New Books In Anthropology

In Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique (Stanford University Press, 2020) anthropologist and activist Sa’ed Atshan explores the Palestinian LGBTQ movement and offers a window into the diverse community living both in historic Palestine and in diaspora. His timely and urgent account contends that the movement has been subjected to an “empire of critique,” which has inhibited its growth and undermines the fight against homophobia in the region and beyond. On the one hand, explains Atshan, queer Palestinians must contend with the harsh realities of patriarchal nationalism, homophobia and heteronormativity, Israeli occupation, dehumanizing discourses such as ‘pinkwashing,’ and the legacies of western imperialism. At the same time, Atshan argues that critiques against such issues – leveled by academics, journalists, and even queer activists – have contributed to a stifling ideological purism that has put activists on the defensive and alienates some queer Palestinians. Along with a succinct presentation of t

Castoffs of Capital: Work and Love among Garment Workers in Bangladesh (U Minnesota Press, 2022) examines how female garment workers experience their work and personal lives within the stranglehold of global capital. Drawing on fieldwork in Bangladesh, anthropologist Lamia Karim focuses attention onto the lives of older women aged out of factory work, heretofore largely ignored, thereby introducing a new dimension to the understanding of a female-headed workforce that today numbers around four million in Bangladesh. Bringing a feminist labor studies lens, Castoffs of Capital foregrounds these women not only as workers but as mothers, wives, sisters, lovers, friends, and political agents. Focusing on relations among work, gender, and global capital's targeting of poor women to advance its market penetration, Karim shows how women navigate these spaces by adopting new subject formations. She locates these women's aspirations for the "good life" not only in material comforts but also in their longings for love a

For centuries, people who died destitute or alone were buried in potters’ fields—a Dickensian end that even the most hard-pressed families tried to avoid. Today, more and more relatives are abandoning their dead, leaving it to local governments to dispose of the bodies. Up to 150,000 Americans now go unclaimed each year. Who are they? Why are they being forgotten? And what is the meaning of life if your death doesn’t matter to others. The Unclaimed: Abandonment and Hope in the City of Angels (Crown, 2024) is an extraordinary work of narrative nonfiction that took Pamela J. Prickett and Stefan Timmermans eight years in the making to uncover this hidden social world. They follow four individuals in Los Angeles, tracing the twisting, poignant paths that put each at risk of going unclaimed, and introducing us to the scene investigators, notification officers, and crematorium workers who care for them when no one else will. The Unclaimed lays bare the difficult truth that anyone can be abandoned. It forces us to c

An Introduction to Language and Social Justice: What Is, What Has Been, and What Could Be (Routledge, 2023) is designed to provide the who, what, where, when, why, and how of the intersections of language, inequality, and social justice in North America, using the applied linguistic anthropology (ALA) framework. Written in accessible language and at a level equally legible for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, this text connects theory and practice by sketching out relevant historical background, introducing theoretical and conceptual underpinnings, illustrating with case studies, discussing a wide range of key issues, and explaining research methodologies.  Using a general-to-specialized content structure, the expert authors then show readers how to apply these principles and lessons in communities in the real world, to become advocates and change agents in the realm of language and social justice. With an array of useful pedagogical resources and practical tools including discussion questions an

An anthropologist walks into a grocery store—no that’s not the start of a joke, that’s the true story of how Cathy Stanton came to be involved with Quabbin Harvest, a food co-op in the former mill town of Orange, Massachusetts.  Part memoir and part history, Stanton’s new book Food Margins: Lessons from an Unlikely Grocer (University of Massachusetts Press, 2024) traces the struggles of one small store in one small town and uncovers the long arc of the modern industrial food system coming into being. In that system, corporate giants offer the kind of abundance, affordability, and convenience that make it all but impossible for small-scale ventures to survive, as Stanton discovered when she joined local efforts to save the nascent food co-op. Drawing on her own deep knowledge of how the plantation, the factory, and the supermarket are politically, ecologically, and economically entangled, she comes to a new understanding of why it’s so hard to effect real change in how we get our food. On the margins of the do

Lahore's Hall Road is the largest electronics market in Pakistan. Once the center of film and media piracy in South Asia, it now specializes in smartphones and accessories. For Hall Road's traders, conflicts between the economic promises and the moral dangers of film loom large. To reconcile their secular trade with their responsibilities as devoted Muslims, they often look to adjudicate the good or bad moral "atmosphere" (mahaul) that can cling to film and media. In Moral Atmospheres: Islam and Media in a Pakistani Marketplace (Columbia UP, 2024),Timothy P. A. Cooper examines the diverse and coexisting moral atmospheres that surround media in Pakistan, tracing public understandings of ethical life and showing how they influence economic behavior. Drawing on extensive ethnographic work among traders, consumers, collectors, archivists, cinephiles, and cinephobes, Moral Atmospheres explores varied views on what the relationship between film and faith should look, sound, and feel like for Pakistan's Muslim-major

The low-wage service industry is one of the fastest-growing employment sectors in the US economy. Its workers disproportionately tend to be low-income and minority women. Service sector work entails rigid forms of temporal discipline manifested in work requirements for flexible, last-minute, and round-the-clock availability, as well as limited to no eligibility for sick and parental leaves, all of which impact workers’ ability to care for themselves and their dependents. Pregnant at Work: Low-Wage Workers, Power, and Temporal Injustice (NYU Press, 2024) examines the experiences of pregnant service sector workers in New York City as they try to navigate the time conflicts between precarious low-wage service labor and safety net prenatal care. Through interviews and fieldwork in a prenatal clinic of a public hospital, Elise Andaya vividly describes workers’ struggles to maintain expected tempos of labor as their pregnancies progress as well as their efforts to schedule and attend prenatal care, where waiting is

Indonesia is the world's second largest cigarette market: two out of three men smoke, and clove-laced tobacco cigarettes called kretek make up 95 percent of the market. To account for the staggering success of this lethal industry, Kretek Capitalism: Making, Marketing, and Consuming Clove Cigarettes in Indonesia (University of California Press, 2024) moves beyond a focus on the addictive hold of nicotine to examine how kretek manufacturers have adopted global tobacco technologies and enlisted Indonesians to labor on their behalf in fields and factories, at retail outlets and social gatherings, and online. The book charts how Sampoerna, a Philip Morris International subsidiary, uses contracts, competitions, and gender, class, and age hierarchies to extract overtime, shift, seasonal, gig, and unpaid labor from workers, influencers, artists, students, retailers, and consumers. Critically engaging nationalist claims about the commodity's cultural heritage and the jobs it supports, Marina Welker shows how global c

In 1974 the government of Jordan established a new ministry to oversee a nationwide scheme to buy and distribute subsidized flour and regulate bakeries. The scheme sets terms for the politics that are the subject of a new book: States of Subsistence: The Politics of Bread in Contemporary Jordan (Stanford University Press, 2022). Rest assured, this is no dull account of state welfare that posits and tests for a two-dimensional relationship between the delivery of a staple food and public acquiescence to authoritarian rule. Far from it! To explain these politics, José Ciro Martínez goes to work baking, and taking the reader through kitchens, byways and marketplaces. Via descriptions of bakers and regulators, and interviews with consumers and policymakers, he offers a sophisticated account of how the state meets the stomach in Jordan, and how both citizens and bureaucracy are changed through this intra-action. States of Subsistence was the winner of the 2023 Roger Owen Book Award, sponsored by the Middle East St

America's elite law firms, investment banks, and management consulting firms are known for grueling hours, low odds of promotion, and personnel practices that push out any employees who don't advance. While most people who begin their careers in these institutions leave within several years, work there is especially difficult for Black professionals, who exit more quickly and receive far fewer promotions than their White counterparts, hitting a "Black ceiling." Sociologist and law professor Kevin Woodson knows firsthand what life at a top law firm feels like as a Black man. Examining the experiences of more than one hundred Black professionals at prestigious firms, Woodson discovers that their biggest obstacle in the workplace isn't explicit bias but racial discomfort, or the unease Black employees feel in workplaces that are steeped in Whiteness. He identifies two types of racial discomfort: social alienation, the isolation stemming from the cultural exclusion Black professionals experience in White spaces,

