New Books in Anthropology

How do we measure and truly grasp the sweeping social and environmental effects of an oil-based economy? Focusing on the special economic zones resulting from China's trading partnership with Nigeria, Enclaves of Exception: Special Economic Zones and Extractive Practices in Nigeria (Indiana UP, 2022) offers a new approach to exploring the relationship between oil and technologies of extraction and their interrelatedness to local livelihoods and environmental practices. In this groundbreaking work, Omolade Adunbi argues that even though the exploitation of oil resources is dominated by big corporations, it establishes opportunities for many former Nigerian insurgents and their local communities to contest the ownership of such resources in the oil-rich Niger Delta and to extract oil themselves and sell it. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, Enclaves of Exception makes clear that, although both the free trade zones and the now booming local artisanal refineries share the goals of profit-making and are enthusiastically supported by those benefiting from them economically, they have yielded dramatically the same environmental outcome for communities around them that included pollution with precarious effects on the health of the populations in the regions, and displacement of population from their livelihood practices. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

In Terror Trials: Life and Law in Delhi's Courts (Fordham UP, 2022), Mayur Suresh shows how legal procedures and technicalities become the modes through which courtrooms are made habitable. Where India’s terror trials have come to be understood by way of the expansion of the security state and displays of Hindu nationalism, Suresh elaborates how they are experienced by defendants in a quite different way, through a minute engagement with legal technicalities. Amidst the grinding terror trials—which are replete with stories of torture, illegal detention and fabricated charges—defendants school themselves in legal procedures, became adept petition writers, build friendships with police officials, cultivate cautious faith in the courts and express a deep sense of betrayal when this trust is belied. Though seemingly mundane, legal technicalities are fraught and highly contested, and acquire urgent ethical qualities in the life of a trial: the file becomes a space in which the world can be made or unmade, the petition a way of imagining a future, and investigative and courtroom procedures enable the unexpected formation of close relationships between police and terror-accused. In attending to the ways in which legal technicalities are made to work in everyday interactions among lawyers, judges, accused terrorists, and police, Suresh shows how human expressiveness, creativity and vulnerability emerge through the law. Shatakshi Singh is a PhD student in Political Science at the University of California Santa Cruz. Her research focuses on legal mobilization and claim-making within the context of dispossession and evictions of urban slums in India. Twitter. Email: [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Sarah E. Vaughn’s Engineering Vulnerability: In Pursuit of Climate Adaptation (Duke UP, 2022) examines climate adaptation strategies that upend the neat divisions of linear temporality separate the past, present, and the future, and shows how multiple temporalities co-exist in the pressing sense of crisis that engulfs coastal spaces vulnerable to flooding. Her ethnographic account takes us to Guyana in the aftermath of the 2005 catastrophic floods that ravaged the country’s Atlantic coastal plain. The country’s ensuing engineering projects reveal the contingencies of climate adaptation and the capacity of flooding to shape Guyanese expectations about racial (in)equalities as seen through the lens of ‘apan jaat’ (loosely translated from Hindi/Bhojpuri to for our kind or community), which has been the dominant political ideology creating a divide between the Afro-Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese diasporas, in the postcolonial independent nation-state, that has been the site of both plantation slavery and indentured labor during the colonial period. Analyzing the coproduction of race and vulnerability, Vaughn details why climate adaptation has implications for the limits of ideologies such as ‘apan jaat’ and demands newer forms of political ideation and action. Such understandings become particularly apparent not only through engineering experts’ and ordinary citizens’ disputes over resources but in their attention to bringing ethical questions to bear on the technoscientific climate adaptation projects. Vaughn offers us a complex and compelling narrative that begins from the local, personal, and deeply material aspects of climate adaptation from the Global South while never losing sight of the stakes for these struggles on the global and planetary stages—showing how questions of environmental justice are inextricably tied to questions of historical racialization. Archit Guha is a PhD researcher in the Duke University History Department. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

After Stories: Transnational Intimacies of Postwar El Salvador (Stanford UP, 2022) builds upon Irina Carlota [Lotti] Silber's nearly 25 years of ethnographic research centered in Chalatenango, El Salvador, to follow the trajectories—geographic, temporal, storied—of several extended Salvadoran families. Traveling back and forth in time and across borders, Silber narrates the everyday unfolding of diasporic lives rich with acts of labor, love, and renewed calls for memory, truth, and accountability in El Salvador's long postwar. Through a retrospective and intimate ethnographic method that examines archives of memories and troubles the categories that have come to stand for "El Salvador" such as alarming violent numbers, Silber considers the lives of young Salvadorans who were brought up in an everyday radical politics and then migrated to the United States after more than a decade of peace and democracy. She reflects on this generation of migrants—the 1.5 insurgent generation born to forgotten former rank-and-file militants—as well as their intergenerational, transnational families to unpack the assumptions and typical ways of knowing in postwar ethnography. As the 1.5 generation sustains their radical political project across borders, circulates the products of their migrant labor through remittances, and engages in collective social care for the debilitated bodies of their loved ones, they transform and depart from expectations of the wounded postwar that offer us hope for the making of more just global futures. Irina Carlota [Lotti] Silber is Professor of Anthropology at The City College of New York. She is the author of Everyday Revolutionaries: Gender, Violence, and Disillusionment in Postwar El Salvador. Alize Arıcan is a Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Scholar at Boston University and an incoming Assistant Professor of Anthropology at CUNY—City College, focusing on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Azraq refugee camp, built in 2014 and host to forty thousand refugees, is one of two official humanitarian refugee camps for Syrian refugees in Jordan. Time and Power in Azraq Refugee Camp: A Nine-To-Five Emergency (American University of Cairo Press, 2023) by Dr. Melissa Gatter investigates the relationship between time and power in Azraq, asking how a politics of time shapes, limits, or enables everyday life for the displaced and for aid workers. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, carried out during 2017–2018, the book challenges the perceptions of Azraq as the ‘ideal’ refugee camp. Dr. Gatter argues that the camp operates as a ‘nine-to-five emergency’ where mundane bureaucratic procedures serve to sustain a power system in which refugees are socialized to endure a cynical wait—both for everyday services and for their return—without expectations for a better outcome. Time and Power in Azraq Refugee Camp also explores how refugees navigate this system, both in the day-to-day and over years, by evaluating various layers of waiting as they affect refugee perceptions of time in the camp—not only in the present, but the past, near future, and far future. Far from an ‘ideal’ camp, Azraq and its politics of time constitute a cruel reality in which a power system meant to aid refugees is one that suppresses, foreclosing futures that it is supposed to preserve. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Brenda Beck discusses her lifelong work on a Tamil folk legend, resulting in a graphic novel, an English translation and Hidden Paradigms: Comparing Epic Themes, Characters, and Plot Structures (U Toronto Press, 2022) which identifies important symbolic patterns connecting this tale to other epic stories. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

