New Books in Anthropology

In mid-March, Europeans observed the Dutch national elections with intense interest. Onlookers believed that a victory of the Party for Freedom led by Geert Wilders will influence the results of coming elections in France, the UK, and Germany. It was thought that it would impact these countries immigration policies, and shape their attitudes to their Muslim population. The media coverage stressed...

Doing Reflexivity: An Introduction (Policy Press, 2017) by Jon Dean, a senior lecturer in politics and sociology at Sheffield Hallam University, explores and explains reflexivity as one of the essential concepts in modern social research. The book draws on the work of Pierre Bourdieu as its starting point, but broadens out the definition of reflexivity to include a range of critical perspectives,...

Cultivating Community: Interest, Identity, and Ambiguity in an Indian Social Mobilization by Michael Youngblood, a cultural anthropologist based in San Francisco, was published in November, 2016 by the South Asian Studies Association Press. The book is a winner of the Joseph W. Elder Book Prize (conferred by the American Institute of Indian Studies), and has been very well received by reviewers. C...

Now and then we feature a book on New Books in Southeast Asian Studies whose author we ought to have had on the show some time ago. The Perfect Business? Anti-Trafficking and the Sex Trade Along the Mekong (University of Hawaii Press, 2012) is one such book. Sverre Molland wrote his tandem ethnography of traffickers and anti-traffickers while researching on the border of Thailand and Laos in the 2...

The history of humanity is intertwined with that of the horse to such a degree that it is no exaggeration to say that the existence of either species as we know it today is a product of its relationship with the other. In The Age of the Horse: An Equine Journey Through Human History (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2017), Susanna Forrest looks at the various roles horses have played in the development of...

Michael Muhammed Knight writes this book from a first-person perspective, as a piece of creative non-fiction. The book includes a liberal amount of swearing and sexual references, and Knight’s writing style is raw, sometimes jarring, but smart and sophisticated. Indeed by pushing boundaries, it offers the reader an experience and angle that many authors prefer to avoid. Tripping with Allah: Islam,...

Jessie Daniels and Arlene Stein have written Going Public: A Guide for Social Scientists (University of Chicago Press, 2017). How can political scientists and other social scientists speak beyond campus walls? Through blogs, social media, and podcasts, scholars are finding new avenues for intellectual expression. In Going Public, Daniels and Stein offer careful advice for how to use these avenues...

If you’ve been hospitalized in Europe, North America, Australia or the Middle East in recent years, chances are that at some point a nurse from the Philippines has had some part in your treatment. As Megha Amrith writes in the introduction to Caring for Strangers: Filipino Medical Workers in Asia (NIAS Press, 2017), Filipinos today comprise one of the largest global diasporas of medical workers, w...

Making Gullah: A History of Sapelo Islanders, Race, and the American Imagination (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) is a wide-ranging history that upends a long tradition of scrutinizing the Low Country blacks of Sapelo Island by outsiders. The book promotes a refocusing, and the observational lens is instead focused on those white and black scholars who the Gullah of Sapelo Island during...

Jeanette Jouili‘s fascinating new book Pious Practice and Secular Constraints: Women in the Islamic Revival in Europe (Stanford University Press, 2015) navigates practices and challenges of living pious ethical lives in inhospitable conditions. Through a finely textured analysis of quotidian practices of piety among conservative Muslim women in France and Germany, this book offers a nuanced and an...

Sophia Roosth‘s wonderful new book follows researchers clustered around MIT beginning in 2003 who named themselves synthetic biologists. A historically informed anthropological analysis based on many years of ethnographic work, Synthetic: How Life Got Made (University of Chicago Press, 2017) offers a fascinating account of the changing relationship between making and understanding in the life scie...

What kind of object is a planet? Lisa Messeri‘s new book asks and addressed this question in a fascinating ethnography that explores how scientific practices transform planets into places and helps us understand why that matters not just for how we understand outer space, but also for how we understand the Earth and ourselves. Based on 15 months of participant observation in 2009 and 2010 that inc...

