New Books in Anthropology

We have long lacked a biography of Erving Goffman. Partly this can be explained by Goffman's direction for his papers not to be opened to researchers after his death. This meant those who may wish to write Goffman's biography had a lack of material to draw upon. Dmirti Shalin, author of Erving Manuel Goffman: Biographical Sources of Sociological Imagination (2025, Routledge), has overcome this by developing the Erving Goffman Archives, a collection of correspondence, family histories, syllabi and reminisces which allows for this book to exist as the first true biography of the great scholar. In providing the details of Goffman's life, Shalin has provided new ways of looking at Goffman, showing how factors like his upbringing in a family of Russian Jewish immigrants, his relationship with, and the sad suicide of, his wife, his interactions with colleagues and his everyday interactions shaped his sociology. Along the way we are encouraged to look anew at Goffman's work on topics such as the presentation of self, mental health, gambling and gender. In doing so, we learn much about Goffman not just as a scholar, but as a man. In our conversation we cover the whole of Goffman's life, moving from his youth and onto the significant points in his career and their impact upon his sociology. We also discuss the archive and how it came to be and discuss what Goffman's legacy maybe for the future of democratic politics. Your host, Matt Dawson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow and the author of G.D.H. Cole and British Sociology: A Study in Semi-Alienation (2024, Palgrave Macmillan), along with other texts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

In Decolonizing Ukraine: The Indigenous People of Crimea and Pathways to Freedom (Rowman & Littlefield, 2025), anthropologist 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 operation, many of whom fled for government-controlled Ukraine. Via the narratives of people who traversed perilous geographies and world-altering events, Dr. Uehling traces the development of a new sense of social cohesion that encompasses diverse ethnic and religious groups. The result is a compelling story—one of resilience, transformation, and ultimately, the unwavering pursuit of freedom and autonomy for Ukraine, regardless of ethnicity or race. Decolonizing Ukraine: The Indigenous People of Crimea and Pathways to Freedom demonstrates how understanding Crimea is essential to understanding Ukraine – and the war with Russia – today. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

The Birthplace of Jesus Is in Palestine: A Memoir (Wipf and Stock, 2024) is a narrative of a Christian family in Bethlehem in the West Bank. Based on diary entries and interviews from 2000 to 2023, the Dutch author--an anthropologist and peace activist--chronicles the spontaneous reactions of his Palestinian children and wife navigating the challenges posed by curfews and checkpoints. Problems of Palestinian school life are shown from the perspective of teachers and students. Against the background of Israeli occupation and settlement building, the intricacies of Palestinian culture in its daily rhythms and domestic spaces come to life. Throughout the pages, the key Palestinian concept of sumud, or steadfastness, is explored. The memoir details acts of creative nonviolent resistance, individual protests, affirmations of cultural identity, and inspiring examples of Muslim-Christian community. The book also reveals unexpected connections between Palestinian culture in the Bethlehem area and broader Christian values and traditions. An afterword reflects upon implications of Israel's war in Gaza. Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Blusky and IG: @robbyref Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Camilla Annerfeldt joins to discuss Clothing and Identity in Early Modern Rome (Bloomsbury, 2025). This is the first book-length exploration of the clothes worn in early modern Rome and provides novel insights into the city of Rome during one of its most fascinating periods. It also challenges the notion – well-established in dress historical research on the early modern period – that one was supposed to dress solely according to one's social station; as Camilla Annerfeldt explores in great depth, this notion does not always seem to have been applicable to early modern Rome because of its very constitution. Using a range of primary sources from the Roman archives as well as texts of early modern writers, Clothing and Identity in Early Modern Rome presents a vivid account of the history of an early modern society, which will be helpful to historians of fashion, society, politics, material culture, and art, as well as everyone interested in the period when Rome was one of the dominant centres of Europe – culturally, socially, and politically. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

In Emergent Genders: Living Otherwise in Tokyo's Pink Economies (Duke UP, 2025), Michelle H. S. Ho traces the genders manifesting alongside Japanese popular culture in Akihabara, an area in Tokyo renowned for the fandom and consumption of anime, manga, and games. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in josō and dansō cafe-and-bars, establishments where male-to-female and female-to-male crossdressing is prevalent, Ho shows how their owners, employees, and customers creatively innovate what she calls emergent genders—new practices, categories, and ways of being stemming from the simultaneous fracturing, contestations, and (re)imaginations of older forms of gender and sexual variance in Japan. Such emergent genders initiate new markets for alternative categories of expression and subjectivity to thrive in a popular cultural hub like Akihabara instead of Tokyo's gay and lesbian neighborhood of Shinjuku Ni-chōme. By rethinking identitarian models of gender and sexuality, reconfiguring the significance of capitalism for trans studies and queer theory, and decentering theoretical frameworks incubated in a predominantly United States academic context, Ho offers new ways of examining how trans and gender nonconforming individuals may survive and flourish under capitalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

In Transformismo, M. Myrta Leslie Santana draws on years of embedded research within Cuban trans/queer communities to analyze how transformistas, or drag performers, understand their roles in the social transformation of the island. Once banned and censored in Cuba, transformismo, or drag performance, is now state-sponsored events. Transformismo suggests that these performances are making critical interventions in Cuban trans/queer life and politics and in doing so, the volume offers critical insight into how Cuba's postsocialist reform has exacerbated racial, sexual, and economic inequalities. Leslie Santana argues that mainstream trans/queer nightlife in Cuba is entangled with the island's tourism economy, which has shaped the aesthetics and social makeup of transformismo in coastal Havana, which largely caters to foreigners. Leslie Santana considers how Black lesbian and transgender transformistas are expanding understandings of sexual selfhood and politics on the island, particularly questioning the ways that Black women's creativity is prominently featured in the aesthetics of tourism and trans/queer nightlife, while Black women themselves are denied social and material capital. M. Myrta Leslie Santana is Assistant Professor of Music at the University of California San Diego. Katie Coldiron is the Outreach Program Manager for the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) and PhD student in History at Florida International University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Following a group of US Midwest farmers who purchased tracts of land in the tropical savanna of eastern Brazil, Welcome to Soylandia: Transnational Farmers in the Brazilian Cerrado (Cornell University Press, 2025) by Dr. Andrew Ofstehage investigates industrial farming in the modern developing world. Seeking adventure and profit, the transplanted farmers created what Dr. Ofstehage calls "flexible farms" that have severed connections with the basic units of agriculture: land, plants, and labor. But while the transnational farmers have destroyed these relationships, they cannot simply do as they please. Regardless of their nationality, race, and capital, they must contend with pests, workers, the Brazilian state, and the land itself. Welcome to Soylandia explores the frictions that define the new relationships of flexible farming—a paradigm that Dr. Ofstehage shows is ready to be reproduced elsewhere in Brazil and exported to the rest of the globe, including the United States. Through this compelling ethnography, Dr. Ofstehage takes readers on a tour of Soylandia and the new world of industrial agriculture, globalized markets, international development, and environmental change that it heralds. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