For decades, parents across America have asked their kids, “If your friends jumped off a bridge, would you?” The answer is, “Duh, yes.” Peers, as parents well know, have a tremendous impact on who their kids are and what they will become. And even while they insist otherwise, parents know that they’re largely powerless to change this. But the effect of peers is not just a story about kids; peers can also affect adult behavior—they affect what we do and who we are well into old age. Noted sociologists Syed Ali and Margaret M. Chin call this “the peer effect.” In their book, The Peer Effect: How Your Peers Shape Who You Are and Who You Will Become (NYU Press, 2023), they take readers on a tour of how our peers, and the peer cultures they create, shape our behavior in schools and the workplace. Ali and Chin begin their look at the peer effect at the high school from which they both graduated: New York City’s prestigious Stuyvesant High School, arguably the best public high school in the nation. Through a fascinating and often humorous narrative, they show how peers can influence each other—in this case, how highly motivated students can create a culture of influence to achieve success in learning and in admission to elite colleges. They also show the many other ways that peers can influence one another beyond school performance, from hookup culture to school bullying and youth suicide. Ali and Chin are also interested in the extent to which the peer effect can last. Through interviews with adult graduates of Stuyvesant, they investigate the long-lasting effects of high school peer culture. They also examine the peer effect in post–high school settings, notably around workplace misconduct, including the steroid culture in baseball and the use of excessive force by the police. The Peer Effect ultimately offers ways to understand the power of peer influence and apply this understanding to resolving issues regarding schools, college graduation rates, workplace culture, and police violence. In the tradition of big idea books like The Tipping Point, The Peer Effect will forever change the way we look at the world of human behavior. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington, 2022). His general area of study is about the construction of place in tourist cities and about the people who reside there. He is currently conducting research for his next project on the social construction of tourist cities. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Sexuality and gender have come to serve as measures for cultural belonging in discussions of the position of Muslim immigrants in multicultural Western societies. While the acceptance of assumed local norms such as sexual liberty and gender equality is seen as successful integration, rejecting them is regarded as a sign of failed citizenship. Focusing on premarital sex, homosexuality, and cohabitation outside marriage, Sexual Self-Fashioning: Iranian Dutch Narratives of Sexuality and Belonging (Berghahn Books, 2022) provides an ethnographic account of sexuality among the Iranian Dutch. It argues that by embracing, rejecting, and questioning modernity in stories about sexuality, the Iranian Dutch actively engage in processes of self-fashioning. Rahil Roodsaz is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. Armanc Yildiz is a postdoctoral researcher at Humboldt University. He received his Ph.D. in Social Anthropology at Harvard University, with a secondary degree in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. He is also the founder of Academics Write, where he supports scholars in their writing projects as a writing coach and developmental editor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Through historical and ethnographic research, Blackness in Mexico: Afro-Mexican Recognition and the Production of Citizenship in the Costa Chica (UP of Florida, 2023) delves into the ongoing movement toward recognizing Black Mexicans as a cultural group within a nation that has long viewed the non-Black mestizo as the archetypal citizen. Anthony Jerry focuses on this process in Mexico's Costa Chica region in order to explore the relational aspects of citizenship and the place of Black people in how modern citizenship is imagined. Jerry's study of the Costa Chica shows the political stakes of the national project for Black recognition; the shared but competing interests of the Mexican government, activists, and townspeople; and the ways that the state and NGOs are working to make "Afro-Mexican" an official cultural category. He argues that that the demand for recognition by Black communities calls attention to how the mestizo has become an intuitive point of reference for identifying who qualifies as "other." Jerry also demonstrates that while official recognition can potentially empower African descendants, it can simultaneously reproduce the same logics of difference that have brought about their social and political exclusion. One of few books to center Blackness within a discussion of Mexico or to incorporate a focus on Mexico into Black studies, this book ultimately argues that the official project for recognition is itself a methodology of mestizaje, an opportunity for the government to continue to use Blackness to define the national subject and to further the Mexican national project. Anthony Russell Jerry is Assistant Professor of anthropology at the University of California, Riverside. Reighan Gillam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Vincanne Adams's book Glyphosate and the Swirl: An Agroindustrial Chemical on the Move (Duke UP, 2023) is part of a broader trend in anthropology that is developing new methods and techniques to study our increasingly polluted and toxic world. Adams takes Glyphosate as a case study and follows this chemical as it moves from the past to the present, from the lab to the dinner table, from outside our bodies, to within our cells to grapple with what it is to live in such an entangled world. Adams explores the chemical glyphosate—the active ingredient in Roundup and a pervasive agricultural herbicide—as a predicament of contested science and chemically saturated life. Adams traces the history of glyphosate’s invention and its multiple uses as activists, regulators, scientists, clinicians, consumers, and sick people try to determine its safety and harm. Scientific and political debates over glyphosate’s toxicity are agitated into a swirl—a condition in which certainty is continually contested, divided, and multiplied. This movement replicates the chemical’s movement in soils, foods, bodies, archives, labs, and legislative bodies, settling in some places here and in other places there, its potencies changing and altering what it touches with different scales and kinds of impact. The swirl is both an artifact of academic capitalism, activist tactics, and contested scientific facts and a way to capture the complexity of contemporary life with chemicals. Prof. Vincanne Adams, is professor Anthropology, History and Social Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Elliott M. Reichardt, MPhil, is a PhD Candidate in Socio-Cultural Anthropology at Stanford University. Elliott's research interests are in capitalism, colonialism, and socio-ecological health in North America. Elliott also has long standing interests in medical anthropology and the history of science and medicine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

In Hailing the State: Indian Democracy Between Elections (Duke UP, 2023), Lisa Mitchell explores the methods of collective assembly that people in India use to hold elected officials and government administrators accountable, demand inclusion in decision making, and stage informal referendums. Mitchell traces the colonial and postcolonial lineages of collective forms of assembly, in which—rather than rejecting state authority—participants mobilize with expectations that officials will uphold the law and fulfill electoral promises. She shows how assembly, which ranges from sit-ins, hunger strikes, and demands for meetings with officials to massive general strikes and road and rail blockades, is fundamental to the functioning of democracy in India. These techniques are particularly useful for historically marginalized groups and others whose voices may not be easily heard. Moving beyond an exclusive focus on electoral processes, Mitchell argues that to understand democracy—both in India and beyond—we must also pay attention to what occurs between elections, thereby revising understanding of what is possible for democratic action around the world. Sneha Annavarapu is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Yale-NUS College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

In recent years, Israeli state policies have attempted to dissuade Orthodox Jews from creating large families, an objective that flies in the face of traditional practices in their community. As state desires to cultivate a high-income, tech-centered nation come into greater conflict with common Orthodox familial practices, Jewish couples are finding it increasingly difficult to actualize their reproductive aims and communal expectations. In The State of Desire: Religion and Reproductive Politics in the Promised Land (New York University Press, 2023), Lea Taragin-Zeller provides an intimate examination of the often devastating effects of Israel's steep cutbacks in child benefits, which are aimed at limiting the rapid increase in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish population. Taragin-Zeller takes the reader beyond Orthodox taboos, capturing how cracks in religious convictions engender a painful process of re-orientating desires to reproduce amidst shrinking public support, feminism, and new ideals of romance, intimacy and parenting. Paying close attention to ethical dilemmas, the book explores not just pro-ceptive but also contraceptive desires around family formation: when to have children, how many, and at what cost. The volume offers a rare look at issues of contraception in the Orthodox context, and notably includes interviews with men, making the case that we cannot continue to study reproductive choice solely through the perspectives of women. The State of Desire is a groundbreaking anthropological approach to the study of religion and reproduction, and a remarkably intimate account of the delicate balance between personal desires and those of the state. Lea Taragin-Zeller is Assistant Professor in the Federmann School of Public Policy and Program in Cultural Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Similar to countries like the US and Canada, Taiwan also has indigenous peoples who've existed before the arrival of colonizers, and continue to grapple with the legacy of colonialism to this day. Scott Simon's Truly Human: Indigeneity and Indigenous Resurgence on Formosa (U Toronto Press, 2023) explores lifeworlds, traditions, and political relationships in two of Taiwan's indigenous communities—the Sediq and Truku. Simon is a Professor of Sociological and Anthropological Studies at the University of Ottawa, where he is also the Chair of Taiwan studies. Truly Human is the result of nearly two decades of field research and interactions among the Sediq and Truku; the book provides a deep yet accessible dive into matters such as hunting practices, belief systems, electoral politics, historical narratives, and how Taiwan's geopolitical status may affect the island's indigenous communities. As Taiwan becomes ever-more-prominent in international headlines, Truly Human helps readers draw parallels with indigenous peoples in other parts of the world, and learn about a dimension of Taiwanese and Austronesian society that often gets lost in discussions centered on conflict. Anthony Kao is a writer who intersects international affairs and cultural criticism. He founded/edits Cinema Escapist—a publication exploring the sociopolitical context behind global film and television—and also writes for outlets like The Guardian, Al Jazeera, The Diplomat, and Eater. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

