Anon. 2019. Religion, History, and Place in the Origin of Settled Life. University Press Of Colorado. Religion, History, and Place in the Origin of Settled Life is a new episode of the Templeton saga led by Ian Hodder and is about the concept of “history-making”. This volume follows previous work on the nine-thousand-year old town, […]
Kaplan, Jonathan H., Federico Paredes-Umaña, Arlen F. Chase, and Diane Z. Chase. 2018. Water, Cacao, and the Early Maya of Chocolá. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Water, Cacao, and the Early Maya of Chocolá presents the results of Jonathan Kaplan and Federico Paredes Umana’s three seasons of archaeological investigations and additional years of research at […]
Petersen, Andrew. 2018. Bones of Contention: Muslim Shrines in Palestine. Singapore, Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan. Bones of Contention will be valuable to historians and archaeologists, as much as social scientists, although it does require a particular kind of reading (at times, against its own grain). The introduction does not fully anticipate the arguments to come, and […]
Weiss, Elizabeth. 2017. Reading the Bones: Activity, Biology, and Culture. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Reading the Bones: Activity, Biology and Culture considers the study of bones’ features as a way to understand osteological variation – Is the environment a suitable explanation? Or genetic selection? Is it possible to study specific markers to reconstruct past […]
Srinivas, Tulasi. 2018. The Cow in the Elevator: An Anthropology of Wonder. Durham: Duke University Press. Any Western anthropologist working in India has, at times, been dumbstruck by the creative and spontaneous moments of encounter between traditional religious life and the realities of a modern global economy. I, for one, will certainly never forget hearing […]
Gullette, Margaret Morganroth. 2017. Ending Ageism, or How Not to Shoot Old People. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Ending Ageism, or How Not To Shoot Old People, the latest book by distinguished age-critic Margaret Morganroth Gullette, describes ageist ideology and its effects, and proffers an array of approaches to bring about change. In this artfully […]
Amrith, Megha. 2017. Caring for Strangers: Filipino Medical Workers in Asia. Copenhagen, Denmark: NIAS Press. International labor migration has become an increasingly popular topic for anthropologists, striking at the deep tensions arising from a global economic landscape dependent on both the transnational flows of people and the retrenchment of national, racial and cultural politics that […]
Fennell, Christopher. 2017. Broken Chains and Subverted Plans: Ethnicity, Race, and Commodities. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. In Broken Chains and Subverted Plans: Ethnicity, Race, and Commodities, Christopher C. Fennell presents two communities that resisted oppressive forces by creating new responses to dominant capitalistic trends. The book is divided into two parts: “Ethnicity and Commodity Chains […]
Pétric, Boris-Mathieu. 2015. Where Are All Our Sheep? Kyrgyzstan, a Global Political Arena. New York: Berghahn Books. Where Are All Our Sheep? Kyrgyzstan, A Global Political Arena is a result of ten years multi-sited fieldwork in Kyrgyzstan (2001 – 2010), namely in the Naryn region in the north, its capital Naryn and Bishkek, the country’s […]
Brian Gersten, Liv Dubendorf, & Wei Ying, 2017, Caviar Dreams, The Video Project There is little extraordinary in the taste of caviar. To the unsophisticated, exemplified in the ethnographic film Caviar Dreams by children, caviar is just “fishy.” A connoisseur might add a detail about tiny “bursts of flavor” inside one’s mouth, but the overall verdict […]
Salverda, Tijo. 2015. The Franco-Mauritian Elite: Power and Anxiety in the Face of Change. New York: Berghahn. Reading postcolonial Sub-Saharan African political history books usually evokes a sense that African indigenous people, mostly phenotypically black Sub-Saharan people, were subject to a heroic European colonial conquest and suffered the effects of political domination at every level […]
LiPuma, Edward. 2017. The Social Life of Financial Derivatives: Markets, Risk, and Time. Durham: Duke University Press. According to Edward LiPuma, a dominant name in the anthropology of finance, we now live in a new and transformative phase of capitalism in which the proportion of wealth “held in financial as opposed to physical assets” is […]
Simonse, Simon. 2018. Kings of Disaster: Dualism, Centralism and the Scapegoat King in Southeastern Sudan. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Kings of Disaster: Dualism, Centralism and the Scapegoat King in Southern Sudan (Michigan State & Fountain) is a remarkable ethnography of people whose sense of commonality is produced by their common opposition to their […]
McKay, Ramah. 2018. Medicine in the Meantime: The Work of Care in Mozambique. Durham: Duke University Press. Ramah McKay’s ethnography opens on a demonstration—a group of doctors marching out of Maputo’s Central Hospital protesting low wages and government malaise in the public health sector. The tableau of striking doctors in Mozambique’s capital illustrates health as […]
Losier, Catherine. 2016. Approvisionner Cayenne Sous l’Ancien Régime: Archéologie et Histoire Des Réseaux Commerciaux. Leiden: Sidestone Press. Guyana’s colonial history was shaped by 17th century European trade interests. Slavery decimated almost all native groups, so workforce issues were solved through a coercive trade whose exclusive goal consisted in providing profits for the French metropole. To […]
Hamdy, Sherine, Coleman Nye, Sarula Bao, Caroline Brewer, and Marc Parenteau. 2017. Lissa: A Story about Medical Promise, Friendship, and Revolution. North York, Ontario, Canada: University of Toronto Press. Lissa: A Story About Medical Promise, Friendship, and Revolution does not resemble a traditional ethnographic publication, but it definitely qualifies as a page-turner. Written by Sherine […]
Baird, Melissa F., and Paul A. Shackel. 2017. Critical Theory and the Anthropology of Heritage Landscapes. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Melissa Baird, assistant professor in Anthropology at Michigan Technological University, uses a comparative approach based on a variety of fieldworks and methods that focus on social, ecological and political impacts of resource extraction, especially […]
Mischa Hedges (director), 2017, Women’s March: A Documentary Film About Democracy and Human Rights, TrimTab Media Women’s March: A Documentary Film About Democracy and Human Rights was produced in 2017 by TrimTab Media, an agency whose aim is to produce independent documentaries which highlight social and environmental issues. Mischa Hedges, co-founder of the agency, directed […]
Richard, François G., and Kevin C. MacDonald. 2021. Ethnic Ambiguity and the African Past: Materiality, History, and the Shaping of Cultural Identities. Routledge. In a strange twist of fate, I read Ethnic Ambiguity and the African Past: Materiality, History, and the Shaping of Cultural Identities at the same time as Amselle and M’Bokolo’s Au cœur […]
Klaus, Haagen D., Amanda R. Harvey, Mark Nathan Cohen, and Clark Spencer Larsen, eds. 2017. Bones of Complexity: Bioarchaeological Case Studies of Social Organization and Skeletal Biology. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Bones of Complexity is a considerable collection of bioarchaeological studies that aims to identify social structures and inequality in ancient communities from osteological […]
Robertson, Jennifer. 2018. Robo Sapiens Japanicus: Robots, Gender, Family, and the Japanese Nation. Oakland, California: University of California Press. Jennifer Robertson’s most recent book on robots in Japan is an easy-to-read ethnography-based overview of the ways that the national robotics policies in Japan are shaping the contemporary Japanese society as well as the ways that […]
Bill Benenson (director), 2014, The Hadza: The Last Of The First, Benenson Productions and Firestick Productions. This is a fascinating, watchable documentary on the Hadza people of Tanzania. Anyone interested in hunter-gatherers and their lives in today’s world, as well as their contribution to our understanding of human evolution, will want to see it. Several […]
Albert, Victor. 2016. The Limits to Citizen Power: Participatory Democracy and the Entanglements of the State. London: Pluto Press. Political anthropologists and ethnographers often address the limits to citizen power, in terms of the material and symbolic barriers ordinary people encounter in their attempts to have a say in the rule of the state. Victor […]
Mahmood, Saba. 2016. Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Saba Mahmood presents an interesting analysis of how secularism and modern liberal state, contrary to their claims of maintaining religious harmony, have exacerbated “interfaith inequalities” (2). Moreover, she argues that their claim of “religious neutrality” (2) is false and […]
Zierden, Martha A., Elizabeth Jean Reitz, and Joseph P. Riley. 2016. Charleston: An Archaeology of Life in a Coastal Community. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Charleston: An Archaeology of Life in a Coastal Community summarizes almost half a century of archaeological research in the South Carolina city known for its historic buildings and vibrant, tourism-centered […]
Tarlo, Emma. 2017. Entanglement: The Secret Lives of Hair. Paperback edition. London: Oneworld. “Had I become a hair fetishist?” Emma Tarlo asks herself and her reader only eleven pages into her captivating, strange, exciting, and surprising new book, Entanglement: The Secret Lives of Hair. If you ask yourself that question, the answer is probably a […]
Kohrt, Brandon, and Emily Mendenhall, eds. 2015. Global Mental Health: Anthropological Perspectives. Walnut Creek, California: Left Coast Press, Inc. Global Mental Health: Anthropological Perspectives, a collection of ethnographic chapters edited by Brandon A. Kohrt and Emily Mendenhall, is well situated at the intersection of medical anthropology and global health. The discipline of global health recognizes […]
Englehardt, Joshua, and Ivy A. Rieger, eds. 2017. These “Thin Partitions”: Bridging the Growing Divide between Cultural Anthropology and Archaeology. Boulder: University Press of Colorado. These “Thin Partitions:” Bridging the Growing Divide Between Cultural Anthropology and Archaeology co-edited by Joshua D. Englehardt and Ivy A. Rieger seeks to reexamine if and to what extent the […]
Biruk, Crystal. 2018. Cooking Data: Culture and Politics in an African Research World. Durham: Duke University Press. “Clean data—well-collected raw numbers—contain within them thousands of stories,” Crystal Biruk writes in Cooking Data: Culture and Politics in an African Research World (Duke, 2018), an excellent new ethnography of quantitative data production in Malawi. Whether it is […]
Matthews, Christopher N., and Allison Manfra McGovern, eds. 2015. The Archaeology of Race in the Northeast. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. The authors in The Archaeology of Race in the Northeast, edited by Christopher N. Matthews and Allison Manfra McGovern, are part of the growing cohort of researchers within historical archaeology that reject a simple […]
Nolan, Riall W. 2017. Using Anthropology in the World: A Guide to Becoming an Anthropologist Practitioner. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. Using Anthropology in the World: A Guide to Becoming an Anthropologist Practitioner by Riall W. Nolan (2017) offers aspiring anthropologists a thorough look at the discipline as well as essential core competencies. […]
Aya Domenig, The Day the Sun Fell, ICAN films, 2015 On the morning of August 6, 1945, internist Shigeru Doi (1914-1991) left his family home in the countryside for his daily seventy-kilometer commute to the Red Cross Hospital in Hiroshima. He did not return until ten days later, and he greeted his wife on his […]
Domínguez, Virginia R., and Jasmin Habib, eds. 2017. America Observed: On an International Anthropology of the United States. New York: Berghahn. This edited collection contributes to the framing of a global anthropology in the 21st century as it poses a question and a mystery to readers. The question, whether the US can be “othered”, seems […]
Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. 2016. Overheating: An Anthropology of Accelerated Change. London: Pluto Press. In the title of the first chapter, Thomas Hylland Eriksen cites Lévi-Strauss: “Le monde est trop plein”. In a very illustrative picture, this sentence summarizes Overheating, which according to the subtitle, is an anthropology of accelerated change. It is a book about […]
O’Connor, Mary I. 2016. Mixtec Evangelicals: Globalization, Migration, and Religious Change in a Oaxacan Indigenous Group. Boulder: University Press of Colorado. Like many other groups in Latin America, the indigenous Mixtec people of Oaxaca, Mexico have been Catholic for centuries. And like many other groups in Latin America, the Mixtec people have become less Catholic […]
Hughes, David McDermott. 2017. Energy without Conscience: Oil, Climate Change, and Complicity. Durham: Duke University Press. Throughout history, humankind’s energy sources have advanced from simple wood-fueled fires for warmth to complex extraction and development of deeply buried fossil fuels to fuel vehicles and heat homes. In Energy Without Conscience: Oil, Climate Change, and Complicity David […]
O’Neill, Bruce. 2017. The Space of Boredom: Homelessness in the Slowing Global Order. Durham: Duke University Press. The Space of Boredom: Homelessness in the Slowing Global Order, by Bruce O’Neill, offers a crucial insight into the boredom experienced by the homeless in Bucharest, Romania. Examining the pitfalls of global capitalism, O’Neill is able to probe […]