In the past decades, various forms of Buddhism have emerged in-between, above, and beyond conventional conceptions of religious and spiritual life in China. Multiple Liminalities of Lay Buddhism in Contemporary China: Modalities, Material Culture, and Politics (Leiden UP, 2024) is a qualitative study exploring manifestations of the massive revival of Buddhism among non-monastic people and communities. The book wishes to answer the central question: How do Chinese groups and individuals practice Buddhism under the socio-political and cultural circumstances of contemporary China?  This inquiry is based on a sample of case studies from the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (Taiwan, ROC), exploring Buddhist communities, individual practitioners, materials, spaces, practice modalities and relationships. Each chapter examines a significant paradigm that plays a role in the revival of Buddhism in China, highlighting how lay practitioners negotiate their spaces, resources, moral and ethical beliefs, and values, in the face of rapid societal changes. The research reveals how state policies, economic shifts, local trends, and global developments, such as environmental concerns and technological advances impact and transform older Buddhist traditions. Overall, the author argues for the concept of multiple liminalities as a framework to describe the contemporary predicament of lay Buddhism in Chinese societies. Accordingly, lay Buddhist actors occupy liminal positions or operate across ambiguous boundaries where realms of in-betweenness, serve as avenues for religious responses to the complex challenges Buddhism in China faces. Dr. Tiatemsu Longkumer is a faculty in the Dept. of Anthropology at Royal Thimphu College, Bhutan. His academic pursuits center on the fields of Anthropology and the Philosophy of Religion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Moving between shower drains, aqueducts, rain gardens, and even kitchen sinks, Replumbing the City: Water Management as Climate Adaptation in Los Angeles (University of California Press, 2025) traces the enormous urban waterscape of Los Angeles in a state of flux. For more than a century, the city of Los Angeles has relied on faraway water for the vast majority of its municipal supply, but climate change is making these distant sources much less dependable. To adapt, Angelenos—including city engineers, advocates at NGOs, and residents—are developing new water supplies within the space of the city.  Sayd Randle's ethnography examines the labor of replumbing LA's sprawling water system, detailing how a desire to sustain unlimited and uninterrupted water provision for paying customers is reshaping the urban environment and its management. Tracking how such projects redistribute the work of water management, the book explores thorny questions of how the labor of climate adaptation should be mobilized and valued. This episode is hosted by Elena Sobrino. Elena is a lecturer in Anthropology at Tufts University. Her research explores volunteer work, union histories, and environmentalism in the Flint water crisis. She is currently writing about the politics of fatigue and crisis, and teaching classes on science and technology studies, ethnographies of crisis, and global racisms. You can read more about her work at elenasobrino.site. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Forest Lost: Producing Green Capitalism in the Brazilian Amazon (2024) is an ethnography of forest carbon offsets and the wider effort to make the living rainforest valuable in the Brazilian Amazon. Situated in the state of Acre, which continuously had to grapple with a complex positionality between frontier and periphery, Maron E. Greenleaf explores forest carbon offset to understand green capitalism. Commodifying forest carbon offset requires keeping carbon in place through forest protection and valuation, unlike other forest commodities – for example Açaí berries, which also feature in the ethnography – that involve extraction. Initially set out to do a supply chain analysis, Greenleaf instead wrote a well-thought-out account disentangling the relationships at play in a place which at the time was celebrated for being ‘a leader in forest- focused development', through tracing the complexity of the uneven, contingent and contesting cultural, material and multispecies relations involved in making forest carbon valuable. At the same time, she illustrates how forest carbon's commodification turned it into a source of redistributable public environmental wealth and how green capitalism can also reinforce just the marginalization it seeks to combat. By outlining these complex relations and tensions, Greenleaf elucidates broader efforts to create a capitalism suited to the Anthropocene and those efforts' alluring promises and vexing failures. Mentioned in this episode: Anand, Nikhil. Hydraulic City : Water and the Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai. Duke University Press, 2017. Appadurai, Arjun, et al. The Social Life of Things : Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Edited by Arjun Appadurai, Cambridge University Press, 1986. Holston, James. Insurgent Citizenship : Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil. Princeton University Press, 2008. Maron E. Greenleaf is a cultural anthropologist, political ecologist and legal scholar and currently Assistant Professor at the Anthropology Department at Dartmouth. She is interested in how human and more-than-human relationships are shaped through efforts linked to environmental crisis. Her topics of interest include landscapes, green economies, environmental justice and land rights. Olivia Bianchi is a postgraduate student at the University of Oxford, currently finishing the MSc program in Visual, Material and Museum Anthropology. Her interests include anthropological inquiries into materials, especially textiles, as well as the topics of sustainability and waste more generally. 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 growing appeal of fascist idealism for young people? Why is radical nationalism on the rise in Europe and throughout the world? In Living Right: Far Right Youth Activists in Contemporary Europe (Princeton UP, 2024), Dr. Agnieszka Pasieka provides an in-depth account of the ideas and practices that are driving the varied forms of far-right activism by young people from all walks of life, revealing how these social movements offer the promise of comradery, purpose, and a moral calling to self-sacrifice, and demonstrating how far-right ideas are understood and lived in ways that speak to a variety of experiences. Dr. Agnieszka Pasieka draws on her own sometimes harrowing fieldwork among Italian, Polish, and Hungarian militant youths, painting unforgettable portraits of students, laborers, entrepreneurs, musicians, and activists from well-off middle class backgrounds who have all found a nurturing home in the far right. With a focus on far-right morality that challenges commonly held ideas about the right, Dr. Pasieka describes how far-right movements afford opportunities to the young to be active members of tightly bonded comradeships while sharing in a broader project with global ramifications. In this episode we consider: the power of listening, locating and unpacking complexities, navigating field work, and handling difficult situations. Our guest is: Dr. Agnieszka Pasieka, who is a sociocultural anthropologist. Before joining the University of Montreal, she was a senior research fellow at the University of Vienna and held guest lecturer and guest professor positions at various universities: Central European University, University of Bayreuth, Dartmouth College, and Yale University. She is the author of Living right: far-right youth activists in contemporary Europe, published by Princeton University Press in 2024. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who works as a developmental editor for scholars, and is the producer of the Academic Life podcast. Playlist for listeners: Dear Miss Perkins Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism Secret Harvests Teaching About Race and Racism in the College Classroom Immigration Realities The Ungrateful Refugee Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can help support the show by downloading, assigning or sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 250+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Built on the shifting grounds of post-Yugoslav transformation, Staging the Promises examines how the residents of Bor — a Serbian copper-mining town marked by both socialist prosperity and post-socialist decline — became spectators to the staged enactments of promised futures. Deana Jovanović traces how local authorities and the copper-processing company theatrically projected visions of economic, infrastructural, environmental, urban, and post-industrial renewal. The book asks: What impact did the staging of promises have on the residents? What temporal, material, and political effects did these performances generate? How did they shape the citizens' futures and their present? Jovanović offers many ethnographic examples of ambivalence in people's orientation to their futures, while residents balanced hope with despair, disillusionment, and dismay. Staging the Promises highlights how the performances shaped the present, and how, in a Gramscian twist, they sustained hope alongside power dynamics that residents often criticized. Staging the Promises: Everyday Future-Making in a Serbian Industrial Town (Cornell UP, 2025) assesses the performative ways through which contemporary capitalist futures are remade. For Jovanović, Bor represents a site that reflects a current global trend: staging the promises of enhanced futures today play a significant role in contemporary populist politics. Through them, she argues, distant futures become gradually withdrawn from people's horizons. Deana Jovanović is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University. She ethnographically studies how people in late-industrial and post-socialist environments shape futures, interact with pipes and cables, and live with risks and airborne particles. She has published widely on these topics in internationally recognized journals. Yadong Li is a socio-cultural anthropologist-in-training. He is registered as a PhD student at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of economic anthropology, development studies, hope studies, and the anthropology of borders and frontiers. 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

Filming in European Cities: The Labor of Location (Cornell University Press, 2025) explores the effort behind creating screen production locations. Dr. Ipek A. Celik Rappas accounts the rising demand for original and affordable locations for screen projects due to the growth of streaming platforms. As a result, screen professionals are repeatedly tasked with chores such as transforming a former factory in Istanbul to resemble a war zone in Aleppo, or finding a London street that evokes Barcelona. Dr. Celik Rappas highlights the pivotal role crew members play in transforming cities and locations into functional screen settings. Examining five European media capitals—Athens, Belfast, Berlin, Istanbul, and Paris—the book delves into the overlooked aspects of location-related screen labor and its ability to generate production value. Filming in European Cities demonstrates that in its perpetual quest for authentic filming locations, the screen industry extracts value from cities and neighborhoods, their marginalized residents, and screen labor, enriching itself through this triple exploitation. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

The spread of democracy across the Global South has taken many different forms, but certain features are consistent: implementing a system of elections and an overarching mission of serving the will and well-being of a country's citizens. But how do we hold politicians accountable for such a mission? How are we to understand the efficacy of the policies they put forth?  In Indicators of Democracy (Stanford UP, 2024), Diana Graizbord exposes the complex, often-hidden world of the institutions that are meant to ensure democratic accountability and transparency. Taking the case of Mexico's National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy (CONEVAL), Graizbord provides a deep theory of what happens when democratic aspirations intersect with technocratic ambitions. Analyzing what it takes to establish and sustain monitoring and evaluation as a form of official state expertise, Graizbord is able to put forward the contours of technodemocracy—a democratic political project that hinges on the power of experts to shape politics in unexpected but profound ways. 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 multinational mining corporations use participation to undermine resistance? Do the struggles of local communities, activists and NGOs matter on a global scale? Why are there so many different global standards in mining? Undermining Resistance: The Governance of Participation by Multinational Mining Corporations (Manchester UP, 2024) develops a new critical political economy approach to studying extractive accumulation, drawing on three detailed Indonesian cases to explain how participatory mechanisms continuously reshape and are reshaped by community-corporate conflict. Findings highlight feedback between local social relations, conflict, transnational activism, crises of legitimacy and global governance. The author argues that corporate social responsibility, community development, 'gender-mainstreaming' and environmental monitoring are neither simple outcomes of corporate ethics nor mere greenwashing strategies. Rather, participation is a mechanism to undermine resistance and create social relations amenable to extractive accumulation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

In Burying the Enemy: The Story of Those who Cared for the Dead in Two World Wars (Yale University Press, 2025), Tim Grady recounts here a detailed history of the fate of combatants who died on enemy soil in England and Germany in  World Wars I and II. The books draws on a rich archive of personal family experiences, and describes the often touching acts of kindness and reconciliation with families caring for graves of enemy personnel in churchyards and local cemeteries close to where those deaths took place. Both sides were at pains to photograph tended graves, demonstrating reciprocal respect. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission and the German equivalent - the VDK - obscured decision-making around repatriation, which led to some family distress. Grady recounts in detail the creation of the German military cemetery at Cannock Chase, which comprised a year-long programme of exhumations across the UK. This book is a highly readable and touching account of the tensions that arose between families and the state in response to military death in the World Wars, offering a unique insight into personal German/English relations during both and after both conflicts. Tim Grady is professor of modern history at the University of Chester. Dr Julie Rugg is a Reader in Social Policy at the University of York, UK. She has an abiding interest in the ways in which societies come to an accommodation with mortality. The Cemetery Research website connects scholars with similar interests and in multiple disciplines from around the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Factory fires, chemical explosions, and aerial pollutants have inexorably shaped South Baltimore into one of the most polluted places in the country. In Futures After Progress: Hope and Doubt in Late Industrial Baltimore (U Chicago Press, 2024), anthropologist Chloe Ahmann explores the rise and fall of industrial lifeways on this edge of the city and the uncertainties that linger in their wake. Writing from the community of Curtis Bay, where two hundred years of technocratic hubris have carried lethal costs, Ahmann also follows local efforts to realize a good future after industry and the rifts competing visions opened between neighbors. Examining tensions between White and Black residents, environmental activists and industrial enthusiasts, local elders and younger generations, Ahmann shows how this community has become a battleground for competing political futures whose stakes reverberate beyond its six square miles in a present after progress has lost steam. And yet—as one young resident explains — “that's not how the story ends.” Rigorous and moving, Futures after Progress probes the deep roots of our ecological predicament, offering insight into what lies ahead for a country beset by dreams deferred and a planet on the precipice of change. Futures after Progress is available in Open Access here.Mentioned in this episode: Ahmann, Chloe and Anand Pandian. 2024. “The Fight Against Incineration is a Chance to Right Historic Wrongs.” Baltimore Beat, June 26. Ahmann, Chloe. 2024. “Curtis Bay Residents Deserve a Coal-free Future.” Baltimore Sun, February 18. Boym, Svetlana. 2007. “Nostalgia and Its Discontents.” Hedgehog Review 9(2). Butler, Octavia. 1993. Parable of the Sower. New York: Grand Central Publishing. Butler, Octavia. 1998. Parable of the Talents. New York: Grand Central Publishing. Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press. South Baltimore Community Land Trust. https://www.sbclt.org/ Weston, Kath. 2021. “Counterfactual Ethnography: Imagining What It Takes to Live Differently.” AIBR: Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana 16(3): 463–87. Chloe Ahmann is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University. Her work explores what efforts to think and enact environmental futures look like from the sedimented space of late industrialism. Liliana Gil is Assistant Professor of Comparative Studies (STS) at The Ohio State University. [please link my name. Special thanks to Brittany Halley, Nikoo Karimi, Abigail Musch, Kate Roos, and Koray Sackan, who helped prepare this interview in the Comparative Studies Seminar in Technology and Culture. 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 episode, Maliha Safri, Marianna Pavlovskaya, Stephen Healy, and Craig Borowiak talk about their new co-authored book Solidarity Cities: Confronting Racial Capitalism, Mapping Transformation (University of Minnesota Press, 2024). This volume is part of the Diverse Economies and Livable Worlds series. Solidarity economies, characterized by diverse practices of cooperation and mutual support, have long played pivotal but largely invisible roles in fostering shared survival and envisioning alternatives to racial capitalism globally and in the United States. This book maps the thriving existence of these cooperative networks in three differently sized American cities, highlighting their commitment to cooperation, democracy, and inclusion and demonstrating the desire—and the pressing need—to establish alternative foundations for social and economic justice.  Collectively authored by four social scientists, Solidarity Cities analyzes the deeply entrenched racial and economic divides from which cooperative networks emerge as they work to provide unmet basic needs, including food security, affordable housing, access to fair credit, and employment opportunities. Examining entities such as community gardens, credit unions, cooperatives, and other forms of economic solidarity, the authors highlight how relatively small yet vital interventions into public life can expand into broader movements that help bolster the overall well-being of their surrounding communities.  Bringing together insights from geography, political economy, and political science with mapping and spatial analysis methodologies, surveys, and in-depth interviews, Solidarity Cities illuminates the extensive footprints of solidarity economies and the roles they play in communities. The authors show how these initiatives act as bulwarks against gentrification, exploitation, and economic exclusion, helping readers see them as part of the past, present, and future of more livable and just cities. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions. This episode is hosted by Elena Sobrino. Elena is a lecturer in Anthropology at Tufts University. Her research explores volunteer work, union histories, and environmentalism in the Flint water crisis. She is currently writing about the politics of fatigue and crisis, and teaching classes on science and technology studies, ethnographies of crisis, and global racisms. You can read more about her work at elenasobrino.site. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

After four decades of reform and development, China is confronting a domestic waste crisis. As the world's largest waste-generating nation, the World Economic Forum projects that by 2030, the volume of household waste in China will be double that of the United States. Starting in the early 2000s, Chinese policymakers came to see waste management as an object of environmental governance central to the creation of "modern" cities, and experimented with the circular economy, in which technology and policy could convert all forms of waste back into resources. Based on long-term research in Guangzhou, Circular Ecologies: Environmentalism and Waste Politics in Urban China (Stanford University Press, 2024) critically analyzes the implementation of technologies and infrastructures to modernize a mega-city's waste management system, and the grassroots ecological politics that emerged in response. In Guangzhou, waste's transformation revealed uncomfortable truths about China's environmental governance: a preference for technology over labor, the aestheticization of order, and the expropriation of value in service of an ecological vision. Amy Zhang argues that in post-reform China, waste-the material vestige of decades of growth and increasing consumption-is a systemic irritant that troubles China's technocratic governance. Waste provoked an unlikely coalition of urban communities, from the middle class to precarious migrant workers, that came to constitute a nascent, bottom-up environmental politics, and offers a model for conceptualizing ecological action under authoritarian conditions. Amy Zhang is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at New York University.Victoria Oana Lupașcu is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at University of Montréal Let's face it, most of the popular podcasts out there are dumb. NBN features scholars (like you!), providing an enriching alternative to students. We partner with presses like Oxford, Princeton, and Cambridge to make academic research accessible to all. Please consider sharing the New Books Network with your students. Download this poster here to spread the word. Please share this interview on Instagram, LinkedIn, or Bluesky. Don't forget to subscribe to our Substack here to receive our weekly newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

An enthralling tour of the world's rarest and most endangered languages Languages and cultures are becoming increasingly homogenous, with the resulting loss of a rich linguistic tapestry reflecting unique perspectives and ways of life.  Rare Tongues: The Secret Stories of Hidden Languages (Princeton University Press, 2025) tells the stories of the world's rare and vanishing languages, revealing how each is a living testament to human resilience, adaptability, and the perennial quest for identity. Taking readers on a captivating journey of discovery, Lorna Gibb explores the histories of languages under threat or already extinct as well as those in resurgence, shedding light on their origins, development, and distinctive voices. She travels the globe—from Australia and Finland to India, the Canary Islands, Namibia, Scotland, and Paraguay—showing how these languages are not mere words and syntax but keepers of diverse worldviews, sites of ethnic conflict, and a means for finding surprising commonalities. Readers learn the basics of how various language systems work—with vowels and consonants, whistles and clicks, tonal inflections, or hand signs—and how this kaleidoscope of self-expression carries vital information about our planet, indigenous cultures and tradition, and the history and evolution of humankind. Rare Tongues is essential reading for anyone concerned about the preservation of endangered languages and an eloquent and disarmingly personal meditation on why the world's linguistic heritage is so fundamental to our shared experience—and why its loss should worry us all. Lorna Gibb is associate professor of creative writing and linguistics at the University of Stirling. Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Emergency in Transit: Witnessing Migration in the Colonial Present (University of California Press, 2024) by Dr. Eleanor Paynter responds to the crisis framings that dominate migration debates in the global north. This capacious, interdisciplinary open-access study reformulates Europe's so-called "migrant crisis" from a sudden disaster to a site of contested witnessing, where competing narratives threaten, uphold, or reimagine migrant rights. Focusing on Italy, a crucial port of arrival, Dr. Paynter draws together testimonials from ethnographic research—alongside literature, film, and visual art—to interrogate the colonial, racial logics that inform emergency responses to migration. She also examines the media, discourses, policies, and practices that shape lived experiences of migration well beyond international borders. Centering the witnessing of Black Africans in Italy, Emergency in Transit reveals how this emergency apparatus operates and posits a vision of mobility that refutes the notions of crisis so often imposed on those who cross the Mediterranean Sea. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

CrossFit in the United States has become increasingly popular, around which a fascinating culture has developed which shapes everyday life for the people devoted to it. CrossFit claims to be many things: a business, a brand, a tremendously difficult fitness regimen, a community, a way to gain salvation, and a method to survive the apocalypse. In The Cult of CrossFit: Christianity and the American Exercise Phenomenon (NYU Press, 2025), Dr. Katie Rose Hejtmanek examines how this exercise program is shaped by American Christian values and practices, connecting American religious ideologies to secular institutions in contemporary American culture. Drawing upon years of immersing herself in CrossFit gyms in the United States and across six continents, this book illustrates how US CrossFit operates using distinctly American codes, ranging from its intensity and patriarchal militarism to its emphasis on (white) salvation and the adoration of the hero and vigilante. Despite presenting itself as a secular space, Dr. Hejtmanek argues that CrossFit is both heavily influenced by and deeply intertwined with American Christian values. She makes the case that the Christianity that shapes CrossFit is the Christianity that shapes much of America, usually in ways we do not even notice. Offering a new cross-cultural perspective for understanding a popular workout, The Cult of CrossFit provides a window into a particularly American rendition of a Christian plotline, lived out one workout at a time. 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. You can find Miranda's episodes on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

On the podcast today I am joined by Christof Lammer, a social anthropologist based at the University of Klagenfurt and inherit fellow at Humboldt University of Berlin. Christof is joining me to talk about his new book, Performing State Boundaries: Food Networks, Democratic Bureaucracy and China published in Open Access by Berghahn Books in 2024. The book delves into intricate political processes in an eco-village in Sichuan, revealing the multiple ways in which the boundary between state and non-state is performed. It shows how, in these performances, competing images of the Chinese state's authoritarian, socialist and cultural otherness are mobilized to shape social policy and the transition to ecological agriculture in unexpected ways. Scholars working on China or the anthropology of the state more generally will find the book eye-opening, with its rich theoretical discussions and deep analytical insights, all based on fine-grained ethnography.  Performing State Boundaries: Food Networks, Democratic Bureaucracy and China is Open Access and available to download free on the Berghahn Books website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

How and why do local political processes in rural Nepal become an arena for political mythmaking? And, how do political myths obscure their own historical construction, thereby making hierarchical power structures appear inevitable? In this episode we discuss these questions with Ankita Shrestha whose ethnographic explorations into these issues foreground the persistent centrality of caste, gender and indigeneity to everyday forms of domination and hierarchy in contemporary rural Nepal. Ankita Shrestha holds a PhD in human geography from the University of Oslo. Kenneth Bo Nielsen, a social anthropologist based in Oslo, and the leader of the centre for South Asian Democracy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Radical nationalism is on the rise in Europe and throughout the world. Living Right: Far-Right Youth Activists in Contemporary Europe (Princeton University Press, 2024) provides an in-depth account of the ideas and practices that are driving the varied forms of far-right activism by young people from all walks of life, revealing how these social movements offer the promise of comradery, purpose, and a moral calling to self-sacrifice, and demonstrating how far-right ideas are understood and lived in ways that speak to a variety of experiences. In this eye-opening book, Agnieszka Pasieka draws on her own sometimes harrowing fieldwork among Italian, Polish, and Hungarian militant youths, painting unforgettable portraits of students, laborers, entrepreneurs, musicians, and activists from well-off middle class backgrounds who have all found a nurturing home in the far right. Providing an in-depth account of radical nationalist communities and networks that are taking root across Europe, she shows how the simultaneous orientation of these groups toward the local and the transnational is a key to their success. With a focus on far-right morality that challenges commonly held ideas about the right, Pasieka describes how far-right movements afford opportunities to the young to be active members of tightly bonded comradeships while sharing in a broader project with global ramifications. Required reading for anthropologists and anyone concerned about the resurgence of far-right militancy today, Living Right sheds necessary light on the forces that have made the growing appeal of fascist idealism for young people one of the most alarming trends of our time. Agnieszka Pasieka is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Montreal. * This episode is part of a special collaboration between the New Books Network and the Society for the Anthropology of Europe, a section of the American Anthropological Association. Together, we're highlighting exciting new work in Europeanist anthropology—featuring authors from across the field, including winners of the William A. Douglass Book Prize and contributors to the European Anthropology in Translation series published by Berghahn Books. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