In his book, In the Skin of the City: Spatial Transformation in Luanda (Duke UP, 2022), António Tomás traces the history and transformation of Luanda, Angola, the nation’s capital as well as one of the oldest settlements founded by the European colonial powers in the Southern Hemisphere. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research alongside his own experiences growing up in Luanda, Tomás shows how the city’s physical and social boundaries—its skin—constitute porous and shifting interfaces between center and margins, settler and Native, enslaver and enslaved, formal and informal, and the powerful and the powerless. He focuses on Luanda’s “asphalt frontier”—the (colonial) line between the planned urban center and the ad hoc shantytowns that surround it—and the ways squatters are central to Luanda’s historical urban process. In their relationship with the state and their struggle to gain rights to the city, squatters embody the process of negotiating Luanda’s divisions and the sociopolitical forces that shape them. By illustrating how Luanda emerges out of the continual redefinition of its skin, Tomás offers new ways to understand the logic of urbanization in cities across the global South. Comfort Azubuko-Udah is an Assistant Professor at University of Toronto, cross-appointed in the Department of English and the African Studies Centre. Her work engages narrativizations of African spaces and places with ecocritical and geocritical lenses. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Commercial dating agencies that facilitate marriages across national borders comprise a $2.5 billion global industry. Ideas about the industry are rife with stereotypes-younger, more physically attractive brides from non-Western countries being paired with older Western men. These ideas are more myth than fact, Monica Liu finds in Seeking Western Men: Email-Order Brides Under China's Global Rise (Stanford UP, 2022). Her study of China's email-order bride industry offers stories of Chinese women who are primarily middle-aged, divorced, and proactively seeking spouses to fulfill their material and sexual needs. What they seek in their Western partners is tied to what they believe they've lost in the shifting global economy around them. Ranging from multimillionaire entrepreneurs or ex-wives and mistresses of wealthy Chinese businessmen, to contingent sector workers and struggling single mothers, these women, along with their translators and potential husbands from the US, Canada, and Australia, make up the actors in this multifaceted story. Set against the backdrop of China's global economic ascendance and a relative decline of the West, this book asks: How does this reshape Chinese women's perception of Western masculinity? Through the unique window of global internet dating, this book reveals the shifting relationships of race, class, gender, sex, and intimacy across borders. Dr. Monica Liu is a sociologist whose teaching and research interests include gender, globalization, family, immigration, race/ethnicity, Asia and Asian America, digital technology/media, and qualitative methods. She has explored the phenomenon of global internet dating and cross-border marriage between women from China and men from English-speaking Western countries. She is currently working on a new project that examines institutional racism against Asian women leaders in higher education. Born and raised in China, Dr. Liu immigrated to the U.S. at the age of eight. Before joining the University of St. Thomas, she taught at Colgate University and Carleton College. Victoria Oana Lupașcu is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at University of Montréal. Her areas of interest include medical humanities, visual art, 20th and 21st Chinese, Brazilian and Romanian literature and Global South studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Awkward Archives: Ethnographic Drafts for a Modular Curriculum (Archive Books, 2022) proposes a manual for academic teaching and learning contexts. An ethnographic research approach is confronted with the demands of archival research as both disciplines challenge their inner logics and epistemologies. Through fieldwork and ethnographic tools and methods, both analogue and digital, the editors take various contemporary archival sites in Berlin as case studies to elaborate on controversial concepts in Western thought. Presenting as such a modular curriculum on archives in their awkwardness—with the tensions, discomfort and antagonisms they pose. With case studies on Haus der Kulturen der Welt, the Hahne-Niehoff Archive and the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, among others This book is available open access here. Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Ontology and Ritual Theory”. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

When Ed Goodwin moved with his parents to Greenwood, Tulsa, in 1914, his family joined a growing community on the cusp of becoming a national center of black life. But, just seven years later, on May 31, 1921, the teenaged Ed hid in a bathtub as a white mob descended on his neighborhood, laying waste to thirty-five blocks and murdering as many as three hundred people. The Tulsa Race Massacre was one of the most brutal acts of racist violence in U.S. history, a ruthless attempt to smother a spark of black independence. But that was never the whole story of Greenwood. The Goodwins and their neighbors soon rebuilt it into “a Mecca,” in Ed’s words, where nightlife thrived, small businesses flourished, and an underworld economy lived comfortably alongside public storefronts. Prosperity and poverty intermixed, and icons from W.E.B. Du Bois to Muhammad Ali ambled down Greenwood Avenue, alongside maids, doctors, and every occupation in between. Ed grew into a prominent businessman and bought a newspaper called the Oklahoma Eagle to chronicle Greenwood’s resurgence and battles against white bigotry. He and his wife, Jeanne, raised an ambitious family, and their son Jim, an attorney, embodied their hopes for the Civil Rights Movement in his work. But by the 1970s, urban renewal policies had nearly emptied the neighborhood, even as Jim and his neighbors tried to hold on to it. Today, while new high-rises and encroaching gentrification risk wiping out Greenwood’s legacy for good, the family newspaper remains, and Ed’s granddaughter Regina represents the neighborhood in the Oklahoma state legislature, working alongside a new generation of local activists. In Built from the Fire: The Epic Story of Tulsa's Greenwood District, America's Black Wall Street (Random House, 2023), journalist Victor Luckerson moves beyond the mythology of Black Wall Street to tell the story of an aspirant black neighborhood that, like so many others, has long been buffeted by racist government policies. Through the eyes of dozens of race massacre survivors and their descendants, Luckerson delivers an honest, moving portrait of this potent national symbol of success and solidarity—and weaves an epic tale about a neighborhood that refused, more than once, to be erased. Victor Luckerson is a journalist and author based in Tulsa who works to bring neglected Black history to light. He is a former staff writer at The Ringer and business reporter for Time magazine. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Wired, and Smithsonian. He was nominated for a National Magazine Award for his reporting in Time on the 1923 Rosewood Massacre. He also manages an email newsletter about underexplored aspects of Black history called Run It Back. Reighan Gillam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creations. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Part memoir, part cultural critique, In Our Shoes: On Being a Young Black Woman in Not-So 'Post-Racial' America (Plume Books, 2023) uses pop culture and author Brianna Holt’s own lived experience to dissect the stereotypes and preconceived notions that young Black women must overcome in America today. In this fresh exploration of cultural appropriation, wokeness, tone policing, and more, Holt carefully dismantles myths about Black womanhood, allowing readers to assess their biases while examining the roles Black millennial women are forced to take on simply to survive. Through nine thoughtful chapters—such as “Leave the Box Braids for the Black Girls” and “Why Are You So Dark?”—laced with searing commentary, personal anecdotes from Brianna’s own life, and interviews conducted with “everyday” Black women, In Our Shoes reveals the complexities of existence for Black women and creates a thought-provoking book that helps readers to learn, empathize, reflect, and, most importantly, act. A history, a work of criticism, a piece of reporting, and a call to action, In Our Shoes is a timely exploration of race and womanhood that will entertain, inspire, and inform in equal measures. Brianna Holt is an author, screenwriter, and reporter living in New York City. Holt's writing has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, GQ, The Cut, The Atlantic, Complex, and more, including her own column, Active Voice, through Medium's GEN. In Our Shoes is her first book. Reighan Gillam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creations. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Jenna Grant is a cultural anthropologist from the University of Washington and author of Fixing the Image: Ultrasound and the Visuality of Care in Phnom Penh, published by University of Washington Press in 2022. Introduced in Phnom Penh around 1990, at the twilight of socialism and after two decades of conflict and upheaval, ultrasound took root in humanitarian and then privatized medicine. Services have since multiplied, promising diagnostic information and better prenatal and general health care. In Fixing the Image Jenna Grant draws on years of ethnographic and archival research to theorize the force and appeal of medical imaging in the urban landscape of Phnom Penh. Set within long genealogies of technology as tool of postcolonial modernity, and vision as central to skilled diagnosis in medicine and Theravada Buddhism, ultrasound offers stabilizing knowledge and elicits desire and pleasure, particularly for pregnant women. Grant offers the concept of "fixing"--which invokes repair, stabilization, and a dose of something to which one is addicted--to illuminate how ultrasound is entangled with practices of care and neglect across different domains. Fixing the Image thus provides a method for studying technological practice in terms of specific materialities and capacities of technologies--in this case, image production and the permeability of the body--illuminating how images are a material form of engagement between patients, between patients and their doctors, and between patients and their bodies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Roluah Puia's book Nationalism in the Vernacular: State, Tribes, and Politics of Peace in Northeast India (Cambridge UP, 2023) illuminates our understanding of the relationship between orality and nationalist politics. In doing so, it provides a new angle to the understanding of nationalism by looking at the popular support and participation of ordinary people in the construction of Mizo nationalism, in short, the vernacularisation of nationalism. Nationalism in the Vernacular examines this process of vernacularisation at two levels, the first concerns the process of creating a vernacular language to express nationalist ideas and second, the irrepressibility of the oral against state's violent response to the nationalist movement. Drawing from multiple sources, the book through the rich oral narratives, archival materials, including government and media reports shows how Mizos have remained active agents in asserting and claiming their rights to defining ideas of nationalism in their own terms by making it distinctively Mizo. Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on Indigenous Religion and Christianity at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Individuals can assume—and be assigned—multiple roles throughout a conflict: perpetrators can be victims, and vice versa; heroes can be reassessed as complicit and compromised. However, accepting this more accurate representation of the narrativized identities of violence presents a conundrum for accountability and justice mechanisms premised on clear roles. This book considers these complex, sometimes overlapping roles, as people respond to mass violence in various contexts, from international tribunals to NGO-based social movements. Bringing the literature on perpetration in conversation with the more recent field of victim studies, it suggests a new, more effective, and reflexive approach to engagement in post-conflict contexts. Long-term positive peace requires understanding the narrative dynamics within and between groups, demonstrating that the blurring of victim-perpetrator boundaries, and acknowledging their overlapping roles, is a crucial part of peacebuilding processes. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. Sarah Federman discusses her recent co-edited work, Narratives of Mass Atrocity: Victims and Perpetrators in the Aftermath (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Sarah explains the past and ongoing challenges of restorative justice in cases of genocide and mass atrocity with Christopher Harrison. Sarah's work on issues of corporate complicity during and the attempts of accountability in post-conflict societies, including that of the national railway system active during and long after France's role in the Holocaust, informs their conversation about the book. Sarah offers insights into the research process and how the book materialized as a consequence of an academic conference she attended with a collective of similarly interested researchers and scholars. The interview proceeds by examining the relevance of identity and restorative justice in the context of educating students about such contended narratives. Sarah explains a number of options that can exist and have successfully worked in healing post-conflict societies, most notably within local communities and organizations. The interview includes topics on multiple cases of genocide and mass atrocity including the Holocaust in Europe and the genocide in Rwanda, two diverse populations that have seen tremendous shifts of post-conflict relations over time across multiple generations. Their conversation concludes with an overview of how, even while accepting the emotive and charged circumstances that accompany restoration efforts in response to material, social, and psychological harm in political, educational, and legal processes, it is both possible and important to move beyond the binary idealized identifications of "victim," "perpetrator," and "hero" and begin to address the divisive discourses that dominate both narrative constructs and retributive legal systems. Christopher Harrison teaches at Northern Arizona University. HIs research concerns genocidal warfare and the policies of recruiting perpetrators and capturing victims in both historical and contemporary cases. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Written by a lawyer who works at the intersection between legal education and practice in access to justice and human rights, this book locates, describes and defines a collective identity for social justice lawyering in the UK. Underpinned by theories of cause lawyering and legal mobilisation, the book argues that it is vital to understand the positions that progressive lawyers collectively take in order to frame the connections they make between their personal and professional lives, the tools they use to achieve social change, as well as ethical tensions presented by their work. The book takes a reflexive ethnographic approach to capture the stories of 35 lawyers working to positively transform law and policy in the UK over the last 50 years. It also draws on a wealth of primary sources including case reports, historic campaign materials and media analysis alongside wider ethnographic interviews with academics, students and lawyers and participant observation at social justice conferences, workshops and events. The book explains the way in which lawyers' networks facilitate their collective positioning and influence their strategic decision making, which in turn shapes their interactions with social activists, with other lawyers and with the state itself. Alex Batesmith is a Lecturer in Legal Profession at the School of Law, University of Leeds, UK. His research focuses on lawyers, their professional self-identity and their motivations, and how these shape the institutions and the discipline in which they work. Twitter: @batesmith. His latest publication, a chapter in the collection Leading Works on the Legal Profession (edited by Dan Newman, published by Routledge in July 2023) is entitled “Lawyers Who Want to Make the World a Better Place – Scheingold and Sarat’s Something to Believe In: Politics, Professionalism, and Cause Lawyering." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Elaborating the history, variety, pervasiveness, and function of the adornments and ornaments with which we beautify ourselves, Stephen Davies's Adornment: What Self-Decoration Tells Us About Who We Are (Bloomsbury, 2020) takes in human prehistory, ancient civilizations, hunter-foragers, and present-day industrial societies to tell a captivating story of hair, skin, and make-up practices across times and cultures. From the decline of the hat, the function of jewelry and popularity of tattooing to the wealth of grave goods found in the Upper Paleolithic burials and body painting of the Nuba, we see that there is no one who does not adorn themselves, their possessions, or their environment. But what messages do these adornments send? Drawing on aesthetics, evolutionary history, archaeology, ethology, anthropology, psychology, cultural history, and gender studies, Stephen Davies brings together African, Australian and North and South American indigenous cultures and unites them around the theme of adornment. He shows us that adorning is one of the few social behaviors that is close to being genuinely universal, more typical and extensive than the high-minded activities we prefer to think of as marking our species - religion, morality, and art. Each chapter shows how modes of decoration send vitally important signals about what we care about, our affiliations and backgrounds, our social status and values. In short, by using the theme of bodily adornment to unify a very diverse set of human practices, this book tells us about who we are. Stephen John Davies is Emeritus Professor of philosophy at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He mainly writes on aesthetics, evolution, and particularly the philosophy of art. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Pressing Onward: The Imperative Resilience of Latina Migrant Mothers (U California Press, 2023) centers the stories of mothers who migrated from Latin America, settled in New Haven, Connecticut, and overcame trauma and ongoing adversity to build futures for their children. These migrant mothers enact imperative resilience, engaging cognitive and social strategies to resist racial, economic, and gender-based oppression to seguir adelante, or press onward. Both a contemporary view of the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on racially minoritized populations and a timeless account of the ways immigration enforcement and healthcare inequality affect migrant mothers, Pressing Onward uses ethnography to tell a greater story of persistence amid long-standing structural violence. Jessica P. Cerdeña is an anthropologist, family physician-in-training, and mother of two who lives in New Haven, Connecticut, where she advocates for racial justice and health equity (Twitter: @jes_cerdena) Alize Arıcan is a Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Scholar at Boston University, focusing on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Over the past several decades, the vibrant, multiethnic borough of Queens has seen growth in the community of Nepali migrants, many of whom are navigating the challenging bureaucratic process of asylum legalization. Surviving the Sanctuary City: Asylum-Seeking Work in Nepali New York (U Washington Press, 2023) follows them through the institutional spaces of asylum offices, law firms, and human rights agencies to document the labor of seeking asylum. As an interpreter and a volunteer at a grassroots community center, anthropologist Tina Shrestha has witnessed how migrants must perform a particular kind of suffering that is legible to immigration judges and asylum officers. She demonstrates the lived contradictions asylum seekers face while producing their "suffering testimonials" and traces their attempts to overcome these contradictions through the Nepali notions of kaagaz banaune (making paper) and dukkha (suffering). Surviving the Sanctuary City asks what everyday survival among migrants and asylum seekers can tell us about the cultural logic of suffering within the confines of US borders. Through rich ethnographic detail and careful nuanced narratives, it puts the lives and perspectives of the Nepali migrant community at the center of the story. In so doing, Shrestha offers a fundamental rethinking of asylum seeking as a form of precarious labor and immigration enforcement in a rapidly changing US society. Tina Shrestha is a researcher at the Waseda Institute for Advanced Study, Waseda University. Reighan Gillam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creations. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Quinoa's new status as a superfood has altered the economic fortunes of Quechua farmers in the Andean highlands. Linda J. Seligmann journeys to the Huanoquite region of Peru to track the mixed blessings brought about by the surging worldwide popularity of this "exquisite grain." Focusing on how Indigenous communities have confronted globalization, Seligmann examines the influence of food politics, development initiatives, and the region's agrarian history on present-day quinoa production among Huanoquiteños. She also looks at the human stories behind these transformations, from the work of quinoa brokers to the ways Huanoquite's men and women navigate the shifts in place and power occurring in their homes and communities. Finally, Seligmann considers how the consequences of nearby mining may impact Huanoquiteños' ability to farm quinoa and thrive in their environment, and the efforts they are taking to resist these threats to their way of life. The untold story behind the popular health food, Quinoa: Food Politics and Agrarian Life in the Andean Highlands (U Illinois Press, 2022) illuminates how Indigenous communities have engaged with the politics and policies surrounding their production of a traditional and minor crop that became a global foodstuff. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Hiring domestic workers is a routine part of the expat development lifestyle. Whether working for the United Nations, governmental aid agencies, or NGOs such as Oxfam, Save the Children, or World Vision, expatriate aid workers in the developing world employ maids, nannies, security guards, gardeners and chauffeurs. Though nearly every expat aid worker in the developing world has local people working within the intimate sphere of their homes, these relationships are seldom, if ever, discussed in analyses of the development paradigm and its praxis. Aid and the Help: International Development and the Transnational Extraction of Care (Stanford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Dinah Hannaford addresses this major lacuna through an ethnographic analysis of the intersection of development work and domestic work. Examining the reproductive labor cheaply purchased by aid workers posted overseas opens the opportunity to assess the multiple ways that the ostensibly "giving" industry of development can be an extractive industry as well. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

In rapidly changing and highly precarious contexts, unauthorized African migrants turn to kinship in search of security, stability, and predictability. Through the exchange of identity documents between “siblings,” assistance in obtaining such documentation through kinship networks, and marriages that provide access to citizenship, new assemblages of kinship are continually made and remade to navigate the shifting demands of European states. These new kinship relations, however, often prove unreliable, taking on new, unexpected dynamics in the face of codependency; they become more difficult to control than those who enter into such relations can imagine. Through unusually close ethnographic work in West African migrant communities in Amsterdam, Apostolos Andrikopoulos reveals the unseen dynamics of kinship through shared papers, the tensions of race and gender that develop in mutually beneficial marriages, and the vast, informal networks of people, information, and documentation on which migrants rely. Throughout Argonauts of West Africa: Unauthorized Migration and Kinship Dynamics in a Changing Europe (U Chicago Press, 2023), Andrikopoulos demonstrates how inequality, exclusionary practices, and the changing policies of an often-violent state demand innovative ways of doing kinship to successfully navigate complex migration routes. Apostolos Andrikopoulos is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at Harvard University and at the University of Amsterdam. Alize Arıcan is a Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Scholar at Boston University, focusing on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

"To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted."—Ecclesiastes 3:1–2 The Appalachian region is deeply rooted in customs that have been handed down for generations. "Planting by the signs," a practice predicated on the belief that moon phases and astrological signs exert a powerful influence on the growth and well-being of crops, is deemed superstitious by some but has been considered essential to gardeners and farmers for centuries and is still in use today. Sown in the Stars: Planting by the Signs (UP of Kentucky, 2023) brings together the collective knowledge of farmers in central and eastern Kentucky about the custom of planting by the signs. Sarah Hall interviews nearly two dozen contemporary Kentuckians who still follow the signs of the moon and stars to guide planting, harvesting, canning and food preservation, butchering, and general farmwork. Hall explores the roots of this system in both astrology and astronomy and the profound connections felt to the stars, moon, planets, and the earth. Revealed in the personal narratives are the diverse interpretations of the practice. Some farmers and gardeners believe that the moon's impact on crop behavior is purely scientific, while others favor a much wider interpretation of the signs and their impact on our lives. Featuring photographs by Meg Wilson, this timely book bridges the past, present, and future by broadening our understanding of this practice and revealing its potential to increase the resiliency of our current agricultural food systems. Sarah L. Hall is associate professor of agriculture and natural resources at Berea College. Her scholarly articles on the restoration of native forests and grasslands in Kentucky have been published in a wide range of journals, including Restoration Ecology and New Forests. Candy Boatwright is currently studying for a M.A. History degree at Clemson University. Her research focus is early South Carolina trade and commerce. She is also interested in material culture and memory. A long-time resident of the upstate she enjoys hiking and exploring the natural beauty as well as the historical places of South Carolina. Her personal website is www.candyrboatwright.net/blog and she is also on Twitter at @CandyBoatwright. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Who are the English upper class? In The Fall and Rise of the English Upper Class: Houses, Kinship and Capital Since 1945 (Manchester UP, 2023) Daniel Smith, a lecturer in sociology at Cardiff University, offers an analysis of the role and power of the upper class in English society. Drawing on, and critiquing, sociology, anthropology, literary and cultural studies, and psychoanalysis, the book uses a vast range of methods and examples to tell the story of the continued dominance of English elites. With examples ranging from fashion and bookshops, through fee-paying schools, to memoirs and money, the book is essential reading across the social sciences and humanities, and for anyone interested in understanding Britain’s current social, economic, and cultural crisis. Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

On February 6, 2023, fighting erupted around Las Anod, a city in the eastern parts of the de facto independent state of Somaliland. This still-ongoing conflict has been subject to recent scrutiny from the United Nations, IGAD, US State Department, and others. Markus Hoehne, a Research Associate at the Institute of Social Anthropology in the University of Leipzig, has extensive knowledge about this conflict, which has already been simmering for decades before this year's latest eruption. In 2015, Hoehne published Between Somaliland and Puntland: Marginalization, Militarization and Conflicting Political Visions (Rift Valley Institute, 2023), one of the most extensive English-language texts about the roots and consequences of tensions in the Las Anod area. In this episode, we revisit Between Somaliland and Puntland in light of the Las Anod conflict. Markus Hoehne gives an overview of the conflict, outlines his main points from the book, and provides insights from a recent visit to the Las Anod area in May 2023. He also shares broader thoughts on the role of social anthropologists in conflict zones—a topic of concern in Dynamics of Identification and Conflict: Anthropological Encounters, one of Hoehne's edited volumes. More information about Markus Hoehne's works can be found here: Between Somaliland and Puntland: Marginalization, Militarization and Conflicting Political Visions Dynamics of Identification and Conflict: Anthropological Encounters Markus' latest article in African Arguments about Las Anod Anthony Kao is a writer who intersects international affairs and cultural criticism. He founded/edits Cinema Escapist—a publication exploring the sociopolitical context behind global film and television—and also writes for outlets like The Guardian, The Diplomat, and Eater. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Fifty thousand years ago, Homo sapiens was not the only species of humans in the world. There were also Neanderthals in what is now Europe, the Near East, and parts of Eurasia; Hobbits (H. floresiensis) on the island of Flores in Indonesia; Denisovans in Siberia and eastern Eurasia; and H. luzonensis in the Philippines. Tom Higham investigates what we know about these other human species and explores what can be learned from the genetic links between them and us. He also looks at whether H. erectus may have survived into the period when our ancestors first moved into Southeast Asia. Filled with thrilling tales of recent scientific discoveries, Tom Higham book The World Before Us: The New Science Behind Our Human Origins (Yale UP, 2021) offers an engaging synopsis of our current understanding of human origins and raises new and interesting possibilities--particularly concerning what contact, if any, these other species might have had with us prior to their extinction. Melek Firat Altay is a neuroscientist, biologist and musician. Her research focuses on deciphering the molecular and cellular mechanisms of neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental disorders. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

New Directions in Queer Oral History, edited by Amy Tooth Murphy, Clare Summerskill, and Emma Vickers (Routledge, 2022) is a comprehensive international collection that reflects on the practice, purpose, and functionality of queer oral history, and in doing so demonstrates the vibrancy and innovation of this rapidly evolving field. Drawing on the roots of oral history’s original commitment to "history from below" queer oral history has become an indispensable methodology at the heart of queer studies. Expanding and extending the existing canon, this book offers up key observations about queer oral history as a methodology, and how it might be advanced through cutting-edge approaches. The collection contains a mix of contributions from established scholars, early career researchers, postgraduate students, archivists, and activists, ensuring its accessibility and wide appeal. Dr. Amy Tooth Murphy is Lecturer in Oral History at Royal Holloway, University of London, where her specialisations include queer oral history, post-war lesbian history of Britain, and oral history theory and method. She is a Trustee of the Oral History Society and a Co-Founder and Editor of the peer-reviewed blog, Notches: (re)marks on the history of sexuality. Isabel Machado is a cultural historian whose work often crosses national and disciplinary boundaries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Humans are awesome. Our brains are gigantic, seven times larger than they should be for the size of our bodies. The human brain uses 25% of all the energy the body requires each day. And it became enormous in a very short amount of time in evolution, allowing us to leave our cousins, the great apes, behind. So the human brain is special, right? Wrong, according to Suzana Herculano-Houzel. Humans have developed cognitive abilities that outstrip those of all other animals, but not because we are evolutionary outliers. The human brain was not singled out to become amazing in its own exclusive way, and it never stopped being a primate brain. If we are not an exception to the rules of evolution, then what is the source of the human advantage? Herculano-Houzel shows that it is not the size of our brain that matters but the fact that we have more neurons in the cerebral cortex than any other animal, thanks to our ancestors' invention, some 1.5 million years ago, of a more efficient way to obtain calories: cooking. Because we are primates, ingesting more calories in less time made possible the rapid acquisition of a huge number of neurons in the still fairly small cerebral cortex—the part of the brain responsible for finding patterns, reasoning, developing technology, and passing it on through culture. Herculano-Houzel shows us how she came to these conclusions—making “brain soup” to determine the number of neurons in the brain, for example, and bringing animal brains in a suitcase through customs. The Human Advantage is an engaging and original look at how we became remarkable without ever being special. Suzana Herculano-Houzel is Associate Professor and Head of the Laboratory of Comparative Anatomy, Institute of Biomedical Sciences, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Prehension is a hymn to the hand. In Prehension, Colin McGinn links questions from science to philosophical concerns to consider something that we take for granted: the importance of the hand in everything we do. Drawing on evolutionary biology, anatomy, archaeology, linguistics, psychology, and philosophy, among other disciplines, McGinn examines the role of the hand in shaping human evolution. He finds that the development of our capacity to grasp, to grip, to take hold (also known as prehension) is crucial in the emergence of Homo sapiens. The human species possesses language, rational thought, culture, and a specific affective capacity; but there was a time when our ancestors had none of these. How did we become what we so distinctively are, given our early origins? McGinn, following Darwin and others, calls the hand the source of our biological success. When our remote ancestors descended from trees, they adopted a bipedal gait that left the hands free for other work; they began to make tools, which led to social cooperation and increased brain capacity. But McGinn goes further than others in arguing for the importance of the hand; he speculates that the hand played a major role in the development of language, and presents a theory of primitive reference as an outgrowth of prehension. McGinn sings the praises of the hand, and evolution, in a philosophical key. He mixes biology, anthropology, analytical philosophy, existential philosophy, sheer speculation, and utter amazement to celebrate humans' achievement of humanity. Colin McGinn has taught philosophy at institutions of higher learning including University College London, Rutgers University, and Oxford University. He is the author of The Character of Mind, Consciousness and Its Objects, The Meaning of Disgust, The Philosophy of Language: The Classics Explained (MIT Press), and other books. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Online comment can be informative or misleading, entertaining or maddening. Haters and manipulators often seem to monopolize the conversation. Some comments are off-topic, or even topic-less. In Reading the Comments, Joseph Reagle urges us to read the comments. Conversations "on the bottom half of the Internet," he argues, can tell us much about human nature and social behavior. Reagle visits communities of Amazon reviewers, fan fiction authors, online learners, scammers, freethinkers, and mean kids. He shows how comment can inform us (through reviews), improve us (through feedback), manipulate us (through fakery), alienate us (through hate), shape us (through social comparison), and perplex us. He finds pre-Internet historical antecedents of online comment in Michelin stars, professional criticism, and the wisdom of crowds. He discusses the techniques of online fakery (distinguishing makers, fakers, and takers), describes the emotional work of receiving and giving feedback, and examines the culture of trolls and haters, bullying, and misogyny. He considers the way comment--a nonstop stream of social quantification and ranking--affects our self-esteem and well-being. And he examines how comment is puzzling--short and asynchronous, these messages can be slap-dash, confusing, amusing, revealing, and weird, shedding context in their passage through the Internet, prompting readers to comment in turn, "WTF?!?" Joseph M. Reagle, Jr. is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northeastern University and the author of Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia (MIT Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Until fairly recently, Orthodox people in Israel could not imagine embracing their LGBT sexual or gender identity and staying within the Orthodox fold. But within the span of about a decade and a half, Orthodox LGBT people have forged social circles and communities and become much more visible. This has been a remarkable shift in a relatively short time span. Queer Judaism offers the compelling story of how Jewish LGBT persons in Israel created an effective social movement. Drawing on more than 120 interviews, Orit Avishai illustrates how LGBT Jews accomplished this radical change. She makes the case that it has taken multiple approaches to achieve recognition within the community, ranging from political activism to more personal interactions with religious leaders and community members, to simply creating spaces to go about their everyday lives. Orthodox LGBT Jews have drawn from their lived experiences as well as Jewish traditions, symbols, and mythologies to build this movement, motivated to embrace their sexual identity not in spite of, but rather because of, their commitment to Jewish scripture, tradition, and way of life. Unique and timely, Queer Judaism: LGBT Activism and the Remaking of Jewish Orthodoxy in Israel (NYU Press, 2023) challenges popular conceptions of how LGBT people interact and identify with conservative communities of faith. Orit Avishai is an ethnographer at Fordham University, where she teaches in the Sociology Department and in the Program on Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her work considers how ideology and culture, broadly defined, shape social institutions, identities, political dialogue, and cultural practices. Her recent public-facing writing has appeared in The Conversation, The Katz Center Blog, and Religion Dispatches. Dr. Avishai has degrees from The University of California at Berkeley, the Yale Law School, and Tel Aviv University Law School. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

In Mobility, Mobilization, and Counter/Insurgency: The Routes of Terror in an African Context (U Michigan Press, 2022), Daniel Agbiboa takes African insurgencies back to their routes by providing a transdisciplinary perspective on the centrality of mobility to the strategies of insurgents, state security forces, and civilian populations caught in conflict. Drawing on one of the world’s deadliest insurgencies, the Boko Haram insurgency in northeast Nigeria and the Lake Chad region, this well-crafted and richly nuanced intervention offers fresh insights into how violent extremist organizations exploit forms of local immobility and border porosity to mobilize new recruits, how the state’s “war on terror” mobilizes against so-called subversive mobilities, and how civilian populations in transit are treated as could-be terrorists and subjected to extortion and state-sanctioned violence en route. The multiple and intersecting flows analyzed here upend Eurocentric representations of movement in Africa as one-sided, anarchic, and dangerous. Instead, this book underscores the contradictions of mobility in conflict zones as simultaneously a resource and a burden. Intellectually rigorous yet clear, engaging, and accessible, Mobility, Mobilization, and Counter/Insurgency is a seminal contribution that lays bare the neglected linkages between conflict and mobility. Daniel E. Agbiboa is Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Professor Agbiboa’s research and teaching focus on how state and nonstate forms of order and authority interpenetrate and shape each other, and the spatialization and materialization of mobility, power, and politics in contemporary African cities. Sidney Michelini is a PhD student at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research with the FutureLab - Security, Ethnic Conflicts and Migration. His work focuses on how climate, climate shocks, and climate change impact conflicts of different types. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Intensifying droughts and competing pressures on water resources foreground water scarcity as an urgent concern of the global climate change crisis. In India, individual, industrial, and agricultural water demands exacerbate inequities of access and expose the failures of state governance to regulate use. State policies and institutions influenced by global models of reform produce and magnify socio-economic injustice in this "water bureaucracy." Drawing on historical records, an analysis of post-liberalization developments, and fieldwork in the city of Chennai, Leela Fernandes traces the configuration of colonial historical legacies, developmental-state policies, and economic reforms that strain water resources and intensify inequality. While reforms of water governance promote privatization and decentralization, they strengthen the state centralized control over water through city-based development models. Understanding the political economy of water thus illuminates the consequent failures of the state within countries of the Global South. Governing Water in India: Inequality, Reform, and the State (U Washington Press, 2022) is available open access here. Anubha Anushree is a Lecturer at the COLLEGE Program, Stanford University. She could be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Houseways in Southern Oman (Routledge, 2022) explores how houses are created, maintained and conceptualized in southern Oman. Based on long-term research in the Dhofar region, it draws on anthropology, sociology, urban studies and architectural history. The chapters consider physical and functional aspects, including regulations governing land use, factors in siting houses, architectural styles and norms for interior and exterior decorating. The volume also reflects on cultural expectations regarding how and when rooms are used and issues such as safety, privacy, social connectedness and ease of movement. Houses and residential areas are situated within the fabric of towns, comparison is made with housing in other countries in the Arabian peninsula, and consideration is given to notions of the ‘Islamic city’ and the ‘Islamic house’. The book is valuable reading for scholars interested in the Middle East and the built environment. Marielle Risse Dr. Marielle Risse has lived and taught at the university level in Oman for over sixteen years and in the United Arab Emirates for two years. Her research areas are Dhofari cultures, comparative literature, and intercultural communication. She has published three books: Houseways in Southern Oman (2023, Routledge). Foodways in Southern Oman (Routledge, 2021) and Community and Autonomy in Southern Oman (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Ayesha Mu’alla is a PhD candidate at the Department of Sociology, at Shiv Nadar University. Her ethnographic research explores the social life of frankincense, its materiality, and human entanglements in Oman. Ayesha has taught at the College of Applied Sciences in Nizwa and at the Cairo Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University, Near Eastern Studies Department. His research focuses on the intersection of law, the occult sciences, and the environment across the western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email [email protected] or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Not merely the act of representing events with words or images, a "news event" is the reciprocal relationship between the events being reported in the news and the event of the news coverage itself. In The News Event: Popular Sovereignty in the Age of Deep Mediatization (U Chicago Press, 2023), Francis Cody focuses on how imaginaries of popular sovereignty have been remade through the production and experience of such events. Political sovereignty is thoroughly mediated by the production of news, and subjects invested in the idea of democracy are remarkably reflexive about the role of publicly circulating images and texts in the very constitution of their subjectivity. The law comes to stand as both a limit and positive condition in this process of event making, where acts of legal and extralegal repression of publication can also become the stuff of news about news makers. When the subjects of news inhabit multiple participant roles in the unfolding of public events, when the very technologies of recording and circulating events themselves become news, the act of representing a political event becomes difficult to disentangle from that of participating in it. This, Cody argues, is the crisis of contemporary news making: the news can no longer claim exteriority to the world on which it reports. Atreyee Majumder is an anthropologist based in Bangalore, India. She tweets at @twitatreyee. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Accounts of corruption in Africa and the Global South are generally overly simplistic and macro-oriented, and commonly disconnect everyday (petty) corruption from political (grand) corruption. In contrast to this tendency, They Eat Our Sweat: Transport Labor, Corruption, and Everyday Survival in Urban Nigeria (Oxford UP, 2023) offers a fresh and engaging look at the corruption complex in Africa through a micro analysis of its informal transport sector, where collusion between state and nonstate actors is most rife. Focusing on Lagos, Nigeria's commercial capital and Africa's largest city, Daniel Agbiboa investigates the workaday world of road transport operators as refracted through the extortion racket and violence of transport unions acting in complicity with the state. Steeped in an embodied knowledge of Lagos and backed by two years of thorough ethnographic fieldwork, including working as an informal bus conductor, Agbiboa provides an emic perspective on precarious labour, popular agency and the daily pursuit of survival under the shadow of the modern world system. Corruption, Agbiboa argues, is not rooted in Nigerian culture but is shaped by the struggle to get by and get ahead on the fast and slow lanes of Lagos. The pursuit of economic survival compels transport operators to participate in the reproduction of the very transgressive system they denounce. They Eat Our Sweat: Transport Labor, Corruption, and Everyday Survival in Urban Nigeria is not just a book about corruption but also about transportation, politics, and governance in urban Africa. Rituparna Patgiri, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics, and Publics of the Late Capitalist City (Cornell UP, 2023) illuminates how corruption is fundamental to global storytelling about how states and elites abuse entrusted power in late capitalism. The millennial city of the global South is a charged setting for allegations of corruption, with skyscrapers, land grabs, and slum evictions invoking outrage at deepening economic polarization. Drawing on ethnography in Bengaluru and Mumbai and a cross-section of literary and cinematic stories from cities around the world, Malini Ranganathan, David L. Pike, and Sapana Doshi pay close attention to the racial, caste, class, and gender locations of the narrators, spaces, and publics imagined to be harmed by corruption. Corruption Plots demonstrates how corruption talk is leveraged to make sense of unequal spatial change and used opportunistically by those who are themselves implicated in wrongdoing. Offering a wide-ranging analysis of urban worlds, the authors reveal the ethical, spatial, and political stakes of storytelling and how vital it is to examine the corruption plot in all its contradictions. Sneha Annavarapu is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Yale-NUS College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

We live in times where theory is often understood as irrelevant in the real world. It appears to have no practical results. This has been further complicated in a post-fact world, where our ‘identities’ and ‘perception’ have become the final judges of truth. Sociology/social anthropology, in contrast, rests on a fundamental distinction between commonsense and theoretically informed knowledge. It teaches us to get rid of ‘perceptions’ and alerts us to go beyond taken-for-granted ideas. The paradox is that although theory is taught as a mandatory paper in sociology, it is either reduced to a topic in the syllabi or used as ceremonial citations. Emphasizing that theories emerge in specific historical contexts and are embedded in economic, political, social, cultural, institutional and intellectual processes, this edited volume Doing Theory: Locations, Hierarchies and Disjunctions (Orient Blackswan, 2018) by Maitrayee Chaudhuri and Manish Thakur takes a new approach by highlighting the sociological paths through which theories travel and are adopted by institutions in different parts of the country. Rituparna Patgiri is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Objects generate time; time does not generate or change objects. That is the central thesis of this book by the philosopher Graham Harman and the archaeologist Christopher Witmore, who defend radical positions in their respective fields. Against a current and pervasive conviction that reality consists of an unceasing flux - a view associated in philosophy with New Materialism - object-oriented ontology asserts that objects of all varieties are the bedrock of reality from which time emerges. And against the narrative convictions of time as the course of historical events, the objects and encounters associated with archaeology push back against the very temporal delimitations which defined the field and its objects ever since its professionalization in the nineteenth century. In a study ranging from the ruins of ancient Corinth, Mycenae, and Troy to debates over time from Aristotle and al-Ash'ari through Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead, the authors draw on alternative conceptions of time as retroactive, percolating, topological, cyclical, and generational, as consisting of countercurrents or of a surface tension between objects and their own qualities. Objects Untimely: Object-Oriented Philosophy and Archaeology (Polity Press, 2023) invites us to reconsider the modern notion of objects as inert matter serving as a receptacle for human categories. Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Ontology and Ritual Theory”. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

On any given day, the remains of countless deceased migrants are shipped around the world to be buried in ancestral soils. Others are laid to rest in countries of settlement, sometimes in cemeteries established for religious and ethnic minorities, where available. For immigrants and their descendants, perennial questions about the meaning of home and homeland take on a particular gravitas in death. When the boundaries of a nation and its members are contested, burial decisions are political acts. Building on multi-sited fieldwork in Berlin and Istanbul—where the author worked as an undertaker—Dying Abroad: The Political Afterlives of Migration in Europe (Cambridge UP, 2023) offers a moving and powerful account of migrants' end-of-life dilemmas, vividly illustrating how they are connected to ongoing political struggles over the stakes of citizenship, belonging, and collective identity in contemporary Europe. Osman Balkan is Associate Director of the Huntsman Program in International Studies and Business at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on borders and migration, citizenship and identity, race and ethnicity, transnationalism, cultural memory, Islam, and necropolitics. Alize Arıcan is a Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Scholar at Boston University, focusing on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Critical Brass: Street Carnival and Musical Activism in Olympic Rio de Janeiro (Wesleyan University Press, 2022) tells the story of neofanfarrismo, an explosive carnival brass band community turned activist musical movement in Rio de Janeiro, as Brazil shifted from a country on the rise in the 2000s to one beset by various crises in the 2010s. Though predominantly middle-class, neofanfarristas have creatively adapted the critical theories of carnival to militate for a more democratic city. Illuminating the tangible obstacles to musical movement building, Andrew Snyder argues that festive activism with privileged origins can promote real alternatives to the neoliberal city, but meets many limits and contradictions in a society marked by diverse inequalities. Dr. Andrew Snyder is a Research Fellow in the Institute of Ethnomusicology at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa [New University] of Lisbon] in Portugal. Building on the recently published book that is the subject of this interview, Critical Brass: Street Carnival and Musical Activism in Olympic Rio de Janeiro, he is beginning a new book project focused on the postcolonial relationships enacted in Brazilian carnival practices in Lisbon. He has also increasingly worked as an editor, having co-edited the books, HONK! A Street Band Renaissance of Music and Activism and At the Crossroads: Music and Social Justice, and he will soon be a lead co-editor of the Journal of Festive Studies. He is also a trumpet player, who has played with many of the groups he studies. Isabel Machado is a cultural historian whose work often crosses national and disciplinary boundaries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Where would we be without the knee? This down-to-earth joint connecting the thigh and the lower leg doesn’t receive the attention it deserves. Yet, as The Curious Human Knee (Columbia UP, 2023) reveals, it is crucial to countless facets of science, medicine, culture, and history—and even what makes us human. The science writer Han Yu provides an informative, surprising, and entertaining exploration of the human knee across time and place. She begins with our earliest ancestors, emphasizing that walking upright separates us from the apes and bipedal knees appeared long before big brains and sophisticated tools. Yu considers the intricate anatomy of the knee, its evolutionary history, and the complexity of treating knee pain, including her own. She examines why women’s knees might be more prone to damage than men’s and addresses the roles of race and class in ailments such as osteoarthritis. This book gets knee-deep into an astonishing range of topics—fashion from flappers to miniskirts and ripped jeans, cultural practices spanning Japanese knee walking and Thai boxing, and more. Yu reflects on the symbolic power of kneeling from the imperial court in China to the football field in the United States and shows why the knee figures into so many social and political phenomena. Distilling a vast amount of research in a style that is engaging, conversational, and even personal and witty, this book opens readers’ eyes to the complexity and significance of the humble knee. Rachel Pagones is an acupuncturist, educator, and author based in Cambridge, England. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Who is responsible for ensuring access to clean potable water? In an urbanizing planet beset by climate change, cities are facing increasingly arid conditions and a precarious water future. In Well Connected: Everyday Water Practices in Cairo (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023), anthropologist Tessa Farmer details how one community in Cairo, Egypt, has worked collaboratively to adapt the many systems required to facilitate clean water in their homes and neighborhoods. As a community that was originally not included in Cairo's municipal systems, the residents of Ezbet Khairallah built their own potable water and wastewater infrastructure. But when the city initiated a piped sewage removal system, local residents soon found themselves with little to no power over their own water supply or wastewater removal. Throughout this transition, residents worked together to collect water at the right times to drink, bathe, do laundry, cook, and clean homes. These everyday practices had deep implications for the health of community members, as they struggled to remain hydrated, rid their children of endemic intestinal worms, avoid consuming water contaminated with sewage, and mediate the impact of fluctuating water quality. Farmer examines how the people of Cairo interact with one another, with the government, and with social structures in order to navigate the water systems (and lack thereof) that affect their day-to-day lives. Farmer's extensive ethnographic fieldwork during the implementation of the Governorate of Cairo's septic system shines through in the compelling stories of community members. Well Connected taps into the inherent sociality of water through social contacts, moral ideology, interpersonal relationships, domestic rhythms, and the everyday labor of connecting. Tessa Farmer is Associate Professor at the University of Virginia in the Anthropology Department and the program in Global Studies, where she directs the Global Studies–Middle East & South Asia track within the Global Studies major. Alize Arıcan is a Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Scholar at Boston University, focusing on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Marius Wamsiedel's book The Moral Evaluation of Emergency Department Patients: An Ethnography of Triage Work in Romania (Lexington, 2023) is an ethnography of the social process by which healthcare workers ration and rationalize the provision of care. Examining the social categorization of patients, this work documents the interactional production of exclusion at two emergency departments in Romania. Roland Clark is a Reader in Modern European History at the University of Liverpool, a Senior Fellow with the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right, and the Principal Investigator of an AHRC-funded project on European Fascist Movements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology