New Books in Anthropology

It is an intuitive truth that religious beliefs are different from ordinary factual beliefs. We understand that a belief in God or the sacredness of scripture is not the same as believing that the sun will rise again tomorrow or that flipping the switch will turn on the light. In Religion as Make Believe: A Theory of Belief, Imagination, and Group Identity (Harvard UP, 2023), Neil Van Leeuwen draws on psychological, linguistic, and anthropological evidence to show that psychological mechanisms underlying religious beliefs function like those that enable imaginative play. When someone pretends, they navigate the world on two levels simultaneously, or as Van Leeuwen describes it, by consulting two maps. The first map is that of factual, mundane reality. The second is a map of the imagined world. This second map is then superimposed on top of the first to create a multi-layered cognitive experience that is consistent with both factual and imaginary understandings. With this model in mind, we can understand religious belief, which Van Leeuwen terms religious "credence", as a form of make-believe that people use to define their group identity and express values they hold as sacred. Religious communities create a religious-credence map which sits on top of their factual-belief map, creating an experience where ordinary objects and events are rich with sacred and supernatural significance. Recognizing that our minds process factual and religious beliefs in fundamentally different ways allows us to gain deeper understanding of the complex individual and group psychology of religious faith. Author recommended reading: The WEIRDEST People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous by Joseph Henrich. Mentioned resources: Lecture 'But... But... But... Extremists!' by Neil van Leeuwen Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists by Scott Atran Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Handcrafted Careers: Working the Artisan Economy of Craft Beer (U California Press, 2024) unpacks the problems and privileges of pursuing a career of passion by exploring work inside craft breweries. As workers attempt new modes of employment in the era of the Great Resignation, they face a labor landscape that is increasingly uncertain and stubbornly unequal. With Handcrafted Careers, sociologist Eli Revelle Yano Wilson dives headfirst into the everyday lives of workers in the craft beer industry to address key questions facing American workers today: about what makes a good career, who gets to have one, and how careers progress without established models. Wilson argues that what ends up contributing to divergent career paths in craft beer is a complex interplay of social connections, personal tastes, and cultural ideas, as well as exclusionary industry structures. The culture of work in craft beer is based around “bearded white guy” ideals that are gendered and racialized in ways that limit the advancement of women and people of color. A fresh perspective on niche industries, Handcrafted Careers offers sharp insights into how people navigate worlds of work that promote ideas of authenticity and passion-filled careers even amid instability. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a 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 Books, 2022). His general area of study is at the intersection of built-environment, experience, identity, and place. He is currently conducting research on how architectural designers, builders, and community planners negotiate a sense of identity and place for residents of newly constructed neighborhoods. 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

On this podcast today, I am joined by three scholars: postdoctoral fellow and lecturer at Goethe University Frankfurt, Gil Hizi; assistant professor at Sun Yat-sen University, Xinyan Peng; and lecturer and researcher at the University of Ghent, Mieke Matthyssen. All three guests join me to talk about their chapters in the new book, Self-Development Ethics and Politics in China Today: A Keyword Approach (Amsterdam University Press, 2022) Self-Development Ethics and Politics in China Today takes readers on a journey into a central aspect of life in China, so-called "self-development." Twelve contributors have each written wonderfully elaborate chapters drawing on a wide range of material from practices in education, labor, and self-help as they spotlight "keywords" by which individuals make sense of their self-development journeys - including new forms of resistance to social norms. The book consists of twelve chapters and twelve keywords. In this episode, we talk about how three terms relate to self-development ethics and politics in China today: Gil Hizi joins me to talk about the Chinese term 'xinshang' (apprecation), Xinyang Peng discusses duanlian (exercise) and Mieke Matthyssen expands on the term tangping (lying flat). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Dr. Aviad Moreno is himself an incarnation of entwined homelands. He is an Israeli whose grandfather moved from Morocco to Venezuela, sent his son back to Morocco to study. The family hailed from Spain before the Exile in 1492 only to maintain much of the Spanish language and character. These migrations create a unique diaspora for the Jews of northern Morocco, one that is Hispanophone and yet extremely connected to their Jewish roots. Thus is created these diasporas who have developed strong and growing heritage. Dr. Moreno is a scholar on migrations and this focus on this small community has the complexity of much larger diasporas. His new book is Entwined Homelands, Empowered Diasporas: Hispanic Moroccan Jews and Their Globalizing Community (Indiana UP, 2024). At Jewish Unity Through Diversity we often discuss the lost worlds of various Jewish diasporas and the yearnings for homelands. Northern Moroccan Jews have multiple homelands and have returned to those homelands as well - a unique character. This is a Spanish Moroccan Jewish strong community back in Morocco, in Israel, and in Spain today. They are a small unique community that is even today growing their heritage. Follow us on www.unitytdiversity.com, FB Jewish Unity Through Diversity, Instagram, and YouTube. Send us your stories of connecting to your heritage and learn more about the greater Jewish narrative. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Ehaab D. Abdou's book Education, Civics, and Citizenship in Egypt: Towards More Inclusive Curricular Representations and Teaching (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) explores how to render curricular representations more inclusive and how individuals' interactions with competing historical narratives and discourses shape their civic attitudes and intergroup dynamics. Based on ethnographic research in the Egyptian context, it offers insights for curriculum developers, teacher educators, and teachers interested in the development of critical citizens who are able to engage with multiple narratives and perspectives. Drawing on theorizations of historical consciousness, critical pedagogy, and critical discourse analysis, it demonstrates the need for more nuanced and holistic analytical frameworks and pedagogical tools. Further, it offers insights towards building such analytical and pedagogical approaches to help gain a deeper understanding of connections between students' historical consciousness tendencies and their civic engagement as citizens. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

China today positions itself as a model of state-led environmentalism. On the country’s arid rangelands, grassland conservation policies have targeted pastoralists and their animals, blamed for causing desertification. State environmentalism - in the form of grazing bans, enclosure, and resettlement - has transformed the lives of many ethnic minority herders in China’s western borderlands. However, this book shows how such policies have been contested and negotiated on the ground, in the context of the state’s intensifying nation-building project. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Alasha, in the far west of China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, Thomas White describes how ethnic Mongols have foregrounded the local breed of Bactrian camel, mobilizing ideas of heritage and resource conservation to defend pastoralism. In exploring how the greening of the Chinese state affects the entangled lives of humans and animals at the margins of the nation-state, this study is both a political biography of the Bactrian camel and an innovative work of political ecology addressing critical questions of rural livelihoods, conservation, and state power. Thomas White is lecturer in China and Sustainable Development at the Lau China Institute, King’s College London. His research interests include China’s borderlands, political ecology, infrastructure, and Sino-Mongolian relations. China's Camel Country: Livestock and Nation-Building at a Pastoral Frontier (U Washington Press, 2024) is his first monograph. Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of state, the anthropology of time, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Why do people go to college? In Polished: College, Class, and the Burdens of Social Mobility (U Chicago Press, 2024), Melissa Osborne, an associate professor at Western Washington University, explores the experiences of students from low income and first-generation backgrounds who attend elite universities in the USA. The book offers a vital intervention for our understanding of the role of higher education and its connection to a range of social inequalities. It captures the sometimes difficult and ambivalent experiences of students from outside the traditional demographics for elite institutions. The analysis offers a nuanced understanding of the process of social mobility, showing the struggles of students and institutions, and the limits of individually-focused approaches to social change. Rich with ethnographic and qualitative data, as well as a powerful set of ideas for elite institutional change, the book is essential reading for educators everywhere. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

When people migrate and settle in other countries, do they automatically form a diaspora? In Insurgent Communities: How Protests Create a Filipino Diaspora (U Chicago Press, 2024), Sharon M. Quinsaat explains the dynamic process through which a diaspora is strategically constructed. Quinsaat looks to Filipinos in the United States and the Netherlands—examining their resistance against the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, their mobilization for migrants’ rights, and the construction of a collective memory of the Marcos regime—to argue that diasporas emerge through political activism. Social movements provide an essential space for addressing migrants’ diverse experiences and relationships with their homeland and its history. A significant contribution to the interdisciplinary field of migration and social movements studies, Insurgent Communities illuminates how people develop collective identities in times of social upheaval. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a 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 Books, 2022). His general area of study is in the areas of social construction of experience, identity, and place. He is currently conducting research on the relationship between identity and place in the construction of neighborhood development. 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

From Skepticism to Competence: How American Psychiatrists Learn Psychotherapy (U Chicago Press, 2024) offers an examination of how novice psychiatrists come to understand the workings of the mind - and the nature of medical expertise - as they are trained in psychotherapy. While many medical professionals can physically examine the body to identify and understand its troubles - a cardiologist can take a scan of the heart, an endocrinologist can measure hormone levels, an oncologist can locate a tumor - psychiatrists have a much harder time unlocking the inner workings of the brain or its metaphysical counterpart, the mind. In From Skepticism to Competence, sociologist Mariana Craciun delves into the radical uncertainty of psychiatric work by following medical residents in the field as they learn about psychotherapeutic methods. Most are skeptical at the start. While they are well equipped to treat brain diseases through prescription drugs, they must set their expectations aside and learn how to navigate their patients’ minds. Their instructors, experienced psychotherapists, help the budding psychiatrists navigate this new professional terrain by revealing the inner workings of talk and behavioral interventions and stressing their utility in a world dominated by pharmaceutical treatments. In the process, the residents examine their own doctoring assumptions and develop new competencies in psychotherapy. Exploring the world of contemporary psychiatric training, Craciun illustrates novice physicians’ struggles to understand the nature and meaning of mental illness and, with it, their own growing medical expertise. Mariana Craciun is Associate Professor in Sociology at Tulane University. As a cultural sociologist, she is interested in the issues of expertise, professions, science, and technology. Her writings on psychotherapeutic expertise and authority and was published in top peer reviewed journals, including the American Journal of Sociology, Theory and Society, Qualitative Sociology, and the Sociology of Health and Illness. Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of environmental anthropology, the anthropology of time, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Professor David Zeitlyn’s book offers a major contribution to the study and analysis of divination, based on continuing fieldwork with the Mambila in Cameroon. It seeks to return attention to the details of divinatory practice, using the questions asked and life histories to help understand the perspective of the clients rather than that of the diviners. Drawing on a corpus of more than 600 cases, David Zeitlyn reconsiders theories of divination and compares Mambila spider divination with similar systems in the area. A detailed case study is examined and analysed using conversational analytic principles. The regional comparison considers different kinds of explanation for different features of social organization, leading to a discussion of the continuing utility of moderated functionalism. Mambila Divination: Framing Questions, Constructing Answers (Routledge, 2021) will be of interest to area specialists and scholars concerned with religion, rationality, and decision-making from disciplines including anthropology, African studies, and philosophy. Additional links and information mentioned in the recording: Professor Zietlyn’s old spider divination simulations Online spider divination site for consultations and additional information Forthcoming exhibition mentioned in the show: Oracles, Omens and Answers, 6 December 2024 - 27 April 2025, S.T. Lee Gallery, Weston Library, Bodleian Libraries, Oxford. Related publications from Bodleian Library Publishing Divination: Oracles and Omens, Edited by Michelle Aroney and David Zeitlyn (5 December) David Zeitlyn has been working with Mambila people in Cameroon since 1985. He taught at the University of Kent, Canterbury, for fifteen years before moving to Oxford as Professor of Social Anthropology in 2010. His recent books include Mambila Divination: Framing Questions, Constructing Answers (Routledge, 2020) and An Anthropological Toolkit: Sixty Useful Concepts (Berghan Books, 2022) Gene-George Earle is currently a PhD candidate in Anthropology at East China Normal University in Shanghai. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Unorthodox Kin: Portuguese Marranos and the Global Search for Belonging (U California Press, 2017) is a lively, readable exploration of "chosen" identity, kin, and community in a global era. Anthropologist Naomi Leite examines the complexity of how we know ourselves -- who we "really" are -- and how we recognize others as strangers or kin through the case of Portugal's "Marranos", people in Lisbon and Porto who identify as descendants of 15th-century Portuguese and Spanish Jews who were forcibly converted to Catholicism. As the book's story unfolds, these individuals are first dismissed by the local Portuguese Jewish community as "non-Jews" and then embraced by foreign Jewish tourists and other visitors, who are fascinated to meet a remnant of Portugal's "lost" medieval Jewish population. Drawing on more than a decade of participatory research, Leite explores how both the Marranos' and their visitors' perceptions of self, peoplehood, and belonging are transformed through their face-to-face encounters with one another. Written in a compelling, first-person narrative style, this acclaimed book will appeal to a wide audience. Accolades: Finalist, National Jewish Book Award (2017) * StIrling Prize for Best Book in Psychological Anthropology (2018) * Graburn Prize for Best First Book in Anthropology of Tourism (2018) * Honorable Mention, Douglass Prize for Best Book in Europeanist Anthropology (2018) Adam Bobeck received his PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from the University of Leipzig. His PhD was entitled “Object-Oriented ʿAzâdâri: 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

Recurring tropes about fragmented communities living on frontier forestlands living in Southeast Asia are that they are either guardians of flora and fauna their destroyers. In much analysis gravitating to one or other position in this dichotomy the role of organised religion is absent. But as Faizah Zakaria shows in The Camphor Tree and the Elephant: Religion and Ecological Change in Maritime Southeast Asia published by the University of Washington Press (2023) shows conversions from animist belief systems to Islam and Christianity enabled human-centric views that helped alienate the natural world from Batak communities for wealth. Using a wide array of archival evidence from the 19th century from North Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula, this book sheds light on the power of everyday religious practice to shape the Anthropocene. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

In Japan, a country popularly perceived as highly secularized and technologically advanced, ontological assumptions about spirits (tama or tamashii) seem to be quite deeply ingrained in the cultural fabric. From ancestor cults to anime, spirits, ghosts, and other invisible dimensions of reality appear to be pervasive. In Spirits and Animism in Contemporary Japan (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), international scholars from various backgrounds consider together this “invisible empire” and highlight the “agency of the intangible.” The contributors of this edited volume approach spirits and animism in contemporary Japan from diverse perspectives. Satō Hiroo opens the book with a chapter on the transformation in Japanese visions of the afterlife, the status of the dead, and regional traditions of memorialization. Andrea De Antoni looks further into the ontology of spirits via an investigation into recent cases of spirit possession (tsuki, hyōi) that is treated at the Kenmi Shrine in Shikoku. Jason Josephson-Storm traces both the European and Japanese genealogies of theorizing “primitive” civilizations and their beliefs in spirits, magic, and an animated nature. In Fabio Rambelli’s chapter, a unique type of epistemological system for understanding the existence of spirits is introduced: Minataka Kumagusu’s “Minakata mandala,” which involves Buddhist philosophy, Western science, and an awareness of the Japanese folk tradition all at the same time. In Ellen Van Goethem’s chapter, she explores how and why there were widespread assumptions about how the city of Kyoto was animated by invisible agencies such as guardian spirits and the flow of qi (Jp. Ki). Carina Roth continues the discussion on enchanted landscapes by drawing our attention to “power spots” (pawā supotto) and “healing” forests as recent developments in contemporary Japanese religiosity. Focusing on the role of media in the public perceptions of new religious movements (NRMs) and their animistic positions, Ioannis Gaitanidis shows how the media paradoxically both helps to normalize animism as part of “traditional” Japanese culture while chastising animistic NRM’s egregious behaviors. Concerning spirits in modern Japanese fiction, another type of powerful media in contemporary Japanese society, Rebecca Suter identifies in her chapter a “fantastic hesitation” that authors take on, which opens doors to the “undecidability of reality” that seems to be a main gateway to the spirit world. Centering on the media arts scene in Japan, Mauro Arrighi in his chapter highlights how animism serves as one of the main creative sources for contemporary artists. Then, Jolyon Thomas turns our focus to anime and their depictions of humanity’s connection with nature. In doing so, he invites us to reflect on the term “animism” and how the spirits of anime are really rooted in late capitalist modernity with its attendant pleasures and woes. In the closing chapter, Andrea Castiglioni points out a growing tendency in recent Japanese films to focus on violent spirit entities (araburugami), rather than benign figures. He argues that this perhaps is related to the emergence of a new kind of national identity for Japan as a country that is uniquely able to control the unpredictability of nature and malignant invisible agencies. In this podcast episode, I spoke with the editor of this edited volume, Dr. Fabio Rambelli. Fabio Rambelli is a professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Daigengna Duoer is a PhD student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation researches on transnational and transregional Buddhist networks connecting twentieth-century Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, Republican China, Tibet, and the Japanese Empire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Folksongs of Another America: Field Recordings from the Upper Midwest, 1937–1946 (University of Wisconsin Press) first appeared in 2015 when it comprised of a hardback book, five CDs, and one DVD. It went on to win the “Best Historical Research in Folk or World Music” award from the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, was nominated for a Grammy for “Best Album Notes,” received universally superlative reviews, and sold out within a year. The project has now been re-issued as a paperback, albeit without any accompanying discs; instead the related tracks and film footage are now available for online access care of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Library. It’s not hard to fathom why this monumental work received so much acclaim. A groundbreaking multimedia endeavor, Folksongs of Another America is the product of decades of work by the distinguished folklorist, James P. Leary. Leary is, amongst other things, Professor Emeritus of Folklore and Scandinavian Studies and Cofounder of the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, a former editor of the Journal of American Folklore, and a native of rural Wisconsin, which is one of the three states – along with Michigan and Minnesota – whose rich musical bounty is explored in this study. Leary sifted through over 2,000 field recordings, made by fieldworkers Sidney Robertson, Alan Lomax, and Helene Stratman-Thomas during the 1930s and 40s, to select the 187 tunes and songs that feature here. Together the chosen pieces create the impression of a region populated by immigrants from a host of different lands, as well as by Native Americans, all with their own musical traditions. For every track, Leary offers extensive documentation, information about the performers, and full lyrics (including in the original language with English translation as necessary which, given that the collection includes twenty-five languages, is often the case). The recordings themselves, which have been wonderfully restored and remastered, provide vivid aural experiences. Folksongs of Another America is, as noted by a reviewer for Deutschlandradio Kultur, “an exceptional achievement that demonstrates for the first time the full worth and cultural wealth of the Upper Midwest for music listeners.” Rachel Hopkin is a UK born, US based folklorist and radio producer and is currently a PhD candidate at the Ohio State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

The Parashakthi Temple in Pontiac, Michigan serves as a site of worship for the Hindu goddess Karumariamman, whose origins are in South India. In her American home Karumariamman has assumed the status of Great Goddess, a tantric deity and wonder worker who communicates directly with devotees through dreams, visions, and miracles. Drawing on fifteen years of field work, Tracy Pintchman reveals how the Parashakthi Temple has become a site of theological and ritual innovation. A unique spiritual community, the temple does not simply reproduce Indian goddess traditions, but instead reimagines Hinduism and the Hindu Goddess in the American religious, cultural, and natural landscape. The congregation's faith is grounded in a vision of the Goddess as a breaker of boundaries, including those of race, ethnicity, religion, geography, history, and nationality. Like her congregants, Pintchman suggests, the goddess is emblematic of the qualities of a new immigrant; she embraces the opportunities her new home affords her and refashions herself, but she does not forget her roots, keeping one foot planted in her Indian homeland and another planted firmly in her new land, the United States. In Goddess Beyond Boundaries: Worshipping the Eternal Mother at a North American Hindu Temple (Oxford UP, 2023), Pintchman considers larger issues concerning the creativity of immigrant Hindu communities and the ways in which diaspora contexts facilitate the production of new forms of Hinduism that are made possible by globalization and modern technology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Mumbai is not commonly seen as a bike-friendly city because of its dense traffic and the absence of bicycle lanes. Yet the city supports rapidly expanding and eclectic bicycle communities. Exploring how people bike and what biking means in the city, Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria challenges assumptions that underlie sustainable transportation planning.Arguing that planning professionals and advocates need to pay closer attention to ordinary people who cycle for transportation or for work, or who choose to cycle for recreation, Mumbai on Two Wheels: Cycling, Urban Space, and Sustainable Mobility (U Washington Press, 2024) offers an alternative to the thinking that dominates mainstream sustainable transportation discussions. The book's insights come from bicycle activists, commuters, food delivery workers, event organizers, planners, technicians, shop owners, transportation planners, architects, and manufacturers. Through ethnographic vignettes and descriptions of diverse biking experiences, it shows how pedaling through the city produces a way of seeing and understanding infrastructure. Readers will come away with a new perspective on what makes a city bicycle friendly and an awareness that lessons for more equitable and sustainable urban future can be found in surprising places. In the episode, we make a reference to an essay Jonathan Anjaria wrote for Ethnographic Marginalia. You can read the essay here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Maid to Queer: Asian Labor Migration and Female Same-Sex Desires (Hong Kong UP, 2021) is the first book about Asian female migrant workers who develop same-sex relationships in a host city. Based on participant observation and in-depth interviews with Indonesian domestic workers in Hong Kong, the book explores the meanings of same-sex relationships to these migrant women. Instead of searching for reasons to explain why they engage in a same-sex relationship, this book provides an ethnographic perspective by addressing their Sunday activities and considering how migration policies and the practices of Hong Kong people unintentionally produce alternative sexuality and desires for them. The author contrasts the migrant experiences of same-sex relationships with the Western discourse that individuals carry a strong sense of sexual identification prior to migration; same-sex desires among Indonesian domestic workers are often not realized until they leave home. Addressing the changes from maid to queer, this book documents the intersections of domestic work, labor migration, race, and religion on the sexual subject formation, specifically how Indonesian women negotiate heteronormativity and remake a space for their love, sex, and intimacy. For those interested in lesbian studies, Asian labor migration, sexual citizenship, and queer migration, this ethnography fills an important gap in explaining how the feminization of international migration and the constraints imposed on live-in domestic workers unintentionally become productive possibilities of queerness and normativity. Qing Shen is currently a PhD candidate in anthropology at Uppsala University, Sweden. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Using a multidisciplinary and intersectional approach, Liberating Fat Bodies: Social Media Censorship and Body Size Activism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) by Dr. Wesley Bishop & Dr. Bessie Rigakos explores the social factors that influence the ways in which societal norms police fat bodies. Chapters examine the racist and colonial constructions of Western beauty norms as well as the evolution of anti-fat bias and fat liberation, before delving into the relationship between social media and body size activism, with a particular emphasis on social media companies censoring fat people. The authors draw on first-person narratives of artists, activists, and fat social media users to unpack how, these mostly women, have used their bodies to transform the negative social perceptions of fat people. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses 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

An in-depth examination of the regulatory, entrepreneurial, and organizational factors contributing to the expansion and transformation of China’s supplemental education industry. Like many parents in the United States, parents in China, increasingly concerned with their children’s academic performance, are turning to for-profit tutoring businesses to help their children get ahead in school. China’s supplemental education industry is now the world’s largest and most vibrant for-profit education market, and we can see its influence on the US higher education system: more than 70% of Chinese students studying in American universities have taken test preparation classes for overseas standardized tests. The Fruits of Opportunism: Noncompliance and the Evolution of China's Supplemental Education Industry (U Chicago Press, 2022) offers a much-needed thorough investigation into this industry. This book examines how opportunistic organizations thrived in an ambiguous policy environment and how they catalyzed organizational and institutional changes in this industry. A former insider in China’s Education Industry, sociologist Le Lin shows how and why this industry evolved to become a for-profit one dominated by private, formal, nationally operating, and globally financed corporations, despite restrictions the Chinese state placed on the industry. Looking closely at the opportunistic organizations that were founded by marginal entrepreneurs and quickly came to dominate the market, Lin finds that as their non-compliant practices spread across the industry, these opportunistic organizations pushed privatization and marketization from below. The case of China’s Education Industry laid out in The Fruits of Opportunism illustrates that while opportunism leaves destruction in its wake, it can also drive the formation and evolution of a market. Professor Le Lin’s research centers on organizations, political economy, economic sociology and social stratification, especially where these areas intersect with education and healthcare in China, the U.S. and in a transnational context. His most recent book The Fruits of Opportunism: Noncompliance and the Evolution of China’s Supplemental Education Industry, was published by the University of Chicago Press won the Honorable Mention of the Asia/Transnational Book Award, American Sociological Association (ASA) in 2023. His articles and research have also appeared in journals such as Socio-Economic Review, Higher Education and Global Perspectives, and has won awards from the American Sociological Association and the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics. Gene-George Earle is currently a PhD candidate in Anthropology at East China Normal University in Shanghai. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Nguzunguzu is the traditional figurehead which was formerly affixed to canoes in the Solomon Islands. In this episode, Julie Yu-Wen Chen talks to Rodolfo Maggio, a senior researcher at the University of Helsinki about his book project on the dragon and the nguzunguzu, namely the relationship between China and the Soloman Islands. The dragon and the nguzunguzu are taken as symbols of, respectively, Chinese and Solomon Islands identity. This essentializing maneuver is complicated by the appreciation of the two faces of both the dragon and the nguzunguzu. Nguzunguzu are traditionally used to adorn canoes: they can be either belligerent or peaceful, depending on the relationship between those who paddle and those who see them coming. Similarly, in Chinese folklore, dragons can bring prosperity or destruction, depending on their relationships with the humans who encounter them. Nguzunguzu and dragons are thus similar as symbols of supernatural forces whose potential can concretize as either propitious or nefarious, depending on their relationships with humans. Maggio encountered a dragon-nguzunguzu hybrid during his fieldwork in 2024. As explicitly phrased by the carver, the hybrid represents his attempt to localize China. This inspires Maggio’s book project, encouraging him to use this hybrid figure as an entry point to offer a grassroot perspective on the interactions between Chinese and Solomon Islanders. Rodolfo Maggio is a social anthropologist of moral and economic values in the Asia-Pacific region. At the University of Helsinki, he is working on an ERC-funded project “properties of units and standards”. Previously, Maggio had an episode on Kiribati in the Chinese Pacific and an episode on Sino-Pacific Relations with Nordic Asia Podcast that might interest listeners. Julie Yu-Wen Chen is Professor of Chinese Studies at the Department of Cultures at the University of Helsinki (Finland) and visiting professor at the Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia at Mahidol University (Thailand). Since 2023, she has been involved in the EUVIP: The EU in the Volatile Indo-Pacific Region, a project funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe coordination and support action 10107906 (HORIZON-WIDERA-2021-ACCESS-03). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Women, Agency, and the State in Guinea: Silent Politics (Routledge, 2020) examines how women in Guinea articulate themselves politically within and outside institutional politics. It documents the everyday practices that local female actors adopt to deal with the continuous economic, political, and social insecurities that emerge in times of political transformations. Carole Ammann argues that women's political articulations in Muslim Guinea do not primarily take place within women's associations or institutional politics such as political parties; but instead women's silent forms of politics manifest in their daily agency, that is, when they make a living, study, marry, meet friends, raise their children, and do household chores. The book also analyses the relationship between the female population and the local authorities, and discusses when and why women's claim making enjoys legitimacy in the eyes of other men and women, as well as representatives of 'traditional' authorities and the local government. Paying particular attention to intersectional perspectives, this book will be of interest to scholars of African studies, social anthropology, political anthropology, the anthropology of gender, urban anthropology, gender studies, and Islamic studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Each year, thousands of youth endure harrowing unaccompanied and undocumented migrations across Central America and Mexico to the United States in pursuit of a better future. Drawing on the firsthand narratives of migrant youth in Los Angeles, California to produce Sin Padres, Ni Papeles: Unaccompanied Migrant Youth Coming of Age in the United States (University of California Press, 2024), Dr. Stephanie L. Canizales shows that while a lucky few do find reprieve, many are met by resource-impoverished relatives who are unable to support them, exploitative jobs that are no match for the high cost of living, and individualistic social norms that render them independent and alone. Sin Padres, Ni Papeles illuminates how unaccompanied teens who grow up as undocumented low-wage workers navigate unthinkable material and emotional hardship, find the agency and hope that is required to survive, and discover what it means to be successful during the transition to adulthood in the United States. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses 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 this podcast, Ashis Roy (Psychoanalyst (IPA) and author of the recently published book Intimacy in Alienation: A Psychoanalytic Study of Hindu-Muslim Relationships ( Yoda Press, 2024) is in conversation with Dhwani Shah, MD. Shah is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst currently practicing in Princeton, NJ. He is a clinical associate faculty member in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and a Supervising Analyst and instructor at the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia. Together they engage with Late Sudhir Kakar´s last book the Indian Jungle: Psychoanalysis and Non-Western Civilizations (Karnac, 2024). Shah reflects on Kakar´s contributions to psychoanalysis and on some of the pillars in Kakar´s writing. About the Indian Jungle For more than a century, the cultural imagination of psychoanalysis has been assumed and largely continues to be assumed as Western. Although the terroirs of psychoanalysis in South America, France, Italy, England, the United States, and so on have important differences, they all share a strong family resemblance which distinguishes them clearly from the cultural imaginations of Indian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and other non-Western terroirs. Fundamental ideas about human relationships, family, marriage, and gender often remain unexamined and pervade the analytic space as if they are universally valid. Thus, ideas that are historically and culturally only true of and limited to modern Western, specifically European and North American middle-class experience, have been incorporated unquestioningly into psychoanalytic thought. In the intellectual climate of our times, with the rise of relativism in the human sciences and politically with the advent of decolonization, the cultural and historical transcendence of psychoanalytic thought can no longer be taken for granted. Insights from clinical work embedded in the cultural imaginations of non-Western civilizations could help psychoanalysis rethink some of its theories of the human psyche, extending these to cover a fuller range of human experience. These cultural imaginations are an invaluable resource for the move away from a universal psychoanalysis to a more global one that remains aware of but is not limited by its origins in the modern West. This book of essays aims to be a step in that journey, of altering the self-perception of psychoanalysis from ‘one size fits all’ into a more nuanced enterprise that reflects and is enriched by cultural particularities. The perfect book for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, cultural psychologists, anthropologists, students of South Asian, cultural, and post-colonial studies, and anyone interested in the current and possible future shape of psychoanalytic thought. 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, companies have felt the pressure to be transparent about their environmental impact. Large documents containing summaries of yearly emissions rates, carbon output, and utilized resources are shared on companies’ social media pages, websites, and employee briefings in a bid for public confidence in corporate responsibility. And yet, Matthew Archer argues, these metrics are often just hollow symbols. Unsustainable: Measurement, Reporting, and the Limits of Corporate Sustainability (New York University Press, 2024) contends with the world of big banks and multinational corporations, where sustainability begins and ends with measuring and reporting. Drawing on five years of research among sustainability professionals in the US and Europe, Unsustainable shows how this depoliticizing tendency to frame sustainability as a technical issue enhances and obscures corporate power while doing little, if anything, to address the root causes of the climate crisis and issues of social inequality. Through this obsession with metrics and indicators, the adage that you can’t manage what you can’t measure transforms into a belief that once you’ve measured social and environmental impacts, the market will simply manage them for you. The book draws on diverse sources of evidence―ethnographic fieldwork among a wide array of sustainability professionals, interviews with private bankers, and apocalyptic science fiction―and features analyses of name-brand companies including Volkswagen, Unilever, and Nestlé. Making the case for the limits of measuring and reporting, Archer seeks to mobilize alternative approaches. Through an intersectional lens incorporating Black and Indigenous theories of knowledge, power and value, he offers a vision of sustainability that aims to be more effective and more socially and ecologically just. Robin Steiner is an economic anthropologist based in Miami, FL. His published work explores economic development, labor, and citizenship in Oman and the Arab Gulf. He teaches in the Department of Global and Sociocultural Studies at Florida International University. Robin can 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

What is the right way to live? This is an old question in Western moral philosophy, but in recent years anthropologists have turned their attention to this question in what has been called, a “moral turn”. In this original ethnographic study, Pursuing Morality: Buddhism and Everyday Ethics in Southeastern Myanmar (NUS Press, 2024), Justine Chambers examines the Plong (Pwo) Karen people’s conception of themselves as a moral people. In the decade between Myanmar’s opening up in 2011 and the military coup in 2021, the Plong Karen community near the Myanmar-Thailand border has experienced rapid political, economic, and social change. These changes are challenging that conception. Based on extensive fieldwork Chambers examines the sources of Plong morality, particularly Theravada Buddhism, and how moral considerations are being impacted: by increasing access to higher education; the powerful economic draw of Thailand; young women questioning older gender roles; the rise of Buddhist millenarian movements and Buddhist nationalism; and growing anti-Muslim sentiment shared by much of Myanmar’s Buddhist population. Justine Chambers is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS) in Copenhagen, Denmark. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

White Supremacy and Racism in Progressive America: Race, Place, and Space (Policy Press, 2024) examines the connections between race, place, and space, and sheds light on how they contribute and maintain racial hierarchies. Dr. Miguel Montalva Barba focuses on the White residents of Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, which, according to the Cooks Political Report Partisan Voting Index, is the most liberal district in the state and 15th in the United States of America. The book uses settler colonialism and critical race theory to explore how self-identified progressive White residents perceive their gentrifying neighborhood and how they make sense of their positionality. Using the extended case method, as well as in-depth interviews, participant observation, content analysis and visual/media analysis, the author reveals how systemic racialized inequality persists even in a politically progressive borough. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses 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

Across the world, algorithms are changing the nature of work. Nowhere is this clearer than in the logistics and distribution sectors, where workers are instructed, tracked and monitored by increasingly dystopian management technologies. In Cyberboss: The Rise of Algorithmic Management and the New Struggle for Control at Work (Verso, 2024), Craig Gent takes us into workplaces where algorithms rule to excavate the politics behind the newest form of managerial power. Combining worker testimony and original research on companies such as Amazon, Uber, and Deliveroo, the cutting edge of algorithmic management technology, this book reveals the sometimes unexpected effects these new techniques have on work, workers and managers. Gent advances an alternative politics of resistance in the face of digital control. Louisa Hann attained a PhD in English and American studies from the University of Manchester in 2021, specialising in the political economy of HIV/AIDS theatres. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Tracing women’s experiences of miscarriage and termination for foetal anomaly in the second trimester, before legal viability, shows how such events are positioned as less ‘real’ or significant when the foetal being does not, or will not, survive. Invisible Labour: The Reproductive Politics of Second Trimester Pregnancy Loss in England (Berghahn, 2024) by Dr. Aimee Louise Middlemiss describes the reproductive politics of this category of pregnancy loss in England. It shows how second trimester pregnancy loss produces specific medical and social experiences, revealing an underlying teleological ontology of pregnancy. Some women then understand their pregnancy through kinship with the unborn baby. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses 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

Do newborns think-do they know that 'three' is greater than 'two'? Do they prefer 'right' to 'wrong'? What about emotions--do newborns recognize happiness or anger? If they do, then how are our inborn thoughts and feelings encoded in our bodies? Could they persist after we die? Going all the way back to ancient Greece, human nature and the mind-body link are the topics of age-old scholarly debates. But laypeople also have strong opinions about such matters. Most people believe, for example, that newborn babies don't know the difference between right and wrong-such knowledge, they insist, can only be learned. For emotions, they presume the opposite-that our capacity to feel fear, for example, is both inborn and embodied. These beliefs are stories we tell ourselves about what we know and who we are. They reflect and influence our understanding of ourselves and others and they guide every aspect of our lives. In a twist that could have come out of a Greek tragedy, Berent proposes that our errors are our fate. These mistakes emanate from the very principles that make our minds tick: our blindness to human nature is rooted in human nature itself. An intellectual journey that draws on philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, cognitive science, and Berent's own cutting-edge research, The Blind Storyteller: How We Reason about Human Nature (Oxford UP, 2020) grapples with a host of provocative questions, from why we are so infatuated with our brains to what happens when we die. The end result is a startling new perspective on our humanity. You can find Dr. Berent on Twitter at @berent_iris. Joseph Fridman is a researcher, science communicator, media producer, and educational organizer. He lives in Boston with two ragdoll kittens and a climate scientist.You can follow him on Twitter @joseph_fridman, or reach him at his website, https://www.josephfridman.com/. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Losing a pet has always been a unique kind of pain. No set rituals exist to help provide closure when pets die, there are no readily shared passages from spiritual texts, no community of compassion to surround the mourner and help alleviate grief. And there is a sense of taboo, that it is somehow socially incorrect to mourn an animal as one would a person and feel the pain so intensely. Faithful Unto Death: Pet Cemeteries, Animal Graves, and Eternal Devotion (Thames & Hudson, 2024) by Dr. Paul Koudounaris confronts this taboo by telling the stories of people who have memorialised their beloved animals. The book addresses the moral and spiritual prejudices that have historically surrounded animals, and reveals how, in the face of these prejudices, a movement started in the nineteenth century to treat pets with dignity even in death. It is a fight that is still far from over, but the triumphs that are revealed as the book unfolds, found in burial grounds small to grand and on monuments humble to huge, possess the power to touch everyone who has ever cared for an animal companion. In tracing the historical evolution of pet cemeteries through the stories of the people and pets that have been integral to their development, this book reveals both similarities in the way we mourn animal companions and a stunning cultural diversity. From humble Cherry in London to pets of the rich and powerful, this is a history filled with inspiration, wild eccentricity, and eternal love. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses 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

What Work Means: Beyond the Puritan Work Ethic (ILR Press, 2024) goes beyond the stereotypes and captures the diverse ways Americans view work as a part of a good life. Dispelling the notion of Americans as mere workaholics, Claudia Strauss presents a more nuanced perspective. While some live to work, others prefer a diligent 9-to-5 work ethic that is conscientious but preserves time for other interests. Her participants often enjoyed their jobs without making work the focus of their life. These findings challenge laborist views of waged work as central to a good life as well as post-work theories that treat work solely as exploitative and soul-crushing. Drawing upon the evocative stories of unemployed Americans from a wide range of occupations, from day laborers to corporate managers, both immigrant and native-born, Strauss explores how diverse Americans think about the place of work in a good life, gendered meanings of breadwinning, accepting financial support from family, friends, and the state, and what the ever-elusive American dream means to them. By considering how post-Fordist unemployment experiences diverge from joblessness earlier, What Work Means paves the way for a historically and culturally informed discussion of work meanings in a future of teleworking, greater automation, and increasing nonstandard employment. Claudia Strauss is Professor of Anthropology at Pitzer College. She is the author of A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning with Naomi Quinn and co-editor of Human Motives and Cognitive Models. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Is a green future possible? In Petrochemical Planet: Multiscalar Battles of Industrial Transformation (Duke UP, 2023), Alice Mah, a Professor in Urban and Environmental Studies at the University of Glasgow examines the practices of the petrochemical industry, along with the communities living with, and resisting, its impact. Offering ethnographic and theoretical reflections on this often overlooked and hidden part of the oil and plastics production chain, the book offers a new perspective on our present environmental crisis. Diagnosing the acuteness of problems as well as the challenges of solutions, the book is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand our planet and environment. The book is available open access here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

If ideology has never before been so much in evidence as a fact and so little understood as it appears to be today then, Jason Blakely argues in his new book Lost in Ideology: Interpreting Modern Political Life (Agenda Publishing, 2023), this may not be because we are like travellers guided by old maps of the political world but because we make the mistake of thinking that our maps are the worlds in which we live and act politically. When we read them as if they are reality, rather than a representation of it, we get lost. If you like this episode of New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science then you might also be interested in others in the series, including Jason and Mark Bevir talking about their Interpretive Social Science, and James C. Scott, who passed away shortly before this episode was recorded, discussing his Against the Grain. Jason recommends Charles Taylor’s sequel to The Language Animal, Cosmic Connections, and Jon Fosse’s novelistic exploration of the human condition, Septology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Mainstream portrayals of ultra-Orthodox religious women often frame their faith as oppressive: they are empowered only when they leave their community. For Women and Girls Only: Reshaping Jewish Orthodoxy Through the Arts in the Digital Age (NYU Press, 2024), by Jessica Roda, flips this notion on its head. Drawing on six years of fieldwork between New York and Montreal, Roda examines modern performances on the stage and screen directed by and for ultra-Orthodox women. Their incredibly vibrant Jewish artistic scenes defy stereotypes that paint these women as repressed, reclusive to their shtetl (village), and devoid of creativity and agency. For Women and Girls Only argues that access to technology has completely transformed how ultra-Orthodox women express their way of being religious and that the digital era has enabled them to create an alternative entertainment market outside of the public, male-dominated one. Because expectations surrounding modesty, ultra-Orthodox women do not sing, dance, or act in front of men and the public. Yet, in a revolutionary move, they are creating “women and girls only” spaces onsite and online, putting the onus on men to shield themselves from the content. They develop modest public spaces on the Internet, about which male religious leaders are often unaware. The book also explores the entanglement between these observant female artists and those who left religion and became public performers. The author shows that the arts expressed by all these women offer a means of not only social but also economic empowerment in their respective worlds. Interviewee: Jessica Roda is Assistant Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Host: 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). 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

This episode is the first of two episodes this season on Muslims in China. Here Claudia Radiven and Chella Ward talk to Darren Blyer about his book Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City (Duke UP, 2022). Darren is a sociocultural anthropologist at Simon Fraser University, whose book explores how islamophobia and capitalism contribute to the violence against Uyghur Muslims in East Turkestan. Our conversation spans the history of China, the question of global Islamophobia and the importance of friendship. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Paradoxes of Migration in Tajikistan: Locating the Good Life (UCL Press, 2024) by Dr. Elena Borisova is the first ethnographic monograph on migration in Tajikistan, one of the most remittance-dependent countries in the world. Moving beyond economistic push-pull narratives about post-Soviet migration, it foregrounds the experiences of those who ‘stay put’ in the sending society and struggle to reproduce their moral communities. Dr. Borisova examines the role of mobility in historical and cultural ideas about the good life and how it becomes entwined with people’s efforts to become good, moral and modern subjects. Addressing the complex relationship between the economic, imaginative and moral aspects of (im)mobility, she shows that mass migration from Tajikistan is as much a project of navigating ethical personhood as it is a quest for economic resources. This book reveals how transnational regimes and structures of mobility, citizenship and histories map out in the intimate spheres of the body, the person and the family. It is a contribution to contemporary migration research, which is mostly centred on Europe and North America, and to the field of Central Asian studies. It will be of interest to researchers of migration, (im)mobility and citizenship, and to scholars of all disciplines working on Central Asia. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses 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

Roots of Power: The Political Ecology of Boundary Plants (Routledge, 2023) tells five stories of plants, people, property, politics, peace, and protection in tropical societies. In Cameroon, French Polynesia, Papua New Guinea, St. Vincent, and Tanzania, dracaena and cordyline plants are simultaneously property rights institutions, markers of social organization, and expressions of life-force and vitality. In addition to their localized roles in forming landscapes and societies, these plants mark multiple boundaries and demonstrate deep historical connections across much of the planet’s tropics. These plants’ deep roots in society and culture have made them the routes through which postcolonial agrarian societies have negotiated both social and cultural continuity and change. This book is a multi-sited ethnographic political ecology of ethnobotanical institutions. It uses five parallel case studies to investigate the central phenomenon of "boundary plants" and establish the linkages among the case studies via both ancient and relatively recent demographic transformations such as the Bantu expansion across tropical Africa, the Austronesian expansion into the Pacific, and the colonial system of plantation slavery in the Black Atlantic. Each case study is a social-ecological system with distinctive characteristics stemming from the ways that power is organized by kinship and gender, social ranking, or racialized capitalism. This book contributes to the literature on property rights institutions and land management by arguing that tropical boundary plants’ social entanglements and cultural legitimacy make them effective foundations for development policy. Formal recognition of these institutions could reduce contradiction, conflict, and ambiguity between resource managers and states in postcolonial societies and contribute to sustainable livelihoods and landscapes. This book will appeal to scholars and students of environmental anthropology, political ecology, ethnobotany, landscape studies, colonial history, and development studies, and readers will benefit from its demonstration of the comparative method. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Liberal democracy is in crisis around the world, unable to address pressing problems such as climate change. There is, however, another path—cooperation democracy. From consumer co-ops to credit unions, worker cooperatives to insurance mutuals, nonprofits to mutual aid, countless examples prove that people working together can extend the ideals of participatory democracy and sustainability into every aspect of their lives. These forms of cooperation do not depend on electoral politics. Instead, they harness the longstanding practices and values of cooperatives: self-determination, democratic participation, equity, solidarity, and respect for the environment. Bernard E. Harcourt develops a transformative theory and practice that builds on worldwide models of successful cooperation. He identifies the most promising forms of cooperative initiatives and then distills their lessons into an integrated framework: Coöperism. This is a political theory grounded on recognition of our interdependence. It is an economic theory that can ensure equitable distribution of wealth. Finally, it is a social theory that replaces the punishment paradigm with a cooperation paradigm. A creative work of normative critical theory, Cooperation: A Political, Economic, and Social Theory (Columbia UP, 2023) provides a positive vision for addressing our most urgent challenges today. Harcourt shows that by drawing on the core values of cooperation and the power of people working together, a new world of cooperation democracy is within our grasp. Bernard E. Harcourt is the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law and professor of political science at Columbia University and a chaired professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. An editor of Michel Foucault’s work in French and English, Harcourt is the author of several books, including Critique and Praxis (Columbia, 2020). He is a social-justice litigator and the recipient of the 2019 Norman Redlich Capital Defense Distinguished Service Award from the New York City Bar Association for his longtime representation of death row prisoners. 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. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Playwright Naomi Westerman was an anthropology graduate student studying death rituals around the world when her whole family died, turning the end of lives from an academic pursuit into something deeply personal. She became fascinated by the concept of loss and grief, the multiple ways we experience it across cultures, history, and art. Happy Death Club: Essays on Death, Grief, and Bereavement Across Cultures (404 Inklings, 2024) is part memoir, part meditation on the many faces of death – from sprinkling ashes across the globe, to the power of horror movies, the complexities of engaging in true crime entertainment, and the vital communities of peer support groups – Happy Death Club is a frank, curious and darkly humorous look at one person’s journey through grief, and what lies beyond. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses 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

How did ordinary Iraqis survive the occupation of their communities by the Islamic State? How did they decide whether to stay or flee, to cooperate or resist? Based on an original survey from Baghdad alongside key interviews in the field Surviving the Islamic State: Contention, Cooperation, and Neutrality in Wartime Iraq (Columbia University Press, 2024) offers an insightful account of how Iraqis in different areas of the country responded to the rise and fall of the Islamic State. Dr. Austin J. Knuppe argues that people adopt survival repertoires—a variety of social practices, tools, organized routines, symbols, and rhetorical strategies—to navigate wartime violence and detect threats. He traces how repertoires varied among different communities over the course of the conflict. In areas insulated from insurgent control, such as cosmopolitan Baghdad, local residents had the flexibility to support coalition forces while also voicing opposition to government policies. For Iraqis in rural communities confronting insurgent control, collaboration and resistance entailed significant risks. In Sunni-majority communities in the western desert, passive acquiescence and active cooperation temporarily insulated Iraqis from insurgent victimization. For ethnic and religious minorities in the north, however, flight or resistance proved the only viable options. In many communities, local residents mobilized neighborhood self-defense groups and militias loosely aligned with coalition forces once the tides turned against the Islamic State. Beyond contributing to academic and policy debates about civilian protection during wartime, Surviving the Islamic State foregrounds everyday people’s experiences while modeling an ethical approach for conducting field research in conflict-affected communities. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses 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

Anxiety may have been abounding in the old Cold War West that progress - whether political or economic - has been reversed, but for citizens of former-socialist countries, murky temporal trajectories are nothing new. Grounded in the multiethnic frontier town of Hunchun at the triple border of China, Russia, and North Korea, Ed Pulford traces how several of global history’s most ambitiously totalizing progressive endeavors have ended in cataclysmic collapse here. From the Japanese empire which banished Qing, Tsarist, and Choson dynastic histories from the region, through Chinese, Soviet, and Korean socialisms, these borderlands have seen projections and disintegrations of forward-oriented ideas accumulate on a grand scale. Taking an archaeological approach to notions of historical progress, the book’s three parts follow an innovative structure moving backwards through linear time. Part I explores “post-historical” Hunchun’s diverse sociopolitics since high socialism’s demise. Part II covers the socialist era, discussing cross-border temporal synchrony between China, Russia, and North Korea. Finally, Part III treats the period preceding socialist revolutions, revealing how the collapse of Qing, Tsarist, and Choson dynasties marked a compound “end of history” which opened the area to projections of modernity and progress. Examining a borderland across linguistic, cultural, and historical lenses, Past Progress: Time and Politics at the Borders of China, Russia, and Korea (Stanford UP, 2024) is a simultaneously local and transregional analysis of time, borders, and the state before, during, and since socialism. Ed Pulford is Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester. His research and teaching focus on anthropological and historical approaches to Eurasian borderlands, Sino-Russian relations, the past and present of socialism, and comparative experiences of socialism and empire. He has lived and worked in China, Russia, Japan, and Korea. Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of state, the anthropology of time, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Violent Affections: Queer Sexuality, Techniques of Power, and Law in Russia (UCL Press, 2022) by Alexander Sasha Kondakov uncovers techniques of power that work to translate emotions into violence against queer people. Based on analysis of over 300 criminal cases of anti-queer violence in Russia before and after the introduction of ‘gay propaganda’ law, the book shows how violent acts are framed in emotional language by perpetrators during their criminal trials. It then utilises an original methodology of studying ‘legal memes’ and argues that these individual affective states are directly connected to the political violence aimed at queer lives more generally. The main aim of Violent Affections is to explore the social mechanisms and techniques that impact anti-queer violence evidenced in the reviewed cases. Kondakov expands upon two sets of interdisciplinary literature – queer theory and affect theory – in order to conceptualise what is referred to as neo-disciplinary power. Taking the empirical observations from Russia as a starting point, he develops an original explanation of how contemporary power relations are changing from those of late modernity as envisioned by Foucault’s Panopticon to neo-disciplinary power relations of a much more fragmented, fluid and unstructured kind – the Memeticon. The book traces how exactly affections circulate from body to body as a kind of virus and eventually invade the body that responds with violence. In this analytic effort, it draws on the arguments from memetics – the theory of how pieces of information pass on from one body to another as they thrive to survive by continuing to resonate. This work makes the argument truly interdisciplinary. This book is available open access here. Alexander Sasha Kondakov is an assistant professor at the School of Sociology, University College Dublin, Ireland. Tatiana Klepikova is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Regensburg, where she leads a research group on queer literatures and cultures under socialism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Tazin Abdullah speaks with Dr Ibrar Bhatt about heritage literacies, particularly as they are practiced by Chinese Muslims. Bhatt is the author of A Semiotics of Muslimness in China (Cambridge UP, 2023). About the book: A Semiotics of Muslimness in China examines the semiotics of Sino-Muslim heritage literacy in a way that integrates its Perso-Arabic textual qualities with broader cultural semiotic forms. Using data from images of the linguistic landscape of Sino-Muslim life alongside interviews with Sino-Muslims about their heritage, the author examines how signs of 'Muslimness' are displayed and manipulated in both covert and overt means in different contexts. In so doing the author offers a 'semiotics of Muslimness' in China and considers how forms of language and materiality have the power to inspire meanings and identifications for Sino-Muslims and understanding of their heritage literacy. The author employs theoretical tools from linguistic anthropology and an understanding of semiotic assemblage to demonstrate how signifiers of Chinese Muslimness are invoked to substantiate heritage and Sino-Muslim identity constructions even when its expression must be covert, liminal, and unconventional. For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

What do universal rights to public goods like education mean when codified as individual, private choices? Is the “problem” of school choice actually not about better choices for all but, rather, about the competition and exclusion that choice engenders—guaranteeing a system of winners and losers? Unsettling Choice: Race, Rights, and the Partitioning of Public Education (U Minnesota Press, 2024) addresses such questions through a compelling ethnography that illuminates how one path of neoliberal restructuring in the United States emerged in tandem with, and in response to, the Civil Rights movement. Drawing on ethnographic research in one New York City school district, Unsettling Choice traces the contestations that surfaced when, in the wake of the 2007–2009 Great Recession, public schools navigated austerity by expanding choice-based programs. Ujju Aggarwal argues that this strategy, positioned as “saving public schools,” mobilized mechanisms rooted in market logics to recruit families with economic capital on their side, thereby solidifying a public sphere that increasingly resembled the private—where contingency was anticipated and rights for some were marked by intensified precarity for poor and working-class Black and Latinx families. As Unsettling Choice shows, these struggles over public schools—one of the last remaining universal public goods in the United States—were entrapped within neoliberal regimes that exceeded privatization and ensured exclusion even as they were couched in language of equity, diversity, care, and rights. And yet this richly detailed and engaging book also tracks an architecture of expansive rights, care, and belonging built among poor and working-class parents at a Head Start center, whose critique of choice helps us understand how we might struggle for—and reimagine—justice, and a public that remains to be won. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

For some four hundred years, Hindus and Christians have been engaged in a public controversy about conversion and missionary proselytization, especially in India and the Hindu diaspora. Hindu Mission, Christian Mission: Soundings in Comparative Theology (SUNY Press, 2024) reframes this controversy by shifting attention from "conversion" to a wider, interreligious study of "mission" as a category of thought and practice. Comparative theologian Reid B. Locklin traces the emergence of the nondualist Hindu teaching of Advaita Vedānta as a missionary tradition, from the eighth century to the present day, and draws this tradition into dialogue with contemporary proposals in Christian missiology. As a descriptive study of the Chinmaya Mission, the Ramakrishna Mission, and other leading Advaita mission movements, Hindu Mission, Christian Mission contributes to a growing body of scholarship on transnational Hinduism. As a speculative work of Christian comparative theology, it develops key themes from this engagement for a new, interreligious theology of mission and conversion for the twenty-first century and beyond. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

The 'baby boom' generation, born between the 1940s and the 1960s, is often credited with pioneering new and creative ways of relating, doing intimacy and making families. With this cohort now entering mid and later life in Britain, they are also said to be revolutionising the experience of ageing. Are the romantic practices of this 'revolutionary cohort' breaking with tradition and allowing new ways of understanding and doing ageing and relating to emerge? Based on an innovative combination of sensory ethnography in salsa classes and life history interviews, Ageing and New Intimacies: Gender, Sexuality and Temporality in an English Salsa Scene (Manchester UP, 2024) by Dr. Sarah Milton documents the meanings of desire and romance, and 'new' - or renewed - intimacies, among women in mid and later life. Beginning with women at a transition point, when newly single or newly dating in midlife, the chapters look back over life histories to examine prior relationship experiences at different life stages, and look forward to hopes for future intimacies. In the navigation of romance and new relationships we see the sensory, sensual and affective nature of heteronormativity, and gendered practices that are informed by memories of the past, the imagination of previous generations and class-based desires. Challenging conventional notions of the baby boomers, this book illuminates the intersections of age, class, and white normativity, making important contributions to our understanding of ageing and generation, intimacy and gender. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses 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

Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel talks with Paula Bialski, an Associate Professor for Digital Sociology at the University of St. Gallen in St. Gallen, Switzerland, about her recent book, Middle Tech: Software Work and the Culture of Good Enough (Princeton UP, 2024). The pair talk about the art of ethnographic study of software work, and how, maybe, our world could do with a healthy dose of good enough-ness. They also scheme about some potential collaborations here on Peoples & Things, which you should definitely keep an eye out for. (You should also check out Paula’s folk pop group, Paula & Karol, whose music was greatly enjoyed while working on this episode.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Imagine that you volunteer for the clinical trial of an experimental drug. The only direct benefit of participating is that you will receive up to $5,175. You must spend twenty nights literally locked in a research facility. You will be told what to eat, when to eat, and when to sleep. You will share a bedroom with several strangers. Who are you, and why would you choose to take part in this kind of study? This book explores the hidden world of pharmaceutical testing on healthy volunteers. Drawing on two years of fieldwork in clinics across the country and 268 interviews with participants and staff, it illustrates how decisions to take part in such studies are often influenced by poverty and lack of employment opportunities. It shows that healthy participants are typically recruited from African American and Latino/a communities, and that they are often serial participants, who obtain a significant portion of their income from these trials. This book reveals not only how social inequality fundamentally shapes these drug trials, but it also depicts the important validity concerns inherent in this mode of testing new pharmaceuticals. These highly controlled studies bear little resemblance to real-world conditions, and everyone involved is incentivized to game the system, ultimately making new drugs appear safer than they really are. Adverse Events: Race, Inequality, and the Testing of New Pharmaceuticals (New York University Press) provides an unprecedented view of the intersection of racial inequalities with pharmaceutical testing, signaling the dangers of this research enterprise to both social justice and public health. Jill A. Fisher is Associate Professor of Social Medicine and Bioethics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

In Dance Music Spaces: Clubs, Clubbers, and DJs Navigating Authenticity, Branding, and Commercialism (Lexington Books, 2022), Danielle Antoinette Hidalgo examines the production of physical and digital spaces in dance music, and how the players—clubs, clubbers, and DJs—use authenticity, branding, and commercialism to navigate them. An in-depth study into three women DJs—The Blessed Madonna, Honey Dijon, and Peggy Gou—reveals a new concept, “authenticity maneuvering.” In it Danielle Hidalgo exposes how the strategic use of a rave ethos both bolsters acceptance in dance music spaces and hides often problematic commercial practices. This timely, thoughtful, and deeply personal book presents a compelling analysis of the complicated interplay between dancing bodies, digital practices, and spatial offerings in contemporary dance music. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a 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 Books, 2022). His general area of study is in the areas of social construction of experience, identity, and place. He is currently conducting research for his next project that looks at nightlife and the emotional labor that is performed by employees of bars and nightclubs. 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

Israeli universities have long enjoyed a reputation as liberal bastions of freedom and democracy. Drawing on extensive research and making Hebrew sources accessible to the international community, Maya Wind shatters this myth by documenting how Israeli universities are directly complicit in the violation of Palestinian rights. In Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom (Verso, 2024) shows, Wind argues that Israeli universities serve as pillars of Israel's system of oppression against Palestinians. Academic disciplines, degree programs, campus infrastructure, and research laboratories all service Israeli occupation and apartheid, while universities violate the rights of Palestinians to education, stifle critical scholarship, and violently repress student dissent. Towers of Ivory and Steel is a powerful exposé of Israeli academia’s ongoing and active complicity in Israel’s settler-colonial project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology