020)
January 03, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourAnthropological theory can radically transform our understanding of human experience and offer theologians an introduction to the interdisciplinary nature between anthropology and Christianity. Both sociocultural anthropology and theology have made fundamental contributions to our understanding of human experience and the place of humanity in the world. But can these two disciplines, despite the radical differences that separate them, work together to transform their thinking on these topics?...
Lilie Chouliaraki and Myria Georgiou, "The Digital Border: Migration, Technology, Power" (NYU Press, 2022)
January 02, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourHello, world! This is the Global Media & Communication podcast series. In this episode, our host Juan Llamas-Rodriguez discusses the book The Digital Border: Migration, Technology, Power (2022) by Dr. Lilie Chouliaraki and Dr. Myria Georgiou. You’ll hear about: What The Digital Border is about, its importance, and its implication; How the authors’ previous works helped build the foundation for writing this book collaboratively; Why and how the authors chose to focus on specific forms of me...
Magnus Fiskesjö, "Stories from an Ancient Land: Perspectives on Wa History and Culture" (Berghahn Books, 2021)
January 01, 2023 09:00 - 53 minutesIn 2013, the Journal of Burma Studies published an article titled “An Introduction to Wa Studies.” It seems that even within the last decade the Wa, an upland people living predominantly on what is today the Burma-China frontier, still needed to be introduced to other scholars of the region. Magnus Fiskesjö, the article’s author, began with the caveat that it was by no means complete and was intended only by way of brief introduction. But the article held out the promise of more, and now its ...
Bonus Episode: "Nomadland"
January 01, 2023 09:00 - 29 minutesA special bonus episode in honor of the 93rd Academy Awards on April 25, 2021! One of the most-nominated films at this year's Oscars is "Nomadland," adapted from a book of the same name by journalist Jessica Bruder. "Nomadland" is about a 21st-century American phenomenon - the post-2008 increase in (mostly elderly) people who practice "vandwelling," living in vans, trucks, or other mobile housing and traveling the country in search of seasonal jobs. This episode talks about the characteristic...
Mathew Gandy, "Natura Urbana: Ecological Constellations in Urban Space" (MIT Press, 2022)
December 30, 2022 09:00 - 32 minutesIn his new book, Natura Urbana: Ecological Constellations in Urban Space (MIT Press, 2022), Mathew Gandy explores urban nature as a multilayered material and symbolic entity. The book examines the articulation of alternative, and in some cases, counterhegemonic, sources of knowledge about urban nature produced by artists, writers, scientists, as well as curious citizens, including voices seldom heard in environmental discourse. The book is driven by Dr. Gandy’s long-standing fascination with ...
Trader, Hunter, Herder, Other: Types and Categories of Nomadism
December 28, 2022 09:00 - 27 minutesThis episode looks at the main types and categories of nomads, how they live, and the similarities and differences between them. Music in this episode: Desert City by Kevin MacLeod. License. All other sounds courtesy of the BBC Sound Effects Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology
Luke Munn, "Automation Is a Myth" (Stanford UP, 2022)
December 27, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourFor some, automation will usher in a labor-free utopia; for others, it signals a disastrous age-to-come. Yet whether seen as dream or nightmare, automation, argues Munn, is ultimately a fable that rests on a set of triple fictions. There is the myth of full autonomy, claiming that machines will take over production and supplant humans. But far from being self-acting, technical solutions are piecemeal; their support and maintenance reveals the immense human labor behind "autonomous" processes....
Ruth Tsoffar, "Life in Citations: Biblical Narratives and Contemporary Hebrew Culture" (Routledge, 2019)
December 25, 2022 05:00 - 1 hourIn her latest book, Life in Citiations: Biblical Narratives and Contemporary Hebrew Culture (Routledge, 2019), Ruth Tsoffar studies several key biblical narratives that figure prominently in Israeli culture. Life in Citations provides a close reading of these narratives, along with works by contemporary Hebrew Israeli artists that respond to them. Together they read as a modern commentary on life with text, or even life under the rule of its verses, to answer questions like: How can we explai...