New Books in Anthropology

Today I’m speaking with Asad L. Asad, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Stanford University. He is the author of Engage and Evade: How Latino Immigrant Families Manage Surveillance in Everyday Life (Princeton UP, 2023). A highly relevant book, Engage and Evade documents the interactions between undocumented people and the agents and institutions of government. One might expect undocumented people to avoid the IRS, but as Asad demonstrates, many engage with government institutions in the hopes that positive interactions and compliance might help their immigration cases down the road. Published in 2023, immigration policy and treatment of undocumented people by the government has shifted dramatically in a short time. I’m grateful today to be able to speak with Asad about this thoughtful book.

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In the contemporary world, ruins, rubble, and decaying material have become increasingly iconic landscapes. They can foster a more layered theory of time, change and memory. The seven ethnographic case studies in Haunting Ruins (Berghahn Books, 2025) trace human engagements with the temporal forces of ruins, which can trace the past and transform the present. Conjuring environmental humanities, the anthropology of history, memory studies, and archaeology, this fascinating new edited volume delves into the complex influence of the past on the present and the future and urges scholars to consider ruins as things to think with.

Valentina Gamberi is a MSCA-CZ Postdoctoral Fellow at the Palacký University Olomouc. She is an anthropologist focusing on material culture studies, museum and heritage studies, with a foundation in religious studies and material religion. She has conducted fieldwork in several European museums and, since 2017, in Taiwan. Orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0857-2233 Email: [email protected]

Chiara Calzana is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Turin and an Adjunct Lecturer at the University of Milano-Bicocca. Her research interests lie in the fields of historical anthropology and memory studies. She conducted ethnographic fieldwork and historical research in the Vajont disaster area (Italian Alps), focusing on memorialization and monumentalization practices. Since 2023, she has been a member of the research team of the ERC Project ‘The World Behind a Word. An Anthropological Exploration of Fascist Practices and Meanings among European Youth (F-WORD)’. E-mail: [email protected]

Yadong Li is a socio-cultural anthropologist-in-training. He is registered as a PhD student at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of economic anthropology, medical anthropology, hope studies, and the anthropology of borders and frontiers. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

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Although the history of Indonesian music has received much attention from ethnomusicologists and Western composers alike, almost nothing has been written on the interaction of missionaries with local culture. 

Missionaries, Anthropologists, and Music in the Indonesian Archipelago (U California Press, 2025) represents the first attempt to concentrate on the musical dimension of missionary activities in Indonesia. In fourteen essays, a group of distinguished scholars show the complexity of the topic: while some missionaries did important scholarship on local music, making recordings and attempting to use local music in services, others tried to suppress whatever they found. Many were collaborating closely with anthropologists who admitted freely that they could not have done their work without them. And both parties brought colonial biases into their work. By grappling with these realities and records, this book is a collective effort to decolonize the project of making music histories.

Byung Ho Choi is a Ph.D. candidate in the History and Ecumenics program at Princeton Theological Seminary, concentrating in World Christianity and history of religions. His research focuses on the indigenous expressions of Christianities found in Southeast Asia, particularly Christianity that is practiced in the Muslim-dominant archipelagic nation of Indonesia. More broadly, he is interested in history and the anthropology of Christianity, complexities of religious conversion and social identity, inter-religious dialogue, ecumenism, and World Christianity.

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How do individuals address serious challenges in a context where organized gatherings are subject to strict government control? This new edited volume brings together a diverse group of scholars to explore the many ways people in China self-organize and create varied forms of coordination to solve important problems.

Through compelling, detail-rich case studies, The Extraordinary in the Mundane (Columbia UP, 2024) shows that family structures and networks deeply shape these modes of association. Because the public-private dichotomy does not resonate with many people in China, they rely on informal social ties, not formal organizations or state agencies, to confront personal challenges. Chapters present vivid ethnographic portraits that consider both positive and negative aspects of community formation. A woman with an autistic child creates an organization to advocate for inclusion of neurodivergent children in public schools. A trainee in a psychological counseling course finds mutual support among other participants. A boy is taken by his father to an internet addiction treatment camp that aims to restructure family interactions. A woman in her seventies shows off the burial clothes she prepared for herself, to the admiration of a group of friends. Offering a glimpse into the unofficial realities that often remain off the record, this book provides a wide-ranging and timely examination of the varieties of civic action in contemporary China.

Becky Yang Hsu is Associate Professor of Sociology at Georgetown University. Her research interests include morality, institutions, and culture, and is currently studying happiness and mourning in China. More details about her research can be found here.

Yadong Li is a socio-cultural anthropologist-in-training. He is registered as a PhD student at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of economic anthropology, medical anthropology, hope studies, and the anthropology of borders and frontiers. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

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On the podcast today I am joined by socio-cultural anthropologist, Tuomas Tammisto, who is an academy research fellow in Social Anthropology at Tampere University. Tuomas is joining me to talk about his recently published book, Hard Work: Producing Places, Relations and Value on a Papua New Guinea Resource Frontier (Helsinki UP, 2024)

Hard Work examines human-environmental relations, value production, natural resource extraction, and state formation within the context of the Mengen people of Papua New Guinea. It provides elaborate, rich ethnography to make sense of how the Mengen engage with their land and outside actors like companies, NGOs, and the state through agriculture, logging, plantation labor, and environmental conservation. These practices have shaped the Mengen’s lived environment, while also sparking debates on what is considered valuable and how value is created.

The book is the result of hard work: for years Tuomas Tammisto has gained rich empirical research to detail how indigenous Mengen people perceive and live with the threats of logging. The chapters are not only rich in ethnography and theory, but they are also interlaced with beautiful photos and poetic song lyrics both in the original and translated languages, to provide an eye-opening window into Mengen perceptions of their complex lived environment.

The book is Open Access and available to read for free here.

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Martha S. Jones grew up feeling her Black identity was obvious to all who saw her. But weeks into college, a Black Studies classmate challenged Jones’s right to speak. Suspicious of the color of her skin and the texture of her hair, he confronted her with a question that inspired a lifetime of introspection: “Who do you think you are?”

Now a prizewinning scholar of Black history, Jones delves into her family’s past for answers. In every generation since her great-great-great-grandmother survived enslavement to raise a free family, color determined her ancestors’ lives. But the color line was shifting and jagged, not fixed and straight. Some backed away from it, others skipped along it, and others still were cut deep by its sharp teeth.

Journeying across centuries, from rural Kentucky and small-town North Carolina to New York City and its suburbs, The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir (Basic Books, 2025) is a lyrical, deeply felt meditation on the most fundamental matters of identity, belonging, and family.

Martha S. Jones is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor, professor of history, and a professor at the SNF Agora Institute at the Johns Hopkins University. A prizewinning author and editor of four books, most recently Vanguard, she is past copresident of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians and has contributed to the New York Times, Atlantic, and many other publications. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).

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Experimental Times: Startup Capitalism and Feminist Futures in India (U California Press, 2024) is an in-depth ethnography of the transformation of Bengaluru/Bangalore from a site of "backend" IT work to an aspirational global city of enterprise and innovation. The book journeys alongside the migrant workers, technologists, and entrepreneurs who shape and survive the dreams of a "Startup India" knitted through office work, at networking meetings and urban festivals, and across sites of leisure in the city. Tracking techno-futures that involve automation and impending precarity, Hemangini Gupta details the everyday forms of experimentation, care, and friendship that sustain and reproduce life and labour in India's current economy.

Rituparna Patgiri is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Guwahati. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter.

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The former border enclaves of Bangladesh and India existed as extra-territorial spaces since 1947. They were finally exchanged and merged as host state territories in 2015.

Sovereign Atonement: Citizenship, Territory, and the State at the Bangladesh-India Border (Cambridge UP, 2024) focuses on the protracted territorial exchange and experiences of the newly accepted Bangladeshi citizens. It grapples with one broad question: why did the state assume an active role in smoothing the once excluded population's experiences into their inclusion within the sovereign project? The book dives deep into an ethnographic and historical reading of the everyday state, land and territory, informality, (non)state actors, and performance of sovereignty. Furthermore, it troubles the often taken-for-granted understanding of exception, governance, and citizenship. As such, Ferdoush offers a retake on the two seemingly contradictory concepts -'sovereign' and 'atonement'- to demonstrate that bridged together these concepts as sovereign atonement enables a novel way of appreciating geopolitical narratives, political geographies, and nationalistic discourse in South Asia and beyond.

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Syaifudin Zuhri’s book Wali Pitu and Muslim Pilgrimage in Bali, Indonesia: Inventing a Sacred Tradition (Leiden, 2022) is a detailed examination of the recent emergence of the Wali Pitu (“Seven Saints”) tradition in Bali, Indonesia. The study is a multi-sited ethnography of pilgrimage traditions to the grave sites of the Wali Pitu, which is a part of a larger context of rising interest in saint veneration in Indonesia generally, and Muslim religious tourism on the Hindu-majority island of Bali in particular.

Themes of the book include saint veneration in historical and contemporary Indonesia, the relationship between religious invention and religious authenticity in Islamic traditions, religious cultures and the economic imperative of the tourism industry, relationships between Hindus and Muslims sharing religious space, and the diversity of approaches to religion and Islamic experience in Southeast Asia. Zuhri’s work offers important new perspectives on Indonesian Islam by examining the creation, experience, economy, and contestations of popular Muslim practices that are only growing in their significance.

Dr. Syaifudin Zuhri is a lecturer at the State Islamic University of Sayyid Ali Rahmatullah Tulungagung (UIN SATU) and a former research fellow at the Berlin Graduate School of Muslim Cultures and Societies.

Dr. Jaclyn Michael is Assistant Professor of Religion at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (USA). She is the author of several articles on Muslim cultural representation, performance, and religious belonging in India and in the United States.

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Drawing Coastlines: Climate Anxieties and the Visual Reinvention of Mumbai's Shore (Cornell UP, 2024) reveals the ways that technical images such as weather infographics, sea-level projections, and surveys are fast remaking Mumbai's coasts and coastal futures. They set in place infrastructural interventions, vocabularies of development and conservation, and their lines and dots inscribe material conditions of existence and horizons of loss that entangle life forms.

V. Chitra interlaces graphics and text by redrawing scientific images, the moments of their construction, the choices and consequences of what gets drawn and what does not, and how images are seen, performed, and manifest. These visual reconstructions show how images remake human-nonhuman relationships, arrange urban politics, and materialize landscapes in complex and contradictory ways. The multimodal format of Drawing Coastlines engages in the politics of its context where words and images combine to create coastal worlds, and to find, through a creative anthropology, openings to build new forms of care in the midst of crisis.

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Big-time college football promises prestige, drama, media attention, and money. Yet most athletes in this unpaid, amateur system encounter a different reality, facing dangerous injuries, few pro-career opportunities, a free but devalued college education, and future financial instability. In one of the first ethnographies about Black college football players, anthropologist Tracie Canada reveals the ways young athletes strategically resist the exploitative systems that structure their everyday lives.

Tackling the Everyday: Race and Nation in Big-Time College Football (University of California Press, 2025) shows how college football particularly harms the young Black men who are overrepresented on gridirons across the country. Although coaches and universities constantly invoke the misleading "football family" narrative, this book describes how a brotherhood among Black players operates alongside their caring mothers, who support them on and off the field. With a Black feminist approach—one that highlights often-overlooked voices—Canada exposes how race, gender, kinship, and care shape the lives of the young athletes who shoulder America's favorite game.

Tracie Canada is the Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. Her work has been featured in public venues and outlets such as the Museum of Modern Art, The Guardian, and Scientific American.

Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).

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Boaters of London is an ethnography that delves into the process of becoming a boater, adopting an alternative lifestyle on the water and the political impact that this travelling population has on the state.

London and the Southeast of England in general is home to many people and families who live on narrowboats, cruisers and barges, along a network of canals and rivers. Many of these 'boaters' move from place to place every two weeks and form itinerant communities in the heart of some of the UK’s most crowded urban spaces. Boaters of London delves into the process of becoming a boater and the political impact of this travelling population on the state, the volume examines an alternative style of living and the potential of a life spent afloat.

Ben Bowles is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at SOAS, University of London. He is also Course Lecturer at Fordham University, London Campus, and Research Fellow at the Open University’s Centre for Policing Research and Learning. His research interests include economic and political anthropology, and the anthropology of the UK.

Yadong Li is a socio-cultural anthropologist-in-training. He is registered as a PhD student at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of economic anthropology, medical anthropology, hope studies, and the anthropology of borders and frontiers. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

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The vast majority of people who stream themselves playing videogames online do so with few or no viewers. In Streaming by the Rest of Us: Microstreaming Videogames on Twitch (MIT Press, 2025) Dr. Mia Consalvo, Dr. Marc Lajeunesse, and Dr. Andrei Zanescu investigate who they are, why they do so, and why this form of leisure activity is important to understand. Unlike the esports athletes and streaming superstars who receive the lion's share of journalistic and academic attention, microstreamers are not in it for the money and barely have an audience. In this, the first book dedicated to the latter group, the authors gather interviews from dozens of microstreamers from 2017 to 2019 to discuss their lives, struggles, hopes, and goals.

For readers interested in livestreaming, and Twitch in particular, the book rethinks the medium's history through accounts of the everyday uses of webcams, with particular attention to notions of liveness and authenticity. These two concepts have become calling cards for the videogame livestreaming platform and underlie streamer motivations, the construction of their practices (whether casual, serious, or anywhere in between), and the complex “metas” that take shape over time. The book also looks at the authors' own practices of livestreaming, focusing on what can be gained through experiencing the lived reality of the practice. Finally, the authors explain how Twitch's platform (studied from 2017–2023) informs how streamers structure their every day and how corporate ideologies bleed into real-world spaces like TwitchCon.

This book is available open-access via the MIT Press website.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Iconic as a novelist and popular cultural figure, Zora Neale Hurston remains underappreciated as an anthropologist. Is it inevitable that Hurston's literary authority should eclipse her anthropological authority? If not, what socio-cultural and institutional values and processes shape the different ways we read her work? Jennifer L. Freeman Marshall considers the polar receptions to Hurston's two areas of achievement by examining the critical response to her work across both fields. Drawing on a wide range of readings, Freeman Marshall explores Hurston's popular appeal as iconography, her elevation into the literary canon, her concurrent marginalization in anthropology despite her significant contributions, and her place within constructions of Black feminist literary traditions. Perceptive and original, Ain't I an Anthropologist (University of Illinois Press, 2023) is an overdue reassessment of Zora Neale Hurston's place in American cultural and intellectual life.

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Aiming to explore the Sino-Tibetan border region, which is renamed “Shangri-La” by the Chinese government for tourism promotion, Crafting a Tibetan Terroir (U Washington Press, 2025) examines how the deployment of the French notion of terroir creates new forms of ethno-regional identities and village landscapes through the production of Tibetan wine as a commodity. In Shangri-La, a rapidly developing international ethno-travel destination, European histories and global capitalism are being reestablished and reformulated through viticulture, which has altered landscapes and livelihoods.

From the introduction of vineyards by nineteenth-century French and Swiss Catholic missionaries to make sacramental wine to twenty-first century commercialization, this ethnography documents the ways Tibetans are indigenizing modernity in the context of economic development on their own terms. It provides timely insight into China's rapid entry into the global wine market, highlighting the localized impacts of this emergent industry, which include transformation from subsistence agriculture to monocropping and intensified agrochemical use. It also addresses larger issues of international trade, suggesting that certain commodities - stimulants and intoxicants in particular - have long connected Europe and the Asia Pacific region, and that these connections are now being reconceived in fashioning new industries and identities.

Brendan A. Galipeau is a Lecturer in Binghamton University’s Environmental Studies program. He is the author of Crafting a Tibetan Terroir: Winemaking in Shangri-La (University of Washington Press, 2025). His research and publications broadly focus on environmental and social change and human relations with nature in southwest China and Taiwan.

Yadong Li is a socio-cultural anthropologist-in-training. He is registered as a PhD student at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of economic anthropology, medical anthropology, hope studies, and the anthropology of borders and frontiers. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

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Dental modification was common across ancient societies, but perhaps none were more avid practitioners than the Maya. They filed their teeth flat or pointy, polished and drilled them, and crafted decorative inlays of jade and pyrite. Unusually, Maya of all social classes, ages, and professions engaged in dental modification. What did it mean to them?

Ancient Maya Teeth: Dental Modification, Cosmology, and Social Identity in Mesoamerica (University of Texas Press, 2024) by Dr. Vera Tiesler is the most comprehensive study of Maya dental modification ever published, based on thousands of teeth recovered from 130 sites spanning three millennia. Esteemed archaeologist Dr. Tiesler sifts the evidence, much of it gathered with her own hands and illustrated here with more than a hundred photographs. Exploring the underlying theory and practice of dental modification, Tiesler raises key questions. How did modifications vary across the individual's lifespan? What tools were used? How did the Maya deal with pain—and malpractice? How did they keep their dentitions healthy, functioning, and beautiful? What were the relationships among gender, social identity, and particular dental-modification choices? Addressing these and other issues, Ancient Maya Teeth reveals how dental-modification customs shifted over the centuries, indexing other significant developments in Mayan cultural history.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Sideways Migration: Being French in London (Routledge, 2025) examines the relationship between migration and socioeconomic status. In particular, it charts a set of middle-class aspirations that lead people to move to a nearby nation that is similar in wealth and social indicators - a type of horizontal relocation that it terms "sideways migration." It chronicles the experiences of a diverse group of French middle-class citizens who moved to London during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. 

Based on longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork over a ten-year period, this book engages at length with their strategies of emplacement through the lens of Pierre Bourdieu's concept of social space. Against a backdrop of heightened anxieties about immigration, the disruptions of the Brexit process and, more recently, a pandemic, it shows how middle-class migration is affected by processes of dislocation and relocation, settling and unsettling, and the search for belonging. This book points to new directions for understanding transnationalism among middle-class migrants through its consideration of the French emigration apparatus and the role of the multisite French nation in the lives of its citizens living abroad. It will be key reading for scholars and students interested in emigration and migration from anthropology, sociology, geography, political science, history, and international studies.

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Revolutions in technology are fundamentally transforming what it means to be human. Or are they? As Webb Keane points out, before humans consulted ChatGPT, they propitiated oracles. Before they fell in love with robot boyfriends, they ventured into the forest to marry nature spirits. 

In his new book Animals, Robots, Gods: Adventures in the Moral Imagination (Princeton UP, 2025) Keane combines anthropology and philosophy to show us what is new and what is not in our current technological moment. Using a broad comparative perspective he shows us how shamans, hunters, priests, and doctors have long responded to the existential questions which drive our current technological obsessions: Where is the line between human and non-human? How do humans find meaning in our interactions with non-humans? By widening our intellectual imagination, Keane shows us how many of our current intellectual dilemmas about technology are not new -- and are far more deep than enduring than we might have previously suspected.

Webb Keane is the George Herbert Mead Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan.

Alex Golub is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa

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There are many books giving advice about research methods on the market, but The Art and Craft of Comparison (Cambridge UP, 2019) is the first monographic marriage of comparative and interpretive methods. In this episode of the special series New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science, two of its authors, John Boswell and Jack Corbett, discuss their confessional tone in the book, the dilemmas of comparative-interpretive research, some of their rules of thumb for starting and finishing political research that aims for creative comparison, and why Chat GPT is no substitute for embodied, immersive interpretation. Embrace the grind!

Like this episode? You might also be interested in others in the series with co-authors talking about their work, including Erica Simmons and Nicholas Rush Smith, Mark Bevir and Jason Blakely, Peregrine Schwartz-Shea and Dvora Yanow, and Aarie Glas and Jessica Soedirgo talking about Lee Ann Fujii’s Interviewing in Social Science Research. 

Looking around for something to read? If so, then John recommends Personalizing the State by Insa Lee Koch, and State of Empowerment by Carolyn Barnes, while Jack recommends Stephanie Lawson’s Regional Politics in Oceania.

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How to dwell in a forest alongside giants, avoid disturbing a living god, assist an animal with their manners, and help an elephant cross the road. The Presence of Elephants: Sharing Lives and Landscapes in Assam (Routledge, 2024) is an anthropological consideration of coexistence, grounded in people’s everyday interactions with Asian elephants. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Assam, Northeast India, this book examines human-elephant copresence and how minds, tasks, identities, and places are shared between the two species. Sharing lives and landscapes with such formidable beings is a continuously shifting and negotiated exchange inherently composed of tensions, asymmetries, and uncertainties – especially in the Anthropocene when breakdowns in communication increasingly have a violent effect. Developing a multifaceted picture of human-elephant relations in a postcolonial setting, each chapter focuses on a different dimension of encounter, where elephants adapt to human norms, people are subject to elephant projects, and novel interspecies possibilities emerge at the threshold of nature and society. Vulnerability is a common experience intensified in contemporary human-elephant relations, felt through the elephant’s power to disrupt and transform human lives, as well as the risks these endangered animals are exposed to. This book will be of interest to scholars of multispecies ethnography and human-animal relations, environmental humanities, conservation, and South Asian studies.

Rituparna Patgiri is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Guwahati. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter.

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When Only God Can See: The Faith of Muslim Political Prisoners (Pluto Press, 2024), uncovers the unique experiences of Muslim political prisoners held in Egypt and under US custody at Guantanamo Bay and other detention black sites. This groundbreaking book explores the intricate interplay between their religious beliefs, practices of ritual purity, prayer, and modes of resistance in the face of adversity. Highlighting the experiences of these prisoners, faith is revealed to be not only a personal spiritual connection to God but also a means of contestation against prison and state authorities, reflecting larger societal struggles.

Written by Walaa Quisay, who has worked closely with prisoners in Egypt, and Asim Qureshi, with years of experience supporting detainees at Guantanamo Bay, the authors' deep connections with prisoner communities and their emphasis on the power of resistance shine through.

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Of all the mental illnesses, schizophrenia eludes us the most. No matter the strides scientists have made in neurological research nor doctors have made in psychiatric treatment, schizophrenia remains misunderstood, almost complacently mythologized. Without a reason for the illness, patients feel even more alienated than they already do, families are left hopeless, and doctors struggle to provide accurate care. Steven Lesk, though, after a medical career dedicated to those affected by schizophrenia and a determination to find the answer to its existence, presents a groundbreaking theory that will forever change the lives of the mentally ill. 

In Footprints of Schizophrenia: The Evolutionary Roots of Madness (Prometheus, 2023), Lesk threads evolutionary evidence with neurological evidence, turning the mysteries of our minds into a tapestry of logic. With his breakthrough theory and this unprecedented book, Lesk will invite necessary cultural dialogue about this stigmatized illness, provoke new psychiatric and pharmacological research, and provide unequivocal comfort to those afflicted and affected by schizophrenia.

Lesk's "primitive organization theory" is based in human evolution, from Neanderthals to Homo sapiens, and the specific changes to our brains after the emergence of language. We have existed in human-like form for six million years, but we've only had language for 50,000; within the vast span of evolutionary time, that's hardly any time at all. Lesk elucidates us to the hormones affected by language, especially dopamine, and with brilliant clarity, connects human evolution, our brain affected by language, and those with schizophrenia whose dopamine doesn't flow in our new, adaptive way. In other words, the twenty million people who have schizophrenia in the world don't suppress dopamine in the way evolution has trained us, so their brains don't process language well and function as if they're in a hallucinatory, delusional dream state. Not only will Lesk's theory focus treatment efforts for schizophrenia, but it will also affect that of other dopamine-related mental illnesses like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Huntington's chorea, Tourette's, ADD, and more. Publishing Lesk's work will usher in a new era of psychiatric understanding, one that the field and the public desperately needs.

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How do young people participate in democratic societies? Youth Participation and Democracy: Cultures of Doing Society (Bristol UP, 2024) introduces the concept of ‘doing society’ as a new theory of political action. Focused on Finnish youth, it innovatively blends cutting-edge empirical research with agenda-setting theoretical development. Redefining political action, the authors expand beyond traditional public-sphere, scaling from formal to informal and unconventional modes of engaging. The book captures diverse engagement from memes to social movements, from participatory budgeting to street parties and from sleek politicians to detached people in the margins. In doing so, it provides a holistic view of the ways in which young people participate (or do not participate) in society, and their role in cultural change.

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Audun Kjus joins Jana Byars to talk about Adventures in the Play-Ritual Continuum (Utah State Press, 2025), eds. Audun Kjus, Jakob Löfgren, Cliona O’Carroll, Simon Poole & Ida Tolgensbakk. Utah State Press, 2025).

The junctions between play and ritual are many and complex. Play is for fun and joy, but it also demands a total commitment and serious respect for rules. Rituals involve nearly endless varieties of social arrangements and can truly transform people, but they also include improvisation, testing, and pretending. Adventures in the Play-Ritual Continuum explores the connectivity between the playful and the ritualized through a fresh theoretical perspective, highlighting the creative messiness and the cultural paradoxes such intersections allow. The chapters span topics such as hen parties, marriage proposals, ash scatterings, extreme sports races, football fans, computer game festivals, celebrations of fandom, migration heritages, and antiracist protests. While the case studies are selected to show a range of diversity with various mergings of play, game, ritual, ceremony, rite, and ritualizing, the introductory and concluding discussions offer sharpened perspectives on common aspects. Following these excursions through the play-ritual continuum will be enjoyable for readers interested in how people make sense of their own existence and profitable for scholars in folklore, anthropology, religion, pedagogy, cultural studies, and social sciences and humanities more generally.

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Lori Allen and Ajantha Subramanian continue their second series on Violent Majorities. Their previous episode featured Peter Beinart on Zionism as long-distance ethnonationalism; here they speak with Subir Sinha, who teaches at SOAS University of London, comments on Indian and European media, and is a member of a commission of inquiry exploring the 2022 unrest between Hindus and Muslims in Leicester, UK.

The catalysts he identifies for the rise of Hindu nationalism (Hindutva) include the emergence of new middle classes after economic liberalization, the rise of Islamophobia after 9/11, the 2008 crisis in capitalism, and the spread of new communications technologies.

The trio discuss the growth of Hindutva in the US and UK since the 1990s and its further consolidation. Social media has been key to Modi’s brand of authoritarian populism, with simultaneous messaging across national borders producing a globally dispersed audience for Hindutva. Particularly useful to transnational political mobilizations has been the manufacture of wounded Hindu sentiments: a claim to victimhood that draws on the legitimizing language of religious minority rights in the US and UK.

They also note more hopeful signs: Dalit and other oppressed caste politics have begun to strengthen in the diaspora; the contradictions between lived Hinduism and Hindutva have become clearer; there are some demographic and structural barriers to Hindutva’s further growth in the UK and US.

Subir’s Recallable Book is Kunal Purohit’s H-Pop:The Secretive World of Hindutva Pop Stars (Harper Collins India, 2023), which looks at the proliferation of Hindutva Pop, a genre of music that is made to go viral and whip up mob violence against religious minorities.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Subir Sinha, “Fragile Hegemony: Modi, Social Media, and Competitive Electoral Populism in India.” International Journal of Communication 11(2017), 4158–4180.
• Subir Sinha, “‘Strong leaders’, authoritarian populism and Indian developmentalism: The Modi moment in historical context.” Geoforum, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.02.019
• Subir Sinha, “Modi's People and Populism's Imagined Communities.” Seminar, 7 5 6 – A u g u s t 2022, pp.18-23.
• Edward T. G. Anderson, Hindu Nationalism in the Indian Diaspora: Transnational Politics and British Multiculturalism. London: Hurst & Co., 2023.
• Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), or National Volunteer Corps, is the parent organization of the Sangh Parivar, or Hindu nationalist family of organizations. It espouses principles of Hindu unity and aims to transform India into a Hindu supremacist nation-state.
• Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), or World Hindu Organization, is a branch of the Sangh Parivar. Its stated aims are to engage in social service work, construct Hindu temples, and defend Hindus.
• On the anti-caste discrimination bill in the UK parliament, see David Mosse, Outside Caste? The Enclosure of Caste and Claims to Castelessness in India and the United Kingdom
• The Ganesh Puja period is a 10-day festival that honors the Hindu god Ganesha, and usually takes place in late August or early September.
• Diane M. Nelson, A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
• Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso; Revised edition, 2016.
• Yohann Koshy, “What the unrest in Leicester revealed about Britain – and Modi’s India.” The Guardian, 8 February 2024.
• Richard Manuel, Cassette Culture in North India: Popular Music and Technology in North India. University of Chicago .Press; 2nd ed. Edition,1993.

Listen and Read here.

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The relationship between fear people experience in their lives and the government often informs key questions about the rule of law and justice. In nations where the rule of law is unevenly applied, interpreting the people involved in its enforcement allows for contextualized understanding about why that unevenness occurs and is perpetuated.

Joshua Barker’s State of Fear: Policing a Postcolonial City published by Duke University Press (2024) examines policing in Bandung, the capital city of the province of West Java in Indonesia, to show how fear and violence are produced and reproduced. He makes analysis of the emergence of informal and formal forms of political order in Bandung based on ethnographic and historical evidence about neighborhood watch groups, street-level toughs, vigilantes, and people in the police, from clerks to officers. This book provides a compelling interpretive framework for understanding episodes of violence and different forms of authority in Indonesian state-society relations as it does for many other parts of the world where unresolved colonial legacies shape the production of policing.

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What is the connection between fan culture and feminism? In Media Fandom, Digital Feminisms, and Tumblr (Bloomsbury, 2023), Briony Hannell, a lecturer in sociology at the University of Manchester, explores the intersection of fandom, in a variety of forms, and feminist discourses on social media. Using an in-depth case study of Tumblr, the book charts the creation of a community of feminist fans, showing how the sense of being a feminist and belonging to a digital community are created and maintained online. The analysis also reflects on how this community includes and excludes particular social groups, showing the potential and the limits of digital spaces for feminist ideas and activities. A vital intervention at a moment where social media spaces are being transformed in various ways, the book is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the contemporary digital world.

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An ethnographic exploration of anthropological failures through the Mapuche archetypes of witch, clown, and usurper, Three Ways to Fail: Journeys Through Mapuche Chile (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) invites readers to consider concepts of failure, knowing, and being in the world within a rural Mapuche community.

How do we learn what failure looks like? During the years anthropologist Magnus Course spent living with Indigenous Mapuche people in southern Chile, he came to understand failure - both his own and those of the discipline of anthropology - through Mapuche narratives of the witch, the clown, and the usurper. In a context of enduring poverty and racism, increasing state repression, and his own disintegration, he began to realize that these figures of failure, and their insatiable appetites for destruction, greed, and property, reflected as much upon his own failings as on anybody else’s, but also showed the way forward to a better way to live.

Set amidst the stunning natural beauty and political tragedies of southern Chile, Three Ways to Fail is the story of what it means to become a part of other people’s lives, of what it means to fail them, and of what it means to live well when everything falls apart. Grounded in three decades of work and collaboration with Mapuche people, Three Ways to Fail sheds new light on Indigenous lifeways in the Americas while grappling with broader questions about the nature of ethnographic writing and the future of anthropology.

Magnus Course is Chair and Professor in social anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. His research is concerned with the relations between kinship, personhood, power, language, and land. His published books include Becoming Mapuche: Person and Ritual in Indigenous Chile (University of Illinois Press, 2011) and the co-authored Fluent Selves: Autobiography, Person, and History in Lowland South America (University of Nebraska Press, 2014).

Yadong Li is a socio-cultural anthropologist-in-training. He is registered as a PhD student at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of economic anthropology, medical anthropology, hope studies, and the anthropology of borders and frontiers. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

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On the podcast today I am joined by Presidential Scholar and Professor Emerita of Anthropology at John Jay College, City University of New York, Alisse Waterston to talk about her award-winning book, My Father’s Wars: Migration, Memory, and the Violence of A Century (Routledge, 2024). The book was first published in the Innovative Ethnographies series by Routledge Books in 2014. Its acclaim has led to the Tenth Anniversary edition which has just come out in 2024.

My Father’s Wars is a story about twentieth-century social history told through the vivid account of Alisse’s father as he journeys across continents, countries, cultures, languages, generations—and wars. The book is a beautifully moving account bridging family narrative and anthropological offering deeply insightful reflections on themes that remain more urgent than before, including migration, memory and violence. Captivating and powerful, the book is not only an important example of just how much ethnographic writing can show rather than tell, it is also an example of the wide terrain of how anthropologists can communicate knowledge multimedia accompaniments.

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Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, and guest host, Paula Bialski, Associate Professor for Digital Sociology at the University of St. Gallen in St. Gallen, Switzerland, interview Gabriella Coleman, Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University, about her long career studying hacker cultures. Topics include how hacking has changed over time, the different colored “hats” used to describe different hacker ethoses, the aesthetic dimensions of hacking including how poorly written code leads to moral outrage, and how Biella may soon found a new field of Critical Mold Studies. Professor Coleman’s books include Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking and Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous. Professor Bialski, a former P&T guest, is the author of Middletech: Software Work and the Culture of Good Enough.

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Weaving Europe, Crafting the Museum: Textiles, history and ethnography at the Museum of European Cultures, Berlin (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Dr. Magdalena Buchczyk delves into the history and the changing material culture in Europe through the stories of a basket, a carpet, a waistcoat, a uniform, and a dress. The focus on the objects from the collection of the Museum of European Cultures in Berlin offers an innovative and challenging way of understanding textile culture and museums. The book shows that textiles can be simultaneously used as the material object of research, and as a lens through which we can view museums. In doing so, the book fills a major gap by placing textile knowledge back into the museum.

Each chapter focuses on one object story and can be read individually. Swooping from 19th-century wax figure cabinets, Nazi-era collections, Cold War exhibitions in East and West Berlin, and institutional reshuffling after German unification, it reveals the dramatically changing story of the museum and its collection. Based on research with museum curators, makers and users of the textiles in Italy and Germany, Poland and Romania, the book provides intimate insights into how objects are mobilised to very different social and political effects. It sheds new light on movements across borders, political uses of textiles by fascist and communist regimes, the objects' fall into oblivion, as well as their heritage and tourist afterlives. Addressing this complex museum legacy, the book suggests new pathways to prefigure the future.

Featuring new archival and ethnographic research, evocative examples and images, it is an essential read for students of textile and material culture, museum and curatorial studies as well as anyone interested in history, heritage and craft.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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In 1492, Christopher Columbus arrived on the Caribbean Island of Guanahaní to find an Edenic scene that was soon mythologized. But behind the myth of paradise, the Caribbean and its people would come to pay the price of relentless Western exploitation and abuse. In Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis (Doubleday Books, 2025), Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe embarks on a historical journey to chart the forces that have shaped these islands: the legacy of slavery, indentured labor, and the forced toil of Chinese and enslaved Black people who mined the islands’ bounty—including guano, which, at the time, was more valuable than gold—for the benefit of European powers and at the expense of the islands’ sacred ecologies.

Braiding together family history, cultural reportage, and social studies, Goffe radically transforms how we conceive of Blackness, the natural world, colonialism, and the climate crisis; and, in doing so, she deftly dismantles the many layers of entrenched imperialist thinking that shroud our established understanding of the human and environmental conditions to reveal the cause and effect of a global catastrophe. Dark Laboratory forces a reckoning with the received forms of knowledge that have led us astray.

Through the lens of the Caribbean, both guide and warning of the man-made disasters that continue to plague our world, Goffe closely situates the origins of racism and climate catastrophe within a colonial context. And in redressing these twin apocalypses, Dark Laboratory becomes a record of the violence that continues to shape the Caribbean today. But it is also a declaration of hope, offering solutions toward a better future based on knowledge gleaned from island ecosystems, and an impassioned, urgent testament to the human capacity for change and renewal.

Tao Leigh Goffe is a London-born, Black British award-winning writer, theorist, and interdisciplinary artist who grew up between the UK and New York. Her research explores Black diasporic intellectual histories, political, and ecological life. She studied English literature at Princeton University before pursuing a PhD at Yale University. She lives and works in Manhattan where she is currently an Associate Professor at Hunter College, CUNY. Dr. Goffe has held academic positions and fellowships at Leiden University in the Netherlands and Princeton University in New Jersey.

Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).

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What makes sounds “religious”? How are communities shaped by the things they hear, play, or listen to? This book foregrounds connections between sounds, bodies, and media in the private and public life of communities beyond the Global North, analyzing diverse configurations of the category of sound and various sonic ontologies to usher in a more inclusive global anthro-history of religious sounds.

Religious Sounds Beyond the Global North (Amsterdam University Press, 2024) implements a “sonic turn” in the study of religion by engaging with a diversity of auditory, musical, and embodied practices. Dislodging the Global North as the main point of reference for studies on religious sound, in this volume editors Carola E. Lorea and Rosalind I. J. Hackett propose an acoustemology of the post-secular with an emphasis on Asia as method. Unsettling and expanding existing discussions on senses, media, and power, the editors present religious sounds as co-creating subjectivities and collectivities that coalesce around audible aesthetic formations, demonstrating that religious sounds are not only produced by certain religious traditions but also produce communities, shaping the self and sensitivity of those who participate.

Carola E. Lorea is Assistant Professor of Rethinking Global Religion at the University of Tübingen. She worked as a research fellow at NUS Asia Research Institute, International Institute for Asian Studies, Gonda Foundation, and Südasien-Institut (Heidelberg). Her first monograph is Folklore, Religion and the Songs of a Bengali Madman (2016).

Rosalind I. J. Hackett is Extraordinary Professor, Desmond Tutu Centre for Religion and Social Justice, University of the Western Cape, South Africa and Chancellor’s Professor Emerita and Professor Emerita of Religious Studies, University of Tennessee. She is Past President and Honorary Life Member, International Association for the History of Religions.

Khadeeja Amenda is a PhD candidate in the Cultural Studies in Asia programme at the Department of Communication and New Media, National University of Singapore, Singapore.

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As of 2018, only about one in ten Mexican/Mexican American/Xicanx (MMAX) students graduate with a college degree. Drawing on in-depth interviews, participant observations, pláticas, document analyses, and literature on race, space, and racism in higher education, Why you always so political?: The Experiences and Resiliencies of Mexican/Mexican American/Xicanx Students in Higher Education (Viva Oxnard, 2024) by Dr. Martín Alberto Gonzalez documents the narratives of 20 MMAX undergraduate students at a private, historically and predominantly white university in the Northeast United States. Utilizing counterstorytelling as a research method, Martín Alberto Gonzalez argues that the racially hostile campus environment experienced by MMAX students at their respective university manifests itself as a form of educational-environmental racism. By providing culturally relevant counterstories about racism in higher education, this book offers an accessible tool for teaching and learning about the harsh realities of Students of Color who attend predominantly white universities.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Political anthropologists Ajantha Subramanian and Lori Allen are back to continue RTB's Violent Majorities series with a set of three episodes on long-distance ethno-nationalism. Today, they speak with Peter Beinart (an editor at Jewish Currents and Professor of Journalism and Political Science at the City University of New York) about his just-released book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning (Knopf, 2025). It aims to mobilize Jewish religious ethics and teachings to reach a Jewish-American audience shaped by Zionism. Beinart seeks to debunk myths that prevent many from realizing that the moral abominations committed against Palestinians are part of the Israeli settler-colonial-nation-state project.

Peter is haunted by the fact that some of the most ardent opposition to apartheid in his parents’ country of South Africa came from secular Jewish people, and is troubled by the nationalistic tendency of religiously observant Jews there in the apartheid era. The three also discuss questions of solidarity against and among authoritarians, Israel’s threat to international law, the dangers of minority alliances with majoritarian politics, campus politics, and the importance of seeing Gaza and Palestine as connected to us all.

Peter’s Recallable Book is Accepting the Yoke of Heaven: Commentary on the Weekly Torah Portion, by Orthodox scientist, philosopher, and Judaica scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903-1994), who emphasized the idolatry of investing the state with anything more than a supportive role in Jewish life.

Mentioned in the Episode:

• 119 Violent Majorities, Indian and Israeli Ethnonationalism. Episode 2: Natasha Roth-Rowland with Ajantha and Lori
• Aparna Gopalan, "The Hindu Nationalists Using the Pro-Israel Playbook," Jewish Currents.
• Isabella Hammad, Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative.
• Martin Luther King, Letter from a Birmingham Jail.
• Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message.
• The Beinart Notebook podcast

Listen and Read Here.

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**Warning: This episode contains potentially disturbing content!**

On this episode of the Black Beryl, I sit down with Justin McDaniel, a scholar of Theravada Buddhist literature and art. Together we explore the darker side of Thai Buddhism, including meditation on decomposing bodies, fetus spirits, corpse oil, and the spectrum of white and black magic. We discuss the logics of rituals, their role in Thai communities, and how a misfit Catholic punk from Philly found himself in a rural Thai monastery.

If you want to hear scholars and practitioners engaging in deep conversations about the dark side of Asian religions and medicines, then subscribe to Black Beryl wherever you get your podcasts. You can also check out our members-only benefits on Substack.com. Enjoy the show!

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Thai movie Necromancer (2005)
• Justin McDaniel, The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magical Monk: Practicing Buddhism in Modern Thailand (2011)
• Justin McDaniel, Architects of Buddhist Leisure: Socially Disengaged Buddhism in Asia’s Museums, Monuments, and Amusement Parks (2018)
• Justin McDaniel, Wayward Distractions: Ornament, Emotion, Zombies and the Study of Buddhism in Thailand (2021)
• Justin McDaniel, Cosmologies and Biologies: Illuminated Siamese Manuscripts of Death, Time and the Body (2024)
• Press coverage of monasticism course
• Press coverage of existential despair course

Pierce Salguero is a transdisciplinary scholar of health humanities who is fascinated by historical and contemporary intersections between Buddhism, medicine, and crosscultural exchange. He has a Ph.D. in History of Medicine from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (2010), and teaches Asian history, medicine, and religion at Penn State University’s Abington College, located near Philadelphia. www.piercesalguero.com.

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In this NBN episode, I am joined by anthropologists Eva van Roekel (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) and Fiona Murphy (Dublin City University) to talk about theit edited book, A Collection of Creative Anthropologies: Drowning in Blue Light and Other Stories. This beautiful collection brings together a series of creative work of anthropologists who share the art of writing that arises from ‘ordinary’ engagement and reveals its potential for the reimagining of anthropological futures and alternative worlds. This is a collection of creative anthropology anchored in experimentality and encouragement. A book that defies imaginaries of academic convention through the cultivation of a mundus imaginalis requiring moments of pause, of introspection, and of discomfort. This centring of creativity at the heart of anthropology subtly conveys how the complex ethical and moral issues around fieldwork and anthropological theorising can be reflected on through writing otherwise, in creative spaces such as this book. A Collection of Creative Anthropologies fits the current call for radical revisions of the academic canon in anthropology, and the social sciences and humanities more broadly.

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In An Archive of Possibilities: Healing and Repair in Democratic Republic of Congo (Duke UP, 2024), anthropologist and surgeon Rachel Marie Niehuus explores possibilities of healing and repair in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo against a backdrop of 250 years of Black displacement, enslavement, death, and chronic war. Niehuus argues that in a context in which violence characterizes everyday life, Congolese have developed innovative and imaginative ways to live amid and mend from repetitive harm. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and the Black critical theory of Achille Mbembe, Christina Sharpe, Alexis Pauline Gumbs and others, Niehuus explores the renegotiation of relationships with land as a form of public healing, the affective experience of living in insecurity, the hospital as a site for the socialization of pain, the possibility of necropolitical healing, and the uses of prophesy to create collective futures. By considering the radical nature of cohabitating with violence, Niehuus demonstrates that Congolese practices of healing imagine and articulate alternative ways of living in a global regime of antiblackness.

Rachel Marie Niehuus is an anthropologist and a surgeon currently on faculty in the Department of Surgery at University of North Carolina. Her next project continues this study of world-making through an analysis of the role of medicine in what might come after the world of Man.

Atalia Israeli-Nevo is an anthropology PhD student at the University of Texas at Austin.

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Environments associated with migration are often seen as provisional, lacking both history and architecture. As Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi demonstrates in Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement (Duke UP, 2023), a refugee camp’s aesthetic and material landscapes—even if born out of emergency—reveal histories, futures, politics, and rhetorics. She identifies forces of colonial and humanitarian settlement, tracing spatial and racial politics in the Dadaab refugee camps established in 1991 on the Kenya-Somalia border—at once a dense setting that manifests decades of architectural, planning, and design initiatives and a much older constructed environment that reflects its own ways of knowing. She moves beyond ahistorical representations of camps and their inhabitants by constructing a material and visual archive of Dadaab, finding long migratory traditions in the architecture, spatial practices, landscapes, and iconography of refugees and humanitarians. Countering conceptualizations of refugee camps as sites of border transgression, criminality, and placelessness, Siddiqi instead theorizes them as complex settlements, ecologies, and material archives created through histories of partition, sedentarization, domesticity, and migration.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Hannah Pool, whose research focuses on human mobilities. She is a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Studies of Societies.

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Critical Approaches to Death, Dying and Bereavement (Routledge, 2025) by Professor Erica Borgstrom & Dr. Renske Visser is the first of its kind to examine key topics in death, dying, and bereavement through a critical lens, highlighting how the understanding and experience of death can vary considerably, based on social, cultural, historical, political, and medical contexts. It looks at the complex ways in which death and dying are managed, from the political level down to end- of- life care, and the inequalities that surround and impact experiences of death, dying, and bereavement.

Readers are introduced to key theories, such as the medicalisation of dying, as well as contemporary issues, such as social movements, pandemics, and assisted dying. The book stresses how death is not only a biological process or event but rather shaped by a range of intersecting factors. Issues of inequalities in health, inequities in support, and intersectional analyses are brought to the fore, and each chapter is dedicated to an issue that has interdisciplinary resonance, thus showcasing the wider sociocultural and political factors that impact this time of life.

This book is valuable reading for scholars in thanatology and death studies, and for those in related fields such as sociology of health, medical and social anthropology, and interdisciplinary social science courses.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Sociologists have had surprisingly little to say about poetry as a topic while sometimes also making grandiose claims that sociology is/should be like poetry. These are the prompts which begin Andrew Smith’s Class and the Uses of Poetry: Symbolic Enclosures (2024, Palgrave Macmillan). Drawing upon discussions with working class readers of poetry, and interviews with unpublished poets, Smith draws our attention to the ways in which poetry has been enclosed, or fenced off, from working class readers. Influenced by, though offering some criticisms, of, Bourdieu’s approach to the sociology of culture, he shows us how readers become aware of this enclosure but nevertheless engage in collective understanding of the poems they are presented with. In doing do, Smith reminds us of the need to emphasise the aesthetic elements of poetry, and culture more generally, including its creative and expressive affordances. A reader of his book realises that a critical sociology of poetry needs to attest not just to the symbolic capital in who is seen as ‘legitimate’ readers and producers of poetry but also how those shut off from it lose out on the uses of poetry.

Our discussion covers what led Smith to pursue this work, how sociology has, and might in future confront poetry, his experiences of running these reading groups and suggests why, perhaps, we should also perhaps reject the ‘society of the segue way’ and savour some of the finitude which poetry might offer.

Your host, Matt Dawson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow and the author of G.D.H. Cole and British Sociology: A Study in Semi-Alienation (2024, Palgrave Macmillan), along with other texts.

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How do we become moral persons? What about children’s active learning in contrast to parenting? What can children teach us about knowledge-making more broadly? Answer these questions by delving into the groundbreaking ethnographic fieldwork conducted by anthropologists Arthur and Margery Wolf in a martial law era Taiwanese village (1958-60), marking the first-ever study of ethnic Han children. 

Jing Xu skillfully reinterprets the Wolfs’ extensive fieldnotes, employing a unique blend of humanistic interpretation, natural language processing, and machine-learning techniques. Through a lens of social cognition, Unruly' Children: Historical Fieldnotes and Learning Morality in a Taiwan Village (Cambridge UP, 2024) unravels the complexities of children’s moral growth, exposing instances of disobedience, negotiation, and peer dynamics. Writing through and about fieldnotes, the author connects the two themes, learning morality and making ethnography, in light of social cognition, and invites all of us to take children seriously. This book is ideal for graduate and undergraduate students of anthropology and educational studies.

Throughout the interview, the term “Chinese” is used in the broad sense of cultural heritage.

Jing Xu is a research scientist at the Department of Anthropology, University of Washington, Seattle. She holds a B.A. and M.A. from Tsinghua University, China, a Ph.D. in anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis, and received postdoctoral training in developmental psychology at the University of Washington. She pursues interdisciplinary research, bringing together anthropological and psychological perspectives to study how humans become moral persons. She is the author of two monographs: The Good Child: Moral Development in a Chinese Preschool (Stanford U Press, 2017) and “Unruly” Children: Historical Fieldnotes and Learning Morality in a Taiwan Village (Cambridge U Press, 2024).

Yadong Li is a socio-cultural anthropologist-in-training. He is registered as a PhD student at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of economic anthropology, medical anthropology, hope studies, and the anthropology of borders and frontiers. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

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Can older racists change their tune, or will they haunt us further once they're gone? Rich in mystery and life's lessons, God's Waiting Room: Racial Reckoning at Life's End (Rutgers University Press, 2024) considers what matters in the end for older white adults and the younger Black nurses who care for them. An innovation in creative nonfiction, Casey Golomski's story of his years of immersive research at a nursing home in South Africa, thirty years after the end of apartheid, is narrated as a one-day, room-by-room tour. The story is told in breathtakingly intimate and witty conversations with the home's residents and nurses, including the untold story of Nelson Mandela's Robben Island prison nurse, and readers learn how ageism, sexism, and racism intersect and impact health care both in South Africa and in the United States, as well as create conditions in which people primed to be enemies find grace despite the odds.

Casey Golomski is an associate professor of anthropology and women's and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire in Durham and lives in Medford, Massachusetts. He is the author of Funeral Culture: AIDS, Work, and Cultural Change in an African Kingdom.

Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).

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How do Black women experience education in Britain?

Within British educational research about Black students, gender distinctions have been largely absent, male-dominated or American-centric. Due to the lack of attention paid to Black female students, relatively little is known about how they understand and engage with the education system, or the influences which shape their long-term strategies and decision-making in order to gain educational 'success'.

Babygirl, You've Got This! Experiences of Black Girls and Women in the English Education System (Bloomsbury, 2024) by Dr. April-Louise Pennant will illustrate the educational experiences and journeys of Black British women graduates and considers the influence of the intersections of race, gender, ethnicity, culture and social class on their educational journeys. Dr. Pennant uniquely documents the entire educational journey - from primary school to university - within both predominantly white (PW) and predominantly global majority (PGM) educational institutions in order to examine the various accessibility, financial and academic hurdles which face Black girls and women.

The book combines theoretical frameworks such as Critical Race Theory, Bourdieu's Theory of Practice and Black Feminist epistemology, alongside the personal accounts of the author and a range of Black British women graduates. Through analysis of the strategies, choices and decisions made by Black British women in their educational journeys, the book ultimately provides insights into how to navigate the education system effectively, and provides alternatives to normalised understandings of educational 'success'.

Find out more about Dr. April-Louise Pennant on her website!

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Bureaucratic Archaeology: State, Science and Past in Postcolonial India (Cambridge UP, 2022) presents a novel ethnographic examination of archaeological practice within postcolonial India, focusing on the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) as a site where scientific knowledge production intersects with state bureaucracy. Through granular analysis of ASI's quotidian operations, this monograph demonstrates how archaeological micro-practices materially influence the construction of political and religious identities, while simultaneously serving as empirical evidence in India's highest judicial proceedings.

This unprecedented study illuminates the epistemological ecology of postcolonial knowledge production from within the bureaucratic apparatus itself. As the first book-length investigation of archaeological practice beyond the Euro-American tradition, it reveals how non-Western archaeological theory and methodology generate distinct forms of knowledge, thereby expanding our understanding of archaeology's role in postcolonial state formation.

About the Author:

Ashish Avikunthak is a distinguished scholar working at the intersection of archaeology, cultural anthropology, and avant-garde filmmaking. He is Professor of Film Media at the University of Rhode Island's Harrington School of Communication, where his research bridges theoretical and practical approaches to cultural production. His experimental films have been exhibited internationally at prestigious institutions including Tate Modern, Centre Georges Pompidou, and Pacific Film Archive, as well as major film festivals such as Rotterdam and Locarno.

About the Host:

Stuti Roy has recently completed her MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies at the University of Oxford.

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Amrita Narayanan is a practicing Clinical Psychologist (Psy.D. 2007) and Psychoanalyst (Indian Psychoanalytic Society, 2019). She is the author of Women's Sexuality and Modern India: In a Rapture of Distress (Oxford University Press, 2023). She was the Editor of and essayist in The Parrots of Desire: 3000 years of Erotica in India (Aleph Books, 2018) a collection of poems, short prose and fiction in translation from Indian languages, linked by an introductory essay on the central themes in Indian erotic literature. She was an essayist for Pha(bu)llus: a cultural history of the Phallus (Harper Collins, 2020). Amrita is currently visiting faculty at Ashoka University where she teaches classes at the undergraduate and masters level.

Amrita's research interests are in cultural factors in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, the psychodynamics of women's sexual agency, and how cultural factors shape the aesthetics of women's sexual agency. Her writing has appeared in academic journals such as Psychodynamic Practice and Psychoanalytic Review; newspapers such as The Hindu and The Indian Express; and popular press periodicals such as Outlook, Open Magazine India Today and The Deccan Herald. Amrita has received the Sudhir Kakar Prize for psychoanalytic writing, the Taylor and Francis Prize for Psychoanalytic writing, and the Homi Bhabha Fellowship.

The interviewer is Psychoanalyst and Writer, Ashis Roy, New Delhi.

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In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Tazin Abdullah speaks with Dr. Gerald Roche, Associate Professor in the Department of Politics, Media, and Philosophy at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia and head of research for the Linguistic Justice Foundation.

Tazin and Gerald discuss his research into language oppression and focus on his recent book The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet (Cornell UP, 2024).

In The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet, Gerald Roche sheds light on a global crisis of linguistic diversity that will see at least half of the world's languages disappear this century.

Roche explores the erosion of linguistic diversity through a study of a community on the northeastern Tibetan Plateau in the People's Republic of China. Manegacha is but one of the sixty minority languages in Tibet and is spoken by about 8,000 people who are otherwise mostly indistinguishable from the Tibetan communities surrounding them. Recently, many in these communities have switched to speaking Tibetan, and Manegacha faces an uncertain future.

The author uses the Manegacha case to show how linguistic diversity across Tibet is collapsing under assimilatory state policies. He looks at how global advocacy networks inadequately acknowledge this issue, highlighting the complex politics of language in an inter-connected world. The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet broadens our understanding of Tibet and China, the crisis of global linguistic diversity, and the radical changes needed to address this crisis.

For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here.

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Why some cities are more effective than others at reducing inequalities in the built environment.

For the first time in history, most people live in cities. One in seven are living in slums, the most excluded parts of cities, in which the basics of urban life—including adequate housing, accessible sanitation, and reliable transportation—are largely unavailable. Why are some cities more successful than others in reducing inequalities in the built environment? 

In Urban Power: Democracy and Inequality in São Paulo and Johannesburg (Princeton UP, 2024), Benjamin Bradlow explores this question, examining the effectiveness of urban governance in two “megacities” in young democracies: São Paulo, Brazil, and Johannesburg, South Africa. Both cities came out of periods of authoritarian rule with similarly high inequalities and similar policy priorities to lower them. And yet São Paulo has been far more successful than Johannesburg in improving access to basic urban goods.

Bradlow examines the relationships between local government bureaucracies and urban social movements that have shaped these outcomes. Drawing on sixteen months of fieldwork in both cities, including interviews with informants from government agencies, political leadership, social movements, private developers, bus companies, and water and sanitation companies, Bradlow details the political and professional conflicts between and within movements, governments, private corporations, and political parties. He proposes a bold theoretical approach for a new global urban sociology that focuses on variations in the coordination of local governing power, arguing that the concepts of “embeddedness” and “cohesion” explain processes of change that bridge external social mobilization and the internal coordinating capacity of local government to implement policy changes.

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A heartbreaking account of grief, Black boyhood, and how we can support young people as they navigate loss.

JahSun, a dependable, much-loved senior at Boys' Prep was just hitting his stride in the fall of 2017. He had finally earned a starting position on the varsity football team and was already weighing two college acceptances. Then, over Thanksgiving, tragedy struck. An altercation at his older sister's home escalated into violence, killing the unarmed teenager in a hail of bullets. JahSun's untimely death overwhelmed his entire community, sending his family, friends, and school into seemingly insurmountable grief. Worse yet, that spring two additional Boys' Prep students would be shot to death in their neighborhood. JahSun and his peers are not alone in suffering the toll of gun violence, as every year in the United States teenagers die by gunfire in epidemic numbers, with Black boys most deeply affected.

