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 g
