Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast

We’re all familiar with some of the ways that time figures into our political environment. Things such as term limits, waiting periods, deadlines, and criminal sentences readily come to mind. But there are also protocols, accords, mandates, and contracts, and these frequently invoke temporal bounds of various kinds. In fact, when you think of it, a full range of political phenomena are structured by time. And yet time seems to have eluded political theorists and philosophers. In The Political Value of Time: Citizenship, Duration, and Democratic Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Elizabeth Cohen undertakes an examination of the role temporality plays in liberal democratic politics. She develops a fascinating argument according to which time is both a political value and an instrument that can distort value.

What role did Christianity play in Algeria before, during, and after the war of independence? In Decolonizing Christianity: Religion and the End of Empire in France and Algeria (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Darcie Fontaine pursues this crucial question while refusing the notion of a homogeneous Christianity at any stage after the French conquest of Algeria in 1830. Emphasizing the ways religious ideas and practices were subject to change and deep contestation, the book attends to important differences—between Catholics and Protestants; between institutions and individuals; between Christianity as a tool and ideology of the settler state on the one hand, and a site of resistance to its many injustices on the other. A social history of theology that considers the interaction between religion and politics in Algeria and France, Decolonizing Christianity traces the movement of Christians, their beliefs and activisms, across the Mediterranean in both directions. While the book tracks broad shifts at the levels of the colonial state and Church hierarchies, its chapters stay close to the experiences and impact of Christians “on the ground” in Algeria. The compelling stories of committed individuals and groups of faith figure centrally throughout: the life and work of Léon-Etienne Duval, the Archbishop (and later Cardinal) of Algiers; the 1957 trial of a group of “progressivist” Christians accused of supporting Algerian nationalism; the thousands of Christians who remained in Algeria after the large-scale “exodus” of settlers in 1962. Beyond the French imperial and postcolonial Algerian context, the book “provincializes” the history of Christianity by exploring the broader international meanings and effects of the Algerian case in the era of decolonization. Circumstances and events in Algeria shaped the practices and policies of Catholics and Protestants beyond the new state’s borders as Christians (and their churches) grappled locally and globally with the challenges of responding to (and surviving) the ends of empires. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. Her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send an email to: [email protected]. *The music that opens and closes the podcast is an instrumental version of “Creatures,” a song written and performed by Vancouver artist/musician Casey Wei (“hazy”). To hear more, please visit https://agonyklub.com/.

As a 17th-century noblewoman who became the first duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the writer and philosopher Margaret Cavendish has often been viewed as a royalist and a conservative within the context of the social and political issues of her time. In Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Science, and Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Lisa Walters offers a very different interpretation of Cavendish’s thought, revealing the nuance and complexity of Cavendish’s thinking on a variety of subjects. As an aristocrat, Cavendish served as a lady-in-waiting to Queen Henrietta Maria and her family served the Royalist cause during the English Civil War in the 1640s. Yet as Walters demonstrates, Cavendish’s writings contain many radical ideas about women and gender relations, about the makeup of matter, and of political systems. Through an analysis of Cavendish’s writings that draws out commonalities between her fictional works and her nonfiction treatises, Walters provides a very different understanding of this under-appreciated contributor to Western thought.

How do unions and ideas around labor compare between the U.S. and Canada? And how did they come to be as they are today? In his new book, Labor and the Class Idea in the United States and Canada (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Barry Eidlin uses a variety of sources, including archives, to construct a comprehensive picture of the historical development of labor and unions in both countries. The book explores individual and structural explanations including the rise of service sector jobs as well as geographical shifts and preferences for unions. Eidlin also explores policy explanations in each country in turn, highlighting important cases and issues like the importance of the first contracts drafted between unions and management. He finds that political institutions, national character, internal union characteristics, and racial divisions help explain differences between the two countries. The book also breaks down trends over time, from party-class alliances in the US and Canada between 1932 -1948 followed by analysis of the period from 1946-1972. Eidlin brings it all together by focusing on class and regime structures from 1911 to 2016. In the conclusion, Eidlin gives general takeaways from the historical data but also leaves the reader with some road maps going forward. This book will be of interest to sociologists broadly, but especially those interested in labor and unions. This book would fit perfectly in a graduate level sociology of work class, or one focused on labor history. Sarah E. Patterson is a postdoc at the University of Western Ontario. You can tweet her at @spattersearch.

John Rawls is easily the most celebrated and influential political philosopher of the 20th Century, and his impact remains remarkably strong today. The central concepts with which his theory of justice begins are now components of the philosophical vernacular: The Original Position, Veil of Ignorance, Primary Goods, and his Two Principles of Justice (especially the Difference Principle) all will be well known to the majority of professional philosophers. It is less commonly acknowledged that the apparatus just referenced is but the beginning of his theory, and not its ultimate concern. Throughout his work, Rawls is attempting to address a fundamental philosophical question: Can a society committed to the freedom and equality of its citizens yet arrange social institutions in a way that reliably cultivate within persons the attitudes and dispositions required for social justice? In John Rawls: Reticent Socialist (Cambridge UP, 2017), William A. Edmundson argues that Rawlsian justice calls for a socialist economic order. Could it be that America’s premiere political philosopher was a socialist?

Telling the story of a former colony post-independence is tricky, no matter if it’s a colony in Latin America, the Middle East or East Asia. Where does the idea of the ’nation’ slot in? Does it exist independent of colonialism? How does one talk about decolonization in post-imperial contexts? Then, you have to consider the interlocking concepts of language, race and even war. In the Sudanese case, that story can be told through the emergence of economic developmentalism. In Transforming Sudan: Decolonization, Economic Development, and State Formation (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Alden Young tells the story of how the Sudanese state was shaped post-independence as a result of economic planning. Through global, regional, and national notions of how to economically plan a state, Young traces the people, resources, and policies that would have consequences for generations to follow. Alden Harrington Young is assistant professor in the departments of History and of Global Studies and Modern Languages and director of Africana Studies, all at Drexel University. He received his BA from Columbia, his MA from the London School of Economics and Political Science and his PhD from Princeton University. He teaches African History, economic history and the history of Arab and African interactions. Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing.