Brothers in Grief: The Hidden Toll of Gun Violence on Black Boys and Their Schools (U Chicago Press, 2024) closely attends to the neglected victims of youth gun violence: the suffering friends and classmates who must cope, mostly out of public view, with lasting grief and hidden anguish. Set at an ambitious urban high school for boys during the heartbreaking year following the death of JahSun, the book chronicles the consequences of untimely death on Black teen boys and on a school community struggling to recover. Sociologist Nora Gross tells the story of students attempting to grapple with unthinkable loss, inviting readers in to observe how they move through their days at school and on social media in the aftermath of their friends' and classmates' deaths. Gross highlights the discrepancy between their school's educational mission and teachers' and administrators' fraught attempts to care for students' emotional wellbeing. In the end, the school did not provide adequate space for grief, making it more difficult for students to heal, reengage with school, and imagine hopeful futures. Even so, supportive relationships deepened among students and formed across generations, offering promising examples of productive efforts to channel student grief into positive community change.

A searing testimony of our collective failure to understand the inner lives of our children in crisis, Brothers in Grief invites us all to wrestle with the hidden costs of gun violence on racial and educational inequity.

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At War with Women: Military Humanitarianism and Imperial Feminism in an Era of Permanent War (Cornell University Press, 2023) by Jennifer Greenburg reveals how post-9/11 politics of gender and development have transformed US military power. In the mid-2000s, the US military used development as a weapon as it revived counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan. The military assembled all-female teams to reach households and wage war through development projects in the battle for "hearts and minds." Despite women technically being banned from ground combat units, the all-female teams were drawn into combat nonetheless. Based on ethnographic fieldwork observing military trainings, this book challenges liberal feminist narratives that justified the Afghanistan War in the name of women's rights and celebrated women's integration into combat as a victory for gender equality.

Dr. Jennifer Greenburg critically interrogates a new imperial feminism and its central role in securing US hegemony. Women's incorporation into combat through emotional labor has reinforced gender stereotypes, with counterinsurgency framing female soldiers as global ambassadors for women's rights. This book provides an analysis of US imperialism that keeps the present in tension with the past, clarifying where colonial ideologies of race, gender, and sexuality have resurfaced and how they are changing today.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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What we eat, who we are, and the relationship between the two. Eating and Being: A History of Ideas about Our Food and Ourselves (University of Chicago Press, 2024) is a history of Western thinking about food, eating, knowledge, and ourselves. In modern thought, eating is about what is good for you, not about what is good. Eating is about health, not about virtue. Yet this has not always been the case. For a great span of the past—from antiquity through about the middle of the eighteenth century—one of the most pervasive branches of medicine was known as dietetics, prescribing not only what people should eat but also how they should order many aspects of their lives, including sleep, exercise, and emotional management. Dietetics did not distinguish between the medical and the moral, nor did it acknowledge the difference between what was good for you and what was good. Dietetics counseled moderation in all things, where moderation was counted as a virtue as well as the way to health. But during the nineteenth century, nutrition science began to replace the language of traditional dietetics with the vocabulary of proteins, fats, carbohydrates, and calories, and the medical and the moral went their separate ways. Steven Shapin shows how much depended upon that shift, and he also explores the extent to which the sensibilities of dietetics have been lost. Throughout this rich history, he evokes what it felt like to eat during another historical period and invites us to reflect on what it means to feel about food as we now do. Shapin shows how the change from dietetics to nutrition science fundamentally altered how we think about our food and its powers, our bodies, and our minds.

Steven Shapin is professor emeritus of the history of science at Harvard University.

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Cities are fraught sites in the national imagination, turned into identity markers when “urban” and “rural” indicate tastes rather than places. Cities bring chaos, draining the lifeblood of the nation like a tick draws blood from its host, to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson’s anti-urban polemics, which might have been written during any election year—centuries or months ago. Racism and anti-urbanism were born conjoined during the Revolution. Like their Atlantic coastal counterparts in the US North, Southern cities —similarly polyglot and cosmopolitan—resist the dominant, mutually inclusive prejudices of the nation that fails to contain them on its eroding, flooding coasts.

Captive City: Meditations on Slavery in the Urban South (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024) explores the paths of slavery in coastal cities, arguing that captivity haunts the “hospitality” cultures of Charleston, New Orleans, Savannah, and Baltimore. It is not a history of urban slavery, but a literary reflection that argues for coastal cities as a distinct region that scrambles time, resisting the “post” in postindustrial and the “neo” in neoliberalism. Jennie Lightweis-Goff offers a cultural exploration bound by American literature, especially life-writing by the enslaved, as well as compelling reassessments of works by canonical writers such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Hector St. John de Crevecoeur.

Lightweis-Goff reveals how the preserved yet fragile landscapes of these cities are haunted—not simply by the ghost tours that are signature stops for travelers in their historic districts—but by the echoes of slavery in their economies and built environments.

Jennie Lightweis-Goff is a scholar, lyric essayist, and, most essentially, a New Orleans flâneur. She is the author of two scholarly books, Blood at the Root and Captive City. Her essays have appeared in the major journals of U.S. literature, including Signs, American Literature, Mississippi Quarterly, minnesota review, and south. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Point, Liberties, and at her Substack, The Butcher's Darling, where she writes on grief, precarious labor, sobriety, and intellectual work that was "born in the back of the house."

Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).

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Nara Milanich’s Paternity: The Elusive Quest for the Father (Harvard University Press, 2019) explains how fatherhood, long believed to be impossible to know with certainty, became a biological “fact” that could be ascertained with scientific testing. Though the advent of DNA testing might seem to make paternity less elusive, Milanich’s book invites readers to think about paternity not as a biological fact but as a socially-constructed role that has evolved over time. Historically, given assumed paternal uncertainty, fathers were defined in terms of their behavior (acting like a father) or their relationship to a child’s mother (being married to a woman made a man the father of her offspring). In the twentieth century, paternity testing developed as a way to scientifically determine male progenitors, although these new methods never replaced older ways of reckoning paternity. Milanich describes blood tests and other early techniques proffered by doctors and scrutinized by courts as a way to know the “true” father. Paternity testing, she points out, has been used to different ends in different societies: it could identify an errant progenitor or reveal a mother’s liaison. A certain paternity test result could mean economic security for a child or put a person’s life in jeopardy. Moreover, Milanich reveals the uneven application of paternity testing that has tended to protect the most privileged groups in different societies. Paternity is a transatlantic study that moves from South America to Europe and the United States, and its chapters touch upon the histories of science and medicine, gender and the family, and immigration. The podcast features fascinating case studies set in Brazil and Argentina. This book’s reflections on the making of modern paternity speak to our own time, when, for example, the U.S. government is using DNA testing at the border to separate “real” kin from “fictitious” families, as Milanich explains to podcast listeners. The stakes of knowing the father go far beyond determining biological progenitors, and this book vividly reconstructs the political uses and cultural implications of the paternity test.

Rachel Grace Newman is joining Smith College in July 2019 as Lecturer in the History of the Global South. She has a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University, and her dissertation was titled “Transnational Ambitions: Student Migrants and the Making of a National Future in Twentieth-Century Mexico.” She is also the author of a book on a binational program for migrant children whose families divided their time between Michoacán, Mexico and Watsonville, California. She is on Twitter (@rachelgnew).

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Cuban resourcefulness is on full display in Cuban Hustle: Culture, Politics, Everyday Life (Duke 2020), as sociologist Sujatha Fernandes presents an array of strategies not just for survival but for the invention of expressive practices and community-building spaces. Enduring years of Special Period economics and a transition away from Fidel Castro’s leadership as well as shifting political contexts in Latin America, the United States and Europe, Cubans continue to struggle but also find ways to flourish. 

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How do you keep the cracks in Starry Night from spreading? How do you prevent artworks made of hugs or candies from disappearing? How do you render a fading photograph eternal—or should you attempt it at all? These are some of the questions that conservators, curators, registrars, and exhibition designers dealing with contemporary art face on a daily basis. In Still Life: Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum (University of Chicago Press, 2020), Fernando Domínguez Rubio delves into one of the most important museums of the world, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, to explore the day-to-day dilemmas that museum workers face when the immortal artworks that we see in the exhibition room reveal themselves to be slowly unfolding disasters.

Still Life offers a fascinating and detailed ethnographic account of what it takes to prevent these disasters from happening. Going behind the scenes at MoMA, Domínguez Rubio provides a rare view of the vast technological apparatus—from climatic infrastructures and storage facilities, to conservation labs and machine rooms—and teams of workers—from conservators and engineers to guards and couriers—who fight to hold artworks still.

As MoMA reopens after a massive expansion and rearranging of its space and collections, Still Life not only offers a much-needed account of the spaces, actors, and forms of labor traditionally left out of the main narratives of art, but it also offers a timely meditation on how far we, as a society, are willing to go to keep the things we value from disappearing into oblivion.

This interview is part of an NBN special series on “Mobilities and Methods.”

Fernando Domínguez Rubio is an Associate Professor at the Department of Communication at the University of California-San Diego.

Alize Arıcan is a PhD candidate in the department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey.

Nushelle de Silva is a PhD candidate in the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her work examines museums and exhibitions, and how the dissemination of visual culture is politically mediated by international organizations in the twentieth century.

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In India, elite law firms offer a surprising oasis for women within a hostile, predominantly male industry. Less than 10 percent of the country's lawyers are female, but women in the most prestigious firms are significantly represented both at entry and partnership. Elite workspaces are notorious for being unfriendly to new actors, so what allows for aberration in certain workspaces?

Drawing from observations and interviews with more than 130 elite professionals, Accidental Feminism: Gender Parity and Selective Mobility Among India’s Professional Elite (Princeton UP, 2021) examines how a range of underlying mechanisms-gendered socialization and essentialism, family structures and dynamics, and firm and regulatory histories-afford certain professionals egalitarian outcomes that are not available to their local and global peers. Juxtaposing findings on the legal profession with those on elite consulting firms, Swethaa Ballakrishnen reveals that parity arises not from a commitment to create feminist organizations, but from structural factors that incidentally come together to do gender differently. Simultaneously, their research offers notes of caution: while conditional convergence may create equality in ways that more targeted endeavors fail to achieve, "accidental" developments are hard to replicate, and are, in this case, buttressed by embedded inequalities. Ballakrishnen examines whether gender parity produced without institutional sanction should still be considered feminist.

In offering new ways to think about equality movements and outcomes, Accidental Feminism forces readers to critically consider the work of intention in progress narratives.

Noopur Raval is a postdoctoral researcher working at the intersection of Information Studies, STS, Media Studies and Anthropology.

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Computational models of urbanism—smart cities that use data-driven planning and algorithmic administration—promise to deliver new urban efficiencies and conveniences. Yet these models limit our understanding of what we can know about a city. A City Is Not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences (Princeton UP, 2021) reveals how cities encompass myriad forms of local and indigenous intelligences and knowledge institutions, arguing that these resources are a vital supplement and corrective to increasingly prevalent algorithmic models.

Shannon Mattern begins by examining the ethical and ontological implications of urban technologies and computational models, discussing how they shape and in many cases profoundly limit our engagement with cities. She looks at the methods and underlying assumptions of data-driven urbanism, and demonstrates how the “city-as-computer” metaphor, which undergirds much of today’s urban policy and design, reduces place-based knowledge to information processing. Mattern then imagines how we might sustain institutions and infrastructures that constitute more diverse, open, inclusive urban forms. She shows how the public library functions as a steward of urban intelligence, and describes the scales of upkeep needed to sustain a city’s many moving parts, from spinning hard drives to bridge repairs.

Incorporating insights from urban studies, data science, and media and information studies, A City Is Not a Computer offers a visionary new approach to urban planning and design.

Shannon Mattern is professor of anthropology at the New School for Social Research. Her books include Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media and The New Downtown Library: Designing with Communities. She lives in New York City. Website wordsinspace.net Instagram @atlas.sounds Twitter @shannonmattern

Alize Arıcan is a Postdoctoral Associate at Rutgers University's Center for Cultural Analysis. She is an anthropologist whose research focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography.

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Queer Kinship on the Edge? Families of Choice in Poland (Routledge, 2024) explores ways in which queer families from Central and Eastern Europe complicate the mainstream picture of queer kinship and families researched in the Anglo-American contexts.

The book presents findings from under-represented localities as a starting point to query some of the expectations about queer kinship and to provide insights on the scale and nature of queer kinship in diverse geopolitical locations and the complexities of lived experiences of queer families. Drawing on a rich qualitative multi-method study to address the gap in queer kinship studies which tend to exclude Polish or wider Central and Eastern perspectives, it offers a multi-dimensional picture of ‘families of choice’ improving sensitivity towards differences in queer kinship studies. Through case studies and interviews with diverse members of queer families (i.e., queer parents, their children) and their families of origin (parents and siblings), the book looks at queer domesticity, practices of care, defining and displaying families, queer parenthood familial homophobia, and interpersonal relationships through the life course.

Joanna Mizielińska is associate professor at Collegium Civitas in Poland.

Qing Shen recently received his PhD in anthropology from Uppsala University. 

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How did humans come to be who we are? In his marvelous, eccentric, and widely lauded book Being a Beast, legal scholar, veterinary surgeon, and naturalist extraordinaire Charles Foster set out to understand the consciousness of animal species by living as a badger, otter, fox, deer, and swift. Now, he inhabits three crucial periods of human development to understand the consciousness of perhaps the strangest animal of all—the human being.

To experience the Upper Paleolithic era—a turning point when humans became behaviorally modern, painting caves and telling stories, Foster learns what it feels like to be a Cro-Magnon hunter-gatherer by living in makeshift shelters without amenities in the rural woods of England. He tests his five impoverished senses to forage for berries and roadkill and he undertakes shamanic journeys to explore the connection of wakeful dreaming to religion. For the Neolithic period, when humans stayed in one place and domesticated plants and animals, forever altering our connection to the natural world, he moves to a reconstructed Neolithic settlement. Finally, to explore the Enlightenment—the age of reason and the end of the soul—Foster inspects Oxford colleges, dissecting rooms, cafes, and art galleries. He finds his world and himself bizarre and disembodied, and he rues the atrophy of our senses, the cause for much of what ails us.

Drawing on psychology, neuroscience, natural history, agriculture, medical law and ethics, Being a Human: Adventures in Forty Thousand Years of Consciousness (Metropolitan Books, 2021) is one man’s audacious attempt to feel a connection with 45,000 years of human history. This glorious, fiercely imaginative journey from our origins to a possible future ultimately shows how we might best live on earth—and thrive.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at [email protected].

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Cultivating Democracy: Politics and Citizenship in Agrarian India (Oxford UP, 2021) by Dr. Mukulika Banerjee offers a groundbreaking rethinking of democracy, moving beyond its institutional frameworks to focus on its lived, everyday dimensions. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the villages of Madanpur and Chishti in India, the book examines how agrarian communities cultivate democratic values—solidarity, reciprocity, and ethical citizenship—through practices embedded in their daily lives. Dr. Banerjee challenges conventional notions of democracy as confined to elections and state institutions, instead presenting it as a process deeply rooted in cultural-social practices and values. She highlights how rural communities, through cooperation in agriculture, rituals, festivals, and even moments of conflict and repair, create and sustain the democratic spirit. In doing so, the book underscores the resilience of these practices, even as procedural democracy faces erosion under broader political and economic pressures. At its core, Cultivating Democracy compels us to reimagine democracy not as an abstract ideal but as a lived and ongoing project shaped by the rhythms of everyday life. Through its rich ethnographic detail and theoretical insight, the book offers profound lessons on the fragility and strength of democracy, making it both a deeply scholarly and urgently relevant work.

Rounak Bose is a doctoral student in History at the University of Delaware. His research explores the intersections of caste, religiosities, performances, sacred geographies, and the state, as informing/informed by colonial and postcolonial mobilities and circulatory regimes across South Asia and Indian Ocean networks. Besides these specific research interests, his disciplinary interests revolve across anthropology, linguistics, literature, and the digital humanities. When not reading or writing in the university library, Rounak can be found running along Newark's trails and petting the canines he meets along the way.

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In Illustration and Heritage (Bloomsbury, 2024), Rachel Emily Taylor explores the re-materialisation of absent, lost, and invisible stories through illustrative practice and examines the potential role of contemporary illustration in cultural heritage. Heritage is a 'process' that is active and takes place in the present. In the heritage industry, there are opposing discourses and positions, and illustrators are a critical voice within the field.

Grounding discussions in concepts fundamental to the illustrator, the book examines how the historical voice might be 'found' or reconstructed. Rachel Emily Taylor uses her own work and other illustrators' projects as case studies to explore how the making of creative work – through the exploration of archival material and experimental fieldwork – is an important investigative process and engagement strategy when working with heritage.

What are the similar functions of heritage and illustration? How can an illustrator 'give voice' to a historical person? How can an illustrator disrupt an archive or museum? How can an illustrator represent a historical landscape or site?

This book is a contribution to the expanding field of illustration research that focusses on its position in heritage practice. Taylor examines the illustrator's role within the field, while positioning it alongside the disciplines of museology, anthropology, archaeology, performance, and fine art.

Dr Rachel Emily Taylor is an illustrator, artist, researcher, and is Course Leader on BA Illustration at Camberwell College of Arts. She uses interdisciplinary research methods drawn from theatre, archaeology, history, and anthropology, in both the analysis and making of practical work.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.

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Over the two decades since the adoption of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security, peacebuilding interventions around the globe have increasingly incorporated gender perspectives. These initiatives have used both development programs and gender mainstreaming to advance women's empowerment, with the aim of making peacebuilding more effective as well as building more stable societies and efficient economies. This goal has been manifested in a wide range of programs and projects-or "gender interventions"—including economic empowerment measures, gender quotas, gender-responsive budgeting, and legal reforms. Yet, the results have been uneven, provoking a sizable debate among scholars and practitioners seeking to explain the shortcomings and improve the outcomes.

In Building Peace, Rebuilding Patriarchy: The Failure of Gender Interventions in Timor-Leste (Oxford University Press, 2023), Dr. Melissa Johnston explains why gender interventions often fail to help those who most need them, using the case of Timor-Leste, a country subjected to high levels of peacebuilding and gender interventions between 1999 and 2017. Looking at three types of gender interventions—gender-responsive budgeting, the law against domestic violence, and microfinance initiatives—Dr. Johnston argues that these reforms have produced mixed results because they reinscribe entrenched class and gender hierarchies in their implementation.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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What does mourning have to do with politics? How do practices of forced disappearance and improper burial shape subjects, spaces, and what is intelligible? What are people doing in movements across the globe when they gather in public space and recount nightmares of their disappeared loved ones? 

In Nightmare Remains: The Politics of Mourning and Epistemologies of Disappearance (Northwestern University Press, 2024), Ege Selin Islekel creates a South-South dialogue, connecting practices of forced disappearance in Latin America with those in Turkey and the movements of resistance developed by the searchers and remnants. By analyzing methods of power that target death and the afterlives of the dead, Islekel shows that the world is, but need not be, organized by such practices. She shows how people mobilize resistance within the death worlds of necrosovereignty, inventing possibilities from the very stuff of nightmares.

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Death and Funeral Practices in Japan (Routledge, 2024) is an essential introductory text an often overlooked element of cultural expression. The books offers a succinct history to the development of funeral practices over time, and describes a typical contemporary funeral in detail. Japanese funerals reflect the strength of continuing ancestor veneration (senzo kuyō), but face the challenge of high-density urbanisation and and reduction in family size which can lead to  isolation at the time of death. The text explains new trends in funeral practices, including ‘tree burials’ and ‘eternal memorial graves’. This information is supported by material on religious, legal and governance frameworks. This text is part of an extended series of handbooks that gives the reader a clear and accessible introduction to funeral practices in countries all over the world. In this podcast, Julie Rugg of the UK's Cemetery Research Group talks to Hannah Gould about a surprising funeral culture that merges deep tradition and high-tech innovation. 

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Scholars of religion have mostly abandoned the concept of "syncretism" in which certain apparent deviations from "standard" practice are believed to be the result of a mixture of religions. This is particularly relevant to Thailand, in which ordinary religious practice was seen by an earlier generation of scholars as a mixture of three religions: local spirit religion, Hinduism, and Buddhism. In part, the perception that Thai Buddhism is syncretistic is due to a misunderstanding of traditional Buddhism, which has always accepted the existence of local spirits and gods. Nevertheless, there are aspects of Thai Buddhist practice that still stubbornly appear syncretistic. Moreover, Thai Buddhists themselves are increasingly adopting the language of syncretism, referring to traditional Thai religion as a mixture of local, Hindu, and Buddhist practices. This raises the question: If syncretism is so wrong, then why does it seem so right?

In Holy Things: The Genealogy of the Sacred in Thai Religion (Oxford UP, 2024), Nathan McGovern answers this question through an in-depth study of the worship of spirits, gods, and Buddha images--all known as sing saksit, or "holy things"--in Thailand. He takes the reader on a historical and genealogical journey, showing how the category saksit began as a term to describe a power that is inherent to gods and spirits and accessible to Brahmans. Only later, when it was used in the nineteenth century to translate the Western concept of the "holy" did it become associated with Buddhist practice. McGovern shows that what appears to be syncretism is actually an illusion. The worship of "holy things" is not a mixture of different religions, but the category of "holy things" is a mixture of different ways of talking about religion.

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How Is It Between Us?: Relational Ethics and Care for the World (HAU Books, 2023) offers a new theory of relational ethics that tackles contemporary issues. In How Is It Between Us?, Jarrett Zigon puts anthropology and phenomenological hermeneutics in conversation to develop a new theory of relational ethics. This relational ethics takes place in the between, the interaction not just between people, but all existents. Importantly, this theory is utilized as a framework for considering some of today’s most pressing ethical concerns - for example, living in a condition of post-truth and worlds increasingly driven by algorithms and data extraction, various and competing calls for justice, and the ethical demands of the climate crisis. Written by one of the preeminent contributors to the anthropology of ethics, this is a ground-breaking book within that literature, developing a robust and systematic ethical theory to think through contemporary ethical problems.

Jarrett Zigon is a social theorist, philosopher and anthropologist at the University of Virginia, where he is the William & Linda Porterfield Chair in Bioethics and Professor of Anthropology. From 2018 to 2020, he was the founding director of the Center for Data Ethics and Justice at the University of Virginia.

Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of economic anthropology, medical anthropology, hope studies, and the anthropology of borders and frontiers. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

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In this fascinating interview, Nathanael J. Homewood discusses his new book,Seductive Spirits: Deliverance, Demons, and Sexual Worldmaking in Ghanaian Pentecostalism (Stanford University Press, 2024).

Pentecostalism, Africa's fastest-growing form of Christianity, has long been preoccupied with the business of banishing demons from human bodies. Among Ghanaian Pentecostals, deliverance is primary among the embodied, experiential gifts—a loud, messy, and noisy experience that ends only when the possessed body falls to the ground silent and docile, the evil spirits rendered powerless in the face of the holy spirit-wielding-prophets. And nowhere is Ghanaian Pentecostal obsession with demons more pronounced than with sexual demons. Homewood examines the frequent and varied experiences of spirit possession and sex with demons that constitute a vital part of Pentecostal deliverance ministries, offering insight into these practices assembled from long-term ethnographic engagement with four churches in Accra, the capital of Ghana.

Relying on the uniqueness of the Pentecostal sensorium, this book unravels how spirits and sexuality intimately combine to expand the definition of the body beyond its fleshy boundaries. Demons are a knowledge regime, one that shapes how Pentecostals think about, engage with, and construct the cosmos. Deliverance Pentecostals reiterate and tarry with the demonic, especially sexually, as a realm of invention whereby alternative ways of being, sensing, and having sex are dreamed, practiced, and performed. Ultimately, Homewood argues for a distinction between colonial demonization and decolonial demons, charting another path to understanding being, the body, and sexualities.

Nathanael Homewood is the Associate Director of Religious Studies at the University of Minnesota. His areas of specialty are global Christianity, religion and sexuality, African religion, and Pentecostalism. He has earned a B.A. in Political Science at the University of Western Ontario, an M.Div in Global Christianity from Yale Divinity School, an M.A. and Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Rice University.

Jessie Cohen holds a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University, and is an editor at the New Books Network.

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This study of organizing and decluttering professionals helps us understand—and perhaps alleviate—the overwhelming demands society places on our time and energy.

For a widely dreaded, often mundane task, organizing one’s possessions has taken a surprising hold on our cultural imagination. Today, those with the means can hire professionals to help sort and declutter their homes. In More Than Pretty Boxes: How the Rise of Professional Organizing Shows Us the Way We Work Isn't Working (University of Chicago Press, 2024), Carrie M. Lane introduces us to this world of professional organizers and offers new insight into the domains of work and home, which are forever entangled—especially for women.

The female-dominated organizing profession didn’t have a name until the 1980s, but it is now the subject of countless reality shows, podcasts, and magazines. Lane draws on interviews with organizers, including many of the field’s founders, to trace the profession’s history and uncover its enduring appeal to those seeking meaningful, flexible, self-directed work. Taking readers behind the scenes of real-life organizing sessions, More Than Pretty Boxes details the strategies organizers use to help people part with their belongings, and it also explores the intimate, empathetic relationships that can form between clients and organizers.

But perhaps most importantly, More Than Pretty Boxes helps us think through an interconnected set of questions around neoliberal work arrangements, overconsumption, emotional connection, and the deeply gendered nature of paid and unpaid work. Ultimately, Lane situates organizing at the center of contemporary conversations around how work isn’t working anymore and makes a case for organizing’s radical potential to push back against the overwhelming demands of work and the home, too often placed on women’s shoulders. Organizers aren’t the sole answer to this crisis, but their work can help us better understand both the nature of the problem and the sorts of solace, support, and solutions that might help ease it.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is at the intersection of space, behavior, and identity. He is currently conducting research about the negotiation that humans make between their identity and the spaces they inhabit. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his personal website, Google Scholar, Bluesky @professorjohnst.bsky.social,Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at [email protected].

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A. L. McClanan's Griffinology: The Griffin's Place in Myth, History and Art (Reaktion, 2024) is a fascinating exploration of the mythical creature's many depictions in human culture. Drawing on a wealth of historical and literary sources, this book shows how the griffin has captured the imagination of people for over 5,000 years, representing power, transcendence and even divinity. It explores the history and symbolism of griffins in art, from their appearances in ancient Egyptian magic wands to medieval bestiaries, and from medieval coats of arms to corporate logos today. The use of the griffin as a symbol of power and protection is surveyed throughout history and into modern times. Beautifully illustrated, this book should appeal to all those interested in monsters, magic and the mystical, as well as art and history.

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For more than 70 years, South Korea has woven the threat of North Korea into daily life. But now that threat has become mundane, and South Korean national security addresses family, public health, and national unity. Banal Security: Queer Korea in the Time of Viruses (Helsinki University Press, 2023) illustrates how as a result, queer Koreans are seen to represent a viral threat to national security. Taking readers from police stations and the Constitutional Court to queer activist offices and pride festivals, Timothy Gitzen shows how security weaves through daily life and diffuses the queer threat, in a context where queer Koreans are treated as viral carriers, disruptions to public order, and threats to family and culture.

Timothy Gitzen is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Wake Forest University.

Qing Shen recently obtained his PhD in anthropology from Uppsala University, Sweden.

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Shehnaz Haqqani's new book Feminism, Tradition and Change in Contemporary Islam: Negotiating Islamic Law and Gender (Oneworld 2024), masterfully blends textual analysis of pre-modern and modern Islamic consensus with qualitative interviews with Muslims in the contemporary United States, to track how notions of what constitutes Islamic and Islamic tradition shift over time. We learn from her interlocutors that certain Islamic legal rulings can be negotiated, as in the case of child marriage, sexual slavery or even female inheritance, while other legal consensus, such as around women’s interfaith marriage or women leading mixed-gender prayers are not negotiable. Haqqani incisively swifts through these various standards of negotiations and arrives at how legal rulings pertaining to Muslim women’s experiences are met with resistance. It seems then that matters of urgency and relevance, which are inevitably political, dedicate when Islamic law and/or tradition can be negotiated. Haqqani’s book illuminates how Islamic tradition has always been flexible, but male dominated scholarly consensus still dedicates this flexibility (or rather inflexibility from an Islamic feminist perspective). This book will be of interest to those who think on gender, Islam, Islamic feminism, Islamic law, and much more.

Dr. Shehnaz Haqqani is an assistant professor at Mercer University and specialises in Islam, with a focus on gender and sexuality. She is a host of the podcast New Books Network.

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Visual Anthropology of Indian Films: Religious Communities and Cultural Traditions in Bollywood and Beyond (Routledge, 2024) provides a unique insider’s look at the world’s largest film industry, now globally known as ‘Bollywood’ and challenges existing notions about Indian films.

Indian films have been a worldwide phenomenon for decades. Chapters in this edited volume take a fresh view of various hidden gems by maestros such as Raj Kapoor, Bimal Roy, V. Shantaram, Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Mrinal Sen, Shakti Samant, Rishikesh Mukherjee, and others. Other chapters provide a pioneering review and analysis of the portrayal of Indian religious communities such as Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and Parsis. The themes covered include unique Indian feminism and male chauvinism, environment and climate issues, international locations and diaspora tourism, religious harmony and conflict, the India-Pakistan relationship, asceticism, and renunciation in Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism. Unlike many recent studies of Indian films, these chapters do not distinguish between popular and serious cinema. Many chapters focus on Hindi films, but others bring insights from films made in other parts of India and its neighbouring countries.

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In 1980, Charles Wetli---a Miami-based medical examiner and self-proclaimed “cult expert” of Afro-Caribbean religions---identified what he called “excited delirium syndrome.” Soon, medical examiners began using the syndrome regularly to describe the deaths of Black men and women during interactions with police. Police and medical examiners claimed that Black people with so-called excited delirium exhibited superhuman strength induced from narcotics abuse. It was fatal heart failure that killed them, examiners said, not forceful police restraints. 

In Excited Delirium: Race, Police Violence, and the Invention of a Disease (Duke University Press, 2024), Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús examines this fabricated medical diagnosis and its use to justify and erase police violence against Black and Brown communities. Exposing excited delirium syndrome’s flawed diagnostic criteria, she outlines its inextricable ties to the criminalization of Afro-Latiné religions. Beliso-De Jesús demonstrates that it is yet a further example of the systemic racism that pervades law enforcement in which the culpability for state violence is shifted from the state onto its victims. In so doing, she furthers understanding of the complex layers of medicalized state-sanctioned violence against people of color in the United States.

Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús is Olden Street Professor of American Studies at Princeton University and author of Electric Santería: Racial and Sexual Assemblages of Transnational Religion.

Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).

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War forced millions of Syrians from their homes. It also forced them to rethink the meaning of home itself.

In 2011, Syrians took to the streets demanding freedom. Brutal government repression transformed peaceful protests into one of the most devastating conflicts of our times, killing hundreds of thousands and displacing millions. 

The Home I Worked to Make: Voices from the New Syrian Diaspora (Liveright, 2024) takes Syria’s refugee outflow as its point of departure. Based on hundreds of interviews conducted across more than a decade, it probes a question as intimate as it is universal: What is home? With gripping immediacy, Syrians now on five continents share stories of leaving, losing, searching, and finding (or not finding) home. Across this tapestry of voices, a new understanding emerges: home, for those without the privilege of taking it for granted, is both struggle and achievement. Recasting “refugee crises” as acts of diaspora-making, The Home I Worked to Make challenges readers to grapple with the hard-won wisdom of those who survive war and to see, with fresh eyes, what home means in their own lives.

Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at [email protected]. Twitter and IG: @robbyref Website: www.robertomazza.org

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The Ethnographer's Way: A Handbook for Multidimensional Research Design (Duke UP, 2024) guides researchers through the exciting process of turning an initial idea into an in-depth research project. Kristin Peterson and Valerie Olson introduce “multidimensioning,” a method for planning projects that invites scholars to examine their research interests from all angles. Researchers learn to integrate seemingly disparate groups, processes, sites, and things into a unified conceptual framework. The handbook’s ten modules walk readers step-by-step, from the initial lightbulb moment to constructing research descriptions, planning data gathering, writing grant and dissertation proposals, and preparing for fieldwork. Designed for ethnographers and those working across disciplines, these modules provide examples of multidimensional research projects with exercises readers can utilize to formulate their own projects. The authors incorporate group work into each module to break the isolation common in academic project design. In so doing, Peterson and Olson’s handbook provides essential support and guidance for researchers working at all levels and stages of a project.

In this conversation, we talk about: how this book emerged out years of teaching and experimenting with how to craft a compelling object of study; what "multidimensional research design" is; examples of multidimensional ethnographies that capture our attention by juxtaposing surprising concepts; the power of cultivating intuition; holding together contradictions through "tensegrity"; the importance of community and feedback; how creating community agreements strengthens group work; the highs and lows of the research process; how you can use the modules in the handbook to generate a project grid you can draw on for grant writing and fieldwork.  

This episode is hosted by Elena Sobrino. Elena is a lecturer in Anthropology at Tufts University. Her research explores volunteer work, union histories, and environmentalism in the Flint water crisis. She is currently working on an article about the politics of fatigue, and teaching classes on science and technology studies, ethnographies of crisis, and global racisms. You can read more about her work at elenasobrino.site.

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To understand elders' experiences of aging in place, sociologist Stacy Torres spent five years with longtime New York City residents as they coped with health setbacks, depression, gentrification, financial struggles, the accumulated losses of neighbors, friends, and family, and other everyday challenges. The sensitive portrait Torres paints in At Home in the City: Growing Old in Urban America (University of California Press, 2025), moves us beyond stereotypes of older people as either rich and pampered or downtrodden and frail to capture the multilayered complexity of late life.

These pages chronicle how a nondescript bakery in Manhattan served as a public living room, providing company to ease loneliness and a sympathetic ear to witness the monumental and mundane struggles of late life. Through years of careful observation, Torres peels away the layers of this oft-neglected social world and explores the constellation of relationships and experiences that Western culture often renders invisible or frames as a problem. At Home in the City strikes a realistic balance as it highlights how people find support, flex their resilience, and assert their importance in their communities in old age.

Interviewee: Stacy Torres is Assistant Professor of Sociology in the School of Nursing at the University of California, San Francisco.

Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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It is only in recent years that sociologists and historians of the social sciences have given empire the attention it deserves in histories of the discipline. In this context, George Steinmetz’s The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought: French Sociology and the Overseas Empire (Princeton University Press) is likely to be a touchstone text in these debates. Providing a new history of the French national discipline inspired by a ‘Neo-Bourdieusian Historical Sociology of Science’, Steinmetz highlights the centrality of ‘colonial sociology’, work centered on and/or created in the French overseas colonies and protectorates to the discipline’s development. 

The French state, eager to consolidate its empire after World War II, were eager to draw on the expertise of sociologists in pursuing this goal; as Steinmetz shows therefore, during this period, a focus on ‘the colonial’ became central to French sociology to the extent that roughly half the French sociological field could be considered ‘colonial sociologists’. Despite this entanglement with the French state these colonial sociologists became strong critics of imperialism. Alongside the many stories he uncovers Steinmetz explores in depth the case of four such colonial sociologists: Raymond Aron, Jacque Berque, Georges Balandier and Pierre Bourdieu, seeking to show not just the centrality of colonialism to each writer but how their experiences of empire formed their basis for their future work; for example, how Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, capital and field can be traced to his experiences in colonial Algeria.

In our discussion, which also marks the imminent release of the text in paperback, George takes us through this hugely enlightening text, including reflections on why there may have been some ‘disciplinary amnesia’ in sociology’s unwillingness to confront empire, the relations between sociology and other imperial disciplines, how sociologists from the colonies developed their own work, the lessons from his text about how we should confront colonial sociologists and whether Durkheim had an ‘imperial gaze’.

Your host, Matt Dawson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow and is the author of G.D.H. Cole and British Sociology: A Study in Semi-Alienation (2024, Palgrave Macmillan), among other books.

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A fascinating interspecies relationship can be seen among the horse breeding pastoralists in the Altai and Saian Mountains of Inner Asia. Growing up in a community with close human-horse relationships, in The Horse in My Blood: Multispecies Kinship in the Altai and Saian Mountains (Berghahn Books, 2024), Victoria Soyan Peemot uses her knowledge of the local language and horsemanship practices. Building upon Indigenous research epistemologies, she engages with the study of how the human-horse relationships interact with each other, experience injustices and develop resilience strategies as multispecies unions.

Victoria Soyan Peemot is research fellow in Indigenous studies at the University of Helsinki supported by the Kone Foundation. Currently she is a JSPS visiting researcher at the Center for Northeast Asian Studies, Tohoku University. She is a cultural anthropologist who specialises in ethnography of mobile pastoralism in the transborder Altai and Saian Mountainous region of Inner Asia. Victoria’s research interests include Indigenous research epistemologies, human-environment relationships, and museum anthropology.

Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of economic anthropology, medical anthropology, hope studies, and the anthropology of borders and frontiers. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

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Popular discourse around British Muslims has often been dominated by a focus on Muslim women and their sartorial choices, particularly the hijab and niqab. British Bangladeshi Muslims in the East End: The Changing Landscape of Dress and Language (Manchester UP, 2024) by Dr. Fatima Rajina takes a different angle and focuses on Muslim men, examining how factors like the global war on terror influenced and changed their sartorial choices and use of language. The book denaturalises the ubiquitous and deeply problematic security lens through which knowledge of Muslims has been produced in the past two decades.

British Bangladeshi Muslims in the East End offers an alternative reading of these communities and how their political subjectivities emerge. Drawing on historical events, field research and existing academic work, the book aims to address the multiple ways British Bangladeshi Muslim men and women create their relationship with dress and language. This is the first book to empirically examine how dress and language shape the identities of British Bangladeshi Muslims in the East End, using in-depth analysis useful for anyone interested in the study of British Muslims broadly. While the book focuses on a specific Muslim community, the emerging themes demonstrate the interconnectedness of Muslims locally and globally and how they manifest their identities through dress and language.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Abandoned airports. Shipping containers. Squatted hotels. These are just three of the many unusual places that have housed refugees in the past decade. The story of international migration is often told through personal odysseys and dangerous journeys, but when people arrive at their destinations a more mundane task begins: refugees need a place to stay. Governments and charities have adopted a range of strategies in response to this need. Some have sequestered refugees in massive camps of glinting metal. Others have hosted them in renovated office blocks and disused warehouses. They often end up in prefabricated shelters flown in from abroad.

Fragments of Home: Refugee Housing and the Politics of Shelter (Stanford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Tom Scott-Smith focuses on seven examples of emergency shelter, from Germany to Jordan, which emerged after the great "summer of migration" in 2015. Drawing on detailed ethnographic research into these shelters, the book reflects on their political implications and opens up much bigger questions about humanitarian action. By exploring how aid agencies and architects approached this basic human need, Dr. Scott-Smith demonstrates how shelter has many elements that are hard to reconcile or combine; shelter is always partial and incomplete, producing mere fragments of home. Ultimately, he argues that current approaches to emergency shelter have led to destructive forms of paternalism and concludes that the principle of autonomy can offer a more fruitful approach to sensitive and inclusive housing.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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How do we confront difference and change in a rapidly shifting environment? Many indigenous peoples are facing this question in their daily lives. Sensing Others: Voicing Batek Ethical Lives at the Edge of a Malaysian Rain Forest (U Nebraska Press, 2024) explores the lives of Batek people in Peninsular Malaysia amid the strange and the new in the borderland between protected national park and oil palm plantation. As their ancestral forests disappear around them, Batek people nevertheless attempt to live well among the strange Others they now encounter: out-of-place animals and plants, traders, tourists, poachers, and forest guards. How Batek people voice their experiences of the good and the strange in relation to these Others challenges essentialized notions of cultural and species difference and the separateness of ethical worlds.

Drawing on meticulous, long-term ethnographic research with Batek people, Alice Rudge argues that as people seek to make habitable a constantly changing landscape, what counts as Otherness is always under negotiation. Anthropology’s traditional dictum to “make the strange familiar, and the familiar strange” creates a binary between the familiar and the Other, often encapsulating Indigenous lives as the archetypal Other to the “modern” worldview. Yet living well amid precarity involves constantly negotiating Otherness’s ambivalences, as people, plants, animals, and places can all become familiar, strange, or both. Sensing Others reveals that when looking from the boundary, what counts as Otherness is impossible to pin down.

Alice Rudge is a Lecturer in Anthropology at SOAS, University of London. She works at the intersection of environmental anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and science and technology studies. She focuses on themes of alterity, ethics, Indigenous justice, plantation agriculture, and sustainable scientific practice to explore conflicting questions of what it means to live a good life in conditions of environmental breakdown.

Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of economic anthropology, medical anthropology, hope studies, and the anthropology of borders and frontiers. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

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When the last 36 inhabitants of St Kilda, 40 miles west of the Scottish Hebrides, were evacuated in 1930, the archipelago at ‘the edge of the world’ lost its permanent population after five millennia.

It has long been accepted that the islanders’ failure to adapt to the modern world was its demise. Andrew Fleming overturns the traditional view. Unafraid of highlighting dark times, he shows how they sacrificed their reputation as an uncorrupted, ideal society to embrace and exploit the tourist trade. Creating a prestigious tweed, exporting the ancestors of today’s Hebridean sheep, the islanders gained access to consumer goods and learned how to play politics to their advantage.

The Gravity of Feathers: Fame, Fortune and the Story of St Kilda (Birlinn, 2024) by Dr. Andrew Fleming tells the absorbing and eventful story of St Kilda from earliest times, up to the evacuation and its aftermath. Previously untapped sources and fresh insights bring to life the personalities, feelings, attitudes and rich culture of the islanders themselves, as well as the numerous outsiders who engaged with the remote island community.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Devotional Fanscapes: Bollywood Star Deities, Devotee-Fans, and Cultural Politics in India and Beyond (Rowman and Littlefield, 2023) examines how fans worship film stars as deities. Focusing on temples dedicated to Bollywood (Hindi cinema) stars and the artifacts produced by Hindi and Tamil cinema fans, Shalini Kakar illustrates how the fan constructs their identity as a devotee and that of the star as a deity. Extending her research from India to the US, Kakar highlights the transnational dimensions of this phenomenon to demonstrate the degree to which devotional fan practices (fan-bhakti) and fan artifacts can help us rethink art, religion, and politics. With its interdisciplinary approach, this book addresses how fan-bhakti is performed in the global landscape, in the process augmenting new religious models and identities based on the idea of the “cinematic sacred.”

For more information, go here.

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Today’s book is: Sin Padres, Ni Papeles: Unaccompanied Migrant Youth Coming of Age in the United States (U California Press, 2024), a which explores how each year, thousands of youth endure harrowing unaccompanied and undocumented migrations across Central America and Mexico to the United States in pursuit of a better future. Drawing on the firsthand narratives of migrant youth in Los Angeles, California, Dr. Stephanie L. Canizales shows that while a lucky few do find reprieve, many are met by resource-impoverished relatives who are unable to support them, exploitative jobs that are no match for the high cost of living, and individualistic social norms that render them independent and alone. Sin Padres, Ni Papeles illuminates how unaccompanied teens who grow up as undocumented low-wage workers navigate unthinkable material and emotional hardship, find the agency and hope that is required to survive, and discover what it means to be successful during the transition to adulthood in the United States.

Our guest is: Dr. Stephanie L. Canizales, who is a researcher, author, and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Faculty Director of the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative. She specializes in the study of international migration and immigrant integration, with particular interest in the experiences of Latin American migrants in the United States. Throughout her research and writing, Stephanie explores the role of immigration policy in shaping the everyday lives of migrant children and their families, how immigrants and the communities they arrive to (re)make one another mutually, and the meanings immigrants make of success and wellbeing within an increasingly unequal US society. She is the author of Sin Padres, Ni Papeles.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.

Playlist for listeners:

• We Are Not Dreamers
• Immigration Realities
• The Ungrateful Refugee
• Who Gets Believed
• Reunited

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by posting, assigning or sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 225+ Academic Life episodes? You’ll find them all archived here.

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What can social spaces tell us about social relations in society? How do everyday social spaces like teashops, reading rooms and libraries reify-or subvert-dominant social structures like caste and gender? 

These are the questions that Social Spaces and the Public Sphere:: A Spatial-history of Modernity in Kerala (Routledge, 2023) explores through a study of modern Kerala. Using archival material, discourse analysis, participant observation and personal interviews, this book traces the transformation of public spaces through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The volume focuses on how 'modernity' has also been a struggle for access to public spaces, and non-institutional spaces like teashops, markets, public roads, temple grounds, reading-rooms and libraries have all been crucial to how political culture was shaped, and how dominant hegemonies-caste, class or capital-have been challenged. It suggests that the secular public sphere that emerged in the last century in Kerala was a result of the constant negotiations between conflicting ideas which were put to test in these social spaces. 

At a time when digital spaces are fast replacing physical ones, this book is a timely reminder of the struggles that led to the emergence of secular public spaces in Kerala. It contributes to similar studies on public space that have emerged from other parts of the world over the last decades. A major contribution to understanding modern India, this book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of social history, political science, political sociology, gender studies, linguistics, and South Asian studies.

DISCOUNT CODES: Routledge has offered two discount codes that you can use to purchase this book on their website. The discount codes are ESA03 (UK) and SMA24 (USA). 

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Cosplay, born from the fusion of ‘costume’ and ‘play’, transcends mere dress-up by transforming enthusiasts of TV shows, movies, books or video games into living embodiments of their cherished characters. Cosplay and the Dressing of Identity (Reaktion, 2024) by Dr. Vivian Asimos is a close exploration of the vibrant world of cosplay, showing what makes it so captivating for so many.

The book frames cosplay as an enactment and embodiment of mythology, revealing its inherent complexity, and providing valuable insight into cosplayers’ experiences. Exploring cosplay performances, the skills involved and its community, the book shows how cosplayers build a strong connection to the characters and stories they treasure, and ultimately how they are constructing their own identities.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Around the world, millions are forcibly displaced by conflict, climate change, and persecution. Some cross international borders, while others are displaced within their own countries. In We Wait for a Miracle: Health Care and the Forcibly Displaced (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023), Muhammad H. Zaman shares poignant stories across continents to highlight the health care experiences of refugees and forced migrants. For many of these people, health risks unfortunately become part of the fabric of everyday life as they navigate new countries that treat them with varying degrees of care and indifference.

Across widely varied local systems, countries of origin, health concerns, and other contexts, Zaman finds that barriers to health care share these key factors: trust, social network, efficiency of the health system, and the regulatory framework of the host environment. A combination of these factors explains difficulties in accessing health care across the geographic and geopolitical spectrum and challenges the existing global public health framework, which is based entirely on local context. In moving stories that span seven countries—Sudan, South Sudan, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Pakistan, Colombia, and Venezuela—Zaman shares the everyday struggles of refugees, the internally displaced, and the stateless in accessing the health care they need.

This unique look at an urgent global challenge addresses the issue of access for populations that are currently in distress due to civil war, economic collapse, or a conflict driven by external state actors. Organic social networks and trust, rather than top-down policies, are often what save the lives of migrants, refugees, and the stateless. Focusing on that trust—and its deficit—in camps, urban slums, hospitals, and clinics, Zaman combines personal and journalistic accounts of refugees with broad systemic analysis on global health care access to compare problems and solutions in different regions and provide holistic policy and practice recommendations for refugees, internally displaced persons, and stateless populations.

In this episode, Ibrahim Fawzy interviews Muhammad Zaman about the healthcare experiences of refugees, and the power of storytelling.

Ibrahim Fawzy is a literary translator and writer based in Boston. His interests include translation studies, Arabic literature, ecocriticism, disability studies, and migration literature.

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How do street-level bureaucrats in Austria’s public service deal with linguistic diversity? In this episode of the Language on the Move podcast, Ingrid Piller speaks with Dr Clara Holzinger (University of Vienna) about her PhD research investigating how employment officers deal with the day-to-day communication challenges arising when clients have low levels of German language proficiency.

For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here.

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Tribe-state relations are a foundational element of authoritarian bargains in the Middle East, and in particular in the Gulf States. However, the structures of governance built upon that foundation exhibit wide differences. What explains this variation in the salience of kinship authority? 

Through a case comparison of Kuwait, Qatar and Oman, in Kinship, State Formation and Governance in the Arab Gulf States (Edinburgh University Press, 2022) Dr. Scott Weiner shows that variation in tribal access to limited resources before state building can account for these differences. Its conclusions are based on seven months of archival research and interviews in Arabic and English, and reveal new details about state formation on the Arabian Peninsula.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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What good is a good sense of humour especially when the humour may be ethically questionable? Although humour seems a valuable part of a good conversation and indeed a good life, jokes have never seemed more morally problematic than they do now. How can we then evaluate quips, gibes, pranks, teasing, light mockery, sarcasm when they can all too often be mean, deceitful, disrespectful, humiliating, cruel? And how is a moral philosopher to evaluate such dilemmas without taking himself and morality too seriously or too lightly? 

In Wisecracks: Humor and Morality in Everyday Life (University of Chicago Press, 2024), David W. Shoemaker considers the interplay between humor and morality. With wit and evident joy, Shoemaker considers how "wisecracks" between family and friends are of ethical value despite how morally suspect they may appear. In arguing for the moral status of a wisecrack or a joke as partly resting on the wisecracker's intentions and motives, Shoemaker goes on to show just how complicated and sometimes unwarranted the moral complaints against humor are, despite what many may think. Wisecracks may remain, at the book's end, far from benign or an unalloyed good, but unlike in Plato's ideal republic, Shoemaker is convinced we need to keep them coming. 

Damian Maher is a fellow by examination at All Souls College, University of Oxford.

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The Burning Forest: India's War Against the Maoists (Verso, 2019) by Nandini Sundar is an empathetic, moving account of what drives indigenous peasants to support armed struggle despite severe state repression, including lives lost, homes and communities destroyed.

Over the past decade, the heavily forested,mineral-rich region of Bastar in central India has emerged as one of the most militarized sites in the country. The government calls the Maoist insurgency the “biggest security threat” to India. In 2005, a state-sponsored vigilante movement, the Salwa Judum, burnt hundreds of villages, driving their inhabitants into state-controlled camps, drawing on counterinsurgency techniques developed in Malaysia, Vietnam and elsewhere. Apart from rapes and killings, hundreds of ‘surrendered’ Maoist sympathisers were conscripted as auxiliaries. The conflict continues to this day, taking a toll on the lives of civilians, security forces and Maoist cadres.

In 2007, Sundar and others took the Indian government to the Supreme Court over the human rights violations arising out ofthe conflict. In a landmark judgment, the Court in 2011 banned state supportfor vigilantism.

The Burning Forest describes this brutal war in the heart of India, and what it tells us about the courts, media and politics of the country. The result is a granular and critical ethnography of Indian democracy over a decade.

Nandini Sundar is a Professor of Sociology at the Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University, and has been visiting Bastar for over 25 years. Her first book, Subalterns and Sovereigns: An Anthropological History of Bastar (1854-1996) is an authoritative account of Bastar's colonial and post-colonial past.

Stuti Roy has recently graduated with an MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies from the University of Oxford. 

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In the latest edition of Ethnographic Marginalia, we talk with Roxani Krystalli about her new book Good Victims: The Political as a Feminist Question (Oxford UP, 2024). Roxani describes the dilemmas she faced in her research on encounters between those recognized as victims of the Colombian conflict and the state agencies that attend them. She also explains what makes this a feminist book—not because of a focus on gender, but a feminist sensibility that questions categories like politics and victimhood and how they influence each other. Finally, she ends by describing the books that inspired her and telling us about her new project focused on love.

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An Unholy Rebellion, Killing the Gods: Political Ideology and Insurrection in the Mayan Popul Vuh and the Andean Huarochiri Manuscript (University of Nebraska Press, 2024) is the first comprehensive comparison of two of the greatest epics of the Indigenous peoples of Latin America: the Popul Vuh of the Quiché Maya of Guatemala and the Huarochiri Manuscript of Peru's lower Andean regions. The rebellious tone of both epics illuminates a heretofore overlooked aspect in Latin American Indigenous colonial writing: the sense of political injustice and spiritual sedition directed equally at European-imposed religious practice and at aspects of Indigenous belief. The link between spirituality and political upheaval in Native colonial writing has not been sufficiently explored until this work.

Sharonah Esther Fredrick applies a multidisciplinary approach that utilizes history, literature, archaeology, and anthropology in equal measure to situate the Mayan and Andean narratives within the paradigms of their developing civilizations. An Unholy Rebellion, Killing the Gods decolonizes readers' perspective by setting Mayan and Andean authorship center stage and illustrates the schisms and shifts in Native civilizations and literatures of Latin America in a way that other literary studies, which relegate Native literature as a prelude to Spanish-language literature, have not yet done. By demonstrating the power of Native American philosophy within the context of the conquest of Latin America, Fredrick illuminates the profound spiritual dissension and radically conflicting ideologies of the Mesoamerican and Andean worlds before and after the Spanish Conquest.

Books mentioned:

• Breaking the Maya Code by Michael Coe
• The Huarochiri Manuscript translated by Frank Salomon
• Popol Vuh translated by Dennis Tedlock

Sharonah Esther Fredrick teaches in the College of Charleston's Department of Hispanic Studies. She is the Colonial Americas editor for Routledge Resources Online--The Renaissance World.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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Each of us is endowed with an inheritance--a set of evolved biases and cultural tools that shape every facet of our behavior. For countless generations, this inheritance has taken us to ever greater heights: driving the rise of more sophisticated technologies, more organized religions, more expansive empires. But now, for the first time, it's failing us. We find ourselves hurtling toward a future of unprecedented political polarization, deadlier war, and irreparable environmental destruction.

In Inheritance: The Evolutionary Origins of the Modern World (Harvard University Press, 2024), renowned anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse offers a sweeping account of how our biases have shaped humanity's past and imperil its future. He argues that three biases--conformism, religiosity, and tribalism--drive human behavior everywhere. Forged by natural selection and harnessed by thousands of years of cultural evolution, these biases catalyzed the greatest transformations in human history, from the birth of agriculture and the arrival of the first kings to the rise and fall of human sacrifice and the creation of multiethnic empires. Taking us deep into modern-day tribes, including terrorist cells and predatory ad agencies, Whitehouse shows how, as we lose the cultural scaffolding that allowed us to manage our biases, the world we've built is spiraling out of control.

By uncovering how human nature has shaped our collective history, Inheritance unveils a surprising new path to solving our most urgent modern problems. The result is a powerful reappraisal of the human journey, one that transforms our understanding of who we are, and who we could be.

Harvey Whitehouse is Director of the Centre for the Study of Social Cohesion at the University of Oxford.

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In 1966 Benedict Anderson published 'The Languages of Indonesian Politics', a seminal paper exploring the development of Indonesian as a new language for talking about national politics. In that paper Anderson underlined the contrast between the formal/official style of Indonesian news reports and the colloquial, playful speech style of ordinary Jakartans as depicted through comics. Nearly six decades on, how do we understand the 'languages' of Indonesian politics? How are figures of politics constituted through language? 

Associate Professor in Indonesian Studies at The University of Sydney, Dwi Noverini Djenar, expands on these issues. She has worked on the stylistics of adolescent literature, focusing on the production and circulation of styles and their relationship to sociolinguistic change. Her current research focuses on language and relations among social actors in public spheres, particularly in broadcast settings. Novi is co-author of Style and Intersubjectivity in Youth Interaction (2018) and co-editor of Signs of Deference, Signs of Demeanour: Interlocutor Reference and Self-Other Relations across Southeast Asian Communities (NUS Press, 2023).

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Care Activism: Migrant Domestic Workers, Movement-Building, and Communities of Care (U Illinois Press, 2023) challenges the stereotype of downtrodden migrant caregivers by showing that care workers have distinct ways of caring for themselves, for each other, and for the larger transnational community of care workers and their families. Ethel Tungohan illuminates how the goals and desires of migrant care worker activists goes beyond political considerations like policy changes and overturning power structures.

Dr. Tungohan is the Canada Research Chair in Canadian Migration Policy, Impacts and Activism, and Associate Professor of Politics at York University. She has also been appointed as a Broadbent Institute Fellow. Previously, she was the Grant Notley Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Alberta’s Department of Political Science. She received her doctoral degree in Political Science and Women and Gender Studies from the University of Toronto. Her research looks at migrant labor, specifically assessing migrant activism. Dr. Tungohan specializes in socially engaged research and is actively involved in grassroots migrant organizations such as Gabriela-Ontario and Migrante-Canada.

Dr. Tungohan’s hosting a podcast channel, Academic Aunties. You can find her previous conversation with NBN host Dr. Christina Gessler here.

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Carceral Recovery: Prisons, Drug Markets, and the New Pharmaceutical Self (Lexington Books, 2023) explores the interrelation between carceral conditions and substance use by considering the intersections between drug markets, sidewalks, households, and prisons in Baltimore. Sanaullah Khan argues that while housing, medicalization, and incarceration fundamentally create the conditions for substance use, individuals are increasingly experiencing the paradoxes of care and punishment by being propelled into a new regime of recovery which creates new pharmaceuticalized identities. By shedding light on how addiction and the impetus for healing moves through families and institutions of the state, Khan provides an account of the different competing forces that shape substance use, recovery, and relapse. Through a combination of archival research and ethnography, the book makes a case for disentangling punishment from recovery.

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What happens when the elitist space of 'Western' classical music seeks to diversify itself? And what are the social effects worked through diversity discourses in classical music institutions? The Sound of Difference: Race, Class and the Politics of 'Diversity' in Classical Music (Manchester UP, 2024) by Dr. Kristina Kolbe addresses these concerns by critically examining how diversity work takes shape in a cultural sector so deeply implicated in hierarchies of class, structures of whiteness, and legacies of imperialism.

The book draws from ethnographic and interview data to analyse how diversity discourses become constructed in the organisational and creative processes of music production. From rehearsal and performance practices to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the sector's commitment to change, Dr. Kolbe reveals the institutional constraints and precarious labour relations that form around diversity work in classical music and skillfully considers what these processes can tell us about the remaking of class, race, and racism today.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Queer men's cultures of intimacy have long been sites of fierce contestation. Indeed, debates have raged for decades over issues such as monogamy, safer sex, sexual racism and gay marriage. The introduction of the smartphone in 2008 only intensified these debates whilst also raising a further set of questions which are explored in this open access book.

Through interviews with a diverse group of 43 queer men about their smartphone mediated intimacies, Digital Intimacies: Queer Men and Smartphones in Times of Crisis (Bloomsbury, 2024) reveals that queer men use their smartphones, not simply to arrange intimate encounters, but more specifically to gain a sense of control over the parts of their intimate lives that make them feel most vulnerable. For instance, some use messaging apps to gain a sense of control over intimate conversations that they feel too vulnerable to have in person. Others use the 'block' function on dating apps to feel in control of the racism and transphobia they are vulnerable to on these apps.

Digital Intimacies therefore illuminates not only hitherto underexplored aspects of queer men's cultures of intimacy but crucially also brings into view previously obscured cultural dynamics, gaining insight into the historical moments in which they occur.

Jamie Hakim is Lecturer at King's College London, UK.

James Cummings is Lecturer at the University of York, UK.

Qing Shen is a PhD candidate in anthropology at Uppsala University, Sweden.

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Today’s book is: The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World (Princeton University Press, 2024), by Dr. Allison Pugh, which explores the human connections that underlie our work, arguing that what people do for each other is valuable and worth preserving. Drawing on in-depth interviews and observations with people in a broad range of professions—from physicians, teachers, and coaches to chaplains, therapists, caregivers, and hairdressers—Dr. Pugh develops the concept of “connective labor,” a kind of work that relies on empathy, the spontaneity of human contact, and a mutual recognition of each other’s humanity. The threats to connective labor are not only those posed by advances in AI or apps; Dr. Pugh demonstrates how profit-driven campaigns imposing industrial logic shrink the time for workers to connect, enforce new priorities of data and metrics, and introduce standardized practices that hinder our ability to truly see each other. She concludes with profiles of organizations where connective labor thrives, offering practical steps for building a social architecture that works. Vividly illustrating how connective labor enriches the lives of individuals and binds our communities together, The Last Human Job is a compelling argument for us to recognize, value, and protect humane work in an increasingly automated and disconnected world.

Our guest is: Dr. Allison Pugh, who is Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University, and the 2024-25 Vice President of the American Sociological Association. She writes about how people forge connections and find meaning and dignity at work and at home. She is the author of The Tumbleweed Society: Working and Caring in an Age of Insecurity and Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children, and Consumer Culture. Her writing has appeared in leading publications such as The New Yorker, the New York Times, and the New Republic.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.

Playlist for listeners:

• Talking To Strangers
• Making A Meaningful Life
• How to Human
• Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World
• More Than A Glitch
• Meditation and the Academic Life
• Belonging: The Science of Creating Connection and Bridging Divides

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by posting, assigning or sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 225+ Academic Life episodes? You’ll find them all archived here.

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Dr Laura Smith-Khan speaks with Dr Anthea Vogl about her new book, Judging Refugees: Narrative and Oral Testimony in Refugee Status Determination (Cambridge UP, 2024). The conversation introduces listeners to the procedures involved in seeking asylum in the global north and how language is implicated throughout these processes. Discussing Dr Vogl’s new book and research, the podcast explores the difficult narrative demands these processes place on those seeking asylum, and the sociopolitical context underlying them. It reflects on the contributions scholars across disciplines have made and can make to law and policy reform, informing best practice, and advocating for more just systems.

For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here.

Follow Laura Smith-Khan on Bluesky and Twitter.

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Poverty, Gender and Health in the Slums of Bangladesh: Children of Crows (Routledge, 2024) provides comprehensive ethnographic accounts that depict the daily life experiences and health hardships encountered by young women and their families living in the slums of Dhaka city and the injustices they face. 

The analysis focuses on two specific historical eras: 2002-2003 and 2020-2022 and shows that despite recent improvements in employment opportunities and greater mobility for young women, their lives reflect ongoing challenges reminiscent of those faced two decades earlier. While national and global organizations acknowledge the nation's economic and social progress, those on the outskirts of society continue to grapple with enduring poverty. They are excluded from the advantages of economic growth, oppressed by unjust local, national, and global systems, discriminatory laws, and policies. Their struggles go unnoticed as they confront a slew of challenges, including slum evictions, enforced lockdowns, income losses, food insecurity, and ongoing crises related to health, injuries, fatalities, and exploitation and harassment by law enforcement and influential individuals within the slum and the city. After two decades, these obstacles persist, and life remains tenuous, with health severely compromised. This book will appeal to students, academics, and researchers in the fields of Public Health, Medical Anthropology, Gender Studies, Urban Studies, Development Studies, Social Sciences, as well as professionals engaged in urban health and poverty-related work.

Rituparna Patgiri is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Guwahati. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter.

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Digital Masquerade: Feminist Rights and Queer Media in China (NYU Press, 2023) offers a trenchant and singular analysis of the convergence of digital media, feminist and queer culture, and rights consciousness in China. Jia Tan examines the formation of what she calls “rights feminism,” or the emergence of rights consciousness in Chinese feminist formations, as well as queer activism and rights advocacy. Expanding on feminist and queer theory of masquerade, she develops the notion of “digital masquerade” to theorize the co-constitutive role of digital technology as assemblage and entanglement in the articulation of feminism, queerness, and rights.

Drawing from interviews with various feminist and queer media practitioners, participant observation at community events, and detailed analyses of a variety of media forms such as social media, electronic journals, digital filmmaking, film festivals, and dating app videos, Jia Tan captures the feminist, queer, and rights articulations that are simultaneously disruptive of and conditioned by state censorship, technological affordances, and dominant social norms.

Jia Tan is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies in the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Qing Shen is a PhD candidate in anthropology at Uppsala University, Sweden.

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What happens after colonial industries have run their course—after the factory closes and the fields go fallow? Set in the cinchona plantations of India’s Darjeeling Hills, Quinine's Remains: Empire’s Medicine and the Life Thereafter (U California Press, 2024) chronicles the history and aftermaths of quinine. Harvested from cinchona bark, quinine was malaria’s only remedy until the twentieth-century advent of synthetic drugs, and it was vital to the British Empire. Today, the cinchona plantations—and the roughly fifty thousand people who call them home—remain. Their futures, however, are unclear. The Indian government has threatened to privatize or shut down this seemingly obsolete and crumbling industry, but the plantation community, led by strident trade unions, has successfully resisted. Overgrown cinchona fields and shuttered quinine factories may appear the stuff of postcolonial and postindustrial ruination, but quinine’s remains are not dead. Rather, they have become the site of urgent efforts to redefine land and life for the twenty-first century. Quinine's Remains offers a vivid historical and ethnographic portrait of what it means to forge life after empire.

Rounak Bose is a doctoral student in History at the University of Delaware. His research explores questions of caste, religiosities, sacred infrastructures, and performance in the interstices of the colonial and postcolonial state, as well as mobilities and circulations across South Asia and Indian Ocean networks. Besides these specific interests, his disciplinary interests revolve around anthropology, literature, and public history, and the digital humanities. When not reading or writing in the university library, Rounak can be found running along Newark's hiking trails and petting the dogs he meets along the way. Link to twitter page

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Recent social and political psychological research indicates that increased access to ancestry testing has strengthened the notion of genetic essentialism among some groups, or the idea that our biology ties us to particular ethnic identities. This can boost a sense of cultural pride and prosocial behaviors among communities that are perceived to be similar. In the worst-case scenarios, however, this phenomenon can contribute to deeper social woes like misinformation, anti-science agendas, and even social hatred among those who believe in racial superiority. 

Using research from both the social sciences and the genetics literature as support, Ancestry Reimagined: Dismantling the Myth of Genetic Ethnicities (Oxford University Press, 2023) establishes realistic expectations about what we can learn from our DNA as a foundation for examining the psychological impact of ancestry testing, including the differences between how this information is perceived versus its reality. With this book, Dr. Kampourakis flexes his muscles as an esteemed interdisciplinary science educator and author to challenge these traditional social constructs, using the current genetic testing science as a myth busting tool.

Kampourakis argues that DNA ancestry testing cannot reveal a person's true ethnic identity because ethnic groups are socially and culturally constructed. In 10 accessible chapters, he explains the assumptions underlying the scientific study of ancestry, and the resulting paradoxes that are often overlooked. What the study of human DNA mostly shows is that human DNA variation is continuous, and it is not possible to clearly delimit ethnic groups based on DNA data. As a result, we all are members of a huge, extended family, and not of genetically distinct ethnic groups. What ancestry tests can provide are probabilistic estimations of similarities between the test-takers and particular reference populations. This does not devalue the results of these tests, however, because they can indeed provide some valuable information to people who may not know much about their ancestors. In fact, what the tests are very good at doing is finding close relatives, and this is perhaps why the whole enterprise should be rebranded as family, not ancestry, testing. Ultimately, this book reveals that genetic essentialism, biological ethnic identities, racial superiority, and similar social constructs are scientifically unsupported

Kostas Kampourakis is the author and editor of several books about evolution, genetics, philosophy and history of science, as well as the editor of the Cambridge University Press book series Understanding Life. He teaches biology and science education courses at the University of Geneva

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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Every hundred years, as the story goes, two angels wonder out loud whether the bees are still swarming. For as long as the bees are swarming, the angels are reassured, the world holds together. Still, the tale suggests, the angels live in anxious anticipation of the End. Local beekeepers in Bosnia and Herzegovina retell the old tale with growing unease, as their honeybees weather the ground effects of climate change.

Beekeeping in the End Times (Indiana UP, 2024) relates extreme weather events and quieter disasters that have been altering honey ecologies across Bosnia and Herzegovina since 2014. While world-wide endangerment of pollinators, and bees in particular, has been the subject of much global concern, effects of climate change on the indispensable honeybees, remain understudied. Drawing on a five-year long study, the book suggests that local apiarists' field observations resonate with many climate biologists' concerns and speculations about the future of plant-bee relations on the warming planet. Local practice also adds to the record complex and puzzling trends that make honey scarce in otherwise lush, biodiverse landscapes.

To Bosnian Muslims, honeybees are more than pollinators. They are inspired beings whose honey is another form of divinely revelation. To appreciate the meaning of honeybees and to grasp the dire ecological catastrophe underway, Jašarević reads contemporary environmental writings and Sufi texts, she listens to the seasoned beekeepers and collects local wisdom tales. From start to finish, Jašarević pores over key Islamic texts, the Quran and the Hadith, and their popular retellings. The Islamic end-times lore, the book proposes, holds surprising lessons on how to live and strive in the 'not yet,' stalling the apocalypse.

Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of economic anthropology, medical anthropology, hope studies, and the anthropology of borders and frontiers. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

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Atmospheric Violence: Disaster and Repair in Kashmir (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) grapples with the afterlife of environmental disasters and armed conflict and examines how people attempt to flourish despite and alongside continuing violence. Departing from conventional approaches to the study of disaster and conflict that have dominated academic studies of Kashmir, Omer Aijazi’s ethnography of life in the borderlands instead explores possibilities for imagining life otherwise, in an environment where violence is everywhere, or atmospheric.

Drawing on extensive fieldwork in the portion of Kashmir under Pakistan’s control and its surrounding mountainscapes, the book takes us to two remote mountainous valleys that have been shaped by recurring environmental disasters, as well as by the landscape of no-go zones, army barracks, and security checkpoints of the contested India/Pakistan border. Through a series of interconnected scenes from the lives of five protagonists, all of whom are precariously situated within their families or societies and rarely enjoy the expected protections of state or community, Aijazi reveals the movements, flows, and intimacies sustained by a landscape that enables alternative modes of life. Blurring the distinctions between story, theory, and activism, he explores what emerges when theory becomes a project of seeing and feeling from the non-normative standpoint of those who, like the book’s protagonists, do not subscribe to the rules by which most others have come to know the world.

Bringing the critical study of disaster into conversation with a radical humanist anthropology and the capaciousness of affect theory, held accountable to Black studies and Indigenous studies, Aijazi offers a decolonial approach to disaster studies centering not on trauma and rupture but rather on repair—the social labor through which communities living with disaster refuse the conditions of death imposed upon them and create viable lives for themselves, even amidst constant diminishment and world-annihilation.

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Extensively based on fieldwork material, From Tapas to Modern Yoga: Sādhus' Understanding of Embodied Practices (Equinox, 2024) primarily analyses embodied practices of ascetics belonging to four religious orders historically associated with the practice of yoga and hatha yoga. This focus on ascetics stems from the fact that yogic techniques probably developed in ascetic contexts, yet scholars have rarely focused their attention on non-international ascetic practitioners of yoga. Creating a confrontation between textual sources and ethnographic data, the book demonstrates how 'embodied practices' (austerities, yoga and hatha yoga) over the centuries accumulated layers of meanings and practices that coexist in the literature as well as in the words of contemporary sadhus. Drawing from conversations with these interlocutors, the book demonstrates the importance of ethnographic fieldwork in shedding light on past historical developments, transmissions, contemporary reinterpretation and innovation. The strength of the work lies in its methodological approach and in the richness of its materials: by analysing present situations through comparisons and the support of past evidence, the book not only fills an academic gap but also stimulates further research on this highly complex topic.

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Ginkgo Village: Trauma and Transformation in Rural China (Anu Press, 2023) provides an original and powerfully intimate bottom-up perspective on China’s recent tumultuous history. Drawing on ethnographic and life-history research, the book takes readers deep into a village in a mountainous region of central-eastern China known as Eyuwan. In the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, villagers in this region experienced terrible trauma and far-reaching socio‑economic and political change. In the civil war (1927–1949), they were slaughtered in fighting between Nationalist and Communist forces. During the Great Leap Forward (1958–1961), they suffered appalling famine. Since the 1990s, mass labor outmigration has lifted local villagers out of poverty and fueled major transformations in their circumstances and practices, social and family relationships, and values and aspirations.

At the heart of this book are eight tales that recreate Ginkgo Village life and the interactions between villagers and the researchers who visit them. These tales use storytelling to engender an empathetic understanding of Ginkgo Villagers’ often traumatic life experiences; to present concrete details about transformations in everyday village life in an engaging manner; and to explore the challenges and rewards of fieldwork research that attempts empathetic understanding across cultures.

Tamara Jacka is an Emeritus Professor in the College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University. A feminist social anthropologist, her main research interests are in gender, rural-to-urban migration and social change in contemporary China. She is the author of Rural Women in Urban China: Gender, Migration, and Social Change (2006), which won the Francis L.K. Hsu prize for best book in East Asian Anthropology.

Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of economic anthropology, medical anthropology, hope studies, and the anthropology of borders and frontiers. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

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Resigned Activism: Living with Pollution in Rural China (MIT Press, 2021) by Dr. Anna Lora-Wainwright digs deep into the paradoxes, ambivalences, and wide range of emotions and strategies people develop to respond to toxicity in everyday life.

An examination of the daily grind of living with pollution in rural China and of the varying forms of activism that develop in response. Residents of rapidly industrializing rural areas in China live with pollution every day. Villagers drink obviously tainted water and breathe visibly dirty air, afflicted by a variety of ailments—from arthritis to nosebleeds—that they ascribe to the effects of industrial pollution. In Resigned Activism, Anna Lora-Wainwright explores the daily grind of living with pollution in rural China and the varying forms of activism that develop in response. This revised edition offers expanded acknowledgment of the contributions of Lora-Wainwright’s collaborators in China. Lora-Wainwright finds that claims of health or environmental damage are politically sensitive, and that efforts to seek redress are frustrated by limited access to scientific evidence, growing socioeconomic inequalities, and complex local realities. Villagers, feeling powerless, often come to accept pollution as part of the environment; their activism is tempered by their resignation. Drawing on fieldwork done with teams of collaborators, Lora-Wainwright offers three case studies of “resigned activism” in rural China, examining the experiences of villagers who live with the effects of phosphorous mining and fertilizer production, lead and zinc mining, and electronic waste processing. 

The book also includes extended summaries of the in-depth research carried out by Ajiang Chen and his team in some of China’s “cancer villages,” village-sized clusters of high cancer incidence. These cases make clear the staggering human costs of development and the deeply uneven distribution of costs and benefits that underlie China’s economic power.

Dr. Elena Sobrino is a lecturer in Anthropology at Tufts University. Her research focuses on the politics of crisis in the American Rust Belt. She is currently teaching classes on science and technology studies, theories and ethnographies of crisis, and global racisms. You can read more about her work at elenasobrino.site.

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This is Gaza – a place of humanity and creativity, rich in culture and industry. A place now utterly devastated, its entire population displaced by a seemingly endless onslaught, its heritage destroyed.

Daybreak in Gaza: Stories of Palestinian Lives and Culture (Saqi Books, 2024) is a record of an extraordinary place and people, and of a culture preserved by the people themselves. Vignettes of artists, acrobats, doctors, students, shopkeepers and teachers offer stories of love, life, loss and survival. They display the wealth of Gaza’s cultural landscape and the breadth of its history.

Daybreak in Gaza humanises the people dismissed as statistics. It stands as a mark of resistance to the destruction and as a testament to the people of Gaza.

Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at [email protected]. Twitter and IG: @robbyref Website: www.robertomazza.org

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Today’s book is: Reunited: Family Separation and Central American Youth Migration (Russell Sage Foundation, 2024), by Dr. Ernesto Castañeda and Daniel Jenks, which explains the reasons for Central American youth migration, describes the journey, and documents how minors experienced separation from their families and their subsequent reunification. Castañeda and Jenks find that these minors migrate on their own for three main reasons: gang violence, lack of educational and economic opportunity, and a longing for family reunification. 

The authors recount these young migrants’ journey to the U.S. border, detailing the difficulties passing through Mexico, their encounters with U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials, and staying in shelters while their sponsorship, placement, and departure are arranged. The authors also describe the tensions the youth face when they reunite with family members they may view as strangers. Despite their biological, emotional, and financial bonds to these relatives, the youth must learn how to relate to new authority figures and decide whether or how to follow their rules. They are likely to have lived through traumatizing experiences that inhibit their integration. Consequently, schools and social service organizations are crucial, the authors argue, for enhancing youth migrants’ sense of belonging and their integration into their new communities. Bilingual programs, Spanish-speaking PTA groups, message boards, mentoring of immigrant children, and after-school programs for members of reunited families are all helpful in supporting immigrant youth as they learn English, finish high school, apply to college, and find jobs. Offering a complex exploration of youth migration and family reunification, Reunited provides a moving account of how young Central American migrants make the journey north and ultimately reintegrate with their families in the United States.

Our guest is: Dr. Ernesto Castañeda, who is director of the Center for Latin American and Latino studies at American University.

The co-author is: Daniel Jenks, who is a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.

Playlist for listeners:

• Immigration Realities
• Community Building
• The Fight To Save the Town
• Hands Up, Don't Shoot: Researching Racial Injustice
• We Are Not Dreamers

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by posting, assigning or sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 200+ Academic Life episodes? You’ll find them all archived here.

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Children are Everywhere: Conspicuous Reproduction and Childlessness in Reunified Berlin (Berghahn Books, 2024) by Dr. Meghana Joshi engages with how demographic anxieties and reproductive regimes emerge as forms of social inclusion and exclusion in a low fertility Western European context.

This book explores everyday experiences of parenting and childlessness of ‘ethnic’ Germans in Berlin, who came of age around the fall of the Berlin Wall, and brings them into conversation with theories on parenting, waithood, non-biological intimacies, and masculinities. This is the first ethnographic work by a South Asian author on demographic anxieties and reproduction in Germany and reverses the anthropological gaze to study Europe as the ‘Other.’

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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As the predominantly Muslim Chinese who claim ancestry from Persian and Arabic-speaking regions in Central Asia and the Middle East, the Hui people in China have received relatively little attention in anthropology. According to the 2010 census, the Hui are the largest Muslim group in China and its third largest ethnic minority with a total population of 10.6 million. Due to their extensive geographic distribution and long-term acculturation by the atheist Han majority, the question of Hui identity is rarely raised in humanities and social sciences both in China and abroad. This book examines Hui iden­tity in the rural area of Ningxia Hui Auto­no­mous Region, while taking account of China’s rapid modernization and industrialization in the twenty-first century. Speci­fi­cally, it focuses on the massive internal migra­tion of rural popu­la­tions, which has been playing an essen­tial role in the socioe­co­nomic life of Chinese peasants in the past few decades.

Based on field data collected between 2011 and 2013 among the Jahriyya Hui, Wang seeks to clarify the impacts of migra­tion on the Hui’s ethno­re­li­gious iden­tity by inves­ti­ga­ting three key issues: the Hui’s purity concept, fasting and their belief in the after­world. In rela­tion to these refe­rence points, reli­gious rituals, inclu­ding comme­mo­ra­tion cere­mo­nies and the Ramadan fast as well as their chan­ging forms and values, are illu­s­t­rated and analyzed. Muslim Chinese - the Hui in Rural Ningxia (de Gruyter, 2019) shows that Islam conti­nues to play a crucial part in drawing boun­da­ries and main­tai­ning iden­tity for the Hui both before and after migra­tion. However, popu­la­tion move­ments in Ningxia are resul­ting in increased inter­ac­tions between Hui and Han popu­la­tions as well as between Hui from diverse “menhuan” (Sufi paths). Conse­qu­ently, the Hui’s unique “menhuan” aware­ness is being weakened and their purity concept subjected to many queries, doubts, ambi­gui­ties, and tensions.

Xiaoming Wang currently works as a librarian in the East Asia Department of the Berlin State Library. She holds a PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the Free University of Berlin. Her research interests include the anthropology of Islam, identity and migration, power structure, and rural transformation.

Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of economic anthropology, medical anthropology, hope studies, and the anthropology of borders and frontiers. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

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Over the course of the 20th century, the South African state attempted to construct a “White Man’s Country” on the African continent using the biopolitical tools and spatial and economic planning strategies that characterized modern statecraft. My guest today, the geographer Sharad Chari, examines how racialized subaltern populations of Blacks, Indians, and coloureds resisted and circumvented these efforts to construct a racialized social order. At the same time, the book also examines how the legacies of Apartheid shape the experiences of denizens of South Africa’s cities today. Focusing on the Indian Ocean city of Durban from the turn of the 20th century, Apartheid Remains (Duke UP, 2024) is a rich historical and ethnographic account of racialized capitalist space-making and the resistance that it continues to provoke.

Sharad Chari is Associate Professor of Geography at UC Berkeley. He is also the author of Fraternal Capital: Peasant-workers, self-made men and globalization in provincial India (Stanford, 2004) and Gramsci at Sea (Minnesota, 2023). 

You can download Apartheid Remains for free here: https://library.oapen.org/hand...

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A key part of the experience of migration is not being in full control of one’s circumstances and doing. In this episode, Ingrid Piller speaks with Marco Santello about his research with Gambian migrants in Italy. The focus is on Marco’s recent article in Language in Society about migrant experiences of constraints and suffering.

For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here.

Reference:

Santello, M. (2024). Constraints, suffering, and surfacing repertoires among Gambian migrants in Italy. Language in Society, 1-23.

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Walls profoundly shape the spaces we live in and the places we move through, impinge on our everyday lives, and entangle power relations, identity, and hierarchies. Walled-In: Arctic Housing and a Sociology of Walls (Lexington Books, 2024) explores these effects in the context of Arviat, Nunavut. Lisa-Jo Van den Scott lays out the inherent social processes, arguing that walls, in addition to concealing colonial power relations, are boundary objects, cultural objects, and technological objects. Van den Scott's ethnography of Arviammiut's (people of Arviat's) contemporary lived experiences reveals the ways in which Arviammiut are living in a foreign space, how this impacts their experiences, and how they exercise agency in navigating and reinventing these spaces in resilient and heterogenous ways.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is at the intersection of built-environment, experience, identity, and place. He is currently conducting research on the negotiation of identity and place for residents at the neighborhood level. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at [email protected].

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Old Delhi's Parallel Book Bazaar (Cambridge UP, 2024) looks at Old Delhi's Daryaganj Sunday Book Market, popularly known as Daryaganj Sunday Patri Kitab Bazaar, as a parallel location for books and a site of resilience and possibilities. The first section studies the bazaar's spatiality - its location, relocation, and spatialization. Three actors play a major role in creating and organising this spatiality: the sellers, the buyers, and the civic authorities. The second section narrativizes the biographies of the booksellers of Daryaganj to offer a map of the hidden social and material networks that support the informal modes of bookselling. Amidst order and chaos, using their specialised knowledge, Daryaganj booksellers create distinctive mechanisms to serve the diverse reading public of Delhi. Using ethnography, oral interviews, and rhythmanalysis, this Element tells a story of urban aspirations, state-citizen relations, official and unofficial cultural economies, and imaginations of other viable worlds of being and believing.

Dr Kanupriya Dhingra is an Assistant Professor and Assistant Dean at the Jindal School of Languages and Literature, O.P. Jindal Global University (India). She researches the History of the Book and Print Cultures, focusing on Delhi (India), from an ethnographic perspective. She earned her doctorate under the Felix Scholarship Fund from SOAS, University of London in 2021, on her dissertation titled “Daryaganj’s Parallel Book History”, which became this Element. She has also published in journals such as The Caravan, Himal SouthAsian and Seminar Magazine. She is also deeply interested in Hindi, Punjabi, and Urdu poetry, especially that of Amrita Pritam, and continues to research and translate it. Her creative writing and translations have appeared in Indian Literature (A Sahitya Akademi imprint), Scroll, Indian Writers Forum, Guftgu, Aainanagar, and Antiserious. Currently, she is working on translations of Krishna Sobti and Amrita Pritam. 

SM Khalid is a doctoral student at the University of Oxford, working comparatively on postcolonial satire in South Asia in Hindi, Urdu and English.

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In 1997, a group of white pro-life evangelical Christians in the United States created the nation’s first embryo adoption program to “save” the thousands of frozen human embryos remaining from assisted reproduction procedures, which they contend are unborn children. While a small part of US fertility services, embryo adoption has played an outsized role in conservative politics, from high-profile battles over public investment in human embryonic stem cell research to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Based on six years of ethnographic research with embryo adoption staff and participants, Dr. Risa Cromer uncovers how embryo adoption advances ambitious political goals for expanding the influence of conservative Christian values and power.

Conceiving Christian America: Embryo Adoption and Reproductive Politics (NYU Press, 2023) is the first book on embryo adoption tracing how this powerful social movement draws on white saviorist tropes in their aims to reconceive personhood, with drastic consequences for reproductive rights and justice. Documenting the practices, narratives, and beliefs that move embryos from freezers to uteruses, this book wields anthropological wariness as a tool for confronting the multiple tactics of the Christian Right. Timely and provocative, Conceiving Christian America presents a bold and nuanced examination of a family-making process focused on conceiving a Christian nation.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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This episode focuses on a cluster of issues of longstanding significance in Southeast Asia and in Southeast Asian Studies – plantation agriculture, global commodity chains or supply chains, exploitation of labour and environmental degradation, and resistance. To discuss these issues, we are joined by Dr. Alyssa Paredes, an environmental and economic anthropologist who is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan.

Dr. Paredes received her PhD in Anthropology (with distinction) from Yale University in 2020. Her work has been published in a variety of journals, including Antipode, Ethnos, Gastronomica, and the Journal of Political Ecology. She is a contributor to the edited volume Multispecies Justice and the Feral Atlas website, and she is co-editor of Halo-Halo Ecologies: The Emergent Environments Behind Filipino Food, forthcoming with the University of Hawai’i Press in April 2025. She is currently working on a book manuscript provisionally titled Bananapocalypse: Plantation Capitalism from Philippine Mindanao, which traces the afterlives of externalities in the making and unmaking of an industrial agricultural crop, drawing on approaches from such fields as anthropology, science and technology studies, human geography, and critical food studies.

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How do families care for each when they are divided over generations by powerful geopolitical forces beyond their control? In this episode, Hanna Torsh speaks with Lynnette Arnold about her new book Living Together Across Borders: Communicative Care in Transnational Salvadoran Families (Oxford University Press, 2024). Lynnette also shares her tips for emerging scholars in the field about how to conduct research in changing and unstable times.

For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here.

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In the contemporary world, political violence has been an unavoidable issue for everyone. It is therefore essential to criticize political violence in a textured way. The Iraqi Ba’th state’s Anfāl operations (1987-1991) is one of the twentieth century’s ultimate acts of destruction of the possibility of being human. It remains the first and only crime of state in the Middle East to be tried under the 1948 UN Genocide Convention, the 1950 Nuremberg Principles, and the 1969 Iraqi Penal Code and to be recognized as genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes in Baghdad between 2006 and 2007. 

Being Human: Political Modernity and Hospitality in Kurdistan-Iraq (Rutgers UP, 2024) offers an unprecedented pathway to the study of political violence. It is a sweeping work of anthropological hospitality, returning to the Anfāl operations as the violence of political modernity only to turn to the human survivors’ hospitality and acts of translation - testimonial narratives, law, politics, archive, poetry, artworks, museums, memorials, symbolic cemeteries, and infinite pursuit of justice in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. 

Being Human gathers together social sciences, humanities, and the arts to understand modernity's violence and its living on.

Fazil Moradi is Visiting Associate Professor at Faculty of Humanities, University of Johannesburg; Associate Researcher at the Institute for Social Anthropology, Austrian Academy of Sciences; and Affiliated Scholar at the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes against Humanity at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies, Graduate Center—City University of New York. Apart from Being Human, his recent publications include Memory and Genocide: On What Remains and the Possibility of Representation (co-ed. by Maria Six-Hohenbalken and Ralph Buchenhorst, Routledge 2017); and ‘Tele-Evidence: On the Translatability of Modernity’s Violence’ (Special Issue, co-edited by Richard Rottenburg, Critical Studies 2019); and editor of ‘In Search of Decolonised Political Futures: Engaging Mahmood Mamdani’ s Neither Settler Nor Native’ (Special Issue in Anthropological Theory, 2023).

Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of economic anthropology, hope and time studies, and the anthropology of borders and frontiers. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

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Francesco Piraino’s Sufism in Europe: Islam, Esotericism and the New Age (University of Edinburgh Press, 2024) is a vital contribution to the growing field of Sufism in the Global North which often encompasses studies of North America and western Europe. This monograph study, the first focused study of Sufism in Italy and France, uses ethnographic data and sociological analysis to map and situate various Sufi communities in Paris and Milan, along with transnational flows of these communities across Morocco, Algeria, and Cyprus. 

At the heart of these case studies is the question of how to approach and study Sufi communities across an ever diversifying social, religious/spiritual, and political landscape and across categorical commitments such as New Age, New Religious Movements, esotericism, diasporic Islam, Traditionalism and mysticism. Piraino argues for the limitations and utilities of these various categories, and ultimately helps us shift our focus to to the everyday embodied ebbs and flows of a variety of Italian and French Sufi communities to showcase how these terms should be used with fluidity to reflect the lived realities of his interlocutors. This book will be of interest to scholars of contemporary Sufism, sociology of Islam, contemporary Islam, Islam in Europe and much more. 

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Speaking with Professor Shalva Weil, one receives a glimpse into the wider world. Through her family ties, her personal journeys, and her research, she has gained, and shares, an understanding of the unique nature and histories of different groups. In this interview she shared the significance of a Jewish community that lasted less than 200 years but made an incredible impact whose reverberations can be felt to this day. Jewish life has existed on the Indian Peninsula for over 2,000 years by most accounts. Prof Weil is a leading scholar in the Bene Israel community of Baghdad, the Jewish communities of Cochin, as well as this more recent community of Baghdadi Jews in India. 

The Baghdadi Jews in India: Maintaining Communities, Negotiating Identities and Creating Super-Diversity (Routledge, 2021) is an anthology of scholars reviewed by Prof Weil to allow us a glimpse into the unique nature and interactions of Baghdadi Jews in India.

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A compelling work that explores the lives and aspirations of young footballers with deep nuance and insight, The Precarity of Masculinity: Football, Pentecostalism, and Transnational Aspirations in Cameroon (Berghahn Books, 2022) shows how precarious masculinity, Pentecostal spirituality, and aspirations of prosperous futures are intertwining and interrelated in the everyday lives in Southwest regions of Cameroon.

Since the 1990s, an increasing number of young men in Cameroon have aspired to play football as a career and a strategy to migrate abroad. Migration through the sport promises fulfillment of masculine dreams of sports stardom, as well as opportunities to earn a living that have been hollowed out by the country’s long economic stalemate. The aspiring footballers are increasingly turning to Pentecostal Christianity, which allows them to challenge common tropes of young men as stubborn and promiscuous, while also offering a moral and bodily regime that promises success despite the odds. Yet the transnational sports market is tough and unpredictable: it demands disciplined young bodies and introduces new forms of uncertainty. The book unpacks young Cameroonians’ football dreams, Pentecostal faith, obligations to provide, and desires to migrate to highlight the precarity of masculinity in structurally adjusted Africa and neoliberal capitalism.

Uroš Kovač is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Groningen’s Centre for Religion, Conflict, and Globalization. He is a social anthropologist researching gender, migration, religion and development, often through the prism of sports in Africa and Europe.

Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of state, the anthropology of time, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

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From the Rockies to the Himalayas, the bond between horses and humans has spanned across time and civilizations. In this archaeological journey, William T. Taylor explores how momentous events in the story of humans and horses helped create the world we live in today. Tracing the horse's origins and spread from the western Eurasian steppes to the invention of horse-drawn transportation and the explosive shift to mounted riding, Taylor offers a revolutionary new account of how horses altered the course of human history.

Drawing on Indigenous perspectives, ancient DNA, and new research from Mongolia to the Great Plains and beyond, Taylor guides readers through the major discoveries that have placed the horse at the origins of globalization, trade, biological exchange, and social inequality. Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History (U California Press, 2024) transforms our understanding of both horses and humanity's ancient past and asks us to consider what our relationship with horses means for the future of humanity and the world around us.

Sarah Newman is an archaeologist and Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. Her research explores long-term human-environmental interactions, including questions of waste and reuse, processes of landscape transformation, and relationships between humans and other animals.

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It is well-known that the institution of marriage has changed dramatically in the past few decades. However, very little research has focused on the role of religious institutions in helping couples form and maintain their relationships.

Guiding God's Marriage: Faith and Social Change in Premarital Counseling (NYU Press, 2024) by Dr. Courtney Irby offers an examination of Christian marriage preparation programs, exploring their efforts to stabilise the institution of marriage and highlighting the tension between individualism and community in people’s relational lives. Marriage preparation programs offer a useful lens through which to trace shifts in both religious and family institutions because they set out clear and intentional articulations of marriage ideologies and gendered relationship scripts by faith communities. By documenting the changes in content and practices of Christian premarital education along with its advice regarding what makes a good marriage, the book charts the ways that religious communities have been transformed by and have helped to contribute to the individualization of faith and relationships.

Featuring archival research as well as first hand observations of four marriage preparation courses—two Protestant and two Catholic—along with seventy interviews with participating couples and leaders of these and other programs, the book offers a rare view of visions about how to realise a successful and faith-filled relationship. This examination of marriage classes offers key insight into how religious communities have responded to cultural changes in marriage, gender, sexuality, and intimacy.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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The restaurant industry is one of the few places in America where workers from lower-class backgrounds can rise to positions of power and prestige. Yet with over four million cooks and food-preparation workers employed in America’s restaurants, not everyone makes it to the high-status position of chef. What factors determine who rises the ranks in this fiercely competitive pressure-cooker environment?

In Making It: Success in the Commercial Kitchen (Rutgers University Press, 2024), Ellen T. Meiser explores how the career path of restaurant workers depends on their accumulation of kitchen capital, a cultural asset based not only on their ability to cook but also on how well they can fit into the workplace culture and negotiate its hierarchical structures. After spending 120 hours working in a restaurant kitchen and interviewing fifty chefs and cooks from fine-dining establishments and greasy-spoon diners across the country, sociologist Ellen Meiser discovers many strategies for accumulating kitchen capital. For some, it involves education and the performance of expertise; others climb the ranks by controlling their own emotions or exerting control over coworkers. Making It offers a close and personal look at how knowledge, power, and interpersonal skills come together to determine who succeeds and who fails in the high-pressure world of the restaurant kitchen.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is at the intersection of built-environment, experience, identity, and place. He is currently conducting research on how architectural designers, builders, and community planners negotiate a sense of identity and place for residents of newly constructed neighborhoods. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at [email protected].

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After China officially “decriminalized” same-sex behavior in 1997, both the visibility and public acceptance of tongzhi, an inclusive identity term that refers to nonheterosexual and gender nonconforming identities in the People’s Republic of China, has improved. However, for all the positive change, there are few opportunities for political and civil rights advocacy under Xi Jinping’s authoritarian rule.

Words Like Water: Queer Mobilization and Social Change in China (Temple UP, 2023) explores the nonconfrontational strategies the tongzhi movement uses in contemporary China. Caterina Fugazzola analyzes tongzhi organizers’ conceptualizations of, and approaches to, social change, explaining how they avoid the backlash that meets Western tactics, such as protests, confrontation, and language about individual freedoms. In contrast, the groups’ intentional use of community and family-oriented narratives, discourses, and understandings of sexual identity are more effective, especially in situations where direct political engagement is not possible.

Providing on-the-ground stories that examine the social, cultural, and political constraints and opportunities, Words like Water emphasizes the value of discursive flexibility that allows activists to adapt to changing social and political conditions.

Caterina Fugazzola is Assistant Senior Instructional Professor of Global Studies at the University of Chicago.

Qing Shen is a PhD candidate in anthropology at Uppsala University, Sweden.

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Who runs Britain? In Born to Rule: The Making and Remaking of the British Elite (Harvard UP, 2024), Aaron Reeves, and Sam Friedman, both Professors of Sociology at the London School of Economics, tell the story of the UK’s ruling class. The book blends a huge range of qualitative and quantitative data, and uses innovative sociological methods, to offer a historically informed understanding of how those at the top of society preserve their status and privileges. Examining inequalities of race and gender, as well as social class, alongside the enduring impact of Britain’s imperial past, Born to Rule is essential reading for anyone interested in Britain’s past, present and future.

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In the twenty-first century, infrastructure has undergone a seismic shift from West to East. Once concentrated in Europe and North America, global infrastructure production today is focused squarely on Asia. Infrastructure and the Remaking of Asia (U Hawaii Press, 2022) investigates the deeper implications of that pivot to the East. Written by leading international infrastructure experts, it demonstrates how new roads, airports, pipelines, and cables are changing Asian economies, societies, and geopolitics—from the Bosporus to Beijing, and from Indonesia to the Arctic. Ten tightly interwoven case studies powerfully illustrate infrastructure’s leading role in three global paradigm shifts: climate change, digitalization, and China’s emergence as a superpower.

Combining social science methods with mapping techniques from the design professions, Infrastructure and the Remaking of Asia establishes a dialogue between academic research on infrastructure and the professional insights of those responsible for infrastructure’s planning, production, and operation. By applying that mixed method to transport, energy, telecommunication, and resource extraction projects across Asia, the book synthesizes research on infrastructure from six academic fields, while making those insights accessible to a wider audience of students, professionals, and the general public.

Max Hirsh is managing director of the Airport City Academy and a research fellow at the University of Colorado Boulder. He holds a PhD in urban planning from Harvard and is the author of Airport Urbanism: Infrastructure and Mobility in Asia. Max's research investigates the relationship between air travel and urban form.

Till Mostowlansky is a Research Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the Geneva Graduate Institute and the Principal Investigator of the Swiss National Science Foundation funded project “Quiet Aid: Service and Salvation in the Balkans-to-Bengal-Complex”. He is currently a Visiting Professor at the Kyiv School of Economics.

Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of state, the anthropology of time, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

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Why do armed groups employ terrorism in markedly different ways during civil wars? Drawing on more than a decade of fieldwork, Dr. Andreas E. Feldmann examines the disparate behaviour of actors including guerrilla groups, state security forces, and paramilitaries during Colombia’s long and bloody civil war. Analysing the varieties of violence in this conflict, he develops a new theory of the dynamics of terrorism in civil wars.

In Repertoires of Terrorism: Organizational Identity and Violence in Colombia's Civil War (Columbia University Press, 2024) Dr. Feldmann argues that armed groups’ distinct uses—repertoires—of terrorism arise from their particular organisational identities, the central and enduring attributes that distinguish one faction from other warring parties. He investigates a range of groups that took part in the Colombian conflict over the course of its evolution from ideological to criminal warfare, demonstrating that organisational identity plays a critical role in producing and rationalising violence. Armed parties employ their unique repertoires as a means of communication to assert their relevance and territorial presence and to differentiate themselves from enemies and rivals. Repertoires of Terrorism is based on an extensive data set covering thousands of incidents, as well as interviews, archival research, and testimony. It sheds new light on both armed groups’ use of violence in Colombia’s civil war and the factors that shape terrorist activity in other conflicts.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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The open-access edited volume Philosophies of Appropriated Religions: Perspectives from Southeast Asia (Springer, 2023) collects philosophical approaches to Southeast Asian traditions of philosophy and religion. The editors, Soraj Hongladarom, Jeremiah Joven Joaquin, and Frank J. Hoffman, have produced a volume that treats traditional topics in philosophy of religion, such as the problem of evil and afterlife, as well as religious identity, beliefs, practices, and diversity. Contributions vary in methodology; some focus on empirical data and modern culture, while others engage with philosophical texts. Essays focus on a range of religions: Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and indigenous practices. Despite this variety, the volume's editors present the collection as having a kind of unity, both in the specificity of how Southeast Asia "appropriates" religions and the philosophical nature of the essays included.

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Women of the Mafia: Power and Influence in the Neapolitan Camorra (Cornell UP, 2024) by Dr. Felia Allum dives into the Neapolitan criminal underworld of the Camorra as seen and lived by the women who inhabit it. It tells their life stories and unpacks the gender dynamics by examining their participation as active agents in the organisation as leaders, managers, foot soldiers, and enablers. Felia Allum shows that these women are true partners in crime.

The author offers an innovative interdisciplinary analysis that demystifies the notion that the Camorra is a sexist, male-centric organisation. She links her analysis of Camorra culture within the wider Neapolitan context to show how mothers and women act and are treated in the private sphere of the household and how the family helps explain the power women have found in the Neapolitan Camorra.

It is civil society and law enforcement agencies that continue to see the Camorra using traditional gender assumptions which render women irrelevant and lacking independent agency in the criminal underworld. In Women of the Mafia, Allum debunks these assumptions by revealing the power and influence of women in the Camorra.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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In a masterpiece of historical detective work, Sarah Lewis exposes one of the most damaging lies in American history. There was a time when Americans were confronted with the fictions shoring up the nation’s racial regime and learned to disregard them. The true significance of this hidden history has gone unseen—until now.

The surprising catalyst occurred in the nineteenth century when the Caucasian War—the fight for independence in the Caucasus that coincided with the end of the US Civil War—revealed the instability of the entire regime of racial domination. Images of the Caucasus region and peoples captivated the American public but also showed that the place from which we derive “Caucasian” for whiteness was not white at all. Cultural and political figures ranging from P. T. Barnum to Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois to Woodrow Wilson recognized these fictions and more, exploiting, unmasking, critiquing, or burying them.

To acknowledge the falsehood at the core of racial order proved unthinkable, especially as Jim Crow and segregation took hold. Sight became a form of racial sculpture, vision a knife excising what no longer served the stability of racial hierarchy. That stability was shaped, crucially, by what was left out, what we have been conditioned not to see. Groundbreaking and profoundly resonant, The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America (Harvard University Press, 2024) shows how visual tactics have long secured our regime of racial hierarchy in spite of its false foundations—and offers a way to begin to dismantle it.

Sarah Lewis is the founder of Vision & Justice and the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is the author of The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America (Harvard University Press), the bestseller, The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery (Simon & Schuster),  Lewis is the editor of the award-winning volumes, “Vision & Justice” by Aperture magazine and the anthology on the work of Carrie Mae Weems (MIT Press). She is the organizer of the landmark Vision & Justice Convening at Harvard University, and co-editor of the Vision & Justice Book Series, launched in partnership with Aperture. Her awards include the Infinity Award, the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, a Cullman Fellowship, the Freedom Scholar Award (ASALH), the Arthur Danto/ASA Prize from the American Philosophical Association, and the Photography Network Book Prize. Her writing has been published in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Artforum, and the New York Review of Books, and her work has been the subject of profiles from The Boston Globe to the New York Times. Lewis is a sought-after public speaker, with a mainstage TED talk that received over three million views. She received her BA from Harvard University, an MPhil from Oxford University, an MA from Courtauld Institute of Art, and her PhD from Yale University. She lives in New York City and Cambridge, MA.

Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).

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Dr. Aideen O'Shaughnessy is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Lincoln. She has a PhD in Sociology from the University of Cambridge, an MA in Gender Studies Research from Utrecht University and a BA in Sociology and French at Trinity College Dublin. Her research focuses on gender, health, and social movements and she is particularly interested in the study of reproductive health, rights, and justice. She has published widely in journals including Body and Society, the European Journal of Women's Studies, and the BMJ Sexual and Reproductive Health.

Embodying Irish Abortion Reform: Bodies, Emotions, and Feminist Activism (Bristol UP, 2024) explores the lived, embodied and affective experiences of reproductive rights activists living under, and mobilizing against, Ireland’s constitutional abortion ban.

Through qualitative research and in-depth interviews with activists, the author exposes the subtle influence of the 8th Amendment on Irish women and their (reproductive) bodies, whether or not they have ever attempted to access a clandestine abortion.

It explains how the everyday embodied practices, bodily labours and affective experiences of women and gestating people were shaped by the 8th amendment and through the need to ‘prepare’ for crisis pregnancies. In addition, it reveals the integral role of women’s bodies and emotions in changing the political and social landscape in Ireland, through the historical transformation of the country’s abortion laws.

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On the podcast today, I am joined by anthropologist Andrea Pia (London School of Economics and Political Science) to talk about his new book, Cutting the Mass Line: Water, Politics and Climate in Southwest China (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024).

In recent years, the People’s Republic of China has seen an alarmed public endorsing techno-political sustainability proposals for water grabs from inland water-rich provinces such as Tibet or Yunnan. In light of some of the most ambitious inter-basin water transfer schemes in history and the biggest hydropower dam in the world, both Chinese and global environmental conversations seem beholden to the idea that legal and engineering schemes will provide us with answers to water-cycle hazards. Cutting the Mass Line goes against this view to portray the systemic processes of water management. Drawing on rich ethnography, archival materials and statistic data, Andrea Pia explores the vast opportunities that water bureaucrats and rural residents access in efforts to manage water resources as they struggle for sustainability and justice.

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In this episode, we are joined by the anthropologist Tone Bleie for a discussion of her book A New Testament: Scandinavian Missionaries and Santal Chiefs from Company and British Crown Rule to Independence (Solum Bokvennen, 2023), a pioneering piece of scholarship that innovatively rethinks the economic, legal, and social history of the power-laden relationship between a Scandinavian Transatlantic mission and the Santals, Boro and Bengalis of Eastern India, Northern Bangladesh, and Eastern Nepal. Based on decades of research, the book offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of historical encounters across the longue durée, transporting readers back to the medieval period and Danish and British Company Rule, through to the British Raj and the early post-Independence period.

Tone Bleie is Professor of Public Planning and Cultural Understanding at the University of Tromsø, The Arctic University of Norway.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen is a social anthropologist based at the University of Oslo.

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Spain's former African colonies-Equatorial Guinea and Western Sahara-share similar histories. Both are under the thumbs of heavy-handed, postcolonial regimes, and are known by human rights organizations as being among the worst places in the world with regard to oppression and lack of civil liberties. Yet the resistance movement in one is dominated by women, the other by men. 

In Silenced Resistance: Women, Dictatorships, and Genderwashing in Western Sahara and Equatorial Guinea (U Wisconsin Press, 2029), Joanna Allan demonstrates why we should foreground gender as key for understanding both authoritarian power projection and resistance. She brings an ethnographic component to a subject that has often been looked at through the lens of literary studies to examine how concerns for equality and women's rights can be co-opted for authoritarian projects. She reveals how Moroccan and Equatoguinean regimes, in partnership with Western states and corporations, conjure a mirage of promoting equality while simultaneously undermining women's rights in a bid to cash in on oil, minerals, and other natural resources. This genderwashing, along with historical local, indigenous, and colonially imposed gender norms mixed with Western misconceptions about African and Arab gender roles, plays an integral role in determining the shape and composition of public resistance to authoritarian regimes.

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Addressing questions about what it means to be ‘British’ or ‘Irish’ in the twenty-first century, Migrants, Immigration and Diversity in Twentieth-Century Northern Ireland: British, Irish or “Other”? (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) focuses its attention on twentieth-century Northern Ireland and demonstrates how the fragmented and disparate nature of national identity shaped and continues to shape responses to social issues such as immigration. Immigrants moved to Northern Ireland in their thousands during the twentieth century, continuing to do so even during three decades of the Troubles, a violent and bloody conflict that cost over 3,600 lives. 

Foregrounding the everyday lived experiences of settlers in this region, in this groundbreaking book, Dr Jack Crangle comparatively examines the perspectives of Italian, Indian, Chinese and Vietnamese migrants in Northern Ireland, outlining the specific challenges of migrating to this small, intensely divided part of the UK. The book explores whether it was possible for migrants and minorities to remain ‘neutral’ within an intensely politicised society and how internal divisions affected the identity and belonging of later generations. An analysis of diversity and immigration within this divided society enhances our understanding of the forces that can shape conceptions of national insiders and outsiders - not just in the UK and Ireland - but across the world. It provokes and addresses a range of questions about how conceptions of nationality, race, culture and ethnicity have intersected to shape attitudes towards migrants. In doing so, the book invites scholars to embrace a more diverse, ‘four-nation’ approach to UK immigration studies, making it an essential read for all those interested in the history of migration in the UK.

This interview was conducted by Niall Herron, a PhD student at Queen's University Belfast in Anthropological Studies, researching queer assemblages during the Troubles in NI. 

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Today’s book is: Immigration Realities: Challenging Common Misperceptions (Columbia UP, 2024), by Ernesto Castaneda and Carina Cione, which is a practical, evidence-based primer on immigrants and immigration. Each chapter debunks a frequently encountered claim and answers common questions. Presenting the latest findings and decades of interdisciplinary research in an accessible way, Dr. Castañeda and Carina Cione emphasize the expert consensus that immigration is vital to the United States and many other countries around the world. Featuring original insights from research conducted in El Paso, Texas, Immigration Realities considers a wide range of places, ethnic groups, and historical eras. It provides the key data and context to understand how immigration affects economies, crime rates, and social welfare systems, and it sheds light on contentious issues such as the safety of the U.S.-Mexico border and the consequences of Brexit. This book is an indispensable guide for all readers who want to counter false claims about immigration and are interested in what the research shows.

Our guest is: Dr. Ernesto Castañeda, who is the director of the Immigration Lab and the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at American University. His books include A Place to Call Home: Immigrant Exclusion and Urban Belonging in New York, Paris, and Barcelona (2018); Building Walls: Excluding Latin People in the United States (2019); and Reunited: Family Separation and Central American Youth Migration (2024).

The Immigration Realities co-author is: Carina Cione, who is a sociologist and writer based out of Baltimore. Their work has been featured by the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, Trauma Care, El Paso News, and American University’s Center for Latin American & Latino Studies Working Paper Series.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the producer of the Academic Life podcast.

Listeners may enjoy this playlist:

• We Are Not Dreamers: Undocumented Scholars Theorize Undocumented Life in the United States
• We Take Our Cities With Us
• Secret Harvests
• The Ungrateful Refugee
• The Translator's Daughter
• Where Is Home?
• Who Gets Believed: When the Truth Isn't Enough

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by posting, assigning and sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 225+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

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It is an intuitive truth that religious beliefs are different from ordinary factual beliefs. We understand that a belief in God or the sacredness of scripture is not the same as believing that the sun will rise again tomorrow or that flipping the switch will turn on the light. 

In Religion as Make Believe: A Theory of Belief, Imagination, and Group Identity (Harvard UP, 2023), Neil Van Leeuwen draws on psychological, linguistic, and anthropological evidence to show that psychological mechanisms underlying religious beliefs function like those that enable imaginative play. 

When someone pretends, they navigate the world on two levels simultaneously, or as Van Leeuwen describes it, by consulting two maps. The first map is that of factual, mundane reality. The second is a map of the imagined world. This second map is then superimposed on top of the first to create a multi-layered cognitive experience that is consistent with both factual and imaginary understandings. 

With this model in mind, we can understand religious belief, which Van Leeuwen terms religious "credence", as a form of make-believe that people use to define their group identity and express values they hold as sacred. Religious communities create a religious-credence map which sits on top of their factual-belief map, creating an experience where ordinary objects and events are rich with sacred and supernatural significance. 

Recognizing that our minds process factual and religious beliefs in fundamentally different ways allows us to gain deeper understanding of the complex individual and group psychology of religious faith.

Author recommended reading:

• The WEIRDEST People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous by Joseph Henrich.

Mentioned resources: 

• Lecture 'But... But... But... Extremists!' by Neil van Leeuwen
• Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists by Scott Atran

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Handcrafted Careers: Working the Artisan Economy of Craft Beer (U California Press, 2024) unpacks the problems and privileges of pursuing a career of passion by exploring work inside craft breweries.

As workers attempt new modes of employment in the era of the Great Resignation, they face a labor landscape that is increasingly uncertain and stubbornly unequal. With Handcrafted Careers, sociologist Eli Revelle Yano Wilson dives headfirst into the everyday lives of workers in the craft beer industry to address key questions facing American workers today: about what makes a good career, who gets to have one, and how careers progress without established models.

Wilson argues that what ends up contributing to divergent career paths in craft beer is a complex interplay of social connections, personal tastes, and cultural ideas, as well as exclusionary industry structures. The culture of work in craft beer is based around “bearded white guy” ideals that are gendered and racialized in ways that limit the advancement of women and people of color. A fresh perspective on niche industries, Handcrafted Careers offers sharp insights into how people navigate worlds of work that promote ideas of authenticity and passion-filled careers even amid instability.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is at the intersection of built-environment, experience, identity, and place. He is currently conducting research on how architectural designers, builders, and community planners negotiate a sense of identity and place for residents of newly constructed neighborhoods. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at [email protected].

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A perpetual tension exists between history and change, which is an issue long explored by historians and social scientists. Reckoning with Change in Yucatán: Histories of Care and Threat on a Former Hacienda (Routledge, 2023) engages with how best to look upon and respond to change, arguing that this debate is an important arena for negotiating local belonging and a force of transformation in its own right. For residents of Chunchucmil, a historic rural community in Yucatán, Mexico, history is anything but straightforward. Living in what is both a defunct 19th-century hacienda estate and a vibrant Catholic pilgrimage site, Chunchucmileños reckon past, present, and future in radically different ways. For example, while some use the aging estate buildings to weave a history of economic decline and push for revitalization by hotel developers, others highlight the growing fame of the Virgin of the Rosary in the attached church and vow to defend the site from developer interference. 

By exploring how past and future are channeled through changing built environments, landscapes, sacred relics, and legal documents, this ethnographic study details how the politics of change provide Chunchucmileños with a common language for debating commitments to place and each another in the present. Against Western notions of ‘History’ as a relatively coherent account of change, Jason Ramsey suggests we reframe it as an ongoing performance that is always fractured, democratic, and morally tinged.

Jason Ramsey is a faculty member in the Department of Anthropology at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Canada. Based on fieldwork in Yucatan among former plantation laborers, he publishes on topics such as semiotics, ruination, value, and the anthropology of history.

Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of state, the anthropology of time, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

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On this podcast today, I am joined by three scholars: postdoctoral fellow and lecturer at Goethe University Frankfurt, Gil Hizi; assistant professor at Sun Yat-sen University, Xinyan Peng; and lecturer and researcher at the University of Ghent, Mieke Matthyssen. All three guests join me to talk about their chapters in the new book, Self-Development Ethics and Politics in China Today: A Keyword Approach (Amsterdam University Press, 2022)

Self-Development Ethics and Politics in China Today takes readers on a journey into a central aspect of life in China, so-called "self-development." Twelve contributors have each written wonderfully elaborate chapters drawing on a wide range of material from practices in education, labor, and self-help as they spotlight "keywords" by which individuals make sense of their self-development journeys - including new forms of resistance to social norms.

