New Books In Anthropology

Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics, and Publics of the Late Capitalist City (Cornell UP, 2023) illuminates how corruption is fundamental to global storytelling about how states and elites abuse entrusted power in late capitalism. The millennial city of the global South is a charged setting for allegations of corruption, with skyscrapers, land grabs, and slum evictions invoking outrage at deepening economic polarization. Drawing on ethnography in Bengaluru and Mumbai and a cross-section of literary and cinematic stories from cities around the world, Malini Ranganathan, David L. Pike, and Sapana Doshi pay close attention to the racial, caste, class, and gender locations of the narrators, spaces, and publics imagined to be harmed by corruption. Corruption Plots demonstrates how corruption talk is leveraged to make sense of unequal spatial change and used opportunistically by those who are themselves implicated in wrongdoing. Offering a wide-ranging analysis of urban worlds, the authors reveal the ethical, spatial

We live in times where theory is often understood as irrelevant in the real world. It appears to have no practical results. This has been further complicated in a post-fact world, where our ‘identities’ and ‘perception’ have become the final judges of truth. Sociology/social anthropology, in contrast, rests on a fundamental distinction between commonsense and theoretically informed knowledge. It teaches us to get rid of ‘perceptions’ and alerts us to go beyond taken-for-granted ideas. The paradox is that although theory is taught as a mandatory paper in sociology, it is either reduced to a topic in the syllabi or used as ceremonial citations. Emphasizing that theories emerge in specific historical contexts and are embedded in economic, political, social, cultural, institutional and intellectual processes, this edited volume Doing Theory: Locations, Hierarchies and Disjunctions (Orient Blackswan, 2018) by Maitrayee Chaudhuri and Manish Thakur takes a new approach by highlighting the sociological paths through

Objects generate time; time does not generate or change objects. That is the central thesis of this book by the philosopher Graham Harman and the archaeologist Christopher Witmore, who defend radical positions in their respective fields. Against a current and pervasive conviction that reality consists of an unceasing flux - a view associated in philosophy with New Materialism - object-oriented ontology asserts that objects of all varieties are the bedrock of reality from which time emerges. And against the narrative convictions of time as the course of historical events, the objects and encounters associated with archaeology push back against the very temporal delimitations which defined the field and its objects ever since its professionalization in the nineteenth century. In a study ranging from the ruins of ancient Corinth, Mycenae, and Troy to debates over time from Aristotle and al-Ash'ari through Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead, the authors draw on alternative conceptions of time as retroactive

On any given day, the remains of countless deceased migrants are shipped around the world to be buried in ancestral soils. Others are laid to rest in countries of settlement, sometimes in cemeteries established for religious and ethnic minorities, where available. For immigrants and their descendants, perennial questions about the meaning of home and homeland take on a particular gravitas in death. When the boundaries of a nation and its members are contested, burial decisions are political acts. Building on multi-sited fieldwork in Berlin and Istanbul—where the author worked as an undertaker—Dying Abroad: The Political Afterlives of Migration in Europe (Cambridge UP, 2023) offers a moving and powerful account of migrants' end-of-life dilemmas, vividly illustrating how they are connected to ongoing political struggles over the stakes of citizenship, belonging, and collective identity in contemporary Europe. Osman Balkan is Associate Director of the Huntsman Program in International Studies and Business at the

Critical Brass: Street Carnival and Musical Activism in Olympic Rio de Janeiro (Wesleyan University Press, 2022) tells the story of neofanfarrismo, an explosive carnival brass band community turned activist musical movement in Rio de Janeiro, as Brazil shifted from a country on the rise in the 2000s to one beset by various crises in the 2010s. Though predominantly middle-class, neofanfarristas have creatively adapted the critical theories of carnival to militate for a more democratic city. Illuminating the tangible obstacles to musical movement building, Andrew Snyder argues that festive activism with privileged origins can promote real alternatives to the neoliberal city, but meets many limits and contradictions in a society marked by diverse inequalities. Dr. Andrew Snyder is a Research Fellow in the Institute of Ethnomusicology at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa [New University] of Lisbon] in Portugal. Building on the recently published book that is the subject of this interview, Critical Brass: Street Car

Where would we be without the knee? This down-to-earth joint connecting the thigh and the lower leg doesn’t receive the attention it deserves. Yet, as The Curious Human Knee (Columbia UP, 2023) reveals, it is crucial to countless facets of science, medicine, culture, and history—and even what makes us human. The science writer Han Yu provides an informative, surprising, and entertaining exploration of the human knee across time and place. She begins with our earliest ancestors, emphasizing that walking upright separates us from the apes and bipedal knees appeared long before big brains and sophisticated tools. Yu considers the intricate anatomy of the knee, its evolutionary history, and the complexity of treating knee pain, including her own. She examines why women’s knees might be more prone to damage than men’s and addresses the roles of race and class in ailments such as osteoarthritis. This book gets knee-deep into an astonishing range of topics—fashion from flappers to miniskirts and ripped jeans, cultur

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

Who is responsible for ensuring access to clean potable water? In an urbanizing planet beset by climate change, cities are facing increasingly arid conditions and a precarious water future. In Well Connected: Everyday Water Practices in Cairo (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023), anthropologist Tessa Farmer details how one community in Cairo, Egypt, has worked collaboratively to adapt the many systems required to facilitate clean water in their homes and neighborhoods. As a community that was originally not included in Cairo's municipal systems, the residents of Ezbet Khairallah built their own potable water and wastewater infrastructure. But when the city initiated a piped sewage removal system, local residents soon found themselves with little to no power over their own water supply or wastewater removal. Throughout this transition, residents worked together to collect water at the right times to drink, bathe, do laundry, cook, and clean homes. These everyday practices had deep implications for the health of community

Ben Hoffler is the co-founder of several hiking trails in the Middle East, including the Sinai Trail, the Red Sea Mountain Trail, the Wadi Rum Trail, and the Bedouin Trail, which aim to boost and promote sustainable tourism and help conserve the endangered heritage of the Bedouin tribes who historically live in these regions and manage the trails today. In this episode, we discuss tourism as heritage preservation, overcoming negative stereotypes of regions like the Sinai, and how historically-nomadic communities like the Bedouin can benefit from tourism initiatives. Maggie Freeman is a PhD student in the School of Architecture at MIT. She researches uses of architecture by nomadic peoples and historical interactions of nomads and empires, with a focus on the modern Middle East. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

For people who are living with disability, including various forms of chronic diseases and chronic pain, daily tasks like lifting a glass of water or taking off clothes can be difficult if not impossible. In Activist Affordances: How Disabled People Improvise More Habitable Worlds (Duke UP, 2023), Arseli Dokumacı draws on ethnographic work with differently disabled people whose ingenuity, labor, and artfulness allow them to achieve these seemingly simple tasks. Dokumacı shows how they use improvisation to imagine and bring into being more habitable worlds through the smallest of actions and the most fleeting of movements---what she calls “activist affordances.” Even as an environment shrinks to a set of constraints rather than opportunities, the improvisatory space of performance opens up to allow disabled people to imagine that same environment otherwise. Dokumacı shows how disabled people’s activist affordances present the potential for a more liveable and accessible world for all of us. Dr. Arseli Dokumaci

When children are born with disabilities or become disabled in childhood, parents often experience bewilderment: they find themselves unexpectedly in another world, without a roadmap, without community, and without narratives to make sense of their experiences. Amanda Apgar's book The Disabled Child: Memoirs of a Normal Future (U Michigan Press, 2023) tracks the narratives that have emerged from the community of parent-memoirists who, since the 1980s, have written in resistance of their children's exclusion from culture. Though the disabilities represented in the genre are diverse, the memoirs share a number of remarkable similarities; they are generally written by white, heterosexual, middle or upper-middle class, ablebodied parents, and they depict narratives in which the disabled child overcomes barriers to a normal childhood and adulthood. Apgar demonstrates that in the process of telling these stories, which recuperate their children as productive members of society, parental memoirists write their child

Poor Black women who benefit from social welfare are marginalized in a number of ways by interlocking systemic racism, sexism, and classism. The media renders them invisible or casts them as racialized and undeserving "welfare queens" who exploit social safety nets. Even when Black women voters are celebrated, the voices of the poorest too often go unheard. How do Afro-descendant women in former slave-holding societies survive amid multifaceted oppression?  In The Politics of Survival: Black Women Social Welfare Beneficiaries in Brazil and the United States (Columbia University Press, 2023), Gladys L. Mitchell-Walthour offers a comparative analysis of how Black women social welfare beneficiaries in Brazil and the United States defy systems of domination. She argues that poor Black women act as political subjects in the struggle to survive, to provide food for their children and themselves, and challenge daily discrimination even in dire circumstances. Mitchell-Walthour examines the effects of social welfare p

In Health in Ruins: The Capitalist Destruction of Medical Care at a Colombian Maternity Hospital (Duke UP, 2022), César Ernesto Abadía-Barrero chronicles the story of El Materno—Colombia’s oldest maternity and neonatal health center and teaching hospital—over several decades as it faced constant threats of government shutdown. Using team-based and collaborative ethnography to analyze the social life of neoliberal health policy, Abadía-Barrero details the everyday dynamics around teaching, learning, and working in health care before, during, and after privatization. He argues that health care privatization is not only about defunding public hospitals; it also ruins rich traditions of medical care by denying or destroying ways of practicing medicine that challenge Western medicine. Despite radical cuts in funding and a corrupt and malfunctioning privatized system, El Materno’s professors, staff, and students continued to find ways to provide innovative, high-quality, and noncommodified health care. By tracking

The Sistema de Alerta Sísmica Mexicano is the world’s oldest public earthquake early warning system. Given the unpredictability of earthquakes, the technology was designed to give the people of Mexico City more than a minute to prepare before the next big quake hits. How does this kind of environmental monitoring technology get built in the first place? How does its life-saving promise align with reality? And who shapes modern risk mitigation?  In ¡Alerta!: Engineering on Shaky Ground (MIT Press, 2023), Elizabeth Reddy surveys this innovation to shed light on what it means to imagine a world where sirens could sound out an ¡alerta sísmica! at any moment—and what it would be like to live in such a world. Proponents of earthquake early warnings have long held that the technology can save lives and limit economic losses. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and archival data, Reddy conducts a thorough, qualitative analysis of these claims and considers the requirements and uses of the alert system. She embeds her s

If you’ve visited Thailand even for a short time you’ve probably been given, or have come across, some basic instructions on dos and don’ts — where to put, or not to put, your hands and feet, what to wear or not to wear to a temple, why not to get angry in public, that sort of thing. Perhaps you’ve wondered about the pedagogies that give these social practices their durability. And whether you’ve been to the country or not you might have seen news reports showing prime ministers and army generals prostrate in front of members of the royal family, and have wondered how almost a century after the demise of the absolute monarchy deference to sovereign power is so resolutely performed. If so, then you’ve come to the right podcast! On this episode of New Books in Southeast Asian Studies one of the channel hosts, Patrick Jory, sits on the interviewee’s side of the microphone to talk about his A History of Manners and Civility in Thailand (Cambridge University Press, 2021). In a wide-ranging discussion Patrick outli

In Friendship (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023), renowned anthropologist Michael Jackson draws on philosophy, biography, ethnography, and literature to explore the meanings and affordances of friendship—a relationship just as significant as, yet somehow different from, kinship and love. Beginning with Aristotle’s accounts of friendship as a political virtue and Montaigne’s famous essay on friendship as a form of love, Jackson examines the tension between the political and personal resonances of friendship in the philosophy of Hannah Arendt, the biography of the Indian historian Brijen Gupta, and the oral narratives of a Kuranko storyteller, Keti Ferenke Koroma. He offers reflections on childhood friends, imaginary friends, lifelong friendships, and friendships with animals.  He ruminates particularly on the complications of friendship in the context of anthropological fieldwork, exploring the contradiction between the egalitarian spirit of friendship on the one hand and, on the other, the power imbalan

The Women’s Mosque of America (WMA), a multiracial, women-only mosque in Los Angeles, is the first of its kind in the United States. Since 2015, the WMA has provided a space for Muslim women to build inclusive communities committed to gender and social justice, challenging the dominant mosque culture that has historically marginalized them through inadequate prayer spaces, exclusion from leadership, and limited access to religious learning. In The Women’s Mosque of America: Authority and Community in US Islam (NYU Press, 2022), Tazeen M. Ali explores this congregation, focusing on how members contest established patriarchal norms while simultaneously contending with domestic and global Islamophobia that renders their communities vulnerable to violence. Drawing on textual analysis of WMA sermons and ethnographic interviews with community members, and utilizing Black feminist and womanist frameworks, Ali investigates how American Muslim women create and authorize new conceptions of Islamic authority. Whereas th

The monumental sense of dislocation we experience after losing a loved one can be life-altering. There is no script for grieving–each individual passes through their own phases of mourning. In Don't Be Sad When I'm Gone': A Memoir of Loss and Healing in Buenos Aires (Toplight Books, 2020), psychologist Beatriz Dujovne documents how she grieved the loss of her husband and sought therapy during an extended stay in her hometown of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Recounting her healing process day-to-day, from shock through recovery, this book traces her navigation of the uncertainty and devastation that often engulfs those who have suffered profound loss. A profound read! Lexa Rosean is a licensed psychoanalyst with private practice in New York City. I am a graduate of New York Graduate School of Psychoanalysis (NYGSP) and Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies (CMPS). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.f

Cat Button and Gerald Taylor Aiken's Over Researched Places: Towards a Critical and Reflexive Approach (Routledge, 2022) explores the implications that research-density has on the people and places researched, on the researchers, on the data collected and knowledge produced, and on the theories that are developed. It examines the effects that research-density has on the people and places researched, on the researchers, on the data collected and knowledge produced, and on the theories that are developed. By weaving together experiences from a variety of countries and across disciplinary boundaries and research methods, the volume outlines the roots of over-research, where it comes from and what can be done about it. The book will be useful for social science students and researchers working in ethnographic disciplines such as Human Geography, Anthropology, Urban Planning, and Sociology and seeking to navigate the tricky 'absent present' of already existing research on their fields of exploration. Learn more ab

Sheila Liming talks about the party, social gatherings that occasion joy and dread and various emotions in between. The party is both a pause and an acceleration in the life-work continuum, it can deaden political motivation and engender fresh politics. We discuss the horrible parties in The Office and the wonderful parties in Small Axe, among other things. Sheila Liming is Associate Professor at Champlain College in Burlington, VT, where she teaches classes in American literature, writing, and media. She is the author, most recently, of Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time (Melville House, 2023), and also of the books Office (Bloomsbury, 2020) and What a Library Means to a Woman (Minnesota UP, 2020). Her writing has appeared in publications like the The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, Lapham's Quarterly, LitHub, The Globe and Mail, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.  Image: © 2023 Saronik Bosu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show b