How do you make taxpayers comply? Lotta Bjorklund Larsen‘s ethnography, Shaping Taxpayers: Values in Action at the Swedish Tax Agency (Berghahn Books, 2017) offers a vivid, yet nuanced account of knowledge making at one of Sweden’s most esteemed bureaucracies: the Swedish Tax Agency. In its aim to collect taxes and minimize tax faults, the Agency mediates the application of tax law to ensure compl...

This episode of New Books in Jewish Studies features Maya Barzilai, Assistant Professor of Hebrew Literature and Jewish Culture at the University of Michigan and the author of Golem: Modern Wars and Their Monsters (New York University Press, 2016). This timely book traces the evolution of the golem, a clay monster animated by a rabbi to serve and protect his community, from its presence in literat...

In her book, Into the Heart of Tasmania: A Search For Human Antiquity (Melbourne University Press, 2017), Rebe Taylor, the Coral Thomas Fellow at the State Library of New South Wales, explores the life of Ernest Westlake, whose fascination with remnants and antiquity led him in the early 20th century to Tasmania, the southernmost Australian state, where he collected over 13,000 Aboriginal stone to...

Carrie Jenkins‘ new book is a model for what public philosophy can be. Beautifully written, thoughtful, and compellingly and carefully argued, What Love Is: And What it Could Be (Basic Books, 2017) invites us to think openly and critically about romantic love: what it is, what it could be, and why it is crucial for us to ask these questions and come to our own answers. Engaging the work of bell ho...

In recent years, several scholars of religion have moved away from the examination of discursive textual domains or the meaning of ritual practices towards analyzing the material worlds in which these practices and beliefs exists. S. Brent Plate, Visiting Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Hamilton College, has been one of the forerunners of this turn and provides an accessible staring po...

Alcoholism is a strange thing. That it exists, no one seriously doubts. But it’s not entirely clear (diagnostically speaking) what it is, who has it, how they get it, or how to treat it. The answers to these questions depend, apparently, on where you are, which is to say what culture you were born and raise in. Alcoholism and treatments for it in Country A might be very different from alcoholism a...

“Hookup” has become a buzzword, a misleading concept for students, parents and educators alike–one that confuses more than explains the nuances of this complex and pervasive trend. In American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus (W. W. Norton, 2017), Lisa Wade analyzes its cultural roots: the evolution of courtship, our unrealized feminist revolution, America’s new business model of higher ed...

Humans engage in a wide variety of collective behaviors, ranging from simple customs like wearing a heavy coat in winter to more complex group actions, as when an audience gives applause at the close of a musical performance. Some of these collective behaviors are cases of imitation, of doing what others do. In other cases, the behavior is driven by individuals’ expectations about what certain peo...

One of the most interesting, but largely overlooked silent films, is Haxan, written and directed by Benjamin Christensen. Using documentary methods as well as reenactments, he presented a study of witchcraft hysteria, particularly as it compared to post-World War I scientific and psychological studies. In their book, Realizing the Witch: Science, Cinema, and the Mastery of the Invisible (Fordham U...

In his new book Drawn to See: Drawing as an Ethnographic Method (University of Toronto Press, 2016) Andrew Causey argues that social science practitioners can cultivate new ways of experiencing the world through drawing. He has developed thirty-nine “etudes,” drawing exercises that challenge the reader to become a more rigorous observer and to transform their relationship with both visual media an...

Jewish Magic Before the Rise of Kabbalah (Wayne State University Press, 2017) opens new vistas not only on the history of the practice of magic throughout Jewish history, but on the variety and syncretistic depth of such practices. Its author is Yuval Harari, professor in the Department of Jewish Thought and head of the Program of Folklore Studies at Ben Gurion University. Professor Harari’s work...

In The Socialist Way of Life in Siberia: Transformation in Buryatia (Central European University Press, 2014), Melissa Chakars reveals not only how Soviet policies disrupted traditional Buryat ways of life, but also how Buryats adapted to build a modern educated society in the post-war period. Ethnic Buryats were proportionally over-represented in cultural, educational and media positions in the r...

A heritage food in France, and a high-priced obscurity in the United States. But in both countries, foie gras, the specially fattened liver of a duck or goose, has the power to stir a remarkable array of emotions and produce heated debates. Comparing the French and American producers and consumers of this controversial food item, Contested Tastes: Foie Gras and the Politics of Food (Princeton Univ...