The book consists of twelve chapters and twelve keywords. In this episode, we talk about how three terms relate to self-development ethics and politics in China today: Gil Hizi joins me to talk about the Chinese term 'xinshang' (apprecation), Xinyang Peng discusses duanlian (exercise) and Mieke Matthyssen expands on the term tangping (lying flat).

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China today positions itself as a model of state-led environmentalism. On the country’s arid rangelands, grassland conservation policies have targeted pastoralists and their animals, blamed for causing desertification. State environmentalism - in the form of grazing bans, enclosure, and resettlement - has transformed the lives of many ethnic minority herders in China’s western borderlands. However, this book shows how such policies have been contested and negotiated on the ground, in the context of the state’s intensifying nation-building project.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Alasha, in the far west of China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, Thomas White describes how ethnic Mongols have foregrounded the local breed of Bactrian camel, mobilizing ideas of heritage and resource conservation to defend pastoralism. In exploring how the greening of the Chinese state affects the entangled lives of humans and animals at the margins of the nation-state, this study is both a political biography of the Bactrian camel and an innovative work of political ecology addressing critical questions of rural livelihoods, conservation, and state power.

Thomas White is lecturer in China and Sustainable Development at the Lau China Institute, King’s College London. His research interests include China’s borderlands, political ecology, infrastructure, and Sino-Mongolian relations. China's Camel Country: Livestock and Nation-Building at a Pastoral Frontier (U Washington Press, 2024) is his first monograph.

Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of state, the anthropology of time, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

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Dr. Aviad Moreno is himself an incarnation of entwined homelands. He is an Israeli whose grandfather moved from Morocco to Venezuela, sent his son back to Morocco to study. The family hailed from Spain before the Exile in 1492 only to maintain much of the Spanish language and character. These migrations create a unique diaspora for the Jews of northern Morocco, one that is Hispanophone and yet extremely connected to their Jewish roots. Thus is created these diasporas who have developed strong and growing heritage. Dr. Moreno is a scholar on migrations and this focus on this small community has the complexity of much larger diasporas. His new book is Entwined Homelands, Empowered Diasporas: Hispanic Moroccan Jews and Their Globalizing Community (Indiana UP, 2024).

At Jewish Unity Through Diversity we often discuss the lost worlds of various Jewish diasporas and the yearnings for homelands. Northern Moroccan Jews have multiple homelands and have returned to those homelands as well - a unique character. This is a Spanish Moroccan Jewish strong community back in Morocco, in Israel, and in Spain today. They are a small unique community that is even today growing their heritage. 

Follow us on www.unitytdiversity.com, FB Jewish Unity Through Diversity, Instagram, and YouTube. Send us your stories of connecting to your heritage and learn more about the greater Jewish narrative. 

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Ehaab D. Abdou's book Education, Civics, and Citizenship in Egypt: Towards More Inclusive Curricular Representations and Teaching (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) explores how to render curricular representations more inclusive and how individuals' interactions with competing historical narratives and discourses shape their civic attitudes and intergroup dynamics. Based on ethnographic research in the Egyptian context, it offers insights for curriculum developers, teacher educators, and teachers interested in the development of critical citizens who are able to engage with multiple narratives and perspectives. Drawing on theorizations of historical consciousness, critical pedagogy, and critical discourse analysis, it demonstrates the need for more nuanced and holistic analytical frameworks and pedagogical tools. Further, it offers insights towards building such analytical and pedagogical approaches to help gain a deeper understanding of connections between students' historical consciousness tendencies and their civic engagement as citizens.

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Why do people go to college? In Polished: College, Class, and the Burdens of Social Mobility (U Chicago Press, 2024), Melissa Osborne, an associate professor at Western Washington University, explores the experiences of students from low income and first-generation backgrounds who attend elite universities in the USA. The book offers a vital intervention for our understanding of the role of higher education and its connection to a range of social inequalities. It captures the sometimes difficult and ambivalent experiences of students from outside the traditional demographics for elite institutions. The analysis offers a nuanced understanding of the process of social mobility, showing the struggles of students and institutions, and the limits of individually-focused approaches to social change. Rich with ethnographic and qualitative data, as well as a powerful set of ideas for elite institutional change, the book is essential reading for educators everywhere.

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When people migrate and settle in other countries, do they automatically form a diaspora? In Insurgent Communities: How Protests Create a Filipino Diaspora (U Chicago Press, 2024), Sharon M. Quinsaat explains the dynamic process through which a diaspora is strategically constructed. Quinsaat looks to Filipinos in the United States and the Netherlands—examining their resistance against the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, their mobilization for migrants’ rights, and the construction of a collective memory of the Marcos regime—to argue that diasporas emerge through political activism. Social movements provide an essential space for addressing migrants’ diverse experiences and relationships with their homeland and its history. A significant contribution to the interdisciplinary field of migration and social movements studies, Insurgent Communities illuminates how people develop collective identities in times of social upheaval.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is in the areas of social construction of experience, identity, and place. He is currently conducting research on the relationship between identity and place in the construction of neighborhood development. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at [email protected].

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From Skepticism to Competence: How American Psychiatrists Learn Psychotherapy (U Chicago Press, 2024) offers an examination of how novice psychiatrists come to understand the workings of the mind - and the nature of medical expertise - as they are trained in psychotherapy. While many medical professionals can physically examine the body to identify and understand its troubles - a cardiologist can take a scan of the heart, an endocrinologist can measure hormone levels, an oncologist can locate a tumor - psychiatrists have a much harder time unlocking the inner workings of the brain or its metaphysical counterpart, the mind.

In From Skepticism to Competence, sociologist Mariana Craciun delves into the radical uncertainty of psychiatric work by following medical residents in the field as they learn about psychotherapeutic methods. Most are skeptical at the start. While they are well equipped to treat brain diseases through prescription drugs, they must set their expectations aside and learn how to navigate their patients’ minds. Their instructors, experienced psychotherapists, help the budding psychiatrists navigate this new professional terrain by revealing the inner workings of talk and behavioral interventions and stressing their utility in a world dominated by pharmaceutical treatments. In the process, the residents examine their own doctoring assumptions and develop new competencies in psychotherapy. Exploring the world of contemporary psychiatric training, Craciun illustrates novice physicians’ struggles to understand the nature and meaning of mental illness and, with it, their own growing medical expertise.

Mariana Craciun is Associate Professor in Sociology at Tulane University. As a cultural sociologist, she is interested in the issues of expertise, professions, science, and technology. Her writings on psychotherapeutic expertise and authority and was published in top peer reviewed journals, including the American Journal of Sociology, Theory and Society, Qualitative Sociology, and the Sociology of Health and Illness.

Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of environmental anthropology, the anthropology of time, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

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Professor David Zeitlyn’s book offers a major contribution to the study and analysis of divination, based on continuing fieldwork with the Mambila in Cameroon. It seeks to return attention to the details of divinatory practice, using the questions asked and life histories to help understand the perspective of the clients rather than that of the diviners.

Drawing on a corpus of more than 600 cases, David Zeitlyn reconsiders theories of divination and compares Mambila spider divination with similar systems in the area. A detailed case study is examined and analysed using conversational analytic principles. The regional comparison considers different kinds of explanation for different features of social organization, leading to a discussion of the continuing utility of moderated functionalism.

Mambila Divination: Framing Questions, Constructing Answers (Routledge, 2021) will be of interest to area specialists and scholars concerned with religion, rationality, and decision-making from disciplines including anthropology, African studies, and philosophy.

Additional links and information mentioned in the recording:

• Professor Zietlyn’s old spider divination simulations
• Online spider divination site for consultations and additional information

Forthcoming exhibition mentioned in the show: Oracles, Omens and Answers, 6 December 2024 - 27 April 2025, S.T. Lee Gallery, Weston Library, Bodleian Libraries, Oxford.

Related publications from Bodleian Library Publishing

• Divination: Oracles and Omens, Edited by Michelle Aroney and David Zeitlyn (5 December)

David Zeitlyn has been working with Mambila people in Cameroon since 1985. He taught at the University of Kent, Canterbury, for fifteen years before moving to Oxford as Professor of Social Anthropology in 2010. His recent books include Mambila Divination: Framing Questions, Constructing Answers (Routledge, 2020) and An Anthropological Toolkit: Sixty Useful Concepts (Berghan Books, 2022)

Gene-George Earle is currently a PhD candidate in Anthropology at East China Normal University in Shanghai.

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Unorthodox Kin: Portuguese Marranos and the Global Search for Belonging (U California Press, 2017) is a lively, readable exploration of "chosen" identity, kin, and community in a global era. Anthropologist Naomi Leite examines the complexity of how we know ourselves -- who we "really" are -- and how we recognize others as strangers or kin through the case of Portugal's "Marranos", people in Lisbon and Porto who identify as descendants of 15th-century Portuguese and Spanish Jews who were forcibly converted to Catholicism. As the book's story unfolds, these individuals are first dismissed by the local Portuguese Jewish community as "non-Jews" and then embraced by foreign Jewish tourists and other visitors, who are fascinated to meet a remnant of Portugal's "lost" medieval Jewish population. Drawing on more than a decade of participatory research, Leite explores how both the Marranos' and their visitors' perceptions of self, peoplehood, and belonging are transformed through their face-to-face encounters with one another. Written in a compelling, first-person narrative style, this acclaimed book will appeal to a wide audience.

Accolades: Finalist, National Jewish Book Award (2017) * StIrling Prize for Best Book in Psychological Anthropology (2018) * Graburn Prize for Best First Book in Anthropology of Tourism (2018) * Honorable Mention, Douglass Prize for Best Book in Europeanist Anthropology (2018)

Adam Bobeck received his PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from the University of Leipzig. His PhD was entitled “Object-Oriented ʿAzâdâri: Ontology and Ritual Theory”.

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Recurring tropes about fragmented communities living on frontier forestlands living in Southeast Asia are that they are either guardians of flora and fauna their destroyers. In much analysis gravitating to one or other position in this dichotomy the role of organised religion is absent.

But as Faizah Zakaria shows in The Camphor Tree and the Elephant: Religion and Ecological Change in Maritime Southeast Asia published by the University of Washington Press (2023) shows conversions from animist belief systems to Islam and Christianity enabled human-centric views that helped alienate the natural world from Batak communities for wealth. Using a wide array of archival evidence from the 19th century from North Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula, this book sheds light on the power of everyday religious practice to shape the Anthropocene.

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In Japan, a country popularly perceived as highly secularized and technologically advanced, ontological assumptions about spirits (tama or tamashii) seem to be quite deeply ingrained in the cultural fabric. From ancestor cults to anime, spirits, ghosts, and other invisible dimensions of reality appear to be pervasive. In Spirits and Animism in Contemporary Japan (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), international scholars from various backgrounds consider together this “invisible empire” and highlight the “agency of the intangible.”

The contributors of this edited volume approach spirits and animism in contemporary Japan from diverse perspectives. Satō Hiroo opens the book with a chapter on the transformation in Japanese visions of the afterlife, the status of the dead, and regional traditions of memorialization. Andrea De Antoni looks further into the ontology of spirits via an investigation into recent cases of spirit possession (tsuki, hyōi) that is treated at the Kenmi Shrine in Shikoku.

Jason Josephson-Storm traces both the European and Japanese genealogies of theorizing “primitive” civilizations and their beliefs in spirits, magic, and an animated nature. In Fabio Rambelli’s chapter, a unique type of epistemological system for understanding the existence of spirits is introduced: Minataka Kumagusu’s “Minakata mandala,” which involves Buddhist philosophy, Western science, and an awareness of the Japanese folk tradition all at the same time.

In Ellen Van Goethem’s chapter, she explores how and why there were widespread assumptions about how the city of Kyoto was animated by invisible agencies such as guardian spirits and the flow of qi (Jp. Ki). Carina Roth continues the discussion on enchanted landscapes by drawing our attention to “power spots” (pawā supotto) and “healing” forests as recent developments in contemporary Japanese religiosity.

Focusing on the role of media in the public perceptions of new religious movements (NRMs) and their animistic positions, Ioannis Gaitanidis shows how the media paradoxically both helps to normalize animism as part of “traditional” Japanese culture while chastising animistic NRM’s egregious behaviors. Concerning spirits in modern Japanese fiction, another type of powerful media in contemporary Japanese society, Rebecca Suter identifies in her chapter a “fantastic hesitation” that authors take on, which opens doors to the “undecidability of reality” that seems to be a main gateway to the spirit world. Centering on the media arts scene in Japan, Mauro Arrighi in his chapter highlights how animism serves as one of the main creative sources for contemporary artists. Then, Jolyon Thomas turns our focus to anime and their depictions of humanity’s connection with nature. In doing so, he invites us to reflect on the term “animism” and how the spirits of anime are really rooted in late capitalist modernity with its attendant pleasures and woes. In the closing chapter, Andrea Castiglioni points out a growing tendency in recent Japanese films to focus on violent spirit entities (araburugami), rather than benign figures. He argues that this perhaps is related to the emergence of a new kind of national identity for Japan as a country that is uniquely able to control the unpredictability of nature and malignant invisible agencies.

In this podcast episode, I spoke with the editor of this edited volume, Dr. Fabio Rambelli.

Fabio Rambelli is a professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Daigengna Duoer is a PhD student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation researches on transnational and transregional Buddhist networks connecting twentieth-century Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, Republican China, Tibet, and the Japanese Empire.

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Folksongs of Another America: Field Recordings from the Upper Midwest, 1937–1946 (University of Wisconsin Press) first appeared in 2015 when it comprised of a hardback book, five CDs, and one DVD. It went on to win the “Best Historical Research in Folk or World Music” award from the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, was nominated for a Grammy for “Best Album Notes,” received universally superlative reviews, and sold out within a year. The project has now been re-issued as a paperback, albeit without any accompanying discs; instead the related tracks and film footage are now available for online access care of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Library.

It’s not hard to fathom why this monumental work received so much acclaim. A groundbreaking multimedia endeavor, Folksongs of Another America is the product of decades of work by the distinguished folklorist, James P. Leary. Leary is, amongst other things, Professor Emeritus of Folklore and Scandinavian Studies and Cofounder of the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, a former editor of the Journal of American Folklore, and a native of rural Wisconsin, which is one of the three states – along with Michigan and Minnesota – whose rich musical bounty is explored in this study.

Leary sifted through over 2,000 field recordings, made by fieldworkers Sidney Robertson, Alan Lomax, and Helene Stratman-Thomas during the 1930s and 40s, to select the 187 tunes and songs that feature here. Together the chosen pieces create the impression of a region populated by immigrants from a host of different lands, as well as by Native Americans, all with their own musical traditions. For every track, Leary offers extensive documentation, information about the performers, and full lyrics (including in the original language with English translation as necessary which, given that the collection includes twenty-five languages, is often the case). The recordings themselves, which have been wonderfully restored and remastered, provide vivid aural experiences.

Folksongs of Another America is, as noted by a reviewer for Deutschlandradio Kultur, “an exceptional achievement that demonstrates for the first time the full worth and cultural wealth of the Upper Midwest for music listeners.”

Rachel Hopkin is a UK born, US based folklorist and radio producer and is currently a PhD candidate at the Ohio State University.

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The Parashakthi Temple in Pontiac, Michigan serves as a site of worship for the Hindu goddess Karumariamman, whose origins are in South India. In her American home Karumariamman has assumed the status of Great Goddess, a tantric deity and wonder worker who communicates directly with devotees through dreams, visions, and miracles. Drawing on fifteen years of field work, Tracy Pintchman reveals how the Parashakthi Temple has become a site of theological and ritual innovation.

A unique spiritual community, the temple does not simply reproduce Indian goddess traditions, but instead reimagines Hinduism and the Hindu Goddess in the American religious, cultural, and natural landscape. The congregation's faith is grounded in a vision of the Goddess as a breaker of boundaries, including those of race, ethnicity, religion, geography, history, and nationality. Like her congregants, Pintchman suggests, the goddess is emblematic of the qualities of a new immigrant; she embraces the opportunities her new home affords her and refashions herself, but she does not forget her roots, keeping one foot planted in her Indian homeland and another planted firmly in her new land, the United States.

In Goddess Beyond Boundaries: Worshipping the Eternal Mother at a North American Hindu Temple (Oxford UP, 2023), Pintchman considers larger issues concerning the creativity of immigrant Hindu communities and the ways in which diaspora contexts facilitate the production of new forms of Hinduism that are made possible by globalization and modern technology.

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Mumbai is not commonly seen as a bike-friendly city because of its dense traffic and the absence of bicycle lanes. Yet the city supports rapidly expanding and eclectic bicycle communities. Exploring how people bike and what biking means in the city, Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria challenges assumptions that underlie sustainable transportation planning.Arguing that planning professionals and advocates need to pay closer attention to ordinary people who cycle for transportation or for work, or who choose to cycle for recreation, Mumbai on Two Wheels: Cycling, Urban Space, and Sustainable Mobility (U Washington Press, 2024) offers an alternative to the thinking that dominates mainstream sustainable transportation discussions. The book's insights come from bicycle activists, commuters, food delivery workers, event organizers, planners, technicians, shop owners, transportation planners, architects, and manufacturers. 

Through ethnographic vignettes and descriptions of diverse biking experiences, it shows how pedaling through the city produces a way of seeing and understanding infrastructure. Readers will come away with a new perspective on what makes a city bicycle friendly and an awareness that lessons for more equitable and sustainable urban future can be found in surprising places.

In the episode, we make a reference to an essay Jonathan Anjaria wrote for Ethnographic Marginalia. You can read the essay here.

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Maid to Queer: Asian Labor Migration and Female Same-Sex Desires (Hong Kong UP, 2021) is the first book about Asian female migrant workers who develop same-sex relationships in a host city. Based on participant observation and in-depth interviews with Indonesian domestic workers in Hong Kong, the book explores the meanings of same-sex relationships to these migrant women. Instead of searching for reasons to explain why they engage in a same-sex relationship, this book provides an ethnographic perspective by addressing their Sunday activities and considering how migration policies and the practices of Hong Kong people unintentionally produce alternative sexuality and desires for them. 

The author contrasts the migrant experiences of same-sex relationships with the Western discourse that individuals carry a strong sense of sexual identification prior to migration; same-sex desires among Indonesian domestic workers are often not realized until they leave home. Addressing the changes from maid to queer, this book documents the intersections of domestic work, labor migration, race, and religion on the sexual subject formation, specifically how Indonesian women negotiate heteronormativity and remake a space for their love, sex, and intimacy. For those interested in lesbian studies, Asian labor migration, sexual citizenship, and queer migration, this ethnography fills an important gap in explaining how the feminization of international migration and the constraints imposed on live-in domestic workers unintentionally become productive possibilities of queerness and normativity.

Qing Shen is currently a PhD candidate in anthropology at Uppsala University, Sweden.

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Using a multidisciplinary and intersectional approach, Liberating Fat Bodies: Social Media Censorship and Body Size Activism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) by Dr. Wesley Bishop & Dr. Bessie Rigakos explores the social factors that influence the ways in which societal norms police fat bodies. Chapters examine the racist and colonial constructions of Western beauty norms as well as the evolution of anti-fat bias and fat liberation, before delving into the relationship between social media and body size activism, with a particular emphasis on social media companies censoring fat people. The authors draw on first-person narratives of artists, activists, and fat social media users to unpack how, these mostly women, have used their bodies to transform the negative social perceptions of fat people.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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An in-depth examination of the regulatory, entrepreneurial, and organizational factors contributing to the expansion and transformation of China’s supplemental education industry.

Like many parents in the United States, parents in China, increasingly concerned with their children’s academic performance, are turning to for-profit tutoring businesses to help their children get ahead in school. China’s supplemental education industry is now the world’s largest and most vibrant for-profit education market, and we can see its influence on the US higher education system: more than 70% of Chinese students studying in American universities have taken test preparation classes for overseas standardized tests. The Fruits of Opportunism: Noncompliance and the Evolution of China's Supplemental Education Industry (U Chicago Press, 2022) offers a much-needed thorough investigation into this industry. This book examines how opportunistic organizations thrived in an ambiguous policy environment and how they catalyzed organizational and institutional changes in this industry.

A former insider in China’s Education Industry, sociologist Le Lin shows how and why this industry evolved to become a for-profit one dominated by private, formal, nationally operating, and globally financed corporations, despite restrictions the Chinese state placed on the industry. Looking closely at the opportunistic organizations that were founded by marginal entrepreneurs and quickly came to dominate the market, Lin finds that as their non-compliant practices spread across the industry, these opportunistic organizations pushed privatization and marketization from below. The case of China’s Education Industry laid out in The Fruits of Opportunism illustrates that while opportunism leaves destruction in its wake, it can also drive the formation and evolution of a market.

Professor Le Lin’s research centers on organizations, political economy, economic sociology and social stratification, especially where these areas intersect with education and healthcare in China, the U.S. and in a transnational context. His most recent book The Fruits of Opportunism: Noncompliance and the Evolution of China’s Supplemental Education Industry, was published by the University of Chicago Press won the Honorable Mention of the Asia/Transnational Book Award, American Sociological Association (ASA) in 2023. His articles and research have also appeared in journals such as Socio-Economic Review, Higher Education and Global Perspectives, and has won awards from the American Sociological Association and the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics.

Gene-George Earle is currently a PhD candidate in Anthropology at East China Normal University in Shanghai.

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Nguzunguzu is the traditional figurehead which was formerly affixed to canoes in the Solomon Islands. In this episode, Julie Yu-Wen Chen talks to Rodolfo Maggio, a senior researcher at the University of Helsinki about his book project on the dragon and the nguzunguzu, namely the relationship between China and the Soloman Islands.

The dragon and the nguzunguzu are taken as symbols of, respectively, Chinese and Solomon Islands identity. This essentializing maneuver is complicated by the appreciation of the two faces of both the dragon and the nguzunguzu. Nguzunguzu are traditionally used to adorn canoes: they can be either belligerent or peaceful, depending on the relationship between those who paddle and those who see them coming. Similarly, in Chinese folklore, dragons can bring prosperity or destruction, depending on their relationships with the humans who encounter them. Nguzunguzu and dragons are thus similar as symbols of supernatural forces whose potential can concretize as either propitious or nefarious, depending on their relationships with humans.

Maggio encountered a dragon-nguzunguzu hybrid during his fieldwork in 2024. As explicitly phrased by the carver, the hybrid represents his attempt to localize China. This inspires Maggio’s book project, encouraging him to use this hybrid figure as an entry point to offer a grassroot perspective on the interactions between Chinese and Solomon Islanders.

Rodolfo Maggio is a social anthropologist of moral and economic values in the Asia-Pacific region. At the University of Helsinki, he is working on an ERC-funded project “properties of units and standards”. Previously, Maggio had an episode on Kiribati in the Chinese Pacific and an episode on Sino-Pacific Relations with Nordic Asia Podcast that might interest listeners.

Julie Yu-Wen Chen is Professor of Chinese Studies at the Department of Cultures at the University of Helsinki (Finland) and visiting professor at the Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia at Mahidol University (Thailand). Since 2023, she has been involved in the EUVIP: The EU in the Volatile Indo-Pacific Region, a project funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe coordination and support action 10107906 (HORIZON-WIDERA-2021-ACCESS-03).

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Women, Agency, and the State in Guinea: Silent Politics (Routledge, 2020) examines how women in Guinea articulate themselves politically within and outside institutional politics. It documents the everyday practices that local female actors adopt to deal with the continuous economic, political, and social insecurities that emerge in times of political transformations.

Carole Ammann argues that women's political articulations in Muslim Guinea do not primarily take place within women's associations or institutional politics such as political parties; but instead women's silent forms of politics manifest in their daily agency, that is, when they make a living, study, marry, meet friends, raise their children, and do household chores. The book also analyses the relationship between the female population and the local authorities, and discusses when and why women's claim making enjoys legitimacy in the eyes of other men and women, as well as representatives of 'traditional' authorities and the local government.

Paying particular attention to intersectional perspectives, this book will be of interest to scholars of African studies, social anthropology, political anthropology, the anthropology of gender, urban anthropology, gender studies, and Islamic studies.

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Each year, thousands of youth endure harrowing unaccompanied and undocumented migrations across Central America and Mexico to the United States in pursuit of a better future. Drawing on the firsthand narratives of migrant youth in Los Angeles, California to produce Sin Padres, Ni Papeles: Unaccompanied Migrant Youth Coming of Age in the United States (University of California Press, 2024), Dr. Stephanie L. Canizales shows that while a lucky few do find reprieve, many are met by resource-impoverished relatives who are unable to support them, exploitative jobs that are no match for the high cost of living, and individualistic social norms that render them independent and alone. Sin Padres, Ni Papeles illuminates how unaccompanied teens who grow up as undocumented low-wage workers navigate unthinkable material and emotional hardship, find the agency and hope that is required to survive, and discover what it means to be successful during the transition to adulthood in the United States.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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In this podcast, Ashis Roy (Psychoanalyst (IPA) and author of the recently published book Intimacy in Alienation: A Psychoanalytic Study of Hindu-Muslim Relationships (Yoda Press, 2024) is in conversation with Dhwani Shah, MD. Shah is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst currently practicing in Princeton, NJ. He is a clinical associate faculty member in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and a Supervising Analyst and instructor at the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia.

Together they engage with Late Sudhir Kakar´s last book the Indian Jungle: Psychoanalysis and Non-Western Civilizations (Karnac, 2024). Shah reflects on Kakar´s contributions to psychoanalysis and on some of the pillars in Kakar´s writing.

About the Indian Jungle

For more than a century, the cultural imagination of psychoanalysis has been assumed and largely continues to be assumed as Western. Although the terroirs of psychoanalysis in South America, France, Italy, England, the United States, and so on have important differences, they all share a strong family resemblance which distinguishes them clearly from the cultural imaginations of Indian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and other non-Western terroirs.

Fundamental ideas about human relationships, family, marriage, and gender often remain unexamined and pervade the analytic space as if they are universally valid. Thus, ideas that are historically and culturally only true of and limited to modern Western, specifically European and North American middle-class experience, have been incorporated unquestioningly into psychoanalytic thought.

In the intellectual climate of our times, with the rise of relativism in the human sciences and politically with the advent of decolonization, the cultural and historical transcendence of psychoanalytic thought can no longer be taken for granted. Insights from clinical work embedded in the cultural imaginations of non-Western civilizations could help psychoanalysis rethink some of its theories of the human psyche, extending these to cover a fuller range of human experience. These cultural imaginations are an invaluable resource for the move away from a universal psychoanalysis to a more global one that remains aware of but is not limited by its origins in the modern West. This book of essays aims to be a step in that journey, of altering the self-perception of psychoanalysis from ‘one size fits all’ into a more nuanced enterprise that reflects and is enriched by cultural particularities.

The perfect book for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, cultural psychologists, anthropologists, students of South Asian, cultural, and post-colonial studies, and anyone interested in the current and possible future shape of psychoanalytic thought.

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In recent years, companies have felt the pressure to be transparent about their environmental impact. Large documents containing summaries of yearly emissions rates, carbon output, and utilized resources are shared on companies’ social media pages, websites, and employee briefings in a bid for public confidence in corporate responsibility.

And yet, Matthew Archer argues, these metrics are often just hollow symbols. Unsustainable: Measurement, Reporting, and the Limits of Corporate Sustainability (New York University Press, 2024) contends with the world of big banks and multinational corporations, where sustainability begins and ends with measuring and reporting. Drawing on five years of research among sustainability professionals in the US and Europe, Unsustainable shows how this depoliticizing tendency to frame sustainability as a technical issue enhances and obscures corporate power while doing little, if anything, to address the root causes of the climate crisis and issues of social inequality. Through this obsession with metrics and indicators, the adage that you can’t manage what you can’t measure transforms into a belief that once you’ve measured social and environmental impacts, the market will simply manage them for you.

The book draws on diverse sources of evidence―ethnographic fieldwork among a wide array of sustainability professionals, interviews with private bankers, and apocalyptic science fiction―and features analyses of name-brand companies including Volkswagen, Unilever, and Nestlé. Making the case for the limits of measuring and reporting, Archer seeks to mobilize alternative approaches. Through an intersectional lens incorporating Black and Indigenous theories of knowledge, power and value, he offers a vision of sustainability that aims to be more effective and more socially and ecologically just.

Robin Steiner is an economic anthropologist based in Miami, FL. His published work explores economic development, labor, and citizenship in Oman and the Arab Gulf. He teaches in the Department of Global and Sociocultural Studies at Florida International University. Robin can be reached at [email protected]. 

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What is the right way to live? This is an old question in Western moral philosophy, but in recent years anthropologists have turned their attention to this question in what has been called, a “moral turn”. In this original ethnographic study, Pursuing Morality: Buddhism and Everyday Ethics in Southeastern Myanmar (NUS Press, 2024), Justine Chambers examines the Plong (Pwo) Karen people’s conception of themselves as a moral people. In the decade between Myanmar’s opening up in 2011 and the military coup in 2021, the Plong Karen community near the Myanmar-Thailand border has experienced rapid political, economic, and social change. These changes are challenging that conception. Based on extensive fieldwork Chambers examines the sources of Plong morality, particularly Theravada Buddhism, and how moral considerations are being impacted: by increasing access to higher education; the powerful economic draw of Thailand; young women questioning older gender roles; the rise of Buddhist millenarian movements and Buddhist nationalism; and growing anti-Muslim sentiment shared by much of Myanmar’s Buddhist population.

Justine Chambers is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS) in Copenhagen, Denmark.

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White Supremacy and Racism in Progressive America: Race, Place, and Space (Policy Press, 2024) examines the connections between race, place, and space, and sheds light on how they contribute and maintain racial hierarchies.

Dr. Miguel Montalva Barba focuses on the White residents of Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, which, according to the Cooks Political Report Partisan Voting Index, is the most liberal district in the state and 15th in the United States of America. The book uses settler colonialism and critical race theory to explore how self-identified progressive White residents perceive their gentrifying neighborhood and how they make sense of their positionality.

Using the extended case method, as well as in-depth interviews, participant observation, content analysis and visual/media analysis, the author reveals how systemic racialized inequality persists even in a politically progressive borough.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Across the world, algorithms are changing the nature of work. Nowhere is this clearer than in the logistics and distribution sectors, where workers are instructed, tracked and monitored by increasingly dystopian management technologies.

In Cyberboss: The Rise of Algorithmic Management and the New Struggle for Control at Work (Verso, 2024), Craig Gent takes us into workplaces where algorithms rule to excavate the politics behind the newest form of managerial power. Combining worker testimony and original research on companies such as Amazon, Uber, and Deliveroo, the cutting edge of algorithmic management technology, this book reveals the sometimes unexpected effects these new techniques have on work, workers and managers. Gent advances an alternative politics of resistance in the face of digital control.

Louisa Hann attained a PhD in English and American studies from the University of Manchester in 2021, specialising in the political economy of HIV/AIDS theatres.

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Tracing women’s experiences of miscarriage and termination for foetal anomaly in the second trimester, before legal viability, shows how such events are positioned as less ‘real’ or significant when the foetal being does not, or will not, survive. Invisible Labour: The Reproductive Politics of Second Trimester Pregnancy Loss in England (Berghahn, 2024) by Dr. Aimee Louise Middlemiss describes the reproductive politics of this category of pregnancy loss in England. It shows how second trimester pregnancy loss produces specific medical and social experiences, revealing an underlying teleological ontology of pregnancy. Some women then understand their pregnancy through kinship with the unborn baby.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Do newborns think-do they know that 'three' is greater than 'two'? Do they prefer 'right' to 'wrong'? What about emotions--do newborns recognize happiness or anger? If they do, then how are our inborn thoughts and feelings encoded in our bodies? Could they persist after we die? Going all the way back to ancient Greece, human nature and the mind-body link are the topics of age-old scholarly debates. But laypeople also have strong opinions about such matters. Most people believe, for example, that newborn babies don't know the difference between right and wrong-such knowledge, they insist, can only be learned. For emotions, they presume the opposite-that our capacity to feel fear, for example, is both inborn and embodied. These beliefs are stories we tell ourselves about what we know and who we are. They reflect and influence our understanding of ourselves and others and they guide every aspect of our lives. In a twist that could have come out of a Greek tragedy, Berent proposes that our errors are our fate. These mistakes emanate from the very principles that make our minds tick: our blindness to human nature is rooted in human nature itself. 

An intellectual journey that draws on philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, cognitive science, and Berent's own cutting-edge research, The Blind Storyteller: How We Reason about Human Nature (Oxford UP, 2020) grapples with a host of provocative questions, from why we are so infatuated with our brains to what happens when we die. The end result is a startling new perspective on our humanity.

You can find Dr. Berent on Twitter at @berent_iris. 

Joseph Fridman is a researcher, science communicator, media producer, and educational organizer. He lives in Boston with two ragdoll kittens and a climate scientist.You can follow him on Twitter @joseph_fridman, or reach him at his website, https://www.josephfridman.com/.

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Losing a pet has always been a unique kind of pain. No set rituals exist to help provide closure when pets die, there are no readily shared passages from spiritual texts, no community of compassion to surround the mourner and help alleviate grief. And there is a sense of taboo, that it is somehow socially incorrect to mourn an animal as one would a person and feel the pain so intensely. Faithful Unto Death: Pet Cemeteries, Animal Graves, and Eternal Devotion (Thames & Hudson, 2024) by Dr. Paul Koudounaris confronts this taboo by telling the stories of people who have memorialised their beloved animals.

The book addresses the moral and spiritual prejudices that have historically surrounded animals, and reveals how, in the face of these prejudices, a movement started in the nineteenth century to treat pets with dignity even in death. It is a fight that is still far from over, but the triumphs that are revealed as the book unfolds, found in burial grounds small to grand and on monuments humble to huge, possess the power to touch everyone who has ever cared for an animal companion. In tracing the historical evolution of pet cemeteries through the stories of the people and pets that have been integral to their development, this book reveals both similarities in the way we mourn animal companions and a stunning cultural diversity. From humble Cherry in London to pets of the rich and powerful, this is a history filled with inspiration, wild eccentricity, and eternal love.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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What Work Means: Beyond the Puritan Work Ethic (ILR Press, 2024) goes beyond the stereotypes and captures the diverse ways Americans view work as a part of a good life. 

Dispelling the notion of Americans as mere workaholics, Claudia Strauss presents a more nuanced perspective. While some live to work, others prefer a diligent 9-to-5 work ethic that is conscientious but preserves time for other interests. Her participants often enjoyed their jobs without making work the focus of their life. These findings challenge laborist views of waged work as central to a good life as well as post-work theories that treat work solely as exploitative and soul-crushing.

Drawing upon the evocative stories of unemployed Americans from a wide range of occupations, from day laborers to corporate managers, both immigrant and native-born, Strauss explores how diverse Americans think about the place of work in a good life, gendered meanings of breadwinning, accepting financial support from family, friends, and the state, and what the ever-elusive American dream means to them. By considering how post-Fordist unemployment experiences diverge from joblessness earlier, What Work Means paves the way for a historically and culturally informed discussion of work meanings in a future of teleworking, greater automation, and increasing nonstandard employment.

Claudia Strauss is Professor of Anthropology at Pitzer College. She is the author of A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning with Naomi Quinn and co-editor of Human Motives and Cognitive Models.

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Is a green future possible? In Petrochemical Planet: Multiscalar Battles of Industrial Transformation (Duke UP, 2023), Alice Mah, a Professor in Urban and Environmental Studies at the University of Glasgow examines the practices of the petrochemical industry, along with the communities living with, and resisting, its impact. Offering ethnographic and theoretical reflections on this often overlooked and hidden part of the oil and plastics production chain, the book offers a new perspective on our present environmental crisis. Diagnosing the acuteness of problems as well as the challenges of solutions, the book is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand our planet and environment. The book is available open access here.

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If ideology has never before been so much in evidence as a fact and so little understood as it appears to be today then, Jason Blakely argues in his new book Lost in Ideology: Interpreting Modern Political Life (Agenda Publishing, 2023), this may not be because we are like travellers guided by old maps of the political world but because we make the mistake of thinking that our maps are the worlds in which we live and act politically. When we read them as if they are reality, rather than a representation of it, we get lost.

If you like this episode of New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science then you might also be interested in others in the series, including Jason and Mark Bevir talking about their Interpretive Social Science, and James C. Scott, who passed away shortly before this episode was recorded, discussing his Against the Grain.

Jason recommends Charles Taylor’s sequel to The Language Animal, Cosmic Connections, and Jon Fosse’s novelistic exploration of the human condition, Septology.

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Mainstream portrayals of ultra-Orthodox religious women often frame their faith as oppressive: they are empowered only when they leave their community. For Women and Girls Only: Reshaping Jewish Orthodoxy Through the Arts in the Digital Age (NYU Press, 2024), by Jessica Roda, flips this notion on its head. Drawing on six years of fieldwork between New York and Montreal, Roda examines modern performances on the stage and screen directed by and for ultra-Orthodox women. Their incredibly vibrant Jewish artistic scenes defy stereotypes that paint these women as repressed, reclusive to their shtetl (village), and devoid of creativity and agency.

For Women and Girls Only argues that access to technology has completely transformed how ultra-Orthodox women express their way of being religious and that the digital era has enabled them to create an alternative entertainment market outside of the public, male-dominated one. Because expectations surrounding modesty, ultra-Orthodox women do not sing, dance, or act in front of men and the public. Yet, in a revolutionary move, they are creating “women and girls only” spaces onsite and online, putting the onus on men to shield themselves from the content. They develop modest public spaces on the Internet, about which male religious leaders are often unaware. The book also explores the entanglement between these observant female artists and those who left religion and became public performers. The author shows that the arts expressed by all these women offer a means of not only social but also economic empowerment in their respective worlds.

Interviewee: Jessica Roda is Assistant Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.

Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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Paradoxes of Migration in Tajikistan: Locating the Good Life (UCL Press, 2024) by Dr. Elena Borisova is the first ethnographic monograph on migration in Tajikistan, one of the most remittance-dependent countries in the world. Moving beyond economistic push-pull narratives about post-Soviet migration, it foregrounds the experiences of those who ‘stay put’ in the sending society and struggle to reproduce their moral communities. Dr. Borisova examines the role of mobility in historical and cultural ideas about the good life and how it becomes entwined with people’s efforts to become good, moral and modern subjects. Addressing the complex relationship between the economic, imaginative and moral aspects of (im)mobility, she shows that mass migration from Tajikistan is as much a project of navigating ethical personhood as it is a quest for economic resources.

This book reveals how transnational regimes and structures of mobility, citizenship and histories map out in the intimate spheres of the body, the person and the family. It is a contribution to contemporary migration research, which is mostly centred on Europe and North America, and to the field of Central Asian studies. It will be of interest to researchers of migration, (im)mobility and citizenship, and to scholars of all disciplines working on Central Asia.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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This episode is the first of two episodes this season on Muslims in China. Here Claudia Radiven and Chella Ward talk to Darren Blyer about his book Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City (Duke UP, 2022). Darren is a sociocultural anthropologist at Simon Fraser University, whose book explores how islamophobia and capitalism contribute to the violence against Uyghur Muslims in East Turkestan. Our conversation spans the history of China, the question of global Islamophobia and the importance of friendship.

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Roots of Power: The Political Ecology of Boundary Plants (Routledge, 2023) tells five stories of plants, people, property, politics, peace, and protection in tropical societies. In Cameroon, French Polynesia, Papua New Guinea, St. Vincent, and Tanzania, dracaena and cordyline plants are simultaneously property rights institutions, markers of social organization, and expressions of life-force and vitality.

In addition to their localized roles in forming landscapes and societies, these plants mark multiple boundaries and demonstrate deep historical connections across much of the planet’s tropics. These plants’ deep roots in society and culture have made them the routes through which postcolonial agrarian societies have negotiated both social and cultural continuity and change. This book is a multi-sited ethnographic political ecology of ethnobotanical institutions. It uses five parallel case studies to investigate the central phenomenon of "boundary plants" and establish the linkages among the case studies via both ancient and relatively recent demographic transformations such as the Bantu expansion across tropical Africa, the Austronesian expansion into the Pacific, and the colonial system of plantation slavery in the Black Atlantic. Each case study is a social-ecological system with distinctive characteristics stemming from the ways that power is organized by kinship and gender, social ranking, or racialized capitalism. This book contributes to the literature on property rights institutions and land management by arguing that tropical boundary plants’ social entanglements and cultural legitimacy make them effective foundations for development policy. Formal recognition of these institutions could reduce contradiction, conflict, and ambiguity between resource managers and states in postcolonial societies and contribute to sustainable livelihoods and landscapes.

This book will appeal to scholars and students of environmental anthropology, political ecology, ethnobotany, landscape studies, colonial history, and development studies, and readers will benefit from its demonstration of the comparative method.

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Liberal democracy is in crisis around the world, unable to address pressing problems such as climate change. There is, however, another path—cooperation democracy. From consumer co-ops to credit unions, worker cooperatives to insurance mutuals, nonprofits to mutual aid, countless examples prove that people working together can extend the ideals of participatory democracy and sustainability into every aspect of their lives. These forms of cooperation do not depend on electoral politics. Instead, they harness the longstanding practices and values of cooperatives: self-determination, democratic participation, equity, solidarity, and respect for the environment.

Bernard E. Harcourt develops a transformative theory and practice that builds on worldwide models of successful cooperation. He identifies the most promising forms of cooperative initiatives and then distills their lessons into an integrated framework: Coöperism. This is a political theory grounded on recognition of our interdependence. It is an economic theory that can ensure equitable distribution of wealth. Finally, it is a social theory that replaces the punishment paradigm with a cooperation paradigm.

A creative work of normative critical theory, Cooperation: A Political, Economic, and Social Theory (Columbia UP, 2023) provides a positive vision for addressing our most urgent challenges today. Harcourt shows that by drawing on the core values of cooperation and the power of people working together, a new world of cooperation democracy is within our grasp.

Bernard E. Harcourt is the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law and professor of political science at Columbia University and a chaired professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. An editor of Michel Foucault’s work in French and English, Harcourt is the author of several books, including Critique and Praxis (Columbia, 2020). He is a social-justice litigator and the recipient of the 2019 Norman Redlich Capital Defense Distinguished Service Award from the New York City Bar Association for his longtime representation of death row prisoners.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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Playwright Naomi Westerman was an anthropology graduate student studying death rituals around the world when her whole family died, turning the end of lives from an academic pursuit into something deeply personal. She became fascinated by the concept of loss and grief, the multiple ways we experience it across cultures, history, and art.

Happy Death Club: Essays on Death, Grief, and Bereavement Across Cultures (404 Inklings, 2024) is part memoir, part meditation on the many faces of death – from sprinkling ashes across the globe, to the power of horror movies, the complexities of engaging in true crime entertainment, and the vital communities of peer support groups – Happy Death Club is a frank, curious and darkly humorous look at one person’s journey through grief, and what lies beyond.

 This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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How did ordinary Iraqis survive the occupation of their communities by the Islamic State? How did they decide whether to stay or flee, to cooperate or resist? Based on an original survey from Baghdad alongside key interviews in the field Surviving the Islamic State: Contention, Cooperation, and Neutrality in Wartime Iraq (Columbia University Press, 2024) offers an insightful account of how Iraqis in different areas of the country responded to the rise and fall of the Islamic State.

Dr. Austin J. Knuppe argues that people adopt survival repertoires—a variety of social practices, tools, organized routines, symbols, and rhetorical strategies—to navigate wartime violence and detect threats. He traces how repertoires varied among different communities over the course of the conflict. In areas insulated from insurgent control, such as cosmopolitan Baghdad, local residents had the flexibility to support coalition forces while also voicing opposition to government policies. For Iraqis in rural communities confronting insurgent control, collaboration and resistance entailed significant risks. In Sunni-majority communities in the western desert, passive acquiescence and active cooperation temporarily insulated Iraqis from insurgent victimization. For ethnic and religious minorities in the north, however, flight or resistance proved the only viable options. In many communities, local residents mobilized neighborhood self-defense groups and militias loosely aligned with coalition forces once the tides turned against the Islamic State.

Beyond contributing to academic and policy debates about civilian protection during wartime, Surviving the Islamic State foregrounds everyday people’s experiences while modeling an ethical approach for conducting field research in conflict-affected communities.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Anxiety may have been abounding in the old Cold War West that progress - whether political or economic - has been reversed, but for citizens of former-socialist countries, murky temporal trajectories are nothing new. Grounded in the multiethnic frontier town of Hunchun at the triple border of China, Russia, and North Korea, Ed Pulford traces how several of global history’s most ambitiously totalizing progressive endeavors have ended in cataclysmic collapse here. From the Japanese empire which banished Qing, Tsarist, and Choson dynastic histories from the region, through Chinese, Soviet, and Korean socialisms, these borderlands have seen projections and disintegrations of forward-oriented ideas accumulate on a grand scale.

Taking an archaeological approach to notions of historical progress, the book’s three parts follow an innovative structure moving backwards through linear time. Part I explores “post-historical” Hunchun’s diverse sociopolitics since high socialism’s demise. Part II covers the socialist era, discussing cross-border temporal synchrony between China, Russia, and North Korea. Finally, Part III treats the period preceding socialist revolutions, revealing how the collapse of Qing, Tsarist, and Choson dynasties marked a compound “end of history” which opened the area to projections of modernity and progress. Examining a borderland across linguistic, cultural, and historical lenses, Past Progress: Time and Politics at the Borders of China, Russia, and Korea (Stanford UP, 2024) is a simultaneously local and transregional analysis of time, borders, and the state before, during, and since socialism.

Ed Pulford is Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester. His research and teaching focus on anthropological and historical approaches to Eurasian borderlands, Sino-Russian relations, the past and present of socialism, and comparative experiences of socialism and empire. He has lived and worked in China, Russia, Japan, and Korea.

Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of state, the anthropology of time, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

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Violent Affections: Queer Sexuality, Techniques of Power, and Law in Russia (UCL Press, 2022) by Alexander Sasha Kondakov uncovers techniques of power that work to translate emotions into violence against queer people. Based on analysis of over 300 criminal cases of anti-queer violence in Russia before and after the introduction of ‘gay propaganda’ law, the book shows how violent acts are framed in emotional language by perpetrators during their criminal trials. It then utilises an original methodology of studying ‘legal memes’ and argues that these individual affective states are directly connected to the political violence aimed at queer lives more generally. 

The main aim of Violent Affections is to explore the social mechanisms and techniques that impact anti-queer violence evidenced in the reviewed cases. Kondakov expands upon two sets of interdisciplinary literature – queer theory and affect theory – in order to conceptualise what is referred to as neo-disciplinary power. Taking the empirical observations from Russia as a starting point, he develops an original explanation of how contemporary power relations are changing from those of late modernity as envisioned by Foucault’s Panopticon to neo-disciplinary power relations of a much more fragmented, fluid and unstructured kind – the Memeticon. The book traces how exactly affections circulate from body to body as a kind of virus and eventually invade the body that responds with violence. In this analytic effort, it draws on the arguments from memetics – the theory of how pieces of information pass on from one body to another as they thrive to survive by continuing to resonate. This work makes the argument truly interdisciplinary.

This book is available open access here. 

Alexander Sasha Kondakov is an assistant professor at the School of Sociology, University College Dublin, Ireland.

Tatiana Klepikova is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Regensburg, where she leads a research group on queer literatures and cultures under socialism.

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Tazin Abdullah speaks with Dr Ibrar Bhatt about heritage literacies, particularly as they are practiced by Chinese Muslims. Bhatt is the author of A Semiotics of Muslimness in China (Cambridge UP, 2023). About the book: 

A Semiotics of Muslimness in China examines the semiotics of Sino-Muslim heritage literacy in a way that integrates its Perso-Arabic textual qualities with broader cultural semiotic forms. Using data from images of the linguistic landscape of Sino-Muslim life alongside interviews with Sino-Muslims about their heritage, the author examines how signs of 'Muslimness' are displayed and manipulated in both covert and overt means in different contexts. In so doing the author offers a 'semiotics of Muslimness' in China and considers how forms of language and materiality have the power to inspire meanings and identifications for Sino-Muslims and understanding of their heritage literacy. The author employs theoretical tools from linguistic anthropology and an understanding of semiotic assemblage to demonstrate how signifiers of Chinese Muslimness are invoked to substantiate heritage and Sino-Muslim identity constructions even when its expression must be covert, liminal, and unconventional.

For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here.

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What do universal rights to public goods like education mean when codified as individual, private choices? Is the “problem” of school choice actually not about better choices for all but, rather, about the competition and exclusion that choice engenders—guaranteeing a system of winners and losers? Unsettling Choice: Race, Rights, and the Partitioning of Public Education (U Minnesota Press, 2024) addresses such questions through a compelling ethnography that illuminates how one path of neoliberal restructuring in the United States emerged in tandem with, and in response to, the Civil Rights movement. 

Drawing on ethnographic research in one New York City school district, Unsettling Choice traces the contestations that surfaced when, in the wake of the 2007–2009 Great Recession, public schools navigated austerity by expanding choice-based programs. Ujju Aggarwal argues that this strategy, positioned as “saving public schools,” mobilized mechanisms rooted in market logics to recruit families with economic capital on their side, thereby solidifying a public sphere that increasingly resembled the private—where contingency was anticipated and rights for some were marked by intensified precarity for poor and working-class Black and Latinx families. As Unsettling Choice shows, these struggles over public schools—one of the last remaining universal public goods in the United States—were entrapped within neoliberal regimes that exceeded privatization and ensured exclusion even as they were couched in language of equity, diversity, care, and rights. And yet this richly detailed and engaging book also tracks an architecture of expansive rights, care, and belonging built among poor and working-class parents at a Head Start center, whose critique of choice helps us understand how we might struggle for—and reimagine—justice, and a public that remains to be won.

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For some four hundred years, Hindus and Christians have been engaged in a public controversy about conversion and missionary proselytization, especially in India and the Hindu diaspora. 

Hindu Mission, Christian Mission: Soundings in Comparative Theology (SUNY Press, 2024) reframes this controversy by shifting attention from "conversion" to a wider, interreligious study of "mission" as a category of thought and practice. Comparative theologian Reid B. Locklin traces the emergence of the nondualist Hindu teaching of Advaita Vedānta as a missionary tradition, from the eighth century to the present day, and draws this tradition into dialogue with contemporary proposals in Christian missiology. As a descriptive study of the Chinmaya Mission, the Ramakrishna Mission, and other leading Advaita mission movements, Hindu Mission, Christian Mission contributes to a growing body of scholarship on transnational Hinduism. As a speculative work of Christian comparative theology, it develops key themes from this engagement for a new, interreligious theology of mission and conversion for the twenty-first century and beyond.

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The 'baby boom' generation, born between the 1940s and the 1960s, is often credited with pioneering new and creative ways of relating, doing intimacy and making families. With this cohort now entering mid and later life in Britain, they are also said to be revolutionising the experience of ageing. Are the romantic practices of this 'revolutionary cohort' breaking with tradition and allowing new ways of understanding and doing ageing and relating to emerge? Based on an innovative combination of sensory ethnography in salsa classes and life history interviews, Ageing and New Intimacies: Gender, Sexuality and Temporality in an English Salsa Scene (Manchester UP, 2024) by Dr. Sarah Milton documents the meanings of desire and romance, and 'new' - or renewed - intimacies, among women in mid and later life.

Beginning with women at a transition point, when newly single or newly dating in midlife, the chapters look back over life histories to examine prior relationship experiences at different life stages, and look forward to hopes for future intimacies. In the navigation of romance and new relationships we see the sensory, sensual and affective nature of heteronormativity, and gendered practices that are informed by memories of the past, the imagination of previous generations and class-based desires. Challenging conventional notions of the baby boomers, this book illuminates the intersections of age, class, and white normativity, making important contributions to our understanding of ageing and generation, intimacy and gender.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel talks with Paula Bialski, an Associate Professor for Digital Sociology at the University of St. Gallen in St. Gallen, Switzerland, about her recent book, Middle Tech: Software Work and the Culture of Good Enough (Princeton UP, 2024). The pair talk about the art of ethnographic study of software work, and how, maybe, our world could do with a healthy dose of good enough-ness. They also scheme about some potential collaborations here on Peoples & Things, which you should definitely keep an eye out for. (You should also check out Paula’s folk pop group, Paula & Karol, whose music was greatly enjoyed while working on this episode.)

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Imagine that you volunteer for the clinical trial of an experimental drug. The only direct benefit of participating is that you will receive up to $5,175. You must spend twenty nights literally locked in a research facility. You will be told what to eat, when to eat, and when to sleep. You will share a bedroom with several strangers. Who are you, and why would you choose to take part in this kind of study?

This book explores the hidden world of pharmaceutical testing on healthy volunteers. Drawing on two years of fieldwork in clinics across the country and 268 interviews with participants and staff, it illustrates how decisions to take part in such studies are often influenced by poverty and lack of employment opportunities. It shows that healthy participants are typically recruited from African American and Latino/a communities, and that they are often serial participants, who obtain a significant portion of their income from these trials.

This book reveals not only how social inequality fundamentally shapes these drug trials, but it also depicts the important validity concerns inherent in this mode of testing new pharmaceuticals. These highly controlled studies bear little resemblance to real-world conditions, and everyone involved is incentivized to game the system, ultimately making new drugs appear safer than they really are.

Adverse Events: Race, Inequality, and the Testing of New Pharmaceuticals (New York University Press) provides an unprecedented view of the intersection of racial inequalities with pharmaceutical testing, signaling the dangers of this research enterprise to both social justice and public health.

Jill A. Fisher is Associate Professor of Social Medicine and Bioethics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context.

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Israeli universities have long enjoyed a reputation as liberal bastions of freedom and democracy. Drawing on extensive research and making Hebrew sources accessible to the international community, Maya Wind shatters this myth by documenting how Israeli universities are directly complicit in the violation of Palestinian rights. 

In Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom (Verso, 2024) shows, Wind argues that Israeli universities serve as pillars of Israel's system of oppression against Palestinians. Academic disciplines, degree programs, campus infrastructure, and research laboratories all service Israeli occupation and apartheid, while universities violate the rights of Palestinians to education, stifle critical scholarship, and violently repress student dissent. Towers of Ivory and Steel is a powerful exposé of Israeli academia’s ongoing and active complicity in Israel’s settler-colonial project.

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In Dance Music Spaces: Clubs, Clubbers, and DJs Navigating Authenticity, Branding, and Commercialism (Lexington Books, 2022), Danielle Antoinette Hidalgo examines the production of physical and digital spaces in dance music, and how the players—clubs, clubbers, and DJs—use authenticity, branding, and commercialism to navigate them. An in-depth study into three women DJs—The Blessed Madonna, Honey Dijon, and Peggy Gou—reveals a new concept, “authenticity maneuvering.” In it Danielle Hidalgo exposes how the strategic use of a rave ethos both bolsters acceptance in dance music spaces and hides often problematic commercial practices. This timely, thoughtful, and deeply personal book presents a compelling analysis of the complicated interplay between dancing bodies, digital practices, and spatial offerings in contemporary dance music.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is in the areas of social construction of experience, identity, and place. He is currently conducting research for his next project that looks at nightlife and the emotional labor that is performed by employees of bars and nightclubs. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at [email protected].

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Each year, hundreds of thousands of migrants are moved through immigration court. With a national backlog surpassing one million cases, court hearings take years and most migrants will eventually be ordered deported. The Slow Violence of Immigration Court: Procedural Justice on Trial (NYU Press, 2023) by Dr. Maya Pagni Barak sheds light on the experiences of migrants from the “Northern Triangle” (Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador) as they navigate legal processes, deportation proceedings, immigration court, and the immigration system writ large.

Grounded in the illuminating stories of people facing deportation, the family members who support them, and the attorneys who defend them, The Slow Violence of Immigration Court invites readers to question matters of fairness and justice and the fear of living with the threat of deportation. Although the spectacle of violence created by family separation and deportation is perceived as extreme and unprecedented, these long legal proceedings are masked in the mundane and are often overlooked, ignored, and excused. In an urgent call to action, Dr. Barak deftly demonstrates that deportation and family separation are not abhorrent anomalies, but are a routine, slow form of violence at the heart of the U.S. immigration system.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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In Model Cases: On Canonical Research Objects and Sites (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Dr. Monika Krause asks about the concrete material research objects behind shared conversations about classes of objects, periods, and regions in the social sciences and humanities. It is well known that biologists focus on particular organisms, such as mice, fruit flies, or particular viruses when they study general questions about life, development, and disease. Dr. Krause shows that scholars in the social sciences and humanities also draw on some cases more than others, selecting research objects influenced by a range of ideological but also mundane factors, such as convenience, historicist ideas about development over time, schemas in the general population, and schemas particular to specific scholarly communities.

Some research objects are studied repeatedly and shape our understanding of more general ideas in disproportionate ways: The French Revolution has profoundly influenced our concepts of revolution, of citizenship, and of political modernity, just like studies of doctors have set the agenda for research on the professions. Based on an extensive analysis of the role of model cases in different fields, Dr. Krause argues that they can be useful for scholarly communities if they are acknowledged and reflected as particular objects; she also highlights the importance of research strategies based on neglected research objects and neglected combinations of research objects and scholarly concerns.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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