Adams, Vincanne, ed. 2016. Metrics: What Counts in Global Health. Durham: Duke University Press. There has long been a tension between sociocultural anthropology and more quantitative fields such as demography and medicine (Christman and Maretzki, 1982; Schepher-Hughes 1990; Kertzer and Fricke 1997). While some of this history results from differences in methodological and theoretical orientations, […]
Fox, Georgia Lynne, and Michael S. Nassaney. 2015. The Archaeology of Smoking and Tobacco. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. For thousands of years, Indigenous peoples across the Americas cultivated and consumed tobacco. In some Indigenous communities, tobacco was ingested by chewing, in others tobacco was consumed by pipe and cigar smoking (p. 19-20). Native communities […]
Borneman, John. 2015. Cruel Attachments: The Ritual Rehab of Child Molesters in Germany. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. John Borneman’s Cruel Attachments: The Ritual Rehab of Child Molesters in Germany is an ethnographic account of fieldwork among men who had been accused and convicted of child molestation. In much of the West, individuals who […]
Ingold, Tim. 2015. The Life of Lines. London ; New York: Routledge. Introduction This review aims to offer readers a concise yet (hopefully) robust review of Tim Ingold’s latest work, The Life of Lines. Readers familiar with Ingold’s work will remember his controversial (but arguably misunderstood) definition of anthropology as “philosophy with people in” (1992, p.696), […]
Tetreault, Chantal. 2015. Transcultural Teens: Performing Youth Identities in French Cites. Chichester, West Sussex, UK ; Malden, MA: WILEY Blackwell. In Transnational Teens, Tetreault’s most powerful claim is that in French politics and media “‘French’ and ‘Arab Muslim’ are constructed as mutually exclusive” and are in many ways seen as incompatible (p. 2). This is shown […]
Whiteford, Linda M., and Cecilia Vindrola-Padros. 2015. Community Participatory Involvement: A Sustainable Model for Global Public Health. Walnut Creek, California: Left Coast Press. Anthropologists who collaborate with communities and organizations to bring about positive social change and improve public health will be very interested in this concise, but detailed, case study of an international effort […]
Salazar, Carles, and Joan Bestard-Camps, eds. 2015. Religion and Science as Forms of Life: Anthropological Insights into Reason and Unreason. New York: Berghahn Books. Religion and Science as Forms of Life: Anthropological insights into Reason and Unreason is volume edited by Carlos Salazar and Joan Bestard, and published in 2015. The main purpose of the […]
Clemente, Ignasi. 2015. Uncertain Futures: Communication and Culture in Childhood Cancer Treatment. Chichester, West Sussex, UK ; Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons Inc. Uncertain Futures is an emotional and ethnographic journey in the paediatric oncological ward at the Catalonia Hospital in Barcelona. Ignaci Clemente offers a compassionate blueprint of what medical communication looks like when […]
Darnell, Regna, ed. 2015. The Franz Boas Papers. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Early in her preface to this first volume of the Franz Boas Papers, Regna Darnell suggests that Franz Boas is an “elephant in the middle of the room” for contemporary anthropology, in relation to which “all practicing anthropologists have struggled to position […]
Inhorn, Marcia Claire. 2015. Cosmopolitan Conceptions: IVF Sojourns in Global Dubai. Durham: Duke University Press. This book begins with a lengthy prologue, a verbatim transcript of an interview conducted by Marcia Inhorn with Rahina, who relates her story of marital infertility and her quest for conception. The individual stories in this book are situated within […]
Jansen, Stef. 2015. Yearnings in the Meantime: “Normal Lives” and the State in a Sarajevo Apartment Complex. First Edition. New York: Berghahn. Hopes have histories – they may turn into yearnings.(p. 168) When the spatiotemporal anchors of daily lives begin to disintegrate, they may become the backbone of not only the structural, but also the […]
Meinert, Lotte, and Bruce Kapferer, eds. 2015. In the Event: Toward an Anthropology of Generic Moments. New York: Berghahn Books. It has been a while since anthropology gave center stage to the debate on what the focus of its observations should be. Socio-cultural transformations, shifts in theoretical paradigms, and the crisis of representation, to name […]
Dutta, Mohan J. 2015. Neoliberal Health Organizing: Communication, Meaning, and Politics. Walnut Creek, California: Left Coast Press. In a very readable and accessible format Dutta, Provost’s Chair Professor and Head of the Department of Communications and New Media at the National University of Singapore, analyzes the various components of neoliberal strategies in defining and delivering […]
Fuglerud, Øivind, and Leon Wainwright, eds. 2015. Objects and Imagination: Perspectives on Materialization and Meaning. New York: Berghahn Books. Physical objects have tremendous associative power embodying more than remembrance and mental connections. They connect with us individually, affecting us bodily through all of our senses creating strong feelings through their use and presence and collectively […]
Baer, Hans A., and Merrill Singer. 2018. The Anthropology of Climate Change: An Integrated Critical Perspective. Second edition. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY: Routledge. As we begin the Anthropocene, an era characterized by humans’ “unparalleled dominion over the whole planet” (Ackerman 2014: 9), there is a critical need to identify and understand the […]
Sismondo, Sergio, and Jeremy A. Greene, eds. 2015. The Pharmaceutical Studies Reader. Chichester, UK ; Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons Inc. My mother is a psychiatrist, and I grew up in a house littered with Prozac pens and paperweights. By the time I reached adolescence, I had already attended my fair share of drug company-sponsored […]
Maffie, James. 2015. Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World in Motion. First paperback edition. Boulder: University Press of Colorado. Aztec Philosophy is James Maffie’s attempt to reconstruct Aztec perceptions of nature and reality at the time of European contact. To do so, he draws upon a variety of sources including ethnohistorical, ethnographic, archaeological, and linguistic data. […]
Keller, Eva. 2015. Beyond the Lens of Conservation: Malagasy and Swiss Imaginations of One Another. First edition. New York: Berghahn. Eva Keller’s Beyond the Lens of Conservation is an interesting study of the relationship between Malagasy and Swiss people by way of their mutual connection to Masoala National Park in Madagascar. There has been a […]
Swift, Candice Lowe, ed. 2015. Teaching Food and Culture. Walnut Creek, California: Left Coast Press, Inc. With the increase in food studies academic programs and food-centric courses in higher education, Teaching Food and Culture is both timely and relevant. This edited volume includes selections from scholar-teachers who have many years of experience in the field, […]