Tarak Barkawi, a Reader in International Relations at the London School of Economics, has written an important book that will cause many of us to rethink the way we understand the relationships between armies and societies. In Soldiers of Empire: Indian and British Armies in World War II (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Barkawi argues that many scholars of Western armies tend to overstate the degree to which motivation and fighting spirit as well as the urge to commit atrocity derive from the characteristics, strengths or weaknesses of the societies the solders come from. Studying the British Indian Army in Burma during World War II, Barkawi sees instead the way that ritual, drill, and constructed traditions that are more internal to the army itself do more to explain how that army fought so relatively effectively. The Indian peasants who filled the ranks of the British Army shared little socially, politically or otherwise with the United States Marines who fought the Japanese on Guadalcanal. And yet they fought equally hard and with equal brutality against their foe—on behalf of their colonial overlords. Barkawi attends not only to larger political context of British India and to the recruitment and training of the British Army in India, he also describes in considerable detail specific engagements in Burma that make clear how group solidarity and the will to combat are constructed even in an army for whom the normal Western markers of belonging (patriotism, religion, ethnic heritage, even a common language) are absent.

To find out what Americans really think about their government, University of Texas-Austin Professor Roderick P. Hart read and analyzed approximately 10,000 letters to the editor, from 12 “ordinary” cities, written between 1948 and the present. In Civic Hope: How Ordinary Americans Keep Democracy Alive (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Hart...

Ethan L. Menchinger‘s The First of the Modern Ottomans: The Intellectual History of Ahmed Vasif (Cambridge University Press, 2017) traces the life and career of Ahmed Vasif (ca. 1735-1806), a prominent diplomat, historian, and intellectual of the early modern Ottoman Empire. This vivid biography places Vasif in the context of an Empire at a historical crossroads. Having witnessed his Empire’s defeat against Russia firsthand, Vasif struggled with how the Ottoman Empire could regain the prestige and power he felt it had lost. By carefully tracing Vasif’s fascinating career, Menchinger reveals a robust debate among Ottoman elites over morality, war, and Ottoman statecraft that drew on a rich imperial past and the exigencies of a new age. This crucial debate helped to frame the intellectual and political life in the Ottoman Empire’s final century. Menchinger’s book would be of interest to intellectual historians of the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East, as well as students and scholars interested more broadly in issues of decline, reform, and modernity.

What was Italy’s role in the Holocaust? Why is it that Italy is known as the Axis power that was benevolent to Jews, despite a scholarly consensus that many Italians actively participated in anti-Jewish persecution? In Italy’s Jews from Emancipation to Fascism (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Shira Klein skillfully narrates the historical developments that belie this myth, and the complex process that have led to its perpetuation. By examining the experiences of Italian Jews during the Second World War from a wide chronological lens, Klein shows how the particular history of Italian Jews in the century prior to the Holocaust helped to mold their positive perception of Italy during and in the aftermath of genocide. Drawing from oral testimonies as well as unpublished memoirs, Klein reveals how a uniquely Jewish Italian patriotism was fostered in the decades leading up to (and even during) Fascism. Through their allegiance to Italy, she explains, many Jewish exiles and survivors themselves helped to spread the myth of Italian innocence. Shira Klein is Assistant Professor of History at Chapman University. Robin Buller is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

John Munro’s new book, The Anticolonial Front: The African-American Freedom Struggle and Global Decolonization (Cambridge University Press, 2017) is a transnational study that traces the persistence and continuities of Black radicalism from the end of the Second World War through the period of McCarthyism in the United States. Departing from an insistence on colonialism as the primary historical driver of the twentieth century, the book moves from the Popular Front politics of the interwar years to the beginning of the 1960s. Considering of “long civil rights movement” in relationship to the history of forms of colonialism and imperialism that were global in scope, the chapters of the book travel from key sites and events in the U.S. across the Atlantic to the U.K. and Europe, and further afield to spaces and conversations between activists in Asia and Africa. Reframing the history of Cold-War U.S. politics in relationship to broader histories of decolonization, The Anti-Colonial Front challenges analyses that over-emphasize national and generational differences in the social justice struggles and movements of the period, as well as those narratives that would have us believe that McCarthyism was wholly successful in suppressing radical political thought and activisms in the 1950s. Indeed, the book makes a contribution to our understanding of the origins of the revolutionary ideas and events of the 1960s. Drawing on a range of archival materials, the book examines the work of organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Council on African Affairs and the American Society for African Culture. It also explores the lives and political work of individuals, including W.E.B. Du Bois, Claudia Jones, Alphaeus Hunton, George Padmore, Richard Wright, Esther Cooper Jackson, Jack O’Dell and C. L. R. James. Engaging literary works, press and periodical literature across a political spectrum, the book interrogates the boundaries and histories of left and liberal politics in the period. The Anticolonial Front will be of tremendous interests to historians of American political culture, Black radicalisms, and the complex global past of anticolonialism and decolonization in the Cold-War era. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. Her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send an email to: [email protected]. *The music that opens and closes the podcast is an instrumental version of “Creatures,” a song written by Vancouver artist/musician Casey Wei (performing as hazy). To hear more, please visit https://agonyklub.com/.

In her book, The Fruits of Freedom in British Togoland: Literacy, Politics and Nationalism, 1914-2014 (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Kate Skinner examines the history behind the failed project that sought the reunification of Togoland. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Germans colonized the small territory of Togo in West Africa. During the first world war, the British and French invaded Togo and split it between them, introducing a new border that was criticized by the African inhabitants. After the second world war, in the era of decolonization, different visions of independence were put forward. One of these was ABLODE – meaning the reunification and joint independence of British and French Togoland. But the Ablode movement was defeated, and instead British Togoland was integrated with the Gold Coast, and became an integral part of an independent Ghana. The Fruits of Freedom tells the story of ABLODE.’ Kate Skinner is a lecturer in the History of Africa and Its Diasporas at the University of Birmingham. Her forthcoming publication is Ablode Safui (the Key to Freedom): Writing the New Nation in a West African Border Town 1958-63 (written with Dr. Wilson Yayoh of the University of Cape Coast, Ghana). Bekeh Utietiang Ukelina is an Assistant Professor of History at SUNY, Cortland. His research examines the ideologies and practices of development in Africa, south of the Sahara. He is the author of The Second Colonial Occupation: Development Planning, Agriculture, and the Legacies of British Rule in Nigeria. For more NBN interviews, follow him on Twitter @bekeh or head to bekeh.com.

In Ming China and Vietnam: Negotiating Borders in Early Modern Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Kathlene Baldanza explores the complex diplomatic exchanges between China and Vietnam from the 13th to the 17th centuries. Drawing on vast material of both Chinese and Vietnamese primary sources, Baldanza challenges conventional narratives that focus...

Christy Ford Chapin, an associate professor of history at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, has written a history of the funding of America’s health care system: Ensuring America’s Health: The Public Creation of the Corporate Health Care System (Cambridge University Press, 2015). She begins with an account of the development of physicians’ practices in the mid-nineteenth century and traces the evolution of the American Medical Association’s role in shaping how physicians practiced medicine and how it was financed. The advent of the insurance model for funding health care was a creation of the Progressive period and became dominant in the late 1930s, during the New Deal. Chapin provides an account of the pitfalls of the insurance funding mechanism and recounts the battles between vested, competing interests, such as the AMA, independent physicians, corporate employers, labor unions, insurance companies (nonprofit and commercial), and the state and federal governments. Each of these entities shaped the health care system we have today. Chapin’s book helps explain how we got here and her critique of the insurance model suggests possible alternatives to our contemporary system of paying for health care.

How can war change women’s political mobilization? Using Rwanda and Bosnia as case studies Marie E. Berry answers these questions and more in her powerful new book, War, Women, and Power: From Violence to Mobilization in Rwanda and Bosnia Herzegovina (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Berry provides the reader with a solid history and background of how war came to be in each of these countries respectively. The book starts off by shedding light on the transformative nature of war and women’s political mobilization. Berry notes three major changes that are key throughout the book: demographic, economic, and cultural shifts. Starting with Rwanda, Berry sheds light on women’s roles as caregivers during and after the war, and how groups they formed for emotional support lead to starting programs and organizations. Moving to Bosnia, Berry lays out how this situation was similar and also different from Rwanda, noting, interestingly, that NGOs were basically non-existent there before the war. She concludes by noting the ways in which women mobilized politically but also the ways in which the changes that occurred have been limited by systemic issues like victim hierarchies or patriarchal backlash. Overall, the book is rich with information and written in a very clear, organized, and accessible way. The book will be enjoyed by anyone interested in women and war. Folks in sociology, political science, history, women’s studies, as well as those interested in Rwanda and Bosnia specifically, will find this book fascinating. This would fit well in a graduate level Sociology course and would be a solid anchor for a substantive class on women and war. Sarah E. Patterson is a postdoc at the University of Western Ontario. You can tweet her at @spattersearch.

In her new book, Living with the Enemy: German Occupation, Collaboration and Justice in the West Pyrenees, 1940-1948 (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Sandra Ott, Associate Professor of Basque Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno examines German occupation of the Pyrenees. Particularly, Dr. Ott examines cases of collaboration and later justice and demonstrates how collaboration was often motivated out of base desires. She tells the story of this unique region through nine case studies of collaboration with a diverse group of characters bringing to life this fascinating history.

Who was the spymaster of the Third Reich? How did Nazi ideology influence intelligence collection? Katrin Paehler answers these questions with the first analysis of Office VI of the Reich Security Main Office in her new book The Third Reich’s Intelligence Service: The Career of Walter Schellenberg (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Tracing the development of a distinctly and catastrophically ideological approach to intelligence gathering through an institutional biography of the SS security service, its operations in Italy, and clashes with rival agencies inside Germany, Katrin argues that Shellenberg’s ultimate aim was no less than carving out of an independent foreign policy cast in Himmler’s worldview. Katrin Paehler is an associate professor of history at Illinois State University. She was also a member of the Independent Historians’ Commission of the German Foreign Office and Nazism and its Aftermath. Ryan Stackhouse is a historian of Europe specializing in modern Germany and political policing under dictatorship. His research exploring Gestapo enforcement practices toward different social groups is nearing completion under the working title Policing Hitler’s Critics. He also cohosts the Third Reich History Podcast and can be reached at [email protected] or @Staxomatix.

Today I talked to Fahad Bishara about his book A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780-1950 (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Dr. Bishara is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Virginia. He specializes in the economic and legal history of the Indian Ocean and Islamic world. In this podcast, Dr. Bishara discusses his sophisticated history that explores the intricate legal and economic regimes that traversed the Western Indian Ocean for generations. He also talks about how he effectively mined legal documents to craft this narrative. The following podcast was originally published on H-Law’s Legal History Podcast.

Natalia Roudakova’s book Losing Pravda: Ethics and the Press in Post-Truth Russia (Cambridge University Press, 2017) explores changes in the world of journalism in Russia in the last fifty years. Drawing from more than a decade of research of various ethnographic and historical sources, Roudakova approaches truth as a social category. She demonstrates that the status of truth was relatively secure and stable under the Soviet state socialism. It was the transformation from communism to capitalism that led to a drastic dissolution of a sense of responsibility towards the public and, consequently, into the very possibility to produce truth in the post-socialist era. Looking into everyday practices of Soviet journalists and the post-socialist transformation of the media, Losing Pravda provides a glimpse into one possible future of the US and other post-truth settings in the West. Exploring how truth-seeking and truth-telling work under different socio-political conditions, it offers a new, ethics-based vocabulary for thinking about production of facts and meaning in contemporary world. Carna Brkovic is a Lecturer at the University of Regensburg, Germany. She is an author of Managing Ambiguity, winner of the 2015 SIEF Young Scholar prize, and an anthropologist exploring humanitarianism, clientelism, and activism in former Yugoslav countries.

Daniel Kapust‘s book, Flattery and the History of Political Thought: That Glib and Oily Art (Cambridge University Press, 2018), is a rich and fascinating exploration of political thought through the complex lens of the question or concept of flattery. The book traces this complicated concept through both many of the “expected” writers and thinkers in the western political theory canon while also integrating some unexpected thinkers. Kapust positions many of these thinkers in encounters with each other—exploring the kinds of conversations these thinkers might have with each other. The encounters between authors and texts tease out the differing understandings of flattery and the way that it can be used in political contexts as well as within the affective webs in which humans live and engage with one another on a personal level. Thus, Kapust situates flattery within politics, provides the reader with different definitions of flattery, and also teases out the differences between flattery and friendship. The book begins by posing the question as to why flattery is a worrisome political phenomenon and concludes with a brief exploration of the contemporary political dynamic in the United States on the eve of the 2016 election. But between these bookends, Kapust takes the reader through an extended exploration of works by Cicero, Smith, Machiavelli, the Federalist, and others who indeed wrestle with the idea of flattery in the public sphere and also within the context of political friendship and personal relationships.

Jewish ultra-Orthodoxy, in its numerous manifestations, continues to exert profound influence on the Jewish world, even as it undergoes pressure to change from both within and without. In Jewish Radical Ultra-Orthodoxy Confronts Modernity, Zionism, and Women’s Equality (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Motti Inbari accesses recently obtained archival materials and personal correspondence in order to depict the dominant personalities of ultra-Orthodox movements from the late 19th through the 20th centuries, and ​how those movements continue to confront and resist modernity. Inbari, associate professor of religion at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, provides historical, psychological, and ideological perspectives on these complex and often competitive movements in Jewish religious life, in both Israel and the Diaspora. David Gottlieb is a PhD Candidate in the History of Judaism at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His research focuses on interpretations of the Binding of Isaac and the formation of Jewish cultural memory. He can be reached at [email protected].

Did Abraham Maslow actually ever draw a pyramid of hierarchy of needs? Did Kurt Lewin devote substantial work on the development of a change management theory? Why do we omit or misrepresent important features of the work of Adam Smith, Max Weber or Frederick Winslow Taylor? What is the forgotten origin of Harvard Business School case method? I was joined by two of the authors—Stephen Cummings and Todd Bridgman— ofA New History of Management (Cambridge University Press, 2016), a great new book that answers those and many more questions. The book is a very important contribution to critical management studies that uncovers the inaccuracies and simplifications (if not actual inventions) that populate management and organization textbooks. A New History of Management is not a conspiracy theory, but rather it is the result of rigorous historical research on how the field of management studies was constructed in the past century. The authors argue that the existing narratives about how we should organize are built upon, and reinforce, a concept of “good management” derived from what is assumed to be a fundamental need to increase efficiency. But this assumption is based on a presentist, monocultural, and generally limited view of management’s past. This book is for both scholars and practitioners, tutors and students. Academics will be able to reflect critically on the nature of business education and on conformism in teaching and research. Practitioners and students will be able to challenge what they have been taught as a scientific rather than ideological artifact. Both students and scholars will be able to discuss alternative approaches for managing and organizing in the twenty-first century. Animated videos on the book are available on here. Andrea Bernardi is Senior Lecturer in Employment and Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. He holds a doctorate in Organization Theory from the University of Milan, Bicocca. He has held teaching and research positions in Italy, China and the UK. Among his research interests are the use of history in management studies, the co-operative sector, and Chinese co-operatives. His latest project is looking at health care in rural China. He is the co-convener of the EAEPEs permanent track on Critical Management Studies.

Alison McQueen explores the apocalyptic thought of political theorists Niccolo Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, and Hans Morgenthau in her new book, Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times (Cambridge University Press, 2018). The focus of the book is the way that these theorists engage with apocalyptic ideas and integrate those concepts into their broader political projects, while also putting the three thinkers in a kind of dialogue with each other in our understanding of their contributions to realist thought. This is a very thorough and engaging exploration of the political and theoretical projects of these three thinkers, and by engaging all three as realists, McQueen connects Machiavelli’s, Hobbes’, and Morgenthau’s work in ways that they are not often connected, and spans the schools of thought that usual make claim to their work and ideas. The result is a scholarly conversation integrating both international relations theory and the tradition of the history of political thought. McQueen also provides an understanding of where we, as citizens, often hear or see apocalyptic rhetoric and images, how we might want to think about apocalyptic concepts, and why politicians integrate these images into their public speeches.

In Institutions and Democracy in Africa: How the Rules of the Game Shape Political Developments (Cambridge University Press, 2018), the contributors challenge the argument that African states lack effective political institutions as these have been undermined by neo-patrimonialism and clientelism. Scholars such as Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz have argued that Africa’s political culture is inherently different from the West and that African political system is actually working through what they term “instrumentalization of disorder.” While acknowledging some of the contributions that Chabal and Daloz have made to the understanding of Africa institutions, the contributions in this volume challenge this notion that political life in Africa is shaped primarily by social customs and not by formal rules. The contributions examine formal institutions such as the legislature, judiciary, and political parties and they show the impact of these institutions on socio-political and economic developments in the continent. Their contributions show that political and institutional developments vary across the continent and African states should not be treated as if they are the same. They argue that informal institutions have helped to shape and strengthen formal institutions. The authors of the different chapters are cutting-edge scholars in the field and they make a clear and convincing argument that formal institutions matter and that it is impossible to understand Africa without taking into consideration the roles played by these institutions. The book is edited by Nic Cheeseman. He is a professor of Democracy at the University of Birmingham and was formerly Director of the African Studies Centre at Oxford University. He is the recipient of the GIGA award for the best article in Comparative Area Studies (2013) and the Frank Cass Award for the best article in Democratization (2015). He is also the author of Democracy in Africa: Successes, Failures and the Struggle for Political Reform (Cambridge University Press, 2015), the founding editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of African Politic, a former editor of the journal African Affairs, and an advisor to, and writer for, Kofi Annan’s African Progress Panel. Bekeh Utietiang Ukelina is an Assistant Professor of History at SUNY, Cortland. His research examines the ideologies and practices of development in Africa, south of the Sahara. He is the author of The Second Colonial Occupation: Development Planning, Agriculture, and the Legacies of British Rule in Nigeria. For more NBN interviews, follow him on Twitter @bekeh or head to bekeh.com.

Medicaid provides health care for around 1 in 5 Americans. Despite the large number served, the programs administration by state and local governments means very different things in different places. The geography of federalism matters a lot for Medicaid. But unlike some other large social welfare programs, Medicaid seems to reduce rather than increase political participation, resulting in a population of people stigmatized by the program itself and afforded less political representation. Such is a snippet of the argument made by Jamila Michener in her fascinating new book, Fragmented Democracy: Medicaid, Federalism, and Unequal Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Michener is assistant professor of political science at Cornell University. Through extensive quantitative and qualitative research, Michener spotlights the people of Medicaid, their awareness of the inequalities that exist across states and localities, and how some are mobilizing to better represent the Medicaid community. What she finds is that where you reside determines a lot about your relationship to the Medicaid program, from state to state and even from neighborhood to neighborhood in a given city.

Sida Liu and Terence C. Halliday spent ten years interviewing criminal defense attorneys throughout China in order to compile the evidence on the professional lives of criminal defense attorneys in the one-party authoritarian state that is modern China. They present what they found in Criminal Defense in China: The Politics of Lawyers at Work (Cambridge University Press, 2016) In this interview with co-author Sida Liu, we discuss the extreme difficulties faced in daily work by attorneys. From the Communists victory in 1949 until 1979, there was essentially no criminal procedural law in China. In 1979 the Deng Xiaoping regime sought stability and order and created the first criminal procedural law. Since then the law has been revised several times, giving more formal rights to defendants and their counsel, while simultaneously allowing for state harassment of defense attorneys should they too zealously do their jobs. Liu and Halliday reveal the methods of state officials to hinder the pursuit of justice for criminal defendants and their attorneys. In doing so, the authors not only reveal the dangers faced by attorneys but also reveal how dangerous the Communist regime considers this educated, motivated, and articulate group to be to the one-party state. Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory.

When first enacted at the start of the twentieth century, primaries were to decrease the power of party bosses to dominate the choice of who ran for office. Primaries were a feature of the progressive agenda to limit political corruption and democratize party politics. One hundred years later, party organizations remain powerful arbiters of candidate selection. Candidates who aren’t backed by the party rarely fare well. In his new book, The Party’s Primary: Control of Congressional Nominations (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Hans Hassell shows the way that parties use their resources to influence primary elections. Through money, staffing, and information, parties retain control over who runs, both in the House and Senate and for Republicans and Democrats. He uses extensive interviews with party leaders and analysis of over 3,000 nomination contests for the House and senate. Hassell is assistant professor of American politics at Cornell College.

In his new book, Human Rights in Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Bonny Ibhawoh examines the discourse of human rights in Africa. He challenges some of the dominant narratives that focus on ruthless violators and benevolent activists. Crafting the longue duree history of human rights in Africa, he argues that these rights were neither invented during the enlightenment period, nor with the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the postwar period. In his analysis, he draws from African rights tradition that was central in the anti-slavery and anti-colonial struggles. He sees these struggles as human rights histories and challenges the idea that these were merely humanitarian acts. He argues that Africans in the continent and abroad during the abolition, emancipation, colonization, and decolonization processes framed and linked their activism to human rights. The discourse of human rights is so important that it should not be relegated to experts. Ibhawoh’s book is written in a scholarly, clear, and concise way to appeal to general audiences and also to further the conversation and debates on human rights, as well as affirming the dignity of all human beings. Bonny Ibhawoh is a professor of history and global human rights at McMaster University. He has taught in universities in Africa, the United States, and Canada. He was previously a Human Rights Fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics and International Affairs, New York, and a Research Fellow at the Danish Institute for Human Rights, Copenhagen, Denmark. He is the author of Imperial Justice: Africans in Empires Court and Imperialism and Human Rights, named American Library Association Choice Outstanding Academic Title. Bekeh Utietiang Ukelina is an Assistant Professor of History at SUNY, Cortland. His research examines the ideologies and practices of development in Africa, south of the Sahara. He is the author of The Second Colonial Occupation: Development Planning, Agriculture, and the Legacies of British Rule in Nigeria. For more NBN interviews, follow him on Twitter @bekeh or head to bekeh.com.

Taisu Zhang ties together cultural history, legal history, and institutional economics in The Laws and Economics of Confucianism: Kinship and Property in Pre-Industrial China and England (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and offers a novel argument as to why Chinese and English pre-industrial economic development went down different paths. Late Imperial and Republican China (1860-1949) was dominated of Neo-Confucian social hierarchies, under which advanced age and generational seniority were the primary determinants of sociopolitical status. This allowed many poor but senior individuals to possess status and political authority highly disproportionate to their wealth. In comparison, in the more individualistic early modern England (1500-1700) landed wealth was a fairly strict prerequisite for high status and authority. This essentially excluded low-income individuals from secular positions of prestige and leadership. Zhang argues that this social difference had major consequences for property institutions and agricultural production.

As debates on globalization rage in the twenty-first century, many countries and the people within them have been challenged socially, economically, and legally. At the same time, our world is now more bordered geopolitically than ever before. What effect do these phenomena have on one of the most significant social units: the family? In her new book, Legalized Families in the Era of Bordered Globalization (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Daphna Hacker argues that the family is entering an important period of transition and instability in our bordered, global society. Families have been a legalized social category, but now competing legal doctrines and interpretations complicate the existence of this social category given the movement of people in a globalized society. How does secular law and family law impact families in multicultural countries with inhabitants from around the globe? Are pre-nups a good idea or a bad one? How does globalization influence reproduction in the family unit? How are current immigration debates intersecting with these changes to the family? Anyone interested in the law, gender, and globalization will find this book a great read.

Historical debates about the actions of the Roman Catholic Church in relationship to the Third Reich have never been restricted to academic presses and journals like so many other topics. Rather several groups of partisans in both Germany and the United States actively followed them in popular books, magazines, and newspapers since the late 1940s. In his new book, The Battle for the Catholic Past in Germany, 1945-1980 (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Mark Edward Ruff explores seven divisive controversies that exploded over the church’s relationship to National Socialism during the early decades of the Federal Republic in West Germany. Ruff questions why so many early controversies ensnared German Catholics after World War II when there was a much higher rate of collaboration between the Protestant majority and the regime. He argues that public acrimony over the Concordat between the Third Reich and the Vatican in 1933 and the legacy of Pius XII emerged mainly as a proxy war between secular elites, leftwing Catholics, and the church establishment over the political dominance of the Christian Democratic Union in the 1950s and 1960s and the place of religion in modern democracies. Despite so much argumentation, empirical research, and open hostility, it seems that nobody ever changed their mind once their opinions formed on these matters. Combining rigorous research with accessible writing, Ruff authored a book that many listeners will enjoy. Michael E. OSullivan is Associate Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He will publish Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in August 2018.

Historians, writes Dagomar Degroot, rarely feature in discussions about global warming. With his new book, The Frigid Golden Age: Climate Change, the Little Ice Age, and the Dutch Republic, 1560-1720 (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Degroot seeks to remedy this significant omission. The book asks what past cooling, in the form of the Little Ice Age—a variable but overall cold climatic regime that affected much of the world and endured from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries—can teach us about future warming. Focused on the Dutch Republic from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, The Frigid Golden Age examines how and why this particular society prospered during a time of climatic upheaval. What was it about the Dutch Republic that allowed its citizens to thrive during the coldest decades of the Little Ice Age? Through detailed analysis of the commerce, military and culture of the Republic, The Frigid Golden Age examines the resilience and adaptability of a society in the face of climate change, and what it might teach us about our own predicament.

The First World War was not limited the trenches on the Western Front. Nor was the system of internment camps it spawned. In his new book, Colonial Captivity during the First World War: Internment and the Fall of the German Empire, 1914-1919 (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Mahon Murphy looks at the experiences of German colonial settlers interned by the Entente Powers, particularly the British, during World War I. Challenging Europe-centric interpretations of the conflict and internment, Murphy uses a wide range of sources, illustrating both the global integrated camp network, and how experiences of internment varied according to social class, gender and race. He also explores the effects of internment on Germans’ national identity, and how their experiences of post-colonial, Weimar Germany led many to believe that true Germanness was only to be found in the colonies. A must read for anyone interested in the global dimensions of internment and First World War. Anyone in London on 19 March is cordially invited to attend the launch of the book at the London School of Economics. Speakers include William Mulligan and David Stevenson. Information available here. Darren O’Byrne is a PhD student in History at Cambridge University, where he is researching the Ministerial Bureaucracy’s role under National Socialism. He can be contacted at [email protected] or on twitter at @darrenobyrne1.

Do we live in a country of red and blue states or something more purple-ish? The red state/blue state meme of 2000 has really never gone away, and scholarly debate, as well as frequent media attention, has argued for its merits and demerits. Are we a sharply divided and polarized nation or simply one divided by electoral rules that exacerbate relatively small partisan differences? In David A. Hopkins‘ Red Fighting Blue: How Geography and Electoral Rules Polarize American Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2017), he sets out to reconcile many aspects of this debate. He argues for the importance of geography in the context of constitutionally-established electoral procedures, especially the Electoral College. He shows the ways that changes in party coalitions and the rising importance of ideology and issues for the two parties, relate to the electoral map. Hopkins is associate professor of Political Science at Boston College.

AIDS is one of the primary causes of death in Africa. Of the more than 24 million Africans infected with HIV, only about 54% have access to the treatment that they need. Despite the progress made in mitigating this disease in the global north, unfortunately, Africa is left behind. In her new book Doomed Interventions: The Failure of Global Responses to AIDs in Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Kim Yi Dionne examines the obstacles to AIDs interventions in Africa. She challenges the narrative that the failure of these responses is because of insufficient funding or the lack of political will. She argues that designers of these intervention programs are often far removed from the agents who have to implement them and that the priorities between the international organizations who finance these interventions and the local people who have to navigate AIDs in Africa are often misaligned. She makes a case for local actors, priorities, and participation in the design and implementation of these intervention programs. Professor Kim Yi Dionne. She is an Assistant professor of Government at Smith College. Professor Dionne teaches courses on African politics, ethnic politics and field research methods. Her research interests include political behavior and public opinion, health, ethnicity and research methods. The substantive focus of her work is on the opinions of ordinary Africans toward interventions aimed at improving their condition and the relative success of such interventions. Bekeh Utietiang Ukelina is an Assistant Professor of History at SUNY, Cortland. His research examines the ideologies and practices of development in Africa, south of the Sahara. He is the author of The Second Colonial Occupation: Development Planning, Agriculture, and the Legacies of British Rule in Nigeria.

Benjamin R. Gampel‘s award winning volume Anti-Jewish Riots in the Crown of Aragon and the Royal Response, 1391-1392 (Cambridge University Press, 2016) is the first total history of a lesser known period in Jewish history, overshadowed by the Spanish expulsion of 1492 which it would come to foreshadow. Over the course of ten months, Jews across large parts of the Iberian peninsula were murdered or forced to convert to Christianity, and entire communities were decimated—the intensity and duration of this period mark it as the most devastating attack on the Jews of pre-modern Christian Europe. While many historians have written studies about 1391-92 from isolated perspectives, in the face of an overwhelming number of local archives found throughout the peninsula, and the complexity of those sources, a unified narrative has, until now, remained a desideratum. In this methodological tour-de-force, Professor Gampel tells the story of Spanish Jewry and their relationship to royal power by reading state records and the almost daily correspondence of the royal family against the grain, telling the story of the subjects of these sources imbedded in the thick context of their composers. The book is divided into two sections that mirror its title. The first is a detailed study of the violence of 1391-92 arranged according to the geographic regions of the peninsula—the Kingdoms of Castile, Valencia, and Aragon, Catalonia and the island of Majorca. Using a rich array of archival sources and in dialogue with contemporary historiography, Professor Gampel painstakingly sets out the limits of what we can know about the riots, both of the victims and the perpetrators, detailing each episode chronologically, in order to form a picture of the period as a whole. Central to the book is the question of how and why those tasked with protecting the Jewish communities failed to do so. To this end the second section is centered around three members of the Aragonese royal family—King Joan, Queen Iolant, and Duke Marti—and their response to the violence as it unfolded. Here we see the Jewish community as one of many competing interests the royal family faced, and thereby can better appreciate the contingencies of history. The two sections together provide both a deep macro and micro study of this crucial time in Jewish and Spanish history, exposing us not only to the story and context of the too often voiceless victims, but the lives of those in power as well. Its a narrative of tragic violence and the failure of the Royal Alliance, grounded in extensive historical research stripped of none of its drama. Professor Benjamin R. Gampel is the the Dina and Eli Field Family Chair in Jewish History at The Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. You can hear more from him in his video lecture series on the history, society, and culture of medieval Sephardic Jewry. Moses Lapin is a graduate student in the departments of History and Philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem; his friends call him young Farabi.

In his new book, The Economy of Ethnic Cleansing: The Transformation of German-Czech Borderlands after World War II (Cambridge University Press, 2017), David Gerlach, Associate Professor of History at Saint Peter’s University, examines the expulsion of nearly 3 million Germans from the Czech-German borderlands. Dr. Gerlach looks extensively at the economic factors that led to the expulsion of Germans from this area. He argues convincingly how the promise of property and social mobility contributed to the course and outcomes of ethnic cleansing. Ultimately, he demonstrates how the conflict between Czechs and Germans helped to facilitate the rise of the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia.

It was a year that at times left Lyndon Johnson feeling as though he was living in a continuous nightmare. Yet as Kyle Longley describes in his book LBJ’s 1968: Power, Politics, and the Presidency in America’s Year of Upheaval (Cambridge University Press, 2018), it was one in which he continued to engage with the many challenges confronting his presidency as he finished his term in office. That it would be his last year as president was not certain at the beginning of it, as he was expected by everyone to run for another term in the upcoming presidential election. Yet as Longley explains, health concerns and the divisions caused by the Vietnam War led Johnson to contemplate announcing during the State of the Union address that he would not seek another term. Even after he made his decision official in March, he continued to pursue an ambitious agenda that included new Great Society legislation, arms negotiations with the Soviets, and the nomination of his friend Abe Fortas as the next chief justice of the Supreme Court. Longley shows how a combination of Johnson’s lame duck status and events beyond his control often combined to frustrate his intentions, while his desire to avoid a scandal by not publicizing information about the Nixon campaign’s interference in the ongoing negotiations to end the war in Vietnam only paved the way for the even greater political crises in his successor’s administration.

What can be learned about the Soviet Union by viewing it through an environmental lens? What would an environmental history teach us about power in the Soviet system? What lessons can be drawn from the environmental experience of Soviet communism? These are just some of the questions motivating historian Andy Bruno‘s book, The Nature of Soviet Power: An Arctic Environmental History (Cambridge University Press, 2016). The book is the first to consider nature and the environment as actor and participant, rather than passive subject, in Soviet history. It traces the history of economically driven environmental change on the northern Kola Peninsula, covering the construction of railroads, phosphate mining, reindeer farming, nickel and copper smelting, and energy industries, from the Imperial period to the post-Soviet era. The Nature of Soviet Power shows how nature shaped, and was shaped by, the Soviet system, and sees Soviet environmental history as part of the global pursuit for unending economic growth amongst modern states.

Prior to the wave of protests in 2017 supporting immigrants in the US, there were the protests of 2006. That spring, millions of Latinos and other immigrants across the country opposed Congressional action hostile to immigrants. These protesters participated in one of the largest movements to defend immigrant and civil rights in US history. In Latino Mass Mobilization: Immigration, Racialization, and Activism (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Chris Zepeda-Millan surveys the strategies and impacts of this unprecedented wave of protests, focusing on the unique local, national, and demographic dynamics, as well as the role of the ethnic media. Latino Mass Mobilization is an important addition to contemporary debates regarding immigration policy, social movements, and immigrant rights activism in the US and elsewhere. Zepeda-Millan is assistant professor of comparative ethnic studies and Chicano/Latino Studies at UC Berkeley.

In his new book, Dancing in the Blood: Modern Dance and European Culture on the Eve of the First World War (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Edward Ross Dickinson charts the development of modern dance in the turbulent decades of the early twentieth century. Arguing that modern dance provided the aesthetic tools to address the central features of modernity, Dickinson illustrates its impact on Euro-American cultural life, as well as on ideas about gender, nation, race, science, spirituality, and selfhood. Furthermore, he ties the development of modern dance to the emergence of mass culture and the work of marketing modernity. As becomes evident in his analysis, these ideas were fraught with contradictions as modern dance was seen to be both chaste and sexual, scientific and spiritual, universal yet grounded in racial difference. Dancing in the Blood thus provides fascinating insight into the development of modern dance, not only as an artistic genre but as part of the larger project of modernity. Edward Ross Dickinson is Professor in History at UC, Davis. He received his PhD from UC, Berkeley, and has taught at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand and the University of Cincinnati, Ohio. His research interests include the history of social policy, especially in the German child welfare system, and welfare policy in New Zealand; the history of sexuality in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Central Europe; and debates about sexuality, sexual morality and sexual radicalism in Europe and the US. He is completing a book-length interpretive essay on the history of the world in the long twentieth century, which will appear in 2018.

The author of this book, David Hopkin, is Professor of European Social History at Hertford College, Oxford. He is also my brother. However, I’m not featuring him on New Books in Folklore because of some misguided sense of nepotism, but rather because although he is historian by training, he is a folklorist by vocation. This duality is amply evident in his book Voices of the People in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge University Press, 2017) in which he explicitly states that he is proselytizing for a folkloric turn within the discipline of history. As he explains in his introduction, this turn essentially makes two demands of historians. Firstly, I want them to consider oral literature such as tales and songs as appropriate sources for historical analysis; secondly I want to acquaint them with those aspects of post-war folklore scholarship that provide powerful methodologies for understanding popular culture. The bulk of the book is then given over to a series of case studies in which Hopkin practices what he preaches as he mines folklore collections for material which he then examines and interprets in order to shed light on the lives of ordinary people. The chapter titles indicate his chosen subjects: “Storytelling in a Maritime Community: Saint-Cast, 1879-1882,” “The Sailors Tale: Storytelling on Board the North Atlantic Fishing Fleet,” “Love Riddles and Family Strategies in the Dyemans of Lorraine,” “Storytelling and Family Dynamics in an Extended Household: The Briffaults of Montigny-aux-Amognes,” “Work Songs and Peasant Visions of the Social Order” and “The Visionary World of the Vallave Lacemaker.” His interpretations of the archival records offer ideas about how the folk were able to challenge authority figures from a position of safety, negotiate inequalities within their own families, maintain communal bonds despite often trying conditions, and achieve strategic marital alliances. More broadly, he shows how traditional oral forms stories, songs and riddles—provided viable mechanisms through which the poor were able to assert some degree of control over their own destinies. Rachel Hopkin is a UK born, US based folklorist and radio producer and is currently a PhD candidate at the Ohio State University.

In Jews and Leftist Politics: Judaism, Israel, Antisemitism and Gender (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Jack Jacobs, Professor of Political Science at John Jay College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, has assembled a hugely impressive selection of scholars to delve into varied topics related to Jews and Leftists politics. The volume is characterised by judicious appraisals made by respected authorities and sheds considerable light on contentious themes. Max Kaiser is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at [email protected].

Colleen Murphy’s new book, The Conceptual Foundations of Transitional Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2017), argues that attaining some degree of justice is possible in nations transitioning to democratic states. There are many historical instances of nations whose citizens take action to change the nature of their regime from one of authoritarianism to democracy. Whether from France in the 1790s to Eastern Europe and Russia in the 1990s, the challenges facing new leaders to look to the future while accounting for the past can be daunting. Murphy argues that transitions need some degree of justice in order to be successful and she seeks to identify the key elements of just transitions. Murphy notes that a just result can take different forms, because of differences in culture, traditions, and the nature of the old regime. She further notes that transitional justice is not as clear and definitive as more familiar forms of justice, such as the retributive justice of the criminal law or the corrective justice of tort law. Instead, transitional justice involves degrees of accountability for wrongdoers and degrees of compensation and recognition for victims. The tools of transitional justice can include amnesties, criminal trials, memorials, truth and reconciliation commissions or reparations. Accordingly, not everyone in the society will be satisfied with the punishment, if any, meted out to perpetrators and the recognition given to victims may seem incomplete or insufficient. Nevertheless, in order to achieve a society-wide transition to a morally improved regime, traditional notions of justice may remain unsatisfied or incomplete.

The work of sociologist Norbert Elias has had a renaissance in recent times, with Steven Pinker, among others, using it to argue that interpersonal violence has declined globally as states have expanded and subdued restless populations. In Violence and the Civilising Process in Cambodia (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Roderic Broadhurst and his co-authors Thierry and Brigette Bouhours bring the declinist thesis to Southeast Asia. Coupling Elias’s approach with criminological theory, Broadhurst and the Bouhours argue that Cambodia’s experience over a 150 years is broadly consistent with what Elias found in Europe: that by monopolising force, generating chains of interdependence, and sensitising people to violence, states have an overall civilising effect. This is a startling and counterintuitive finding for a country whose name was not so long ago synonymous with genocide. But, Broadhurst and co-authors explain, the civilizing process is not linear. Asia like Europe has had its decivilising periods, and it might yet have some more. The overall trend, nevertheless, is away from violence and towards civility. Roderic Broadhurst joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to talk about state violence versus interpersonal violence, French colonial administration, postcolonialism and modernity, Sihanouk and the Khmer Rouge, Hun Sen and authoritarianism, and the challenges of doing historical sociology across multiple regime types and periods. You may also be interested in: Astrid Noren-Nilsson, Cambodia’s Second Kingdom: Nation, Imagination, and Democracy Abram de Swaan, The Killing Compartments: The Mentality of Mass Murder Nick Cheesman is a fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University. He can be reached at [email protected].

Today we spoke to Gregory Mann about his book From Empires to NGOs in the West African Sahel: The Road to Non-Governmentality (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Gregory Mann investigates how the effectiveness of government institutions declined in the years following the independence of nation-states of the West African Sahel and gave way to a state of non-governmentality. Rather than presenting a linear explanation of this decline, Mann describes instances in which one can see its multiple roots and intricate evolution. These stories describe the activities of anticolonial leaders and intellectuals during the waning years of the colonial empire and its immediate aftermath, debates over the status of migrants and immigration within the Sahel and to France, the arrival of NGOs in light of governments inability to address the drought and famine that afflicted the Sahel between 1973 and 1974 and, finally, the role human rights organizations in the handling of Saharan prisons. By telling these stories Mann illustrates how current understandings of government decline as the result of either neocolonial or neoliberal interventions are both misguided and insufficient and sets the stage for a more nuanced debate about the role of the state in Africa that goes beyond its brief post-colonial past. Gregory Mann is Professor of History at Columbia University. He specializes on the history of French West Africa. Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia is Associate Professor in History at Montclair State University. She specializes in modern intellectual history of Africa, historiography, World history and Philosophy of History. She is the co-author of African Histories: New Sources and New Techniques for Studying African Pasts (Pearson, 2011).

Andrew R. Lewis is the author of the new book, The Rights Turn in Conservative Christian Politics: How Abortion Transformed the Culture Wars (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Lewis is assistant professor of political science at the University of Cincinnati and is the book review editor at the journal of Politics & Religion. Following up on recent podcasts with Daniel Bennett and Christopher Baylor, The Rights Turn demonstrates a transformation of American politics with the waning of Christian America. As opposed to conservatives focusing on morality and liberals on rights, both sides now emphasize rights-based arguments to win policy battles and build support. Based on historical and quantitative data, Lewis analyzes evangelical advocacy and public opinion related to abortion, free speech, and the death penalty. He shows how rights claims have been used to protect evangelicals, whose cultural positions are increasingly in the minority. Heath Brown, associate professor, City University of New York, John Jay College and CUNY Grad Center, hosted this podcast. Please rate the podcast on iTunes and share it on social media.

Since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, there has been a widespread affirmation of economic ideologies that conceive the market as an autonomous sphere of human practice. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, this idea has been countered by calls for reforms of financial markets and for the consideration of moral values in economic practice. Religion and the Morality of the Market: Anthropological Perspectives (Cambridge University Press, 2017) intervenes in these debates by showing how neoliberal market practices engender new forms of religiosity, and how religiosity shapes economic actions. Daromir Rudnyckyj, one of the volumes editors, is Associate Professor of anthropology at the University of Victoria. Hillary Kaell co-hosts NBIR and is Associate Professor of Religion at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.

If you are an enthusiast of The Cheese and the Worms (1976), The Great Cat Massacre (1984), or The Return of Martin Guerre (1983), then Michael Wintroub‘s The Voyage of Thought: Navigating Knowledge Across the Sixteenth-Century World (Cambridge University Press, 2017) is a must read. Simply put, this is a...

Alessandro Duranti is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at UCLA, where he served as Dean of Social Sciences from 2009-2016. In his book The Anthropology of Intentions: Language in a World of Others (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Duranti explores the relevance of intentions in making sense of what others say reflecting the range of his intellectual curiosity: from analytic and continental philosophical foundations of the concept of intentionality to political discourse in Samoa and the U.S., anthropologists’ accounts of the opacity of other minds in Pacific societies, and the embodiment of intentions in jazz improvisation. Duranti takes up the stalled opposition between, on the one hand, analytic philosophy of language–which tends towards individualistic conceptions of intentions–and, on the other hand, linguistic anthropology–which rejects this armchair universalizing, offering counterexamples of contexts where inner states are not socially salient. In making the case for a continuum of intentionality, he offers a way to reconcile this opposition: the salience of intentions varies across individuals and cultures, and with it, the social and linguistic elaboration of being-in-the-world varies too. For Duranti, intentionality is an irreducibly intersubjective phenomenon: an individual’s ostensible, performed, and uniquely conceived meaning is always in tension with the meaning interpreted and evaluated by a community, whether present or not. We are not just beings in the world: we always exist in a world of others. This intersubjective tension undergirds the social construction of, for example, authenticity and responsibility in politics, the ability to be an active listener in music, and the translation of a concept from one social world to another. This interview discusses The Anthropology of Intentions in relation to Duranti’s wide-ranging academic career, up to and including his recent sabbatical excursions into the ancient Greek world in search of the origins of the notions of intention, mind, and soul. [Afterword. Alessandro Duranti contributed to a special edition of Journal of Ethnographic Theory (Vol 7, No 2, 2017) in which he discusses ideas we talked about in the podcast. You can find it here.] John Weston is an Associate Lecturer in Applied Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London. His research focuses on the relationships between language, knowledge and ethics. He can be reached at [email protected].