New Books in Anthropology

While Hollywood’s images present a veneer of fantasy for some, the work to create such images is far from escapism. In Manufacturing Celebrity: Latino Paparazzi and Women Reporters in Hollywood (Duke University Press, 2020), anthropologist Vanessa Díaz examines the raced and gendered hierarchies and inequalities that are imbricated within the work of producing celebrity in Los Angeles, CA. Díaz’s...

Bettina Ng’weno is Professor of African American and African Studies at the University of California, DavisNairobi, known as the Green City in the Sun, has taken shape through anti-urban ideologies that insist that the city cannot be home for most residents. Based on decades of experience in rapidly changing Nairobi, No Place Like Home in a New City: Anti-Urbanism and Life in Nairobi (U of Califo...

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Dr Alexandra Grey speaks with Dr Zozan Balci about Zozan’s new book, Erased Voices and Unspoken Heritage: Language, Identity and Belonging in the Lives of Cultural In-betweeners, published in 2025 by Routledge.. The conversation focuses on a study of adults with three languages ‘at play’ in their childhoods and lives today, exploring how visible...

The soundscape of prison life is that of constant clangs, bangs and jangles. What is the significance of this cacophonous din to those who live and work with it? Sound, Order and Survival in Prison: The Rhythms and Routines of HMP Midtown (Bristol UP, 2024) tells the story of a year spent with a UK prison community, bringing its social world vividly to life for the first time through aural ethnogr...

In his book, Money, Value, and the State: Sovereignty and Citizenship in East Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2024), Kevin Donovan argues that East African decolonization was not coterminous with political sovereignty but rather consisted of a longer process of reorganizing how value was legitimately defined, produced, and distributed. It is an analysis of how postcolonial states tried to rema...

On the podcast today I am joined by Kirin Narayan, emerita professor at the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University. Kirin is joining me to talk about her new book, Cave of my Ancestors: Vishwakarma and the Artisans of Ellora published by Chicago University Press in 2024, and in 2025 as an Indian edition by HarperCollins India. As a young girl in Bombay, Kirin Narayan...

From its crude and uneasy beginnings thirty years ago, Chinese sperm banking has become a routine part of China’s pervasive and restrictive reproductive complex. Today, there are sperm banks in each of China’s twenty-two provinces, the biggest of which screen some three thousand to four thousand potential donors each year. Given the estimated one to two million azoospermic men--those who are unabl...

“Age, Creativity and Culture: Reconsidering how the Phases of Life Influence Knowledge, Experience, and Creation” by Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera appeared in Nuevos Horizontes in 2024. The article examines age as a dimension of identity, creativity and cognition, and in this episode, Heidi Landecker, Samuel Jay Keyser, and Jenny Wilson consider the importance of age in intergenerational relationships. Thi...

A richly imagined new view on the great human tradition of apocalypse, from the rise of Homo sapiens to the climate instability of our present, that defies conventional wisdom and long-held stories about our deep past to reveal how cataclysmic events are not irrevocable endings, but transformations. A drought lasts for decades, a disease rips through a city, a civilization collapses. When we final...

In 2016, Anand Pandian was alarmed by Donald Trump's harsh attacks on immigrants to the United States, the appeal of that politics of anger and fear. In the years that followed, he crisscrossed the country—from Fargo, North Dakota to Denton, Texas, from southern California to upstate New York—seeking out fellow Americans with markedly different social and political commitments, trying to understan...

The Genocide in Rwanda in Comparative Perspective: Death and Survival on the Lake Kivu Shore (Routledge, 2025) combines social science concepts, history and transitional justice studies to examine the social dynamics, specific actors and ideologies involved in the genocide in Rwanda and examines what makes this genocide a unique case of mass violence and political transition compared with other ca...

Gardens are often spaces of hope, expected to solve many problems in a city including food insecurity and climate resilience. In fact, there has been a historical trend of urban gardening gaining popularity during times of crisis. Gardens of Hope is the story of urban gardening in New Orleans in the decade after Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita. Yuki Kato highlights the impact urban gardens ha...

What happens when precarious urban cultural laborers take data collection, laws, and policymaking into their own hands? Buskers have been part of our cities for hundreds of years, but they remain invisible to governments and in datasets. From nuisance to public art, this cultural practice can help us understand the politics of data collection, archives, regulatory frameworks, and urban planning. B...

Although Portland, Oregon, is sometimes called “America’s Whitest city,” Black residents who grew up there made it their own. The neighborhoods of Northeast Portland, also called “Albina,” were a haven for and a hub of Black community life. But between 1990 and 2010, Albina changed dramatically—it became majority White. In We Belong Here, sociologist Dr. Shani Adia Evans offers an intimate look at...

Magdalena Maria Turek is an independent research scholar. She received her PhD from Humboldt University, Germany, and was a Research Fellow with the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Program in Buddhist Studies at the American Council of Learned Societies, USA. Her research examines how contemporary reiterations of Tibetan Buddhist orthopraxy, local narratives, and religious historiography shape B...

Ungendering Menstruation by Ela Przybyło discusses why and how menstrual pain needs to be incorporated into discussions of gender, embodiment, and disability. Honing a "cranky" approach to being a menstruating body expected to accept and embrace trauma, Ungendering Menstruation examines menstrual suppression, toxicity, and the cooptation of menstrual positivity rhetoric. Drawing on their own exper...

In Voyagers: The Settlement of the Pacific (Apollo, 2020), the distinguished anthropologist Nicholas Thomas tells the story of the peopling of the Pacific. In clear, accessible language Thomas shows us that most Pacific Islanders are in fact 'inter-islanders', or people defined by their movement across the ocean and between islands, rather than 'trapped' in islands in a far sea. Thomas also descri...

After the outbreak of the 2011 Syrian War, a number Syrian-Armenians who had lived in the territory for generations, fled to the Republic of Armenia. This book traces the experiences of Syrian-Armenian women as they navigated their changing and gendered identities from their adopted 'homeland' to their socially constructed new 'ancestral' home in Armenia. The rich ethnographic research conducted o...

Through deep attention to sense and feeling, Go with God grapples with the centrality of Evangelical faith in Rio de Janeiro's subúrbios, the city's expansive and sprawling peripheral communities. Based on sensory ethnographic fieldwork and attuned to religious desire and manipulation, this book shows how Evangelical belief has changed the way people understand their lives in relation to Brazil's...

Decolonizing Ukraine, by Dr. Greta Lynn Uehling, illuminates the untold stories of Russia's occupation of Crimea from 2014 to the present, revealing the traumas of colonization, foreign occupation, and population displacement. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork in Ukraine, including over 90 personal interviews, Dr. Uehling brings her readers into the lives of people who opposed Russia's Crimean oper...

Two juxtaposed years frame the subject matter of Moving Memory: Remembering Palestine in Postdictatorship Chile. In one, 1973, General Augusto Pinochet’s troops stormed Chile’s presidential palace. In the other, 1948, Zionist militias expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homeland. That 1973 should move memories in Chile is obvious. That 1948 does is because Chile is home to th...

Even casual observers of the military will notice the unique ways that service members use language. With all of the acronyms and jargon, some even argue that membership in the military requires learning a whole language. But rather than treat military-specific language as a cultural difference of the institution or a technical requirement for the job, Dr. Janet McIntosh examines how military lang...

In the face of accelerating climate change, anticapitalist environmental justice activists and elite tech corporations increasingly see eye to eye. Both envision solar-powered futures where renewable energy redresses gentrification, systemic racism, and underemployment. However, as Myles Lennon argues in Subjects of the Sun: Solar Energy in the Shadows of Racial Capitalism (Duke University Pres...

In the sprawling city of São Paulo, a weekly practice known as devotion to souls (devoção às almas) draws devotees to Catholic churches, cemeteries, and other sites associated with tragic or unjust deaths. The living pray and light candles for the souls of the dead, remembering events and circumstances in a rite of collective suffering. Yet contemporary devotion to souls is not confined to Catholi...

Pakistani women are increasingly pursuing legal avenues against acts of domestic violence. Their claims, however, are often dismissed through character allegations that label them as 'bad' women in need of control, or 'mad' women not to be trusted. Domestic Violence in Pakistan: The Legal Construction of 'Bad' and 'Mad' Women (Oxford University Press, 2025) by Dr. Daanika Kamal explores why the su...