Anti-Semitic or philo-Semitic? Backward or modern? Locally rooted or diasporic? “Polishness” is too often flattened to an oversimplified list of either-or propositions. But a critical look at the multiple, contradictory versions of “Polishness” circulating in the modern era helps us to make sense not only of Poland’s past and present, but of a whole host of global problems: from the failures of multiculturalism, to the mutual misunderstandings of different communities claiming the same identity, to the insidious prejudice sometimes lurking within egalitarian projects.  Conceived and curated as a collaborative encounter by anthropologist Agnieszka Pasieka and historian Paweł Rodak, Rethinking Modern Polish Identities: Transnational Encounters (University of Rochester Press, 2023) challenges conventional wisdom and serves up a range of scholarly essays that are sure to change the way that students and scholars alike think about Poland, Eastern Europe, and some of the biggest challenges facing the modern world.

In Haitian Vodou, spirits impact Black practitioners' everyday lives, tightly connecting the sacred and the secular. As Eziaku Atuama Nwokocha reveals in Vodou En Vogue: Fashioning Black Divinities in Haiti and the United States (UNC Press, 2023), that connection is manifest in the dynamic relationship between public religious ceremonies, material aesthetics, bodily adornment, and spirit possession. Nwokocha spent more than a decade observing Vodou ceremonies from Montreal and New York to Miami and Port-au-Prince. She engaged particularly with a Haitian practitioner and former fashion designer, Manbo Maude, who presided over Vodou temples in Mattapan, Massachusetts, and Jacmel, Haiti. With vivid description and nuanced analysis, Nwokocha shows how Manbo Maude's use of dress and her production of ritual garments are key to serving Black gods and illuminate a larger transnational economy of fashion and spiritual exchange. Eziaku Atuama Nwokocha is assistant professor of religion at the University of Miami. Reig

Sreeparna Chattopadhyay's book The Gravity of Hope (Crossed Arrows, 2023) is a non-fictional account of women’s lives who sometimes endured, often resisted and ultimately coped with marital violence as best as they could in an informal settlement in northeastern Mumbai. It uses anthropological methods and two decades of research-driven insights to analyse the role of gender, marriage, structural violence, family, and informal and legal institutions in tackling wife abuse in India. In conclusion, there are many reasons why domestic violence in India continues unabated; the most important is the social norm that views marriage as the primary, and often the only, path to securing women’s financial futures. Rituparna Patgiri 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. Visi

Fiercely intelligent, fantastically transgressive, Working It: Sex Workers on the Work of Sex (PM Press, 2023) is an intimate portrait of the lives of sex workers. A polyphonic story of triumph, survival, and solidarity, this collection showcases the vastly different experiences and interests of those who have traded sex, among them a brothel worker in Australia, First Nation survivors of the Canadian child welfare system, and an Afro Latina single parent raising a radicalized child. Packed with first-person essays, interviews, poetry, drawings, mixed media collage, and photographs Working It honors the complexity of lived experience. Sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes hardboiled, these dazzling pieces will go straight to the heart. Matilda Bickers is an artist and writer originally from Boston’s South End. Her experience in sex work, which she entered at age eighteen, has enabled her to focus on art and activism and the vital intersection of the two. She has performed her written work at the Radar Reading Se

Singular Selves: An Introduction to Singles Studies (Routledge, 2024) edited By Ketaki Chowkhani and Craig Wynne examines, for perhaps the first time, singlehood at the intersections of race, media, language, culture, literature, space, health, and life satisfaction. It adopts an interdisciplinary approach, borrowing from sociology, literary studies, medical humanities, race studies, linguistics, demographic studies, and critical geography to understand singlehood in the world today. This collection of essays aims to establish the discipline of Singles Studies, finding new ways of examining it from various disciplinary and cultural perspectives. It begins with laying the field and then moves on to critically look at how race has shaped the way we understand singlehood in the West and how class, age, gender, privilege, and the media play a role in shaping singlehood. It argues for a need for increased interdisciplinarity within the field, for example, analyzing singlehood from the perspective of medical humani

As developing states adopt neoliberal policies, more and more working-class women find themselves pulled into the public sphere. They are pressed into wage work by a privatizing and unstable job market. Likewise, they are pulled into public roles by gender mainstreaming policies that developing states must sign on to in order to receive transnational aid. Their inclusion into the political economy is very beneficial for society, but is it also beneficial for women?  In The Stigma Matrix: Gender, Globalization, and the Agency of Pakistan's Frontline Women (Stanford UP, 2024), Fauzia Husain draws on the experiences of policewomen, lady health workers, and airline attendants, all frontline workers who help the Pakistani state, and its global allies, address, surveil, and discipline veiled women citizens. These women, she finds, confront a stigma matrix: a complex of local and global, historic, and contemporary factors that work together to complicate women's integration into public life. The experiences of the t

Capitalism is not only an economic system but also a system of production and allocation of hope. In Egypt, a generation of young men desire fulfilling employment, meaningful relationships, and secure family life, yet find few paths to achieve this.  In The Labor of Hope:: Meritocracy and Precarity in Egypt (Stanford UP, 2023), Harry Pettit follows these educated but underemployed men as they struggle to establish careers and build satisfying lives. In so doing, this book reveals the lived contradiction at the heart of capitalist systems - the expansive dreams they encourage and the precarious lives they produce. Pettit considers the various ways individuals cultivate distraction and hope for future mobility: education, migration, consumption, and prayer. These hope-filled practices are a form of emotional labor for young men, placing responsibility on the individual rather than structural issues in Egypt’s economy. Illuminating this emotional labor, Pettit shows how the capitalist economy continues to captur

Over the last two decades in Beirut, graffiti makers have engaged in a fierce “war of colors,” seeking to disrupt and transform the city’s physical and social spaces. In A War of Colors: Graffiti and Street Art in Postwar Beirut (University of Texas Press, 2024), Dr. Nadine Sinno examines how graffiti and street art have been used in postwar Beirut to comment on the rapidly changing social dynamics of the country and region. Analysing how graffiti makers can reclaim and transform cityscapes that were damaged or monopolised by militias during the war, Dr. Sinno explores graffiti’s other roles, including forging civic engagement, commemorating cultural icons, protesting political corruption and environmental violence, and animating resistance. In addition, she argues that graffiti making can offer voices to those who are often marginalised, especially women and LGBTQ people. Copiously illustrated with images of graffiti and street art, A War of Colors is a visually captivating and thought-provoking journey thro

The Indian state of Kerala is one of the largest blocs of migrants in the oil economies of the Arab Gulf.  Looking closely at the cultural archives produced by and on the Gulf migrants in Malayalam -- the predominant language of Kerala -- The Gulf Migrant Archives in Kerala: Reading Borders and Belonging (Oxford UP, 2024) takes stock of circular migration beyond its economics. It combines formal and thematic analyses of photographs, films, and literature with anthropological and historical details to offer a nuanced understanding of the construction of the Gulf and its translation to the cultural imaginary of Kerala. It explores the dissonance between the private and public discourses on the Gulf among migrants and non-migrants, and demonstrates the role of this disjuncture in the continued fascination for Gulf migrant lives. An enquiry into the various dimensions of the Gulf in Kerala, as an acknowledged means of living, as a rumour, an object of gossip, a public secret, or even a private thrill, this book d

What does cow care in India have to offer modern Western discourse animal ethics? Why are cows treated with such reverence in the Indian context? Join us as we speak to Kenneth R. Valpey about his new book Cow Care in Hindu Animal Ethics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Valpey discusses his methodological odyssey looking at ancient Hindu scriptural accounts of cows, to modern Hindu thinkers (Gandhi, Ambedkar) on cow protection, to ethnographic work on individuals engaged in the modern Indian cow protection movement. This book is Open Access, and you can download a free copy here. For information on your host Raj Balkaran’s background, see rajbalkaran.com/scholarship. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology