2020 has been a turbulent year – to put it mildly. And as the world has seemed at times to come to a standstill, academic publishing has continued, and in some corners increased. While the pandemic has in many ways enhanced and amplified various forms of connectivity, it has also engendered and exacerbated exclusions and […]
Seeger, Martin. 2018. Gender and the Path to Awakening: Hidden Histories of Nuns in Modern Thai Buddhism. First edition. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books. Gender and the Path to Awakening by Martin Seeger is important for its interdisciplinary contributions to anthropology, sociology, gender and religious studies. It is a textual and ethnographic study of seven female […]
Dickinson, Maggie. 2020. Feeding the Crisis: Care and Abandonment in America’s Food Safety Net. Oakland, California: The University of California Press. The return to nearly full employment rates after the Great Recession (2008-2009) has not palliated the need for mass food assistance in the United States. In 2012, over 40 million Americans received food assistance […]
Mariner, Kathryn A. 2019. Contingent Kinship: The Flows and Futures of Adoption in the United States. Oakland, California: University of California Press. Kathryn Mariner’s Contingent Kinship opens up the backstage work in adoption which she encounters through her collaboration with an adoption agency located between Chicago’s affluent suburb and the city’s low-income neighborhoods. Mariner’s focus […]
Beldo, Les. 2019. Contesting Leviathan: Activists, Hunters, and State Power in the Makah Whaling Conflict. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Les Beldo begins his ethnography by recounting a historic event that some recall with pride and joy and others with sadness and pain. On May 17, 1999, a dugout canoe full of men from […]
Richman, Karen E. 2018. Migration and Vodou. University Press of Florida. In Migration and Vodou, Karen Richman presents a fascinatingly rich ethnography that draws on over two decades of multi-sited research across Haiti and the United States, embedded within an extended transnational family of migrant workers and remittance recipients. Through the lens of this one […]
Wu, Keping, and Robert P. Weller, eds. 2020. It Happens among People: Resonances and Extensions of the Work of Fredrik Barth. New York: Berghahn. Keywords: Barth, boundaries, fieldwork, nomad, humanistic tradition This collection, counting just above two hundred pages authored by eleven contributors from Norway, Sweden, China, and the United States in twelve independent chapters […]
Armelagos, George J., and Dennis P. Van Gerven. 2017. Life and Death on the Nile: A Bioethnography of Three Ancient Nubian Communities. Gainesville ; Tallahasee ; Tampa: University Press of Florida. Life and Death on the Nile is a rollicking reminiscence that looks back at the roughly six decades of research collaboration undertaken by Dennis Van Gerven, […]
Gago, Verónica. 2017. Neoliberalism from below: Popular Pragmatics and Baroque Economies. Durham: Duke University Press. Neoliberalism may have lost legitimacy as a state-directed political project, Verónica Gago tells us in Neoliberalism from Below, but its protean elements infect the logics of social relations even amongst those who are understood to suffer from it the most. […]
Cameron, M. M. 2019. Three Fruits: Nepali Ayurvedic Doctors on Health, Nature, and Social Change. Lanham: Lexington Books. Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food. -Hippocrates There is a growing interest in medical anthropology in how indigenous and local healing systems increasingly become (or remain?) ‘alternative’ in the face of mainstreaming, global […]
Kaul, Adam R., and Jonathan Skinner, eds. 2018. Leisure and Death: An Anthropological Tour of Risk, Death, and Dying. Boulder, Colorado: University Press of Colorado. Death has been a subject of study for anthropologists from the very start of the discipline. Being both universal (we all die one day, and almost all of us are confronted […]
Nathalie Berger and Lee Hyde (directors), Call Me Intern (2019). The Video Project Article 23 of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that: Everyone without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work. Everyone who works has the right to just and favorable remuneration. This was David Hyde’s final statement to […]
Anand, Nikhil. 2017. Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai. Durham ; London: Duke University Press. Reading through a work that has already become a signpost in the anthropology of infrastructure, I was reminded of Pa Ranjith’s recent Tamil blockbuster Kaala, a film that, like Nikhil Anand’s monograph Hydraulic City, is set in […]
Moore, Jerry D. 2017. Incidence of Travel: Recent Journeys in Ancient South America. Boulder: University Press of Colorado. Some people are said to have a special affinity with certain species of animals and have the ability to understand their feelings and even what they think. These people are known as whisperers, and among the best […]
Reed-Danahay, Deborah. 2020. Bourdieu and Social Space: Mobilities, Trajectories, Emplacements. New York: Berghahn Books. Keywords: social space; mobility; migration; trajectory; habitus The problem that American anthropologist Deborah Reed-Danahay sets out to solve in Bourdieu and Social Space (2020) is, as the title suggests, what Pierre Bourdieu really meant and did with the notion of social […]
Wilson, Sheena, Adam Carlson, and Imre Szeman, eds. 2017. Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Culture. Montreal ; Chicago: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Keywords: Petrocultures, Critical Theory, Energy, Globalization, Modernity, Climate Change. This thought-provoking book is a collection of essays that cultural theorist Imre Szeman has written over the last two decades. The author takes us through an informed epistemological […]
Günel, Gökçe. 2019. Spaceship in the Desert: Energy, Climate Change, and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi. Experimental Futures. Durham: Duke University Press. Keywords: Urban design, Climate change, Science and Technology, Infrastructures, Energy What happens when “a technocratic dictatorship,” “an expensive toy,” and “spaceship in the desert” entangle together under moments of irony and contradiction to […]
Fitzpatrick, Scott M. 2020. Ancient Psychoactive Substances. University Press of Florida Ancient Psychoactive Substances is an endeavor in the history of what the contemporary society perceives and classifies as both illegal and legal mind-altering substances. Edited by Dr. Scott Fitzpatrick, this investigation and anthology draws from numerous sources in a cross-disciplinary manner, ranging from biomolecular […]
Johnson, Andrew Alan. 2020. Mekong Dreaming: Life and Death along a Changing River. Durham: Duke University Press. Keywords: Mekong, Thailand, environment, economy, uncertainty Mekong Dreaming is an ethnography of a town on the Mekong river that has undergone rapid change in the last two decades, not only in the town itself but also in national […]
Ives, Sarah Fleming. 2017. Steeped in Heritage: The Racial Politics of South African Rooibos Tea. Durham: Duke University Press. Steeped in Heritage explores the fraught claims of indigeneity of white and colored farmers in the rooibos-region of Cederberg in contemporary South Africa. Specifically, Ives sets out to answer the following questions: “How do residents grapple […]
Charlier, Philippe, and Richard J. Gray. 2017. Zombies: An Anthropological Investigation of the Living Dead. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. In Zombies: An Anthropological Investigation of the Living Dead, Philippe Charlier uses biomedicine and physical anthropology to discuss the presence and cultural significance of zombies in Haiti. Charlier is qualified to evaluate zombies because he […]
Kitta, Andrea. 2019. The Kiss of Death: Contagion, Contamination, and Folklore. Logan: Utah State University Press. I was initially drawn to Andrea Kitta’s book, The Kiss of Death: Contagion, Contamination, and Folklore, because of my own research on families who choose not to vaccinate and the metaphors they use to describe bodily contamination through vaccines. […]
Kartomi, Margaret J., ed. 2019. Performing the Arts of Indonesia: Malay Identity and Politics in the Music, Dance and Theatre of the Riau Islands. Copenhagen K, Denmark: NIAS Press. Dispersed from the Straits of Malacca across the South China Sea, from Sumatra, Peninsular Malaysia and Singapore to west Kalimantan, the 2,408 Riau Islands or Kepri […]
Rofel, Lisa, and Sylvia Junko Yanagisako. 2019. Fabricating Transnational Capitalism: A Collaborative Ethnography of Italian-Chinese Global Fashion. Durham: Duke University Press. Keywords: Collaborative research; Transnational capitalism; Kinship; Labor; Fashion Fabricating Transnational Capitalism is remarkable not only for its convincing argument but also for its form: the book is a collaborative ethnography about capitalist transnational collaborations. […]
Allen, Robertson. 2017. America’s Digital Army: Games at Work and War. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Video games, the military, and marketing might seem like disparate sections of society, but anthropologist Robertson Allen’s book, America’s Digital Army, aims to connect the dots and demonstrate ways in which persuasive technology has been used to change […]
Orta, Andrew. 2019. Making Global MBAs: The Culture of Business and the Business of Culture. Oakland, California: University of California Press. It seemed a generation ago that, with the triumph of capitalism, the world had come to the “end of history,”[i] marked by standardization of global markets and the imminent end of local specificity. Today, […]
Hames, M. 2019. Thirst for Power. The Video Project “Water is Life” are the first words the viewer encounters when setting out to watch “Thirst for Power,” and I find them capturing the overall theme of the movie well. “Thirst for Power” is a media production based on the book by Michael E. Webber with […]
Hanselmann, Frederick H. 2019. Captain Kidd’s Lost Ship: The Wreck of the Quedagh Merchant. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Frederick “Fritz” Hanselmann is one of the rising stars in twenty first century underwater archaeology. In little more than a decade he has worked on submerged Pleistocene deposits in coastal Texas, conducted shipwreck surveys in Colombia, […]
Nader, Laura. 2018. Contrarian Anthropology: The Unwritten Rules of Academia. New York: Berghahn. Keywords: Contrarian Anthropology; Controlling Processes; Studying up; American Anthropology; Comparative Anthropology Contrarian Anthropology is a collection of articles published by Laura Nader over the past 50 years that focus on the relationship between knowledge production and power. The book draws extensively on […]
Chidester, David. 2018. Religion: Material Dynamics. Oakland, California: University of California Press. Text and audio by Kristina Helgesson Kjellin In my reading of Religion. Material Dynamics, one sentence in particular strikes me: “[T]he academic study of religion is a joke” (71). Chidester does not write that in order to denounce all academic research pertaining to […]
Vorng, Sophorntavy. 2017. A Meeting of Masks: Status, Power and Hierarchy in Bangkok. Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Monograph Series, no. 135. Copenhagen: NIAS Press. Near the Ratchaprasong intersection in downtown Bangkok, at the entrance to Central World, the mega-mall that consumes more electricity than an entire Thai province, there is a guard who seems […]
¿What do we know about the fresh vegetables that we buy from the shelf in our local supermarket? Where do they come from, who has produced them, and under which labor and social conditions? Zlolniski’s monograph Made in Baja, provides answers to those questions, particularly for US consumers. His intention is to unveil the basic […]
Which type of Bigfoot do you believe in?: Strategies for managing deviance Text and audio: Tom Clark Bader, Christopher, and Joseph O. Baker. 2019. Deviance Management: Insiders, Outsiders, Hiders, and Drifters. Oakland, California: University of California Press. Do you think that you could be considered deviant in some way? Perhaps you spend your weekends searching […]
Koopman, Colin. 2019. How We Became Our Data: A Genealogy of the Informational Person. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Keywords: data, algorithm, politics, ethics, genealogy. Just in February, a big blue Metropolitan police van was parked outside the exit of the London underground at the second biggest shopping center in the British capital in Stratford. […]
Moran-Thomas, Amy. 2019. Traveling with Sugar: Chronicles of a Global Epidemic. Oakland, California: University of California Press. Amy Moran-Thomas’ Traveling with sugar is a journey into the daily work of care for, and of, people living with diabetes in the context of the increase in this condition globally. The book is based on ethnographic research conducted […]
Finkelstein, Maura. 2019. The Archive of Loss: Lively Ruination in Mill Land Mumbai. Durham: Duke University Press. How does one live in a place that refuses to recognize one’s existence? This question motivates cultural anthropologist Maura Finkelstein’s ethnographic work in Mumbai whose textile mills were once central for the city’s industrial profile. That industry has […]