How do corporations use theater to reconcile the crises of late capitalism? In our latest interview on Ethnographic Marginalia, we speak with Dr. Sarah Saddler about her new book Performing Corporate Bodies (Routledge, 2024), where she describes how corporations have borrowed techniques from activist theater to manage their workers in India and beyond. Sarah explains how she came to ethnographic techniques from a theater background, before discussing how she managed the challenges and misunderstandings caused by her identity as a western researcher. And finally, she describes how doing performance ethnography helped her understand how individuals play roles, not just in theater, but everyday life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

In Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism: South Africa in the Chinese Century (Duke UP, 2024), Mingwei Huang traces the development of new forms of racial capitalism in the twenty-first century. Through fieldwork in one of the “China malls” that has emerged along Johannesburg's former mining belt, Huang identifies everyday relations of power and difference between Chinese entrepreneurs and African migrant workers in these wholesale shops. These relations, Huang contends, replicate and perpetuate global structures of white supremacy, anti-Blackness, capitalism, and colonialism, even when whiteness is not present.  Huang argues that this dynamic reflects the sedimented legacies and continued operation of white supremacy and colonialism, which have been transformed in the shift of capitalism's center of gravity toward China and the Global South. These new forms of racial capitalism and empire layer onto and extend histories of exploitation and racialization in South Africa. Taking a palimpsestic approach, Huang offers tools for understanding this shift and decentering contemporary Western conceptions of race, empire, and racial capitalism in the Chinese Century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

How do we acquire knowledge about societies? Does how we acquire social knowledge shape what we know? How conscious must we be of our own experiences as we do our research? What does feminism add to our methods and modes of research? Now in its second edition, Feminist Ethnography: Thinking through Methodologies, Challenges, and Possibilities (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022) by Drs. Crista Craven and Dána-Ain Davis answers these questions. The book is at once a how-to manual for doing feminist ethnography and a compendium of contributions from influential feminist ethnographers. Designed for students, scholars, community activists, and anyone interested in social knowledge, the book is multi-vocal and interdisciplinary and promotes critical methodologies as sites for reflection, collaboration, and creativity. It is a particularly important work for this moment in which anti-DEI efforts aim to minimize the work and perspectives of minoritized groups. Dr. Christa Craven (she/her/hers) is a Professor of Anthropology and Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies at the College of Wooster, and co-founder of the Global Queer Studies minor. She has published four books, including Feminist Ethnography. Her 2019 monograph, Reproductive Losses: Challenges to LGBTQ Family-Making was awarded the Council on Anthropology & Reproduction's Book Prize in 2021, and selected by Women.com as a book that puts “the long, complicated history of reproductive rights into sharp focus.” Dr. Dána-Ain Davis is Professor of Urban Studies at Queens College, City University of New York and on the faculty of the PhD Programs in Anthropology and Critical Psychology. She is the director of the Center for the Study of Women and Society at the CUNY Graduate Center. Davis is the author, co-author, or co-editor of five books including Feminist Ethnography. NYU Press published Davis's Reproductive Injustice: Racism, Pregnancy, and Premature Birth in 2019 and the book received the Eileen Basker Memorial Prize from the Society for Medical Anthropology and The Senior Book Prize from the Association of Feminist Anthropology. Dr. Davis is also a doula. Mentioned in the Podcast: Feminist Activist Ethnography:Counterpoints to Neoliberalism in North America, edited by Christa Craven and Dána-Ain Davis Jafari S. Allen's The Anthropology of ‘What is Utterly Precious: Black Feminists, Black Queer Habits of Mind, and the ‘Object' of Ethnography,” in Unsettling Queer Anthropology: Foundations, Reorientations, and Departures, edited by Margot Weiss Wiki Education help for faculty. Sign up for their info sessions! College of Wooster's Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies's oral histories Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Today I'm speaking with Asad L. Asad, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Stanford University. He is the author of Engage and Evade: How Latino Immigrant Families Manage Surveillance in Everyday Life (Princeton UP, 2023). A highly relevant book, Engage and Evade documents the interactions between undocumented people and the agents and institutions of government. One might expect undocumented people to avoid the IRS, but as Asad demonstrates, many engage with government institutions in the hopes that positive interactions and compliance might help their immigration cases down the road. Published in 2023, immigration policy and treatment of undocumented people by the government has shifted dramatically in a short time. I'm grateful today to be able to speak with Asad about this thoughtful book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

In the contemporary world, ruins, rubble, and decaying material have become increasingly iconic landscapes. They can foster a more layered theory of time, change and memory. The seven ethnographic case studies in Haunting Ruins (Berghahn Books, 2025) trace human engagements with the temporal forces of ruins, which can trace the past and transform the present. Conjuring environmental humanities, the anthropology of history, memory studies, and archaeology, this fascinating new edited volume delves into the complex influence of the past on the present and the future and urges scholars to consider ruins as things to think with. Valentina Gamberi is a MSCA-CZ Postdoctoral Fellow at the Palacký University Olomouc. She is an anthropologist focusing on material culture studies, museum and heritage studies, with a foundation in religious studies and material religion. She has conducted fieldwork in several European museums and, since 2017, in Taiwan. Orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0857-2233 Email: valentina.gamberi@upol.cz Chiara Calzana is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Turin and an Adjunct Lecturer at the University of Milano-Bicocca. Her research interests lie in the fields of historical anthropology and memory studies. She conducted ethnographic fieldwork and historical research in the Vajont disaster area (Italian Alps), focusing on memorialization and monumentalization practices. Since 2023, she has been a member of the research team of the ERC Project ‘The World Behind a Word. An Anthropological Exploration of Fascist Practices and Meanings among European Youth (F-WORD)'. E-mail: chiara.calzana@unito.it Yadong Li is a socio-cultural anthropologist-in-training. He is registered as a PhD student at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of economic anthropology, medical anthropology, hope studies, and the anthropology of borders and frontiers. 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

Although the history of Indonesian music has received much attention from ethnomusicologists and Western composers alike, almost nothing has been written on the interaction of missionaries with local culture.  Missionaries, Anthropologists, and Music in the Indonesian Archipelago (U California Press, 2025) represents the first attempt to concentrate on the musical dimension of missionary activities in Indonesia. In fourteen essays, a group of distinguished scholars show the complexity of the topic: while some missionaries did important scholarship on local music, making recordings and attempting to use local music in services, others tried to suppress whatever they found. Many were collaborating closely with anthropologists who admitted freely that they could not have done their work without them. And both parties brought colonial biases into their work. By grappling with these realities and records, this book is a collective effort to decolonize the project of making music histories. Byung Ho Choi is a Ph.D. candidate in the History and Ecumenics program at Princeton Theological Seminary, concentrating in World Christianity and history of religions. His research focuses on the indigenous expressions of Christianities found in Southeast Asia, particularly Christianity that is practiced in the Muslim-dominant archipelagic nation of Indonesia. More broadly, he is interested in history and the anthropology of Christianity, complexities of religious conversion and social identity, inter-religious dialogue, ecumenism, and World Christianity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

On the podcast today I am joined by socio-cultural anthropologist, Tuomas Tammisto, who is an academy research fellow in Social Anthropology at Tampere University. Tuomas is joining me to talk about his recently published book, Hard Work: Producing Places, Relations and Value on a Papua New Guinea Resource Frontier (Helsinki UP, 2024) Hard Work examines human-environmental relations, value production, natural resource extraction, and state formation within the context of the Mengen people of Papua New Guinea. It provides elaborate, rich ethnography to make sense of how the Mengen engage with their land and outside actors like companies, NGOs, and the state through agriculture, logging, plantation labor, and environmental conservation. These practices have shaped the Mengen's lived environment, while also sparking debates on what is considered valuable and how value is created. The book is the result of hard work: for years Tuomas Tammisto has gained rich empirical research to detail how indigenous Mengen people perceive and live with the threats of logging. The chapters are not only rich in ethnography and theory, but they are also interlaced with beautiful photos and poetic song lyrics both in the original and translated languages, to provide an eye-opening window into Mengen perceptions of their complex lived environment. The book is Open Access and available to read for free here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

How do individuals address serious challenges in a context where organized gatherings are subject to strict government control? This new edited volume brings together a diverse group of scholars to explore the many ways people in China self-organize and create varied forms of coordination to solve important problems. Through compelling, detail-rich case studies, The Extraordinary in the Mundane (Columbia UP, 2024) shows that family structures and networks deeply shape these modes of association. Because the public-private dichotomy does not resonate with many people in China, they rely on informal social ties, not formal organizations or state agencies, to confront personal challenges. Chapters present vivid ethnographic portraits that consider both positive and negative aspects of community formation. A woman with an autistic child creates an organization to advocate for inclusion of neurodivergent children in public schools. A trainee in a psychological counseling course finds mutual support among other participants. A boy is taken by his father to an internet addiction treatment camp that aims to restructure family interactions. A woman in her seventies shows off the burial clothes she prepared for herself, to the admiration of a group of friends. Offering a glimpse into the unofficial realities that often remain off the record, this book provides a wide-ranging and timely examination of the varieties of civic action in contemporary China. Becky Yang Hsu is Associate Professor of Sociology at Georgetown University. Her research interests include morality, institutions, and culture, and is currently studying happiness and mourning in China. More details about her research can be found here. Yadong Li is a socio-cultural anthropologist-in-training. He is registered as a PhD student at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of economic anthropology, medical anthropology, hope studies, and the anthropology of borders and frontiers. 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

Martha S. Jones grew up feeling her Black identity was obvious to all who saw her. But weeks into college, a Black Studies classmate challenged Jones's right to speak. Suspicious of the color of her skin and the texture of her hair, he confronted her with a question that inspired a lifetime of introspection: “Who do you think you are?” Now a prizewinning scholar of Black history, Jones delves into her family's past for answers. In every generation since her great-great-great-grandmother survived enslavement to raise a free family, color determined her ancestors' lives. But the color line was shifting and jagged, not fixed and straight. Some backed away from it, others skipped along it, and others still were cut deep by its sharp teeth. Journeying across centuries, from rural Kentucky and small-town North Carolina to New York City and its suburbs, The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir (Basic Books, 2025) is a lyrical, deeply felt meditation on the most fundamental matters of identity, belonging, and family. Martha S. Jones is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor, professor of history, and a professor at the SNF Agora Institute at the Johns Hopkins University. A prizewinning author and editor of four books, most recently Vanguard, she is past copresident of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians and has contributed to the New York Times, Atlantic, and many other publications. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland. Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Experimental Times: Startup Capitalism and Feminist Futures in India (U California Press, 2024) is an in-depth ethnography of the transformation of Bengaluru/Bangalore from a site of "backend" IT work to an aspirational global city of enterprise and innovation. The book journeys alongside the migrant workers, technologists, and entrepreneurs who shape and survive the dreams of a "Startup India" knitted through office work, at networking meetings and urban festivals, and across sites of leisure in the city. Tracking techno-futures that involve automation and impending precarity, Hemangini Gupta details the everyday forms of experimentation, care, and friendship that sustain and reproduce life and labour in India's current economy. Rituparna Patgiri is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Guwahati. 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. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

The former border enclaves of Bangladesh and India existed as extra-territorial spaces since 1947. They were finally exchanged and merged as host state territories in 2015. Sovereign Atonement: Citizenship, Territory, and the State at the Bangladesh-India Border (Cambridge UP, 2024) focuses on the protracted territorial exchange and experiences of the newly accepted Bangladeshi citizens. It grapples with one broad question: why did the state assume an active role in smoothing the once excluded population's experiences into their inclusion within the sovereign project? The book dives deep into an ethnographic and historical reading of the everyday state, land and territory, informality, (non)state actors, and performance of sovereignty. Furthermore, it troubles the often taken-for-granted understanding of exception, governance, and citizenship. As such, Ferdoush offers a retake on the two seemingly contradictory concepts -'sovereign' and 'atonement'- to demonstrate that bridged together these concepts as sovereign atonement enables a novel way of appreciating geopolitical narratives, political geographies, and nationalistic discourse in South Asia 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

Syaifudin Zuhri's book Wali Pitu and Muslim Pilgrimage in Bali, Indonesia: Inventing a Sacred Tradition (Leiden, 2022) is a detailed examination of the recent emergence of the Wali Pitu (“Seven Saints”) tradition in Bali, Indonesia. The study is a multi-sited ethnography of pilgrimage traditions to the grave sites of the Wali Pitu, which is a part of a larger context of rising interest in saint veneration in Indonesia generally, and Muslim religious tourism on the Hindu-majority island of Bali in particular. Themes of the book include saint veneration in historical and contemporary Indonesia, the relationship between religious invention and religious authenticity in Islamic traditions, religious cultures and the economic imperative of the tourism industry, relationships between Hindus and Muslims sharing religious space, and the diversity of approaches to religion and Islamic experience in Southeast Asia. Zuhri's work offers important new perspectives on Indonesian Islam by examining the creation, experience, economy, and contestations of popular Muslim practices that are only growing in their significance. Dr. Syaifudin Zuhri is a lecturer at the State Islamic University of Sayyid Ali Rahmatullah Tulungagung (UIN SATU) and a former research fellow at the Berlin Graduate School of Muslim Cultures and Societies. Dr. Jaclyn Michael is Assistant Professor of Religion at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (USA). She is the author of several articles on Muslim cultural representation, performance, and religious belonging in India and in the United States. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Drawing Coastlines: Climate Anxieties and the Visual Reinvention of Mumbai's Shore (Cornell UP, 2024) reveals the ways that technical images such as weather infographics, sea-level projections, and surveys are fast remaking Mumbai's coasts and coastal futures. They set in place infrastructural interventions, vocabularies of development and conservation, and their lines and dots inscribe material conditions of existence and horizons of loss that entangle life forms. V. Chitra interlaces graphics and text by redrawing scientific images, the moments of their construction, the choices and consequences of what gets drawn and what does not, and how images are seen, performed, and manifest. These visual reconstructions show how images remake human-nonhuman relationships, arrange urban politics, and materialize landscapes in complex and contradictory ways. The multimodal format of Drawing Coastlines engages in the politics of its context where words and images combine to create coastal worlds, and to find, through a creative anthropology, openings to build new forms of care in the midst of crisis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Big-time college football promises prestige, drama, media attention, and money. Yet most athletes in this unpaid, amateur system encounter a different reality, facing dangerous injuries, few pro-career opportunities, a free but devalued college education, and future financial instability. In one of the first ethnographies about Black college football players, anthropologist Tracie Canada reveals the ways young athletes strategically resist the exploitative systems that structure their everyday lives. Tackling the Everyday: Race and Nation in Big-Time College Football (University of California Press, 2025) shows how college football particularly harms the young Black men who are overrepresented on gridirons across the country. Although coaches and universities constantly invoke the misleading "football family" narrative, this book describes how a brotherhood among Black players operates alongside their caring mothers, who support them on and off the field. With a Black feminist approach—one that highlights often-overlooked voices—Canada exposes how race, gender, kinship, and care shape the lives of the young athletes who shoulder America's favorite game. Tracie Canada is the Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. Her work has been featured in public venues and outlets such as the Museum of Modern Art, The Guardian, and Scientific American. Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Boaters of London is an ethnography that delves into the process of becoming a boater, adopting an alternative lifestyle on the water and the political impact that this travelling population has on the state. London and the Southeast of England in general is home to many people and families who live on narrowboats, cruisers and barges, along a network of canals and rivers. Many of these 'boaters' move from place to place every two weeks and form itinerant communities in the heart of some of the UK's most crowded urban spaces. Boaters of London delves into the process of becoming a boater and the political impact of this travelling population on the state, the volume examines an alternative style of living and the potential of a life spent afloat. Ben Bowles is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at SOAS, University of London. He is also Course Lecturer at Fordham University, London Campus, and Research Fellow at the Open University's Centre for Policing Research and Learning. His research interests include economic and political anthropology, and the anthropology of the UK. Yadong Li is a socio-cultural anthropologist-in-training. He is registered as a PhD student at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of economic anthropology, medical anthropology, hope studies, and the anthropology of borders and frontiers. 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

The vast majority of people who stream themselves playing videogames online do so with few or no viewers. In Streaming by the Rest of Us: Microstreaming Videogames on Twitch (MIT Press, 2025) Dr. Mia Consalvo, Dr. Marc Lajeunesse, and Dr. Andrei Zanescu investigate who they are, why they do so, and why this form of leisure activity is important to understand. Unlike the esports athletes and streaming superstars who receive the lion's share of journalistic and academic attention, microstreamers are not in it for the money and barely have an audience. In this, the first book dedicated to the latter group, the authors gather interviews from dozens of microstreamers from 2017 to 2019 to discuss their lives, struggles, hopes, and goals. For readers interested in livestreaming, and Twitch in particular, the book rethinks the medium's history through accounts of the everyday uses of webcams, with particular attention to notions of liveness and authenticity. These two concepts have become calling cards for the videogame livestreaming platform and underlie streamer motivations, the construction of their practices (whether casual, serious, or anywhere in between), and the complex “metas” that take shape over time. The book also looks at the authors' own practices of livestreaming, focusing on what can be gained through experiencing the lived reality of the practice. Finally, the authors explain how Twitch's platform (studied from 2017–2023) informs how streamers structure their every day and how corporate ideologies bleed into real-world spaces like TwitchCon. This book is available open-access via the MIT Press website. 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

Iconic as a novelist and popular cultural figure, Zora Neale Hurston remains underappreciated as an anthropologist. Is it inevitable that Hurston's literary authority should eclipse her anthropological authority? If not, what socio-cultural and institutional values and processes shape the different ways we read her work? Jennifer L. Freeman Marshall considers the polar receptions to Hurston's two areas of achievement by examining the critical response to her work across both fields. Drawing on a wide range of readings, Freeman Marshall explores Hurston's popular appeal as iconography, her elevation into the literary canon, her concurrent marginalization in anthropology despite her significant contributions, and her place within constructions of Black feminist literary traditions. Perceptive and original, Ain't I an Anthropologist (University of Illinois Press, 2023) is an overdue reassessment of Zora Neale Hurston's place in American cultural and intellectual life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology