Volume 9
2023

ROSA, FREDERICO DELGADO, AND HAN F. VERMEULEN, eds. 2022. Ethnographers before Malinowski: Pioneers of Anthropological Fieldwork, 1870-1922. EASA Series 44. New York: Berghahn Books.   In terms of form, Ethnographers before Malinowski: Pioneers of Anthropological Fieldwork, 1870-1922 stands in contrast to similar edited volumes such as the University of Nebraska Press’s ongoing Histories of Anthropology […]

SOPHIE CHAO, KARIN BOLENDER, EBEN KIRSKEY (eds.), 2022, The Promise of Multispecies Justice. Durham/ London: Duke University Press, 284 pp., ISBN: 978-1-4780-1889-6   This edited volume starts with the question who benefits from multispecies justice, and it remains a central question throughout the book. Drawing from Western philosophy and the political science of rights, the starting […]

Sarah E. Vaughn. Engineering Vulnerability: In Pursuit of Climate Adaptation. 2022 Durham: Duke University Press. pp256. The unfolding effects of climate change are increasingly recognised for their relationship with racialised and colonial histories of inequality and dispossession. From the threat of sea levels rise affecting low-lying South Pacific islands (Farbotko and Lazarus, 2012) and delta […]

KENNETH G. HIRTH, DAVID M. CARBALLO, AND BARBARA ARROYO (EDS.), 2020, Teotihuacan: The World Beyond the City. Dumbarton Oaks Pre-Columbian Symposia and Colloquia, Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. ISBN: 978- 088402-4675. 528 pp. Teotihuacan: The World Beyond the City is a scholarly coffee-table size volume of 15 chapters, written by two dozen authors, […]

BRIAN VILLMOARE, 2023, The Evolution of Everything: The Patterns and Causes of Big History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 416 pp., ISBN 978-1-108-79732-0   Keywords: Big History – Anthropology – Consilience – Evolution – History   This book, The Evolution of Everything, is the latest entry into the interdisciplinary field known as Big History. The term […]

Jeremy Slack, 2019, Deported to Death: How Drug Violence is Changing Migration on the U.S.-Mexico Border.  Oakland: University of California Press, 256 pp., ISBN 978-0520297333   The militarization of the U.S. border over the past thirty years coincides with an escalation of “security” measures undertaken by governments to deny people the basic human right to […]

EDWARD F. FISCHER, 2022, Making Better Coffee. How Maya Farmers and Third Wave Tastemakers Create Value. Oakland: University of California Press, 306 pp. ISBN  9780520386969.   Keywords: Economic Anthropology, Maya Coffee, Values, Tastemakers, Social Sciences   “The history of coffee becomes inseparable from the history of colonialism, imperialism, and the rise of global capitalism.” (Tucker, […]

Patrick O’Hare. Rubbish Belongs to the Poor. Hygienic Enclosure and the Waste Commons. London: Pluto Press. 2022. 218 pages.   This lucid and engaging, at times amusing, ethnography of waste-pickers in Montevideo, Uruguay, challenges readers to think critically about the role of waste in contemporary society, the nature of informality within the local and global […]

MORELLI, CAMILLA. 2023. Children of the Rainforest: Shaping the Future in Amazonia. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. ISBN 9781978825215 Children of the Rainforest traces cultural change over several decades in small communities of Matses speakers. The area encompasses the upper reaches of the Amazon in Peru and Brazil. The Matses have been buffeted by the usual […]

Gwen Burnyeat, 2022, The Face of Peace: Government Pedagogy amid Disinformation in Colombia. Chicago University Press. 320 pp., ISBN: 9780226821627 In a national referendum held October 2nd, 2016, Colombians rejected the peace agreement their government had negotiated with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, commonly known as FARC. President Santos amended the deal, skirted the […]

HEIDI E. FJELD, 2022, The Return of Polyandry: Kinship and Marriage In Central Tibet, New York: Berghahn Books, 232 pp., ISBN  978-1-80073-607-8   Why did the people of Panam, in Western Tibet, opt for polyandry (zasum) over one-to-one marriage in the early 1990s? Heidi Fjeld’s intriguing historical ethnography tackles this question and examines the role […]

Sonia Ahsan-Tirmizi. 2021. Pious Peripheries: Runaway Women in Post-Taliban Afghanistan.Standford, CA: Standford University Press. 239 pp. (ISBN: 9781503614710). Keywords: Afghan women, Taliban, Khana-yi-aman, landay, Promiscuous modernity, honor, ethics, piety, selfhood. Pious Peripheries opens with the question of what happened to the runway Muslim women living in Khana-yi-aman (“home of safety”) after the second fall of […]

Silvia Rodriguez Vega 2023, Drawing Deportation. Art and Resistance among Immigrant Children, New York University Press, 217 pp, ISBN 9781479810451   Keywords: immigration; deportation; childhood; trauma; creative methods.   In this compelling book, Silvia Rodriguez Vega engages with a challenging task: adding to the vast – and crowded – field of migration studies by focusing […]

KATHERINE MCKITTRICK. 2021. Dear Science and Other Stories. Durham: Duke University Press. 221 pp. ISBN 978-1-4780-1104-0   Keywords: black studies, feminist studies, production of knowledge, cultural geography, interdisciplinary   Katherine McKittrick’s Dear Science and Other Stories is pulse, commitment, invitation, groove, gallery, curiosity, and so much more. It beautifully, carefully, and humbly charts black life […]

Eds. by Mikkel Berg-Nordlie, Astri Dankertsen, and Marte Winsvold, 2022, An Urban Future for Sápmi? Indigenous Urbanization in the Nordic States and Russia, Berghahn Books, ISBN 978-1-80073-264-3 This timely volume focuses on the Sámi people of the Nordic states—Sweden, Norway, Finland—and Russia. Significantly, it shines a spotlight on the experiences of Indigenous people around the […]

Antonius C. G. M. Robben and Alexander Laban Hinton, 2023, Perpetrators Encountering Humanity’s Dark Side, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 253 pp., ISBN 9781503634282.   In Perpetrators Encountering Humanity’s Dark Side, two veteran anthropologists provide the discipline with a set of practical lessons for conducting fieldwork with interlocutors who have participated in mass atrocities. These lessons […]

ALLISON MICKEL. 2021. Why Those Who Shovel Are Silent: A History of Local Archaeological Knowledge and Labor. Louisville: University Press of Colorado, xiii + 203 pp. ISBN 978-1-64642-114-5. KEY WORDS: Çatalhöyük, community engagement, ethnography of archaeology, lucrative non-knowledge, Petra. ABSTRACT: This monograph is dedicated to the study of locally hired laborers working on archaeological sites […]

Wright, S., Carney, S., Krejsler, J. B., Nielsen, G. B., Ørberg, J. W. (2020). Enacting the University: Danish University Reform in an Ethnographic Perspective. Springer Nature B. V. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1921-4   The anthropology of higher education is a small area in the subfield of the anthropology of education. While most anthropologists who work in education are […]

Eds. by David Pollack, Anne Tobbe Bader, and Justin N. Carlson, 2021, The Falls of the Ohio River:  Archaeology of Native American Settlement. Gainesville: University of Florida Press. 297 pp. ISBN: 9781683402039. Key Words: Falls of the Ohio River, Landscape Archaeology, Prehistoric Settlement Patterns, Cultural Resource Management, National Historic Preservation Act, Persistent Place, Fort Ancient […]

Keywords: moral economy; parenting and childcare; Latin America; US empire; studying up   Ramos-Zayas’ (2020) ethnography Parenting Empires examines upper class parenting practices in Brazil and Puerto Rico. She argues that US forms of hemispheric control are entrenched in everyday parental routines and aspirations. These include parents’ affective and aesthetic practices, as well as moral […]

DEWAN, CAMELIA. 2021. Misreading the Bengal Delta: Climate Change, Development, and Livelihoods in Coastal Bangladesh. Seattle: University of Washington Press. “Climate change is a fact” (p. 74). So begins anthropologist Camelia Dewan’s conversation with a western development professional called Mr. Jones, who works for a prominent aquaculture organization in coastal Bangladesh. Mr. Jones goes on, […]

Goodwin, Michele. 2020. Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminal Costs of Motherhood. Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.   While the frenzied calls of Trump rally goers during the 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns to jail Hilary Clinton – “lock her up, lock her up!” – was never more than […]

Kishigami, Nobuhiro. 2021. Food Sharing in Human Societies: Anthropological Perspectives, Springer Nature Singapore, ISBN: 9789811678103 In this relatively slim volume, Nobuhiro Kishigami provides a deep examination of an aspect of hunter-gatherer economic systems that is as critical to these systems as is the hunting and harvesting that provide the “stuff” that peoples like Inuit, Ache […]

In the Shadows of the Palm explores how the Marind people in West Papua – colonised by the Indonesian state – experience, conceptualise and contest the social and environmental transformations provoked by deforestation from oil palm expansion. This is a pressing subject in the current moment of global planetary environmental crises as commercial oil palm […]

Keywords: Politics, Revolution, Egypt, Emotions, Masculinity In Egypt’s football revolution: Emotion, Masculinity, and Uneasy Politics, Carl Rommel lays out the recent history and rapid changes to the world of football in Egypt. Through detailed analysis of media, sports fans and revolutionary change, the reader follows the trajectory of the ‘national game’ from its peak of […]