
BRANDI BETHKE and AMANDA BURTT, eds. 2020. Dogs: Archaeology beyond Domestication, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 273 pp., ISBN 978-0-8130-5746-0 Dogs: Archaeology beyond Domestication investigates a topic that has accompanied us since the late Paleolithic, for more than 15,000 years BCE (Boschin et al. 2020): relationships between dogs and humans and their diverse manifestations. The […]
BARUA, MAAN. 2024. Plantation Worlds, Durham: Duke University Press, 312 pp., ISBN: 978-1478020868 The plantation is alive and kicking. Large swatches of land in the Global South are being turned into monocultural plantations of oil palm, soybean, cut flowers, and the usual tropical commodities like bananas, sugar cane, coffee, and tea. No surprise then that […]
Eds. by Mark Micale and Hans Pols. Traumatic Pasts in Asia History, Psychiatry, and Trauma from the 1930s to the Present. New York, NY: Berghahn Books, ISBN:9781800731844 Traumatic Pasts in Asia focuses on how people reacted to horrific past events of wars, mass violence, and natural disasters across modern Asian history, covering the period from the mid-1930s […]
MATTHEW C. CANFIELD, 2022, Translating Food Sovereignty: Cultivating Justice in an Age of Transnational Governance, Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 267 pp., ISBN 978150361344 Introduction Translating Food Sovereignty is a compelling ethnography of transnational food sovereignty movements, grounded in the Pacific Northwest. At the heart of the book are questions of how food sovereignty […]
Elliott, Denielle, and Matthew Wolf-Meyer, eds. 2024, Naked Fieldnotes: A Rough Guide to Ethnographic Writing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 320 pp., ISBN 978-1-5179-16145 In Naked Fieldnotes: A Rough Guide to Ethnographic Writing, editors Denielle Elliott and Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer seek to fill a gap in ethnographic instruction and literature on how to record […]
WILLIAM S. SAX, 2024, In the Valley of the Kauravas: A Divine Kingdom in the Western Himalaya, Oxford University Press, 320 pp., ISBN 978-0-19887-935-0 Keywords: Divine Kingship, Public Enactment, Cultural Solidarity, Local Deities, Ballad and Oral Tradition The Valley of the Kauravas by William Sax is a beautiful yet candid work, showcasing his […]
Garrett, Andrew. 2023. The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall – Language, Memory, and Indigenous California. Cambridge, Massachusetts, The MIT Press. 472 pp. ISBN: 9780262547093 Keywords: Settler Colonialism, Linguistics, Salvage Anthropology, Memory Contestation, Alfred Kroeber Andrew Garrett, professor in the department of linguistics at the University of California Berkeley (UC Berkeley), , sets out in this […]
In Mumbai Taximen, Tarini Bedi holds open the door for readers to hop into a kaalipeeli taxi with her. Together, in the classic “black and yellow” Padmini taxis of Mumbai, India, Bedi and readers “follow how people make lives through driving work and how they participate in a city’s economic, bureaucratic, and political shifts amid […]
AIMÉE JOYCE, 2024, Spectral Borders: History, neighbourliness and discord on the Polish-Belarusian frontier. Canon Pyon: Sean Kingston Publishing, 207 pp, ISBN 9781912385522 Keywords: neighbourliness, haunting, borderland, Poland, Belarus, history How to live comfortably in a place haunted by traumatic events? How are lives lived, day-to-day, in a place that entails more than […]
COE, CATI. 2019. The New American Servitude: Political Belonging among African Immigrant Home Care Workers, New York University Press: New York, Series: Anthropologies of American Medicine: Culture, Power, and Practice, 304 pp., ISBN: 9781479808830 Through the lens of African immigrant home care workers and their clients, Cati Coe’s The New American Servitude: Political Belonging among […]
KEYWORDS: Feminist anthropology; spirituality; activism; decolonial theory; South Asian Studies In a recent essay, Tanya Luhrmann (2023) described ethnography as a spiritual practice. Spiritual practices, writes Luhrmann, are “practices that are meant to transform your life.” Myriad Intimacies holds this potential: it does not merely describe but embodies and enacts what a spiritually-driven intellectual and […]