abf: A Pathfinder
This is a computer-generated pathfinder created against the Distant Reader study called abf.
Each Distant Reader study carrel is composed of many individual items. Each item is bibliographically described with author, title, date, summary, and keyword values. Below is a list of the items' most signficant keywords as well as lists of the items themselves. Purpusing the content of this pathfinder provides the student, researcher, or scholar with one way to get their heads around the scope of the carrel. The keywords include:
Book; Anthropology; People; Women; Work; Health; Author; State; Life; Archaeology; Studies; History; World; Practices; Food; Knowledge; City; Film; Data; Chapters; Maya; Authors; Water; Human; Care; Workers; Ritual; Time; Violence; Production; Energy; Power; Disaster; Religion; Migration; Identity; Year; Children; Change; Science; Class; Oil; Section; Heritage; Development; Ethics; Place; Kinship; North; King; Field; Documentary; Medicine; Complexity; French; Case; Land; Past; Ocean; Belonging; Ethnography; Politics; Landscape; Relations; Sex; Movements; Men; Egypt; China; Democracy; Institutions; Palestine; Public; Andean; Residents; Israel; Sovereignty; Theory; Islands; Death; Culture; Use; Allen; Military; Plantation; Capitalism; War; Child; Mumbai; Danahay; Body; Jackson; Art; Caribbean; Activism; Societies; Mesoamerican; Youth; U.s; Fisher; Images; Pollution; Remains; Animals; Economy; Mining; Dance; Crisis; Duch; Boredom; Metaphysics; Globalization; Cayenne; Fennell; Anna; Derivative; Country; Ageism; Danely; Individuals; Differences; Bigfoot; Contagion; Aoluguya; Johnson; Hajj; Armelagos; Activists; Aztec; Alexander; Articles; Langlitz; Fox; Noise; Clovis; Davis; High; Parenting; Perpetrators; Fjeld; Collaborative; Theater; Hannerz; Street; Design; Fieldnotes; Fort; Chica; Batz; Education; Covering; Dairy; India
Depending on how this pathfinder was created, many of the bibliographic sections will include elaborations on the meaning(s) of the given keywords. These elaborations were generated by feeding the items' summaries to a large langauge model and asking the model to address the question, "What is X?", where "X" is the keyword. The result will be a few sentences of elaboration. Be forewarned. The elaborations are often plausible, but they should not be take as truth. Instead, they should be taken as points for consideration.
Book
- Hidden Genoa by Heiman, Rachel (2017) - Yet as Guano demonstrates, what also is made visible through these tours are Genoa’s entrepreneurial women, who have carved out a niche in what is typically a male profession in other Italian cities. As Guano beautifully explains in her introduction, when describing how she came to write a book on Genoa after years of ethnographic work in Buenos Aires, “Genoa always loomed large as the city that never ceased to intrigue, charm, and disappoint me. Keywords: book; city; class; genoa; guano
- The postcolonial politics of post-national citizenship in Portugal by Kerr, David (2017) - 1 The postcolonial politics of post-national citizenship in Portugal Review by David Kerr Verde, Let's Go: Creole Rappers and Citizenship in Portugal by Derek Pardue University of Illinois Press, 2015 Cape Verde, Let's Go addresses the postcolonial politics of citizenship in Portugal through the lens of Creole rap. Articulations of place and time, of migration, of Lisbon’s poorer neighbourhoods and of Cape Verde form an important unit for analysing the meaning of Creole citizenship. Keywords: book; citizenship; creole
- Kick Dust at their Heels and See if they Cough: Witches in Ghana by Farrer, D.S. (2017) - He claims: “This ignores the major problem, and the very different forms of witchcraft violence that occur in the southern part of Ghana,” adding that, “[m]ost of this book focuses on the witchcraft ideology of the Akan, but considers witchcraft beliefs and related violence throughout Ghana” (x). The author asserts the noble cause of “helping to eradicate witchcraft violence in Ghana and elsewhere” (xi), but to my mind this may be read as a conflation of ideas, where calls to eradicate witchcraft violence are actually calls to eradicate witchcraft per se. Keywords: book; chapter; ghana; violence; witchcraft
- Following Human Hair to Unexpected Places: A Review of Emma Tarlo’s Engtanglement: The Secret Lives of Hair by Porter-Lupu, Jennifer (2018) - Beyond Tarlo’s oddly intimate encounters with hair, many ethnographic encounters center around the different types of laborers who engage with human hair. The value of hair is perhaps best summed up by the supervisor of hair sweepers in a temple in India, who explains, “Hair is more valuable than money… You can find money anywhere, but it is only on a woman’s head that you will find this!” Keywords: book; hair; tarlo
- Book review for Reading the Bones, Activity, Biology and Culture by Elizabeth Weiss (2017) by Martin-Moya, Diane (2018) - Through modern clinical and genetic studies, the author compares and correlates archaeological studies ranging from general analysis to specific material culture elements to understand morphological variations. This book considers both genetic variation and a large spectrum of environmental aspects that has affected past human individuals -such as nutrition, diseases, social organization, physical activities, altitude, weather and other which is essential to understand the various interactions and shifts in morphological variation through time. Keywords: book; research; studies; variation
- Robo Sapiens Japanicus: Robots, Gender, Family, and the Japanese Nation by Kovacic, Mateja (2018) - By doing so, Roberson creates a link between traditional society and traditional gender norms asserted through robots. Her 3 research has a multidisciplinary focus on robots, from autonomous vehicles to humanoid robots in Japan and beyond. Keywords: book; robots
- Disasters, tugg'd with fortune by Tuttle, Brendan Rand (2018) - Part III compares the dualistic structure of the relationship between king and people and the dualism of opposed groups, focusing on the antagonism of the king toward the people. Rainmakers’ standing varied from place to place; most shared the title of ‘king’ with a handful of others responsible for protecting against a host of disasters (epidemics and epizootics, infertility, caterpillars and pests, and so forth); some were powerful rulers with kingdoms comprising more than a dozen large villages, others’ power only extended to a few settlements. Keywords: book; disaster; king; people; simonse; sudan
- Crafting an Engaged Urban Anthropology by Shalabi, Samir (2019) - Although urban anthropology has for long engaged with and sought to remedy urban social problems like the lack of housing, poverty, racial segregation, homelessness and forced displacement, the book reflects a new generation of anthropological research on the city that deals with topics that tangibly mark the present urban condition, including neoliberalism, globalization, ecological crises and intensified socioeconomic and racial disparities. With the rise of the Anthropocene and concerns around the world about environmental degradation and its effects, urban anthropology is particularly equipped to study how the urbanizing world are affecting and being affected by these forces. Keywords: anthropology; book; city; people; world
- The global rise of diabetes seen from Belize by Troccoli, Giuseppe (2020) - Inspired by Sidney Mintz’s work, the book describes the histories of both individual lives and of global racial capitalism, providing ‘an ethnographic version of world systems theory that stitches together glimpses of global processes and infrastructures with their living consequences for people’ (17). The first, shorter part contains three chapters, which introduce the scope of the book and its main themes, referencing the role of global history and that of the Garifuna of Belize, and elucidates research-related ethical and methodological issues. Keywords: book; diabetes; people
- Leisurely enjoying death by Westendorp, Mariske (2020) - Microsoft Word - Westendorp publish.doc Leisurely enjoying death Review by Mariske Westendorp 2 Leisure and Death: An Anthropological Tour of Risk, Death, and Dying Edited by Adam Kaul and Jonathan Skinner Louisville: University Press of Colorado, 2018 Key words: (Anthropology of) death, leisure, (dark) tourism, after-life, risk Death has been a subject of study for anthropologists from the very start of the discipline. For example, researching, reading and writing about death are in these Corona-times different than usual for death scholars like myself. Keywords: book; death; leisure
- Who “Counts”?: Review of Who Counts?: The Mathematics of Death and Life after Genocide by Diane M. Nelson by Nelson, Rebecca (2015) - It struck me as an interesting choice for a famously logocentric scholar like Diane Nelson to focus on numbers. The force of counting and accounting in (re)creating social worlds resonates powerfully in Diane Nelson’s new book, Who Counts?: Keywords: book; count; nelson; people; section
- In the Time of Energy, it is Time to Make Place for Energy in Cultural Production by Betti, Marianna (2020) - These reflections should be assimilated to constitute a starting point from where a paradigmatic shift in cultural production, critical theory and analysis should start. Szeman’s culture is presented, for instance, throughout in reference to a rich body of major contributions to cultural theory and applied to the analysis of globalization, modernity and climate change. Keywords: book; chapter; energy; szeman
- Historical Summary of Anthropological Thought on Climate Change: Review of The Anthropology of Climate Change by Michael R. Dove by Moore, Sandra (2016) - Part two, “Societal and Environmental Change,” consists of works focusing on societal changes associated with climate change from late nineteenth century scholars (Friedrich Ratzel), mid-twentieth century scholars (Betty J. Meggers), and contemporary scholars (Harvey Weiss and Raymond Bradley). Many of the included works also address the social impacts of climate change, such as Jacqueline Soloway’s “Drought as a 'Revelatory Crisis': An Exploration of Shifting Entitlements and Hierarchies in the Kalahari, Botswana” exploring reoccurring drought in the early 1980s as a catalyst for social change. Keywords: book; change; climate; dove; works
- Focused archaeology on an inconstant subject by Eppich, Keith (2021) - KEYWORDS: Classic Maya, archaeology, El Zotz, Maya Kingship, epigraphy This is an excellent book. Microsoft Word - Eppich final.docx 1 Focused archaeology on an inconstant subject THOMAS G. GARRISON AND STEPHEN HOUSTON, editors, 2018, An Inconstant Landscape, The Maya Kingdom of El Zotz, Guatemala, Lewisville: University Press of Colorado, 470 pp., ISBN 978-1646420773. Keywords: book; maya; zotz
- Post-Foucauldian Governmentality and African Healthcare: Review of Para-States and Medical Science by Paul Wenzel Geissler by Decatur, Mary-Anne (2015) - Out of this, temporary multiple publics are formed and governed under often short-term projects, mirroring the fetishization of randomized controlled trials in public health research. Branwyn Poleykett and Lotte Meinert engage with the role of emotion and personal connection in HIV research conducted by para-statal organizations. Keywords: book; organizations; para; research; state
- TO SEE OR NOT THE SEE THE SOY by rabo, annika (2021) - Forests are cut down to provide space for grazing animals and soy cultivation. It can also be read as a narrative of how small farmers and day laborers in the eastern part of the country have economically suffered and been exposed to serious health hazards, and even death, due to the introduction and expansion of soy cultivation. Keywords: book; paraguay; soy
- Decolonizing the politics of resistance in Oaxaca, and elsewhere by Lamrani, Myriam (2021) - It then moves swiftly on considering how the use of grassroots radio and online television stations, the execution of state functions (e.g. governance, policing, and trash collection), protest art, barricades, as well as the occupations of streets and buildings helped foster intergenerational networks of political action. 3 This book is a crucial addition to the study of political protests and revolutions, for researchers working in Oaxaca or Mexico and beyond these geographical borders. Keywords: book; movements; oaxaca; politics; youth
- Sounds of Counter/Revolution by Winegar, Jessica R (2021) - The main takeaway from this book is that the Egyptian revolution (and perhaps all dramatic uprisings) live on in embodied memories and sensory affects. Chapter 2 mainly focuses on violent events in the 2011 uprisings as connected to passionate love, but also shame, grief, fear, and rage. Keywords: affect; book; malmström
- Normal Water by Rodineliussen, Rasmus (2021) - New York University Press: New York, 320 pp, ISBN: 9781479846429 Water is a thought-provoking book wherein the human geographer Jeremy J. Schmidt sets out on a task to retrieve a lost philosophy that he argues is the very basis for the by now common assumption that water is a resource (p. 224) – it should be emphasized that this lost philosophy is not one the author agrees with (p. 36). Dams were important as liberal powerhouses where water could be stored as a scarce resource (p. 114). Keywords: book; water
- Metamorphic sublime, mimetic excess, re-enchantment of nature: the meltdown as a chronicle of contemporaneity by Parreiras, Carolina (2021) - Illustrated by Olivia Taussig, the cover invokes the general theme of Taussig’s analysis: a boy (and his shadow) tries to balance the balls (or are they planets?) which he juggles, probably in order to avoid the collapse invoked in the title of the book. Mastery of non-mastery in the age of meltdown, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 220 pp, ISBN 978-0-226-69867-0 Keywords: Michael Taussig; meltdown; metamorphic sublime; mimesis; mastery of non- mastery In his most recent book, Mastery of Non-Mastery in the Age of Meltdown, Michael Taussig, with his ingenuity and wit, presents a chronicle of contemporaneity. Keywords: book; mastery; taussig; world
- Precolumbian syncretism among the Classic Maya, a review of Maya Gods of War by Eppich, Keith (2022) - On the whole, though, these are minor issues in a major work on Classic Maya religion. Yet, it is only one of several novel perspectives on Classic Maya religion in the book. Keywords: book; gods; maya; teotihuacán
- The political life of images by Kraemer, Jonathan (2022) - Keywords: images; Indonesia; public politics; democracy; image politics; authenticity. Demanding Images: Democracy, Mediation, and the Image-Event in Indonesia. Keywords: book; images; public
- The Omnipresence of Mobile Borders by DasGupta, Amrita (2022) - The function of the border institutes and border technologies (Frontex Agency, European Asylum Dactyloscopy Database, Schengen Information System, Visa Information System) as border infrastructures that allows the border to move is detailed by analyzing the difference it exercises in 3 documenting and surveilling migrants and travelers (27). This book is a detailed study on borders becoming mobile and is an important read for scholars that take interest in border manifestations, border technologies, and its workings in relation to legal and illegal migrations. Keywords: book; borders; dijstelbloem; european
- Escobar, Arturo. 2020. Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible. Durham: Duke University Press. by Lennon, Gabriel (2022) - This roundtable aims to create a supportive environment to ask questions and engage directly with publishers to increase transparency around book publishing. The Anthropology Book Forum ascribes to the principles set forth by the Fair Open Access Alliance Check out the American Anthropological Association’s award winning member magazine, Anthropology News. Keywords: anthropology; book; volume
- Uimonen, Paula, and Flora Nwapa. 2020. Invoking Flora Nwapa: Nigerian Women Writers, Femininity and Spirituality in World Literature. Stockholm, Sweden: Stockholm University Press. by ndaluka, thomas (2022) - Review by Thomas Ndaluka Key words: womanism, spirituality, femininity, global literature In Invoking Flora Nwapa: Nigerian Women Writers, Femininity and Spirituality in World Literature, Paula Uimonen does not only invoke the spirit of Flora Nwapa but also carefully unravels the discursive situation of African women—dead and alive—whose literary contribution has either been long forgotten or largely taken for granted. Using her African experience gained particularly during her many travels to Tanzania - that she considers as her second home - and Nigeria where she conducted her field work in 2016, Uimonen presents the image of African women as a homogeneous group regardless of their color, creed, or origin. Keywords: book; uimonen; women; writers
- MOORE, AMELIA. 2019. Destination Anthropocene: Science and Tourism in the Bahamas. Oakland, California: University of California Press, 216 pp.; ISBN: 978-0-52029-893-4 by Das, Suchismita (2022) - In such Anthropocene simplification, the role of global and national demand in constituting the fisheries economy (over-extractive or not) remains unacknowledged, as does the vulnerability of fishers to both climate change and to these specific forms of blame. Oakland, California: University of California Press, 216 pp.; ISBN: 978-0-52029-893-4 Keywords: Anthropocene science, small islands, vulnerability, climate subjectivity, tourism. Keywords: anthropocene; book; change; climate
- Outside the Benefit Zone, Inside the Impact Zone: Review of Alchemy in the Rain Forest: Politics, Ecology, and Resilience in a New Guinea Mining Area by Jerry K. Jacka by Golub, Alex (2016) - Jacka is an environmental anthropologist and the organization of his book reflects this fact. Throughout the book Jacka cites the ontological turn in anthropology, and particularly the work of Phillipe Descola. Keywords: book; ipili; jacka; porgera
- 2022 Year in Review by Groupp, Emilia (2022) - Microsoft Word - 2022 Year in Review.docx 1 Year in Review We began writing Year in Reviews in 2019 to take a moment to reflect on the past year and share our plans for the future. For those unfamiliar with the Anthropology Book Forum (ABF), it was founded by the American Anthropological Association as an experimental digital platform aimed at accelerating the scholarly book review process and expanding conversations around newly published work. Keywords: book; forum; year
- Dear Science And Other Stories by Keith, Kerry (2023) - This triangulation of here-ongoing-latent liberation provides a foothold of theorizing black livingness, where futures and histories comingle to exceed scientific- including social scientific- determinism. The book’s aim is to point to black livingness that surpasses the “plantocratic- colonial registers” of academic sciences (145). Keywords: book; mckittrick; science; stories
- The Evolution of Everything: The Patterns and Causes of Big History (2023): By Brian Villmoare by Doran, Timothy (2023) - Timothy Doran is Associate Professor of Ancient History and Big History at California State University – Los Angeles, where he teaches Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Ancient Near Eastern history, Ancient Religion, World History, and Big History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 416 pp., ISBN 978-1-108-79732-0 Keywords: Big History – Anthropology – Consilience – Evolution – History This book, The Evolution of Everything, is the latest entry into the interdisciplinary field known as Big History. Keywords: big; book; evolution; history
- The Face of Peace: Government Pedagogy amid Disinformation in Colombia (2022): By Gwen Burnyeat by del Nido, Juan M. (2023) - Formally declaring the conflict an internal war opened it to international humanitarian law and to a liberal peace paradigm; Chapter 2 examines how, in peace pedagogy, this paradigm is propelled forward by a “rationality drive” that sees its own work of explaining peace as technical as opposed to political in both the conversational sense of “governmental” and in the sense of the given hierarchy of values of a worldview (104). The Face of Peace is the result of Burnyeat’s ethnography of peace pedagogy, its bureaucrats, and their ardent belief that disagreement is a misunderstanding in need of a technical key. Keywords: agreement; book; peace; pedagogy
- Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living (2022): By Dimitris Xygalatas by Mason, Paul (2023) - Ritual is an accessible launching pad to learn more about anthropology, to prompt students to ponder anthropological questions, and to inspire new research on human rituals. The front cover, featuring what appears to be a photo of a tea ritual, depicts ritual practices at the other end of the spectrum. Keywords: anthropology; book; practices; ritual; xygalatas
- Field Manual for the Archaeology of Ritual, Religion, and Magic (2022): By Augé, C. Riley by Meinsen, Jamie (2023) - In addition to this, Augé does a commendable job of covering a wide range of religious beliefs. The rituals and religious beliefs of Native Americans, Indigenous Peoples, Asians, and Africans have been presented in popular media as a homogenous mass with no regard for accuracy, understanding, or regional variations in cultural practices and beliefs. Keywords: beliefs; book; chapter; rituals
- Virtanen by Virtanen, Pirjo Kristiina (2023) - The types of jus7ce drawn from localized cases, include spectral jus7ce (Chapter 1 by Govindrajan), transi7onal jus7ce (Chapter 2 by Lyons), mul7world jus7ce (Chapter 5 by Marder), and genera7ve jus7ce (Chapter 7 by Lee). Durham/ London: Duke University Press, 284 pp., ISBN: 978-1-4780-1889-6 This edited volume starts with the ques7on who benefits from mul7species jus7ce, and it remains a central ques7on throughout the book. Keywords: book; jus7ce; species
- Edible People: The Historical Consumption of Slaves and Foreigners and the Cannibalistic Trade in Human Flesh (2022): Christian Siefkes by Julia Johnston (2024) - This work uncovers a deep, untold history of cannibalism by asking questions that have been avoided in most academic literature, confronting the “what,” “why,” and most chillingly “how” of cannibalistic practices around the world. These chapters examine the feelings of desperation caused by starvation, giving the book’s first example of a defined state resorting to cannibalistic practices, and showing the fluidity of social acceptance in terms of cannibalism. Keywords: book; cannibalism; practice
- 2023 Year in Review by Groupp, Emilia; Rodineliussen, Rasmus (2023) - Additionally, book reviews were appearing in print journals or hidden behind paywalls, limiting their impact and the readership who could access them. Based on the idea that book reviews are not just summaries of academic texts, but engagements with scholarship, ideas and authors, the purpose of the Forum is thus to facilitate connections and exchange between authors and readers within and outside of anthropology. Keywords: author; book; forum; reviews; work; year
- Negative ecologies: Fossil fuels and the discovery of the environment: By David Bond by Betti, Marianna (2024) - Case studies used by the author include the trans-Alaskan pipeline, coastal communities devastated by oil spills, toxic fallout from spills, contaminated waters, scorched forests and disappearing mangroves. It is a case of capital funded scientific knowledge and scientific expertise that formalize, sterilize, and naturalize the impact of oil industry disaster. Keywords: bond; book; chapter; oil; spill
- Book review by Brito-Mayor, Aitor (2024) - Dogs: Archaeology beyond Domestication, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 273 pp., ISBN 978-0-8130- 5746-0 Dogs: Archaeology beyond Domestication investigates a topic that has accompanied us since the late Paleolithic, for more than 15,000 years BCE (Boschin et al. 2020): relationships between dogs and humans and their diverse manifestations. The book does not seek to offer a new explanation for how these relationships arose, instead it highlights their meaning and consequences for humans and dogs through case studies. Keywords: analysis; book; chapter; dogs; humans; material
- A Book of Waves (2023): By Stefan Helmreich by ley, lukas (2024) - Readers learn to ponder waves like wave scienOsts, the main figures of the book. “A Book of Waves,” the third monograph by Helmreich, shows how to think with waves. Keywords: book; chapter; helmreich; infrastructure; knowledge; scienosts; waves
- AIMÉE JOYCE, 2014, History, neighbourliness and discord on the Polish-Belarusian frontier. Canon Pyon: Sean Kingston Publishing, 207 pp, ISBN 9781912385522 by Halemba, Agnieszka (2024) - The idea of what borderland is or should be has been in a Polish context shaped by discourses and state organisational practices taking place where Joyce conducted her research; other border regions in Poland received much less research attention. Joyce refers to practices of orientalization and exoticization, of exploiting difference for tourist purposes but she also points out that so-called “dark tourism,” so much present in Poland in general, is not that prominent as it could be in this region, which can be better understood in light of description and analysis of spectre of Jewish presence analysed in Chapter 5. Chapter 3 presents some of the history of this region, in a very concise form, for readers not acquainted with it. Keywords: book; chapter; joyce
- Book Review: In The Valley of Kauravas by Dewari, Abhijeet Singh (2024) - Gods as Agents highlights how deities like Raja Karan require 2 oracles and drums to exercise their agency, with Sax using an example of an American voter to explain this concept. The first takes place on a winter afternoon in 1994, where Sax joins Rajmahon (the Vazir of Karan), Ram Prasad Nautiyal (God’s Brahmin oracle), and Raja Karan, who, through his oracle, predicts the future and resolves disputes. Keywords: book; chapter; gods; karan; sax
- Traumatic Pasts in Asia: History, Psychiatry and Trauma from the 1930s to Present by El Hawary, Nouran (2024) - Most case studies provide a profound critique to the expansion of Western psychiatric diagnostic categories like ‘trauma’ and its concomitant ‘PTSD’ as objective categories in recognizing psychological suffering and their potential incongruity in non-Western contexts. The book includes twelve case studies examining social, cultural, and political manifestations of psychological trauma. Keywords: book; ptsd; studies; trauma
- Inside the Invisible Cage: How Algorithms Control Workers (2024): By Hatim Rahman by Katalinić, Višnja (2025) - The “cold start problem” refers to the challenge new workers face when entering a platform - they must build a reputation from scratch, regardless of their prior experience outside the platform. The book also proposes practical reforms, such as allowing new workers to hide their wages during their first few projects (to offset the “cold start problem”) and setting clearer expectations about algorithmic errors. Keywords: book; control; platform; workers
- Ritual: What It Is, How It Works, and Why (2022): By Robbie Davis-Floyd and Charles D. Laughlin by Pinal, María (2024) - The first chapter introduces how ritual symbols enter and interact with different areas of the brain, synchronizing physical sensations, emotion, meaning, and intellect. Chapter four presents a.particularly intriguing topic—states of consciousness. Keywords: book; chapter; ritual
- Dissonant Records: Close Listening to Literary Archives (2024): By Tanya Elizabeth Clement by Long, Christopher (2024) - Dissonant Records: Close Listening to Literary Archives, 1st ed., Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press., ISBN 0-262-37922-8 In Dissonant Records: Close Listening to Literary Archives, Tanya E. Clement argues that spoken word audio recordings are underrepresented in archival institutions and neglected in literary scholarship. Clement draws our attention to the unwieldy nature of audio recording as a medium with technical limitations in both recording and playback. Keywords: book; clement; listening; recordings
- Resurgent life: How to flourish with what's left by Thompson, Matthew D (2017) - One of the successes of this book is the way Tsing balances thinking through mushrooms and the sensual 5 experiences of mushrooming. “Is it about mushrooms,” she asked, “or the end of the world?” Keywords: assemblage; book; capitalism; matsutake; mushroom; tsing; world
- Nuclear Ghost Atomic Livelihoods in Fukushima's Gray Zone by Kılınç, Atilla (2025) - The overarching hypothesis of Nuclear Ghost is that the “Fukushima disaster, determined by Morimoto as the TEPCO accident to emphasize corporate responsibility, cannot be adequately understood by biomedical and technoscientific measures of radiation exposure, but instead by situated, lived experiences of people living in Minamisōma and adjacent regions. At its most essential level, then, Nuclear Ghost is a radical departure from mainstream disaster ethnographies because it refuses radiation-based narratives of nuclear disasters. Keywords: book; disaster; ghost; morimoto
- A Practical Guide to Oral History by Fazel, Solaiman M (2017) - For Sommer oral history is more than merely documenting and preserving data stored in memories. 1 A Practical Guide to Oral History Review by Solaiman M. Fazel Practicing Oral History in Historical Organizations by Barbara W. Sommer Left Coast Press, 2015 Barbara Sommer’s (2015) Practicing Oral History in Historical Organizations is a welcome addition to the field of qualitative research methodology. Keywords: book; history; sommer
- Heartfelt Research by Baptiste, Eric (2017) - Thus, her research adds to the scholarship on language development in children, a research area that is lacking in linguistics literature. Even though there are more recorded examples of language development and pidgin development by children, the way the book is written makes it very moving. Keywords: book; language
Anthropology
- Structural Conditions of the Mind: Global Contexts, Concerns, and Solutions for Global Mental Health from Medical Anthropology by Hinrichsen, Megan Bond (2018) - The volume opens with introductory chapters by editors Korht, Mendenhall, and Peter J. Brown on anthropological perspectives on mental health, historical background on medical anthropology’s role in global mental health, and anthropological methods in global mental health research. This volume pays particular attention to the role of contextual factors in global mental health, especially the structural influences on mental health. Keywords: anthropology; chapters; health; section; volume
- Perceptions of “Intra-disciplinary” Unity and Division by Tricarico, Anthony R. (2018) - Paul Shakman addresses how intra-disciplinary theoretical applications may serve as both unifying and dividing forces in chapter two, titled “‘It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time:’ The Fate of Cultural Evolution in Cultural Anthropology.” He further demonstrated that cross-cultural perspective may serve as the best model of bridging sub-field divisions through the incorporation of his work in Ancient Greece. Keywords: anthropology; archaeology; field; rieger
- How to Become Part of Anthropology by Mojica, Stephanie (2018) - Unlike some career-oriented books, Nolan’s work does not end with the reader having successfully finished graduate school. Nolan, a professor at Purdue University in Indiana and author of other books such as Development Anthropology (Routledge 2018) and Anthropology in Practice: Building a Career Outside the Academy (Lynne Rienner Publishers 2013), has certainly seen many people’s success stories and pitfalls during his career. Keywords: anthropology; career; chapter; nolan
- What does an international anthropology of the US say about the global practice of the discipline? by Freidenberg, Judith Noemi (2018) - Wulff speaks of the cultural transmission of US culture through the media as “anticipatory socialization” (p. 39) to the US; Hannerz comments that “…the US is a global power influencing everybody’s lives…” (p. 108). For instance, since US culture has disseminated globally, it might not be perceived as an interesting 5 fieldsite. Keywords: anthropologists; anthropology; foreign; practice; research
- Disciplinary Progress, Progressivism, and Professionalism: Re-politicizing D/development paths forward by Fazzino, David V (2019) - Throughout the text, but particularly in this chapter, Gardner and Lewis provide the reader with numerous case studies to support their framework for an analysis of development projects. These lenses are particularly useful frameworks for utilizing critical thinking in regards to project development at all scales, further illustrating the value of anthropological analysis. Keywords: anthropology; development
- Can the ethnographic film and Psychological anthropology become allies? by Senécal-Lirette, Véronique (2019) - This book is intended to complement the stories and themes explored in the films, and to shed light on the contribution of ethnographic film to psychological anthropology. The first part of the book, Steps Towards a Visual Psychological Anthropology, presents the advantages of and interest in ethnographic film, such as the transparency of the fieldwork and access to emotions and intersubjectivity. Keywords: anthropology; film; health
- Why the world needs (medical) anthropologists: Lessons from a (more than just a) handbook on medical anthropology by Douglas, Cristina (2019) - Key words: medical anthropology; global health; structural violence; structural inequality. Medical anthropology is probably one of the fastest growing sub-disciplines of anthropology. Keywords: anthropology; case; health; volume
- Ethnography of an Ethnographer: Review of Autobiography of an Archive by Nicholas B. Dirks by Ghosh, Abhik (2015) - Ethnography of an Ethnographer: A Post-Colonial History of Caste and Other Issues Review by Abhik Ghosh Autobiography of an Archive: A Scholar's Passage to India by Nicholas B. Dirks Columbia University Press, 2015 In India, the tradition of colonial and post-colonial studies has often dominated the world of many of the history departments in a number of Universities. The essays written in this book span over twenty five years, and also become an annotated addition and commentary on other works by Dirks. Keywords: anthropology; dirks; government; history; work
- An anthropology of temporality: In Search of Lost Time, or why time should never get lost by Panagiotopoulos, Christos (2019) - Finally, ‘time work as relational’ assembles the instances where individuals are actively creating temporalities and managing time through social and intersubjective negotiations. But it is also a concept of agency since the temporal experience within socio-historical contexts is constantly modified and negotiated, an enterprise he qualifies 4 as ‘time work,’ or ‘temporal agency.’ Keywords: anthropology; temporality; time; work
- Think like an anthropologist and act as a contrarian by Sukarieh, Mayssoun Sukarieh (2020) - The book draws extensively on two seminal articles written by Nader on “studying up” and “controlling processes,” both of which had a significant impact on several generations of anthropologists in the US and beyond. Supporting this work is the committedly comparative nature of Nader’s anthropological approach: this constituted a call to anthropologists to study their own societies while studying other societies as comparison, in order to help unravel how controlling processes work in different situations and contexts. Keywords: anthropology; control; nader
- Year In Review by Groupp, Emilia (2019) - As a journal that exclusively publishes book reviews, we have the privilege of staying abreast of the newest publications in the field. The aim of the Forum at large is to facilitate a smooth and quick venue for book reviews written for a wide audience. Keywords: anthropology; reviews; year
- Anthropological knowledge production by Cidrelius, Daniel (2020) - If, primarily, the intended readership of the book had been emerging anthropologists the title may have been put differently i.e., ‘The Craft of Anthropology – Exploring the lives we could have led’ accentuating a contextualized perspective on anthropological knowledge production. It expands perspectives on social lives and cultural phenomena. Keywords: anthropology; chapter; eriksen
- Playing with Possibilities by Krishnan, Shweta (2020) - The author Anand Pandian sets up the premise of this book in a conversation with the indigenous Métis scholar Zoe Todd on the subtle and everyday forms of Othering that continue to lace the discipline of anthropology, marginalizing certain bodies and bodies of work, while continuing to canonize others. Together, they wonder how to make anthropology more open to play, plurality and possibility, even as it stubbornly clings to old paradigms of knowing and allows “the bony white hands of the forefathers” to constantly “claw us back” (3). Keywords: anthropology; humanity; pandian; world
- What an Event Does/Is (and What Does/Is Not): Review of In the Event by Lotte Meinert & Bruce Kapferer (eds) by González Gálvez, Marcelo (2016) - The different articles comprising the volume are specific analysis of different events, which in turn could be comprehended as ongoing events in themselves, and whose reading may bear the potential of generative action on the thoughts of their readers. In doing this, the contributors argue against considering events as mere illustrations of more general social issues, and thus as accessories – or adornments – of anthropological descriptions, positioning them instead as the axis of ethnographic analysis. Keywords: analysis; anthropology; chapter; connections; event
- Why We Should Care About the Radical Origins of Anthropology by glowacki, luke (2021) - Whatever their foibles as humans, Boas and his circle were reacting against a system that sought to entrench race as biologically real and a foundation for social policy. As such, despite their emphasis on cultures as static, their lack of realization that many of these cultures were not dying but transforming, and their failure to recognize that the peoples whose culture they were studying cared about the dissemination of their cultural practices, it is clear that we still owe a great debt to these revolutionaries for challenging a system that sought to build social policy on a false belief of races as real and ranked, pathologize non-Victorian heteronormative gender roles, and viewed non-American and European cultures as decidedly less than equal. Keywords: anthropology; boas; king
- Behind the Scenes at American Anthropologist by lange, marc (2021) - In the introduction, Chibnik recounts his way to his editorial position at AA and sets the stage for the following chapters by providing context about academic journals in general and about AA in particular. He reflects on his likes and dislikes about editing AA and comments on recent developments at the journal (under his successor Deborah Thomas), the journal's future and the future of academic journals in general. Keywords: anthropology; chibnik; journal
- Reconstruction of the Anthropology of Identity by Cidrelius, Daniel (2021) - ISBN: 978 1 7868 0004 6 Keywords: anthropological history of ideas, anthropology’s historical identity, anthropological knowledge production, reconciliation of social and natural science, building an anthropology of contemporary identity This volume consisting of fourteen chapters aims at updating and reconstructing the anthropology of identity. Theorizing the world as an overheated space of living, Eriksen and Schober contribute to developing a particular grammar to speak about intensified contact between contemporary identity formations in various places of the world. Keywords: anthropology; chapter; identity; world
- Two Perspectives on Decolonizing Ethnography by Uimonen, Paula; Masimbi, Husein (2021) - Paula Uimonen is professor of social anthropology at Stockholm University, Sweden, with fieldwork experience from Nigeria and Tanzania. Decolonizing anthropology is a challenge, especially developing enough studies that are not biased or based on colonial interpretations and approaches of the so-called West. Keywords: anthropology; authors; research
- Taking Control of Your Health: Review of Neoliberal Health Organizing: Communication, Meaning, and Politics by Mohan J. Dutta by Fazzino, David V (2016) - Culture is a barrier to be overcome in neoliberal health organizing and those that assumedly possess culture cannot be trusted to effectively participate in neoliberal health organizing, rather local knowledge and peoples are neglected, dismissed as irrelevant, or obstacles to expert knowledge. Chapter 5, “NGOs, Health Communication and Democracy,” discusses the role of NGOs as sites of local dissemination of global health communication. Keywords: anthropology; development; dutta; health; neoliberal
- Toward an Anthropology of Evil? by Clark, Tom (2021) - In their very welcome edited collection of essays, Engaging Evil: A Moral Anthropology, William Olsen and Thomas Csordas argue that evil is an existential feature of human relations. Toward an Anthropology of Evil? Review by Tom Clark William C. Olsen and Thomas J. Csordas, 2019, Engaging evil: A Moral Anthropology. Keywords: anthropology; csordas; evil; use
- Anthropology’s many pasts: frustrations, engagements, and commitments by Barron, Nicholas (2021) - The historical actors centered within these works are often Euro-American scholars with allegiance to “the father of cultural anthropology,” Franz Boas. The bulk of the volume’s chapters sit within a subset of the history of anthropology that one might call “Boas studies.” Keywords: anthropology; boas; chapters; history; volume
- Energy Anthropology by Groupp, Emilia (2021) - The study responds to major questions within energy studies and policy circles that focus on how entrenched patterns of energy consumption can be altered, particularly in France, where it appears more than ever locked into nuclear energy as a primary source of electricity. Ethnographies of Power is part of this wider renewal, and each of the core chapters in the volume focuses on contemporary entanglements of energy and political power within the matrices of energy production and consumption. Keywords: anthropology; chapter; energy; power; production; state
- Ethical Approaches to Human Remains A Global Challenge in Bioarchaeology and Forensic Anthropology by Ghalem, Yassmine (2022) - Ethical approaches to human remains: A global challenge in bioarchaeology and forensic anthropology, Springer, 649 pp, ISBN 978-3-030-32925-9 Keywords: Ethics in Biological and Physical Anthropology, Ethics in Forensic Anthropology, Treatment of Human Remains, Repatriation of Human Remains, Multidisciplinary Amongst sciences that study the human body, anthropology has a critical and dark history surrounding the treatment of human remains. Authors discuss consent, dignity of the dead and human right after death, representativeness of human remains in research, unethical past practices, and ethical transformations in the profession of human anatomy, and issues raised by the online human remains trade. Keywords: anthropology; ethics; human; remains
- Anthropology against, of, and with data practices by Ojani, Chakad (2022) - Keywords: data practices, datafication, ethnography, methodology, theory The past years have seen a surge in anthropological studies of data. Even so, the essays variously demonstrate how new data practices transform what counts as data, which does indeed point at certain kinds of change. Keywords: anthropology; data; essay; practices
- Towards an Anthropology of Data by Ojani, Chakad (2022) - Keywords: data practices, datafication, ethnography, methodology, theory The past years have seen a surge in anthropological studies of data. Even so, the essays variously demonstrate how new data practices transform what counts as data, which does indeed point at certain kinds of change. Keywords: anthropology; data; essay; practices
- Multiple Nature-Cultures, Diverse Anthropologies (2019): Edited by Casper Bruun Jensen and Atsuro Morita by López, Elisa M (2023) - Skrydstrup’s ethnography of a Greenlandic ice drilling research station reveals how climatologists operated within a naturalist cosmology while also enacting a reflective layer of multiple natures (“versions” versus “layers” of nature) Skyrdstrup’s chapter highlights not only how proof is produced in the service of a “new nature” for “the global politics of the anthropocene” (p. 61), but how acknowledging scientific conceptions of multiple nature could shift relations between anthropologists and scientific interlocutors in exciting directions. Keywords: anthropology; chapter; nature; new; relations
- Barron by Barron, Nicholas (2023) - In terms of form, Ethnographers before Malinowski: Pioneers of Anthropological Fieldwork, 1870-1922 stands in contrast to similar edited volumes such as the University of Nebraska Press’s ongoing Histories of Anthropology Annual—headed by Regna Darnell and Frederic Gleach and the University of Wisconsin Press’s now defunct History of Anthropology Series— formerly under the editorial eye of George Stocking and, later, Richard Handler. Such histories have humbling qualities for practicing anthropologists who may have largely absorbed the discipline’s past through corridor talk and anecdotal asides. Keywords: anthropology; colonial; malinowski; rosa
- The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall – Language, Memory, and Indigenous California. by Anbert, Lærke Cecilie (2024) - Demands to dename Kroeber Hall therefore, was about much more than just Alfred Kroeber, but about institutional ignorance and misconduct. Garret argues that the discussion about denaming (or unnaming) Kroeber Hall was never really about Kroeber, but about UC Berkeley’s unacknowledged settler colonial legacy. Keywords: anthropology; berkeley; garret; ishi; kroeber
- Stumbling on/in Evaluation Anthropology by Püsök, Imola (2017) - Evaluation being defined as “a study that seeks to scientifically determine the value of something for some kind of utilization” (p. 25), and anthropology as the “study of culture and its role in articulating what humans do as members of societies” (p. 72), the overlap that evaluation anthropology becomes (p.71), is inevitably a discipline laden with ideas and relations of power. In its eight chapters, the book ambitiously aims to introduce evaluation to anthropologists, anthropology to evaluators, and to map the difficulties, controversies, challenges and possible rewards of what doing evaluation anthropology means. Keywords: anthropology; evaluation; research
- The Disabled Anthropologist (2025): Edited by Sumi Colligan and Anna Jaysane-Darr by Marie, Aron Seegers (2025) - The Disabled Anthropologist, featuring ten auto- ethnographic chapters by disabled anthropologists from a wide variety of subdisciplines and career stages, sheds light on the rich experiences of disabled ethnographers. https://proxy1.library.virginia.edu/login?url=https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781003476726 https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?ctpPCa https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?ctpPCa https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?ctpPCa 2 The volume starts off with disabled anthropologists theorizing the ableist underpinnings of anthropology. Keywords: anthropology; https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?euqioo; https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?euqioo https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?euqioo; pain
- Shared Country, Different Stories: An Anthropologist’s Journey (2025): By David Trigger by Rose, James (2025) - 1 TRIGGER, DAVID S., 2025, Shared Country, Different Stories: An Anthropologist’s Journey, New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 248., ISBN 978-1-83695-148-3 KEY WORDS: Forensic and Expert Social Anthropology, FESA, Native Title; Land Rights, Cultural Heritage Protection, Legal Pluralism, Customary Law, Indigenous Australia, Aboriginal Australia Shared Country, Different Stories traces the 50-year career of Professor David Trigger, a leading member of Australia’s fourth generation of forensic and expert social anthropologists (FESAs) (Rose 2024a; 2023; Trigger 2023; 2025a). References Asche, Wendy, and David Trigger. 2011. Keywords: aboriginal; anthropology; australia; land; rose; trigger
- Anthropology and Philosophy: Creating a Workspace for Collaboration by Kloth, Christopher (2017) - As one learns in reading this book, much can be accomplished when, in addition to considering other disciplines in their own individual work, authors are able to develop larger projects and conversations while working in their respective disciplines, with an eye towards collaboration. By creating this “workspace” 2 the editors allow for joint work, in which the authors work in a collaborative manner, while still creating scholarship within their respective discipline. Keywords: anthropology; hope; trust; work
- Anthropology of the Middle East: An Overview by Fazel, Solaiman M (2017) - In the final chapter of unit one, Steven C. Caton agrees with Saud Joseph 3 that “Middle East studies has become a global undertaking” (p 75). He states that unlike the urban studies of the past, which focused on the topics of globalizing metropolis and popular neighborhoods, recent studies in the emergent field of Middle East 6 urban studies has taken on the task of studying small or medium size cities. Keywords: anthropology; chapter; east; middle; middle east; studies; unit
People
- Secret Sex, Anonymous Desire: Review of Love Stories by Paul Manning by Cova, Victor (2015) - Because the encounter takes place with other people sleeping nearby, any disagreement would quickly lead to the pair being discovered and shamed. He also contrasts these to other forms of anonymity that appear in the 20th century in Georgia thanks to the printing press and the development of the internet. Keywords: desire; love; people
- Details of Experience on Health and Culture: Review of Community Health Narratives: A Reader by Emily Mendenhall & Kathy Wollner (eds) by Jayaraman, Nirmala (2015) - The narratives in this book, depicting different communities and customs in rich detail, focus on common social and cultural factors that shape community health (4). Reading health narratives can inspire empathy and interest among general readers. Keywords: health; narratives; people
- Together We Rise by Senécal-Lirette, Véronique (2018) - The latter shares a particularly revealing testimony of the reality of black people in everyday life, mentioning that she is afraid every day for the safety of her brother, who is a male nurse, because some people are afraid simply because of the color of his skin. At this point, it could have been interesting for the documentary to feature the speeches that Raquel Willis or Janet Mock made during the event speaking for trans people, particularly when taking into account that black transgender people are widely persecuted and at risk for sexual violence and transphobia. Keywords: documentary; march; people; women
- From Mogadishu to Melbourne – rediscovering place in a globalized world by Gaini, Firouz (2020) - The main body of the book, nine chapters organized in two parts entitled ‘Emplacement’ and ‘Displacement,’ discusses and analyzes the experiences and life stories of the two main protagonists, Omar and Halima, who with their storytelling (or ‘story-building’), 'have opened up the possibility of understanding human emplacement as located at the crossroads between the closeness of place and the infinity of the universe' (213). Drawing on Ricoeur’s concept of memory places, but connecting it to the present, Lems argues that memory places illustrate the 'lived messiness of life’s temporal flows.' Keywords: lems; people; place
- Grid Desires, or How to Tame a Three-Headed Dragon: Review of Yearnings in the Meantime by Stef Jansen by HadžiMuhamedović, Safet (2016) - Jansen shows how the same individuals who dismiss Dayton BiH structures may become co-opted into its perpetuation. The example of Dobrinja points to a seemingly paradoxical situation where a desire for the (‘normal’) state becomes a resistance to the ‘Dayton BiH’, which is, for better or for worse, also some kind of state. Keywords: bih; dayton; dobrinja; jansen; people; state
- Being Ourselves for You: There’s no Business like Ethnological Show Business by Shunmugan, Natalia Ann (2022) - Are local film makers the only ones who can tell stories about Goma or can a foreigner like Postma also tell a story, and ultimately, who controls that narrative? Postma’s 3 film shows that the Western ‘gaze’ is being contested by local photographers and film makers such as Bartitegera, Ley and Betty – but their progress is stilted by lack of funding and control over their narrative. Keywords: film; people; postma
- Crossing: How We Label and React to People on the Move by Backman, Aina (2022) - While legal binaries are used for differentiating between people based on status, the parameters that go into navigating them by authorities greatly vary. Legal binaries disseminated to multiple categories nevertheless orientates around a rigid center that allows efficient organization of a shared reality – enlightenment out of looming chaos, but the given order remains destructive to some while productive to others. Keywords: binaries; binary; hamlin; people
- Bridges through Conservation Development: Review of Beyond the Lens of Conservation by Eva Keller by Trombley, Jeremy (2016) - It might, in light of Keller’s analysis, be worth imagining the productive possibilities that the friction between the Swiss who visit the Zurich Zoo exhibit and the Malagasy who live near Masoala park might produce. By looking at the way that people from both Switzerland and Madagascar understand one another by way of this national park and its sister exhibit at the Zurich Zoo, the author is able to examine the way that conservation projects mediate peoples’ perceptions of one another over great distances. Keywords: madagascar; park; people
- The Sámi in Urban Areas: Revitalizing and Reinventing Indigenous Identities in Times of Heightened Urbanization by Shani, Serah (2023) - Most of the authors of this book are themselves urban Sámi. Moreover, during that time, invoking a Sámi identity often provoked discrimination, causing people to hide their identity, making it even more difficult, or very nearly impossible, to find reliable population numbers, most urban Sámi people did not know they were Indigenous. Keywords: authors; people; sámi
- Ethics, Value, and Interaction: Bridging Natural and Social Histories in a Semiotic Framework by Weiss, Joseph Julian Ziems (2017) - Keane is quite clear that, whatever ethical affordances go into a given moment of ethical evaluation, what makes such moments take on significance in the world is that they take place in the context of social interaction. Social interaction, for Keane, is the focal point around which every scale of ethical affordance can converge, including “both those psychological processes that work beneath people’s normal awareness and the historical ones that may range beyond it” (26). Keywords: ethics; interaction; keane; life; people; university
- Fulfilling Sex Lives: Understanding People with Disabilities and Sexual Desire in Denmark and Sweden by Carranza, John A. (2017) - Another concern presented by the authors is disability studies’ insistence that people with disabilities teach nondisabled persons about disability. Loneliness and Its Opposite: Sex, Disability, and the Ethics of Engagement is a significant contribution to the body of literature on disability studies because it shows how sex and disability are contested or accepted in a given society by using Denmark and Sweden as examples of how welfare states handle both issues. Keywords: disabilities; people; sex
- Being Everywhere and Dreaming about Possible Places: An Interview on Danya Fast’s The Best Place by Ali, Hannah (2025) - 2 Danya Fast: The chapters in the book reflect where I began, in downtown Vancouver, and how I was drawn into the evolving possibilities of places for young people. From the outset, I was compelled to write in moments when young people refused assumptions about belonging to “street youth community” tied to a specific inner-city neighborhood. Keywords: fast; people; place
Women
- Hadza film review: ‘Last of the First’ by Power, Camilla (2018) - Even recently, the Tanzanian state almost destroyed Hadza culture at a stroke by offering the whole of Yaeda Valley to the Abu Dhabi royal family as a hunting ground. As has been seen with so many other First Nation cultures, Hadza interaction with Tanzanian education is going to be critical in determining how well Hadza culture will be sustained for the future. Keywords: hadza; human; women; years
- At the Crossroads of Care Work and Conversion: How Female Migrant Domestic Workers are Reworking Islam in the Arab Gulf by Marquez, Schuyler (2019) - Domestic workers, like other foreign workers, enter the Gulf through the kafeel system, a sponsorship program in which citizens of good legal standing can act as sponsors for migrant workers. Ahmad highlights that such work cannot only be read through a lens of precarity, and while subject to hierarchies and exclusion, domestic workers also in many ways traverse these boundaries as they perform affective labor for citizens’ families. Keywords: ahmad; women; workers
- Moving to Serve by Kraemer, Jonathan (2019) - Killias’ ethnography provides a unique, intimate and hugely important glimpse into this space control and disciplining, and draws attention to an aspect of contemporary labor migration that is seldom made a subject in the current literature on transnational labor migration, not least since few researchers ever gain such thorough access to these transitory disciplining spaces as Killias has. Keywords: labor migration; Southeast Asia; domestic workers; indentured labor; migration regime. Keywords: labor; migration; women
- Spiritual Journeys within the Patriarchy of Modern Thai Buddhism by Women Buddhist Practitioners by Teo, Sue Ann Ann (2020) - These women were and are renowned Thai women practitioners at local, national and international levels across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who have successfully navigated the patriarchal hierarchy of Thai Buddhist institutions. With the combination of biography and hagiography, Seeger has illuminated the various religious experiences of women practitioners and their modes of religious expression not only through the perceptions of the women practitioners themselves but also through their followers. Keywords: seeger; thai; women
- Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalisation of Motherhood by Loewe, Ronald (2023) - At present, at least thirty-eight states have such laws, and while some state laws were originally intended to protect pregnant women – who are at higher risk of domestic violence – such laws are increasingly used to prosecute rather than protect them. The second is the tendency to assume that a woman has complete control over the outcome of a pregnancy, or, as one South Carolina court held, “absent depraved conduct on the part of pregnant women, stillbirths do not occur and that all pregnancies produce healthy babies (42)”. Keywords: goodwin; laws; south; women
- Infertility: Review of Cosmopolitan Conceptions by Marcia Inhorn by McPherson, Naomi (2016) - Many cosmopolitan women choose childlessness; many women in noncosmopolitan countries have no such choices and have more children than they want. Finally, when I think about what I have read, it occurred to me that feminism, writ large, has failed infertile women. Keywords: countries; global; infertility; inhorn; women
- Rebuilding Community: Displaced Women and the Making of a Shia Ismaili Muslim Sociality (2023): Shenila Khoja-Moolji by Munazir, Shahana (2023) - It is an insightful scholarly work that provides a rare, nuanced analysis of the experiences of Ismaili Muslim women who were displaced from East Africa and East Pakistan in the 1970s and settled in West Pakistan, England, Canada, and the United States. 2 The book consists of seven chapters engaging its audience in the wider discussions on religious community formation of diasporic Ismaili women and their placemaking activities. Keywords: ismaili; khoja; women
- Pious Peripheries: Runaway Women in Post-Taliban Afghanistan (2021): By Sonia Ahsan-Tirmizi by Salih, Mohammed (2023) - Keywords: Afghan women, Taliban, Khana-yi-aman, landay, Promiscuous modernity, honor, ethics, piety, selfhood. It unveils the underexplored narratives behind a shelter built to host Afghan women who have run away from their homes for different reasons (including abuse, rape, and violence). Keywords: aman; khana; taliban; women
- Best Laid Plans: Women Coming Of Age In Uncertain Times (2022): By Jessica Halliday Hardie by Sharma, Khushbu (2023) - Working class women are employed at low-paying jobs while poor women are coming from familial backgrounds in which everyone is struggling to get even a low-paying job. Middle class women come from familial backgrounds in which one or both the parents are in decent paying jobs and have a pretty reliable social circle. Keywords: class; women; working
- The Cancer within: Reproduction, Cultural Transformation, and Health Care in Romania (2022): By Cristina Alexandra Pop by Francis-Levin, Nina (2023) - Using history as the point of entry, Pop situates Romanian cervical cancer incidence and its prevention efforts (i.e., human papilloma virus In the end, in the wake of patriarchal pronatalism and amid newfound democracy, for Romanian women it is ultimately “control over one’s body that outweighs health” (91). Keywords: cancer; care; health; women
- Out to work: Migration, Gender, and the Changing Lives of Rural Women in Contemporary China (2016): By Arianne M. Gaetano by Hu, Tingting (2024) - To present “agency” of migrant women, this book presents rare cases of migrant survivors’ stories, those who successfully achieved class-transgression. Three factors are at work here: first, marriage is a key factor of migrant women’s eventual settlement and with interviewees being “unmarried” it automatically denotes more space of mobility and possibilities for them; second, a young age also plays a vital role in migrant women’s personal desires and aspirations, which are 3 identified as significant in the class-transgression process; third, the familiarity to technology also limits the interviewees to young and promising migrant women with more possibilities. Keywords: gaetano; migration; women
- Punching Back: Gender, Religion, and Belonging in Women-Only Kickboxing (2022): By Jasmijn Rana by Lanclus, Eilis (2025) - The chapter argues that women-only kickboxing is a secular means for realizing piety, challenging stereotypes of Muslim women as submissive or disempowered. Through her focus on women-only kickboxing classes, Rana reveals the ways in which racialized 2 narratives about young Muslim women are reproduced and resisted within Dutch society. Keywords: kickboxing; rana; women
- The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality and Humanity in Modern India (2022): By Shailaja Paik by Raj, Jayaseelan (2025) - Dalit Tamasha performers were inherently denied inclusion in the Assli (authentic), referring to the upper-caste individuals who claimed to embody the ‘modern, respectable Maharashtrian/Indian identity.’ The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality and Humanity in Modern India, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 422 pp., ISBN 9781503634084 Shailaja Paik’s The Vulgarity of Caste delves into the lives of Dalit women engaged in Tamasha, a theatrical art form prevalent in Maharashtra, western India. Keywords: caste; dalit; paik; women
Work
- Book Review Transnational Aging and Reconfigurations of Kin Work by Wolter, Nele (2020) - In the first part of the book, The Kin-scription of Older People into Care, Neda Deneva, Yanqiu Rachel Zhou and Kristin Elizabeth Yarris discuss intergenerational kin work by highlighting the transformations of care work within changing familial relations that are influenced by socioeconomic and political changes on the national and international level. This is particularly visible as kin care for their dying family member although they have other obligations in their busy lives. Keywords: aging; care; kin; work
- Rise Up, Organize, Protest: The Politics of Internships during the 21st Century by Shunmugan, Natalia Ann (2020) - David, Kyle and Marisa’s experiences expose the vectors of race, class and privilege which form the backbone of internships, and intersect with themes such as inter-generational inequality, low social mobility, and the growing global social and geographical divide. These interns highlight the urgent need to change the way internships are awarded by making them paid opportunities that are truly open to all – a ‘democratization’ of internships – which would change the power dynamics around policy making. Keywords: interns; internships; power; work
- Welfare for Profits' Sake by Arqueros, Francisco (2020) - In 2012, over 40 million Americans received food assistance from Emergency Food Providers (EFPs) such as faith-based institutions, senior centers, grassroots community organizations and college campuses; 47 million received (public) Food Stamps. Why has there been such a high number of people receiving food assistance in an expanding economy close to full employment? Keywords: assistance; food; welfare; work
- “The future lives with us”: Diversity work and processes of change in the Church of Sweden by Gemzöe, Lena (2021) - An important feature of these congregations is that in spite of low numbers of members, the level of activity is high with many people coming to the church to pray, to ask for aid and to attend church services. Helgesson Kjellin structures her ethnography around the church building as a physical place that offers different rooms for encounters between people, such as the premises of the congregations where ”språkcaféer” (language cafés) or soup kitchens can be organized, “kyrkbacken” (the space outside the church interior) for spontaneous meetings and the church interior for church services, spontaneous visits and individual prayers – the latter practice led to the creation of the side altar mentioned above. Keywords: church; diversity; helgesson; sweden; work
- Mickel, Allison. 2021. Why Those Who Shovel Are Silent: A History of Local Archaeological Knowledge and Labor. by Marti Gil, Irene (2023) - Furthermore, she conducted a small- scale experiment that involves inclusive photography to show the workers’ stance on archaeological work. Hodder’s vision of community engagement in Çatalhöyük is an exceptional example of how leadership can transform archaeological work. Keywords: knowledge; laborers; mickel; work
- The Subtle Arts of Ethnography and Lineology: Review of The Life of Lines by Tim Ingold by Mohammed, Sideeq; Heathcote-Márcz, Felicity (2016) - The leading of life Ingold conceives of as at once ‘not yet’ and ‘already there’ (p.118), is both this in- between-ness and what is meant by his serious invitation to ‘lay down a line’ (p.118). In many ways then, The Life of Lines may be seen as the product of an entire life subjected to the “retrospective judgement” which, for Ingold (2014), defines “ethnographicness”. Keywords: ethnography; ingold; life; lines; meshwork; work
- Gender, Power, and Non-Governance: Is Female to Male as NGO Is to State? by Emily Selby Smith (2024) - In Chapter 4, Tess Altman, and in Chapter 5, Smita Mishra Panda and Annapurna Devi Pandey, explore how the devaluation of women’s labor has now opened a political alternative for women to critically engage with NGO work and advocacy. By discussing the feminization of work and limiting factors for NGOs in this section, it is evident that Ortner’s framework of State/NGO Male/Female impacts the reception of NGO work around the world. Keywords: ngo; ngos; state; work
- Hijras, Lovers, Brothers: Surviving Sex and Poverty in Rural India (2021): by Vaibhav Saria by Dewari, Abhijeet Singh (2025) - The book Hijras, Lovers, Brothers: Surviving Sex and Poverty in Rural India by Vaibhav Saria presents a profound ethnographic exploration of the lived realities of hijras. Saria’s investigation was driven by three primary objectives: to analyze the complex dynamics between hijras and their biological families, to examine how rural settings increasingly provided more sustainable opportunities for hijras compared to urban environments, and to explore the nature of sexual interactions and intimate relationships within rural communities, where limited anonymity shaped social and personal dynamics. Keywords: chapter; hijras; saria; sex; work
- Tracing afterlives of ethnography: in pursuit of engagements and dialogues with publics by Sharma, Sarbani (2017) - Bessire makes an interesting case for ‘Indigenized public ethnography,’ which is predicated on nonconformity and presumes its subjects to be constantly transforming, as against ‘tactical public ethnography’ that takes nonconformity as evidence of insufficiency or illegitimacy (p.151). In the epilogue to the volume, Fassin describes, through his own ethnographic work in France and South Africa, how the two operations of ‘popularization’ and ‘politicization’ (though both are not always necessarily interlinked) are critical to the practice of public ethnography. Keywords: chapter; ethnography; publics; volume; work
Health
- Visions of Care in a Time of Medical Multiplicity by Backe, Emma Louise (2018) - Nor are the boundaries between transnational biomedicine and public health care easily parsed—instead, Medicine in the Meantime dwells in the in-between, the systems of medical multiplicity emblematic of 21st-century entanglements between the local and the global, and the shifting terrain of support amidst changing notions of governmental responsibility and humanitarian longevity. The mutable landscape of health in McKay’s Mozambican networks also serves to reflect upon the role of ethnography in public health practices, the techniques of listening and care that anthropologists can provide. Keywords: care; health; mckay; medicine; mozambique
- On the cusp of ‘modernity’: Ayurveda’s tryst with ‘development’ in Nepal by Kottai, Sudarshan R (2020) - The book consisting of six lengthy chapters, and adopts a semi- biographic approach focusing principally on eight formally trained Ayurvedic doctors wherein contemporary Ayurveda is “narrated through the subject lives and agency of its doctors” (4). Revolving around everyday narratives and practices of Ayurveda that are constructed by official discourses of the state, informal practitioners, biomedical specialists and political figures including the prime minister, Cameron presents a complicated and conflicted landscape of traditional Ayurveda at the cusp of disenfranchisement, delegitimization and extinction in Nepal. Keywords: ayurveda; cameron; health; nepal
- A Model for Involving Local Communities in Global Health Interventions: Review of Community Participatory Involvement by Linda M Whiteford & Cecilia Vindrola-Padros by Graham, Margaret A (2016) - Local community needs are seen as the responsibility of community members, different levels of political and civil authority, and non-governmental organizations” (p. 43). In this model, even though the engagement of community members is seen as intrinsic in the generation of changes, these changes are seen as requiring input and support from a wide range of stakeholders. Keywords: community; cpi; health; model; water
- Metrics: What Counts in Global Health: Review of Metrics by Vincanne Adams by Wallace, Lauren (2016) - Next, she describes the history and uses of the new gold standard in global health metrics – the randomized control trial (RCT). Finally, in a very brief concluding chapter, Adams explores future directions for social scientists’ meaningful engagements with global health metrics. Keywords: adams; data; health; metrics; ways
- Media, Medicine, Citizen, Capital: Theorizing the Production of Health and Disease by Robertson, William J (2017) - Third, they examined websites, polls and surveys by health organizations, and conducted focus groups to gauge the reception of health media among the public. Shifting back to a more analytical tone, Chapter 3 explores issues of genre and framing in health media, paying particular attention to how journalists deal with (and, indeed, reproduce) biomedical authority. Keywords: briggs; health; media
Author
- Becoming elite in a contested terrain: The post-colonial experiences of the Franco-Mauritian population in Mauritius by Shani, Serah (2018) - However, when new forms of political elites emerged, dominated by the Indo-Mauritians, the Franco-Mauritian elite’s expressions had to be adjusted and deconstructed to adapt to the new government, where excessive power use became rationed or expressed in non-coercive ways, taking, instead, more influential and persuasive forms. Salverda describes elite positions and categories as contested and fluid terrains. Keywords: author; elite; franco; mauritians
- Haunting Tourism: Review of Haunted Heritage by Michele Hanks by d'Hauteserre, Anne-Marie (2015) - The author announces her aims, such as unveiling how ghosts do play a special role in making history or in refashioning the past for their own aims; how ghost tourism provides an embodied means of evidencing ghosts; what types of nationalism and modes of populism ghost hunters (etc.) engage for their politico- social goals, even if they are only implicit. The author launches her discussion of ghost tourism with no working definition of the term, though we later learn that it is characterized by pleasure seeking (p. 64), an essentialist limited definition. Keywords: author; ghost; tourism; tourists
- Famished for Care: A Clinical Anthropology of Eating Disorders by Panagiotopoulos, Christos (2020) - She asserts that eating disorders are a major public health issue, which is heavily misunderstood, and largely underfunded both in research and caretaking with many patients neither getting enough, nor the right care, as a result of failing managed healthcare in the US. The author convincingly argues that eating disorders are a relational question, more than a medical or psychological one. Keywords: author; care; disorders; patients
- Neoliberalism, its critics and the modes of a known genre by del Nido, Juan M. (2020) - The first two chapters introduce La Salada, its people and economies, and Gago’s highly intricate theoretical reservoir: a Spinoza-Deleuze-post-colonial tradition combined with feminist critical theory and political economy. Similarly, whereas the author’s use of “neoliberal” and “liberal” as wholly interchangeable (4, 161, 220-222, 233…) is a common (and pejorative) rhetorical strategy amongst Argentine intellectual and social militancy, their unedited rendition in English is conversationally confusing at best (in certain contexts cultural liberalism and economic neoliberalism are antagonists) and passes for theoretical imprecision at worst. Keywords: author; gago; immigrants; neoliberalism
- Re-politicizing Tourism by Wood, Andrew (2022) - Yet there is a clear explanation for our selective memory when it comes to tourism history: “[it is] because we—as citizens, workers, tourists, researchers and politicians—have contributed to emptying tourism of any political meaning or praxis” (186). Yet as regional tourism development advanced, Celestún would not remain a small, relatively isolated fishing village. Keywords: author; azcárate; cancún; celestún; córdoba; industry; tourism
- Nourishing the Nation: Food as National Identity in Catalonia (2022): By Venetia Johannes by Banquiles, Venes Carmelo (2023) - 1 JOHANNES, VENETIA, 2020, Nourishing the Nation - Food as National Identity in Catalonia, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 278 pp., ISBN 978-1-78920-438-4 Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork and a deep reservoir of various works on Catalonia, Venetia Johaness’ Nourishing the Nation provides a succinct yet informative discussion on the pivotal role that food plays in the formation of Catalan identity, and how these quotidian objects serve as an impetus for pro-independence (and anti-independence) movements. In the second chapter, the author turns the attention to the culinary aspects that give Catalan food its peculiarity. Keywords: author; catalan; catalonia; food
- West African non-migrant youth in the wake of migration and transnationalism by Shani, Serah (2017) - 1 West African non-migrant youth in the wake of migration and transnationalism Review by Serah Shani Bush Bound: Young men and rural permanence in Migrants in West Africa by Paolo Gaibazzi Berghahn Books, 2015 Growing up in Sabi, therefore, young men are socialized to view migration as the fastest and most viable means to social and economic mobility. Keywords: author; men; sabi
- The New American Servitude: Political Belonging among African Immigrant Home Care Workers (2019): By Cati Coe by Shani, Serah (2024) - The author argues that “work conditions are interpreted by African care workers as indicative of the society at large” (p.4) and that “work is one site where political belonging is negotiated in everyday life” (p.8). To put more emphasis on the sometimes racial antagonism between African care workers and their patients, the author states that, “when Africans come to the United States, they encounter a racialized employment market, in which their Africanness, Blackness, and migrant status play major roles in how they are perceived (p.79) Keywords: african; author; belongingness; care; workers
- Dust Inside: Fighting and Living with Asbestos-Related Disasters in Brazil (2020): By Agata Mazzeo by Usman, Ramsha (2024) - Anti-asbestos activism has provided ARD sufferers with language, including political, judicial, and biomedical words, to think about and name their private experiences of exposure, illness, and grief in terms of injustice. Chapter 3, Suffering and Embodied Disasters, Engagement, is a look into anti-asbestos activism which gives workers the space to perform their victimhood as agents by developing a theoretical knowledge through their experiential knowledge of asbestos dangers. Keywords: activism; asbestos; author; knowledge
- Shaylih Muehlmann, 2024, Call the Mothers: Searching for Mexico’s Disappeared in the War on Drugs, Oakland, California: University of California Press, 264 pp., ISBN 9780520314573 by Aslam Aslam, Hammal (2025) - After undertaking a two- year-long search with minimal assistance from state authorities, Leticia finally found her daughter buried in a communal grave. State authorities often employed delay tactics and blamed the victims. Keywords: author; mexico; mothers; state
State
- Unfolding the Paradoxes of a Modern Liberal ‘Secular’ State: Studying Egypt by Ismailee, Sania (2018) - Mahmood undertakes an analysis of the rulings and judgements issued by Egyptian courts (in the first part of the chapter) and European Court of Human Rights (in the second part of the chapter) to show that regulation of religious minorities in both the Western and non-Western societies amount to promotion of the majority’s religious “values and sensibilities” (150) at the expense of the minorities. 1 Unfolding the Paradoxes of a Modern Liberal ‘Secular’ State: Studying Egypt Review by Sania Ismailee Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report By Saba Mahmood Princeton University Press, 2015 Saba Mahmood presents an interesting analysis of how secularism and modern liberal state, contrary to their claims of maintaining religious harmony, have exacerbated “interfaith inequalities” (2). Keywords: egypt; mahmood; state
- Gender, Disability, and Abandonment in the Aftermath of War by Saluk, Seda (2021) - Keywords: gender, disability, biopolitics, militarism, violence Sacrificial Limbs: Masculinity, Disability, and Political Violence in Turkey is a beautifully written ethnography of the everyday lives and political activism of disabled veterans of the armed conflict between the Turkish state and Kurdish guerillas. The book is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted by Salih Can Açıksöz in Istanbul between 2005 and 2008 with disabled veterans as they navigate memories of counter-guerilla warfare; friend, family, and advocacy networks; and debilitating healthcare and welfare regimes. Keywords: chapter; state; veterans
- Responsibility and its derivatives – going beyond the ‘standard’ critique of neoliberalism by Lenhard, Johannes (2021) - Adam shows how tackling HIV has been framed as a collective goal (of a healthy population) that can only be achieved by focusing on individual responsibility to practice ‘safe sex’ (without having to invoke communitarianism or altruism, p. 187), if need be enforced through punitive measures. Keywords: responsibility, care, health, neoliberalism. Keywords: responsibility; state
- From Production to Distribution: Review of Give a Man a Fish by James Ferguson by Laterza, Vito (2015) - From Production to Distribution: The Politics of Dependence and the Emerging Welfare State in Southern Africa Review by Vito Laterza Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the new politics of distribution by James Ferguson Duke University Press, 2015 James Ferguson’s latest book focuses on the rise of social welfare programmes in southern Africa, in the form of grants to low income and vulnerable groups, primarily the elderly, women and their children, and the disabled. Through a focus on direct cash transfers, the author brings together the anthropology of southern Africa, with the latest debates in development practice and anti-poverty activism. Keywords: africa; ferguson; southern; state
- EDYTA ROSZKO, 2021, Fishers, Monks and Cadres: Navigating State, Religion and the South China Sea in Central Vietnam, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 260 pp., ISBN 978-0-8248-9055-1. by Erich, Scott (2024) - These include (but are not limited to): state and religion, religion and folklore, local and national, and many other categorial frameworks that frequently seep into one another. Roszko’s ethnography would be an excellent addition to undergraduate courses on religion and religious worlds, on states or bureaucracy, or on ethnography more broadly to show how certain thinkers (e.g. Webb Keane, Michel de Certeau, et al.) are taken up theoretically and practically in an ethnographic study. Keywords: religion; roszko; state; vietnam
Life
- Where Sanskrit Meets Silicon: A Study of Hinduism in the Heartland of Information Technology by Devarajan, Arthi (2018) - Srinivas approaches these snapshots of modern Indian religious life through the experiential dimension of wonder, and relates wonder to modes of traditional ritual culture, as well as emergent, neoliberal means of 2 adapting to globalization. It is in the spirit of these moments of surprise and curiosity that Tulasi Srinivas explores modern Hinduism in The Cow in the Elevator: An Anthropology of Wonder. Keywords: life; ritual; srinivas; wonder
- Success is not all: When ‘failure’ becomes meaningful in late life by Douglas, Cristina (2019) - ‘Successful aging’ is understood here, as elsewhere in Lamb’s (2014) writings, to refer to a cultural- historical model of growing old, deeply ingrained in philosophical principles of individualistic personhood, bio-political ideologies of aging as a controllable process rather than a normal life stage, and neoliberal values of productivity in later life. Although intending to create a positive view of old age, the paradigm of successful aging ironically ends up, as some of the contributors argue, reinforcing ageist attitudes by “pursuing the goals of agelessness and avoiding oldness” (p. 7). Keywords: age; aging; chapter; life
- A Closer Look at the Livelihoods of Children in the Past by Nicosia, Christopher (2020) - The volume should be on the list of archaeologists, historians, and biological anthropologists interested in child studies. The Children and Childhood in Bioarchaeology volume edited by Patrick Beauchesne and Sabrina Agarwal highlights the importance of nonadult studies by bringing together a wide-range of bioarchaeological scholars who discuss biocultural, life history, and life-course approaches towards enriching children and childhood studies in antiquity that integrate socio-cultural, biological, and archaeological lines of evidence. Keywords: chapter; childhood; children; life; past
- The Social Life of Concepts by Longkumer, Tiatemsu (2022) - Such formation leads them to see concepts as a process of conceptualization whereby understanding conceptualization as “an experiential responsiveness to the demands that life puts on the living.” 1 Veena Das, in chapter 3, ponders on the relationship between the notion of concept and the real. In doing so, Laugier explores “concept” and “experience,” pointing to the experiential aspect of concept called “conceptual sensibility” in trying to understand concepts in relation to lived experiences. Keywords: chapter; concepts; life; reality
- Language, Religion, and Learning to Embrace the Human Lifecourse by Dornisch, Seth Jace (2022) - New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 180 pp., ISBN 978-1-9788-2227-6 Keywords: aging, religion, death, language, well-being Embracing Age is a masterful ethnography of convent life illuminating the linguistic, psychological, and cultural processes that shape the late-life experiences of Franciscan sisters in the American Midwest. The author, Dr. Anna Corwin, a linguistic and psychological anthropologist, draws from a decade of ethnographic visits to the assisted living and infirmary halls of a Catholic convent to unveil the sociolinguistic and historical contexts that support nuns’ well-being through the lifecourse. Keywords: age; aging; life; nuns
- Myriad Intimacies (2022): By Lata Mani by Varma, Saiba (2024) - The sense of co-creating along with Mani, that which lends Myriad Intimacies its brimming vibrancy, is facilitated by the ingenious design of including QR codes that link directly to the multimedia pieces, so readers can watch them on their phones or computers while reading (hopefully, more publishers will follow this elegant design). Attending to Vemula’s demands–Mani argues, putting into conversation with the words of Black feminist poet Pat Parker–means recognizing a key dilemma in social justice activism: that it replicates and reifies the very categories it seeks to dismantle. Keywords: intimacies; life; mani; myriad; new
- Collaborative Happiness: Building the Good Life in Urban Cohousing Communities (2022): By Catherine Pélissier Kingfisher by Nguyen, Phuong (2024) - While in Kankanmori, community “is collaboratively produced in a deliberate, overtly planned way” (133), and “intimate public space was seen as a mechanism for building and maintaining community (126), the permeable boundaries between the public and the private allow for more fluidity in connection among Quayside Village residents. New York: Berghahn Books, 242 pp., ISBN 9781800732391 Keywords: community, the good life, cohousing, happiness, shared living What are the ingredients of a good life? Keywords: cohousing; communities; life
- Atmospheric Violence : Disaster and Repair in Kashmir : By Omer Aijazi by Basu, Akashleena (2024) - 3 In the first scene, where Aijazi intertwines form and content, we meet Niaz, an aspiring school teacher, whose failed body refuses to recover just like the disaster- stricken landscape. Merging the ethical and the political in a geo-politically disputed area, Aijazi brilliance lies in disturbing the sovereign subject in and through the practice of breathing and kindness. Keywords: aijazi; life; scene; violence
Archaeology
- Urban Archaeology and Foodways in South Carolina by Madrigal, T. Cregg (2018) - Two seventeenth century sites from the original Charles Town on the Ashley River, as well as a nearby plantation, have been excavated, but no archaeological sites within modern Charleston dating to the seventeenth century have been found yet. Urban Archaeology and Foodways in South Carolina Review by T. Cregg Madrigal Charleston: An Archaeology of Life in a Coastal Community by By Martha A. Zierden and Elizabeth J. Reitz University Press of Florida, 2016 Charleston: An Archaeology of Life in a Coastal Community summarizes almost half a century of archaeological research in the South Carolina city known for its historic buildings and vibrant, tourism-centered downtown. Keywords: archaeology; century; charleston; city
- Re-evaluating the Place of Race in Historical Archaeology by Netzer Zimmer, Adam (2018) - Therein lies one of the greatest strengths of this volume: it invites the reader to ask questions about our interpretations of archaeological sites rather than simply accept the authorial interpretation. Chapters 7 and 9, by Kruczek-Aaron and Geismar respectively, discuss archaeological sites whose interpretation is enriched by the involvement of descendent communities in the excavation and management of the sites. Keywords: archaeology; new; northeast; race; site
- Theory Can Be Fun: Review of Archaeological Theory in a Nutshell by Adrian Praetzellis by Brunton, Thomas (2015) - In Chapter 1, he discusses the problems with theory books including TLDR (Too Long Didn’t Read), which doesn’t describe this book – most chapters are about ten pages long. This book is about archaeological theory and post-modernism. Keywords: archaeology; chapter; theory
- Doing Archaeology in “Meatspace” and “Metaspace” by Bikowski, Kyle S. (2019) - Archaeogaming discusses four major themes: archaeology in the real-world of video games and game spaces, depictions of archaeology in games, archaeology of the digital, and material culture of the immaterial. New York: Berghahn Books. Keywords: Archaeology; Gaming Studies; Digital Culture; Video Games; Virtual Spaces Scholars are becoming increasingly aware that video games are growing ever more entwined in every aspect of culture in the West and many parts of Asia, from work and education to recreation. Keywords: archaeology; games; reinhard
- Re-evaluating the State of Mortuary Studies in the Near East: Review of Remembering the Dead by Benjamin Porter & Alexis Boutin (eds) by Brass, Mike (2015) - These ideals were re-conceptualised through multivocal commemorations that emphasised different cultural memories reinterpreted in the present. The author suggest that food associated with feasting was given special attention and deliberately deposited, creating a link in social memory between eating, dying and memory. Keywords: archaeology; authors; brass; cemetery; chapter; mortuary
- Captain Kidd’s Lost Ship, The Wreck of the Quedagh Merchant by Skowronek, Russell (2020) - Captain William Kidd was an individual who fell in the grey region between privateer and pirate. Then, early in 1698 they captured the Quedagh Merchant. Keywords: archaeology; hanselmann; kidd; merchant; quedagh
- The Historical Turn in Southeastern Archaeology by Marti Gil, Irene (2022) - Furthermore, the repercussions of introducing the historical turn in southeastern archaeology exceed the merely scholarly purpose: it gives voice to descendant communities, decolonizes views of the Native American past, and brings American Indigenous into the flow of American history. The link between landscape, sacred geographies, and local histories is also the core topic in Chapter 3, by S. Alt. Keywords: american; archaeology; history; turn
- Review of The Falls of the Ohio River: Archaeology of Native American Settlement by Schwarz, Kevin Robert (2023) - After reading these chapters, my knowledge of Middle and Late Archaic cultures is much improved. Key Words: Falls of the Ohio River, Landscape Archaeology, Prehistoric Settlement Patterns, Cultural Resource Management, National Historic Preservation Act, Persistent Place, Fort Ancient Keywords: archaeology; falls; ohio; period; region
Studies
- The Complexity of What is not a bone by Cartolano, Mattia (2018) - The values that determine social inequality are a clear example of the topics on which bioarchaeologists should work. A simple reference to mortuary practices and architectural settings might not be enough in supporting the interpretation of osteological disparities as an indicator of social inequality, especially in circumstances when skeletal sampling is restricted. Keywords: analysis; complexity; inequality; studies
- Representation of the Others in Anthropology by Teo, Sue Ann Ann (2021) - Berghahn Books, 147 pp., ISBN 978-1-78533-371-2 Keywords: Exotic, exoticism, representation, ethnographic nostalgia, exoticization Against Exoticism confronts the complications of theorizing and researching the ‘exotic’ in anthropology. Hence, the book constitutes ethnographic studies carried out in South America, Africa and Asia. Keywords: exotic; exoticism; studies
- Relating with More-than-Humans: Interbeing Rituality in a Living World (2022): By Jean Chamel and Yael Dansac by Questa Rebolledo, Alessandro; Bonilla Valencia , Solange (2023) - Second, he expresses that the chapters advocate treating relationships between humans as comparable to those weaved with non-human beings. In sum, the volume provides several case studies on the importance of non-human beings in contemporary ceremonial and the different relationalities and connections that can be created between them. Keywords: beings; chapter; relationships; ritual; studies
- Identities, Experience, and Change in Early Mexican Villages (2022): Eds. by Catherina E. Santasilia, Guy David Hepp, and Richard A. Diehl by Kolb, Charles C. (2024) - The book, dedicated to Michael D. Coe (1920-2019), a pioneer of Formative period studies, contains the editors’ contextual essay, nine chapters of case studies, and concluding assessment. Lastly, Diehl comments on the nine contributions (pp. 298-308), concluding that Formative studies are thriving and in good hands. Keywords: formative; mexico; olmec; period; site; studies
- The State of the Discipline: A Look at Heritage Studies by Chappell, Geoffrey M.J. (2017) - Publisher: Wiley Blackwell 3 Keywords: Heritage, Historic Sites, National Characteristics, Cultural Property, Ethnicity, 4 The editors of A Companion to Heritage Studies, the 28th title in the Blackwell Companions to Anthropology series, choose to consider the origins of heritage studies with the Venice charter of 1964 before moving to the “heritage boom” of the 1990s and onwards to the present day. In the wake of the rapid increase in scholarly production regarding heritage studies, the editors offer their work as illuminating the concept of “new heritage” which they define as “the exploration of cultural heritage as a construct resulting from processes that give present-day significance to elements from the past” (Logan, Nic Craith, and Kockel 2016). Keywords: chapters; editors; heritage; studies
- Humor, life and everything nice by Bakos, Áron (2017) - Ian Wilkie and Matthew Saxton draw an interesting parallel between adult humor, comic performances and the childhood development of humor, listing and analyzing the features of humor that appear in both contexts. Glauco Sanga’s paper on Italian popular songs with its detailed presentation and analysis of different texts in some sense points to the opposite direction of humor, that is, its ability to socially stigmatize deviances and overstepping of boundaries. Keywords: humor; studies; topic; volume
History
- “History Making” and the Problem of Religion in the Neolithic by Cartolano, Mattia (2018) - This volume follows previous work on the nine-thousand-year old town, Çatalhöyük, supported by the John Templeton Foundation, in particular, another publication titled Religion in the emergence of civilization (2010) when Hodder and Pels introduced the idea of “history houses.” 1 History Making and the Problem of Religion in the Neolithic Review by Mattia Cartolano Religion, History, and Place in the Origin of Settled Life By Ian Hodder University Press of Colorado, 2018 Religion, History, and Place in the Origin of Settled Life is a new episode of the Templeton saga led by Ian Hodder and is about the concept of “history-making”. Keywords: history; making; neolithic; religion
- Writing emotional communities by Wood, Andrew (2022) - To read Elena Poniatowska crónicas is to perhaps feel a slight glimmer of hope amid overwhelming tragedy. Thanks to Beltrán, Poniatowska developed a friendship with a woman named Josefina Bórquez who lived in one of Mexico City’s lower income vecindades. Keywords: history; mexico; poniatowska; stephen
- A History of Platform Mound Ceremonialism: Finding Meaning in Elevated Ground (2021): By M.C. Kassabaum by Marti Gil, Irene (2024) - This connection is highlighted in the Epilogue: the author concludes that the history of platform mound construction in the US is not over, thus it is essential to incorporate contemporary native voices in the study of mounds. Although these mounds vary greatly in size, shape, construction materials and techniques, and functions, platform mounds share one common feature—they are diachronically persistent forms of public architecture that appeared in the monumental repertoire since the inception of moundbuilding in the late Middle and early Late Archaic (ca.5500 BCE) 2 Chapter 4 details the proliferation of platform mounds during the Middle Woodland period (100BCE-500), which was associated with the Hopewell phenomenon but influenced by the preexisting Archaic background. Keywords: history; kassabaum; mounds; platform; time
- Musical power and the East-West international diplomacy by Grégoire, Anthony (2017) - Within this book, she successfully establishes a dialogue between historians and musicologists with the idea that music – particularly classical music – is not only a musicological object but can even be a powerful tool for historians to understand and narrate the history of international relations in the 20th century. On this point, Rosenberg mentions that more research into local sources would be necessary to understand the listeners’ experience and perception of the musical element in international relations at this level. Keywords: chapter; history; international; music; relations; war
World
- Overheating, or “what happens when we rub our hands without a built-in thermostat” by Püsök, Imola (2018) - In this book, the author looks for paradoxes, contradictions, clashes of scale and runaway processes, in an attempt to account for the recent failure of the standard modern narrative about progress and development (ix). Chapter 2 is a conceptual inventory, where the author defines the analytical terms (double-bind, flexibility, runaway processes and treadmill syndromes, and reproduction), the descriptive terms (Anthropocene, neoliberalism) and the sorting device (scale) through which this study of contemporary modernity took place. Keywords: growth; processes; scale; world
- Heritage-making by Tuttle, Brendan Rand (2019) - Heritage sites are tangible but they are never fixed. (Indeed, Chalcraft remarks, graffiti as one of the few options actually available to people to register alternative views, or ‘decolonize’ heritage sites.) Keywords: essays; heritage; naxi; residents; sites; unesco; world
- Wild Blue Media by Uimonen, Paula (2022) - Duke University Press, 240 pp., ISBN: 978-1-4780-0612-1 Keywords: ocean, media, diving, cognitive estrangement, milieu-specific analysis If you have immersed yourself in underwater worlds through scuba diving, you will probably find that Luc Besson’s classic film Le Grand Bleu (The Big Blue, 1988) resonates with you, reconnecting you with that exhilarating feeling of otherness. To Earle, this sense of unbelonging instilled an epistemic humility that inspired her lifelong care for the oceanic other, her deep insights of ocean life compelling her to share her knowledge and protect the ocean, as depicted in the Netflix documentary Mission Blue (2014). Keywords: diving; jue; media; ocean; world
Practices
- The Sociopolitical Shaping of Heritage Landscapes by Murray, Caroline (2018) - In anthropology, it is then essential to locate the sociopolitical, cultural and historical dynamics and extend the understanding of where colonial structures remain in heritage landscape practices, but more importantly, how they are neutralized, regulated, reproduced and absorb change. Moreover, Baird calls “epistemologies of landscapes” the culture of expertise, and its multiple theories interfere with cultural heritage, preservation, and identities (p.14). Keywords: baird; heritage; landscapes; practices
- Raising the Veil: New Clues into Unique Burial Practices by Nicosia, Christopher (2021) - By bringing together a diverse group of bioarchaeological scholars who use integrated biocultural approaches on contextual non-normative samples from several geographic regions and temporal periods, the edited volume asks questions about how we understand atypical burials and advances the study of the topic. The edited volume is divided into 19 case studies that report atypical burials in China, Mongolia, Greece, Japan, Peru, Bolivia, the Caribbean, and various regions in Europe and the United States. Keywords: burial; chapter; mortuary; practices
- Locating the materiality of anxiety and magical practices in Puritanical New England by Brennan, Emily Jane (2022) - In compiling evidence from primary documents and folklore, Augé seeks to develop criteria for identifying gender specific apotropaic magical practices in the archaeological record. C. Riley Augé’s present study aims to explore how seventeenth century British colonists, new to New England, engaged in magical practice, specifically apotropaic (protective) practices, and whether that practice differed across gender. Keywords: augé; chapter; gender; practices
- Sacred Matter: Animacy and Authority in the Americas by Moore, Jerry D (2022) - Mannheim discusses ontological principles in Southern Quechua, his goal being “to identify interdependencies among social practices, regardless of whether they are social (e.g., a particular kind of kinship system), material (e.g., settlement patterns), linguistic (e.g., the structure of grammatical person), or cognitive (spatial orientation)” (pp. 371-72), considering four specific ranges of practice—properties of the world, frame of reference, agency, and causal structures— “that truly form the world in which Quechua speakers and English speakers live, and they are different worlds, as Sapir proposed” (p. 373). His survey of keros, illustrated manuscripts, clay figurines, tombs, and other objects suggests that “ontologies and animism are ever changing categories and that just as those of one culture can be radically different from another, they can have unexpected common ground” (p. 199). Keywords: america; objects; practices; press
- Eds. by Pamela Stewart and Andrew Strathern. 2022. The Palgrave Handbook of Anthropological Ritual Studies by Calvo, Daniela (2023) - This volume engages in the varied and complex field of ritual practices, with a special focus on religious rituals. In Chapter 11, Anne Sigfrid Grønseth examines religious ritual practices as a dynamic space for negotiating and configuring identity, belonging and well-being for transnational migrants and refugees in a context of discrimination, vulnerability, uncertainty and risk. Keywords: chapter; practices; relationships; rituals
Food
- Conversations about Teaching Food and Culture: Review of Teaching Food and Culture by Candice Lowe Swift & Richard R Wilk (eds) by Timmer, Andria D (2016) - Conversely, someone new to teaching food studies courses is not likely to be able to use this resource to help them construct a stand-alone Food and Culture class. Although food studies is inherently interdisciplinary and food related courses are “often taught by the most creative and innovate faculty, who tend to disrespect the traditional boundaries between subjects” (pp. 9-10), it is appropriate that this volume is anthropological. Keywords: culture; food; teaching; volume
- The Agricultural Dilemma: How Not to Feed the World by Richardson, Jill (2022) - The next four chapters form the heart of the book, laying out Stone’s theory of industrial agriculture in (chapter 3), and supporting it with data from three cases: fertilizer (chapter 4), hybrid corn (chapter 5), and the Green Revolution (chapter 6). Stone ends with a chapter on intensive agriculture, showing there is an alternative option to industrial agriculture that already provides an estimated 50% to 75% of the world’s food (p. 211). Keywords: agriculture; farmers; food; stone
- Food Sharing in Human Societies: Anthropological Perspectives by Wenzel, George (2023) - However, before taking an in-depth look at the volume’s substance, I should note that the books primary title, Food Sharing in Human Societies, suggests a breadth that encompasses food sharing under a range of societal and economic types. Kishigami concludes Food Sharing with a discussion of how particular hypotheses (such as resource abundance, camp population size, kinship relations and/or co-residential proximity, display and status, and tolerated theft to name a few) explain food sharing (or not) in the context of the various analytical approaches in which they are discussed. Keywords: food; kishigami; sharing
- Black Food Matters: Racial Justice in the Wake of Food Justice: Eds. by Hanna Garth and Ashanté M. Reese by Fisher, Azure (2023) - Mobility, entrepreneurship, cultural resilience, and Black ingenuity are some of the few concepts explored by authors as they define the varying means of how Black food matters in an anti-Black food system. Marketable areas for Black food that provide the best aesthetic experience receive government funding to renovate businesses and bring in more tourists. Keywords: access; community; food; justice
- Food Connections: Production, Exchange and Consumption in West African Migration (2022): By Maria Abranches by De Guzman, Josef Adriel (2023) - For one, Abranches argues that most studies on migration focused on the arrival of migrants to the new country, but in reality most migrants’ lives continue to be connected to the homeland, with homeland food playing a key role in that connection (7). However, the insights that Abranches has developed in her fieldwork are not only relevant to those interested in West African migration, but also in the larger transnational process of migration and the role that homeland food plays in this process. Keywords: abranches; food; migrants
- Food and Identity in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Ghana: Food, Fights, and Regionalism (2022): By Brandi Simpson Miller by Scheven, Chiara (2024) - In the final chapter Simpson Miller connects previous developments in regional foodways with the consequences of globalization and current debates about food security. Rooted in her own analysis, she sensibly points out that the current discourse on food security, focusing on nutritional issues, does not target long-standing basic issues. Keywords: food; foodways; simpson
Knowledge
- An Inquiry into the Diverse Articulations of Science & Religion in Contemporary Life: Review of Religion and Science as Forms of Life by Carles Salazar & Joan Bestard (eds) by Santos da Costa, Priscila (2016) - In the process of presenting religious views as such, Coleman argues, science (or rather, its advocates) is also creating a nascence of sorts, namely by not taking into consideration how believers experience creationism, and subsequent knowledge produced about it by other sciences, such as anthropology. The authors write from the standpoint of cognitive science in order to explain how this could be so, even with the advancement of scientific reason and of its valued moral position in the western world. Keywords: chapter; knowledge; religion; science
- The Epistemology of North: Indigenous Re-orientations from Northern Fennoscandia by López, Elisa M (2022) - Eeva-Kristina Harlin’s chapter also shows how different institutions and systems of knowledge – Sámi duodji artisans – diverge in their approaches to the preservation of Sámi history and material culture. In part two, critical approaches to Finnish Sámi history are highlighted. Keywords: chapter; knowledge; north; sámi; valkonen
- Dilger, Hansjörg. 2022. Learning Morality, Inequalities, and Faith: Christian and Muslim Schools in Tanzania by Kirby, Benjamin (2023) - In my own work, I suggested that university students in the United States, struggling for the rights to be part of the process of knowledge production in the 1960s and 1970s, ultimately lost that battle, but in the process gained consumer rights. She uses the notion of “figures,” a concept articulated by several anthropologists, to talk about the ways that university students have changed over time and particularly from the 1960s to the present. Keywords: danish; knowledge; university; ways; wright
- Wright et al. 2019. Enacting the University: Danish University Reform in an Ethnographic Perspective. by Shumar, Wesley (2023) - In my own work, I suggested that university students in the United States, struggling for the rights to be part of the process of knowledge production in the 1960s and 1970s, ultimately lost that battle, but in the process gained consumer rights. She uses the notion of “figures,” a concept articulated by several anthropologists, to talk about the ways that university students have changed over time and particularly from the 1960s to the present. Keywords: danish; knowledge; university; ways; wright
- Sensing Disaster: Local Knowledge and Vulnerability in Oceania (2023): By Matthew Lauer by Chakraborty, Sohini (2024) - 1 MATTHEW LAUER, 2023, Sensing Disaster: Local Knowledge and Vulnerability in Oceania, California: University of California Press, 272 pp., ISBN 9780520392076 Keywords: Disaster; Indigenous Ecological Knowledge; Ontology; Resilience; Vulnerability. Dissecting the concepts of vulnerability and resilience by historicizing calamities and revealing their socio-cultural and economic entanglements, the book reveals the Simbo experience of sensing disasters. Keywords: disaster; knowledge; lauer; simbo
City
- The Failed Potentials of Masdar City: Renegotiating the Present and Future through Climate Change Technologies in the United Arab Emirates by Jeon, Hai Ri (2020) - Marketed as “the city of the future and the role model for the world,” Masdar City was created by the government of United Arab Emirates (UAE) as an experiment to implement green technologies and infrastructures as a preparation for a more sustainable post-oil future. Günel encourages us as academics and as persons to rethink, renegotiate, and recreate our imaginations of the future through climate change technologies that do not preserve the status quo, but rather, alter it in the present. Keywords: change; city; climate; energy
- On the thirst for citizenship by Sreenath, Shreyas (2020) - Here, Anand argues that such a plurality of relations both allows them to access municipal water as well as mobilize their locations within water infrastructures to perform forms of urban belonging that bring their habitations both official and tacit recognition. Without reliable metrics to anchor their work, they quickly come to depend on the councilors’ abilities to issue contracts and promotions as well as to placate restless publics. 4 Chapter 6, titled “Disconnection,” focuses on the ways in which the Muslim community of Premnagar experience water as an index of socio-political abjection as they get disconnected from municipal water lines. Keywords: chapter; city; mumbai; water
- Alimia, Sanaa. 2022. Refugee Cities: How Afghans Changed Urban Pakistan. by Husain, Saeed (2023) - Refugee Cities: How Afghans Changed Urban Pakistan provides detailed ethnographic accounts of Afghans living in the coastal mega city of Karachi and the border city of Peshawar to construct how their lives have been shaped – and more importantly are shaping – urban Pakistan today. Refugee Cities: How Afghans Changed Urban Pakistan. Keywords: afghans; alimia; city; pakistan
- Teotihuacan: The World Beyond the City (2020): Eds. Kenn Hirth, David M. Carballo, and Bárbara Arroyo by Kolb, Charles C. (2023) - The volume is organized into an “Introduction” by the three editors (Chapter 1); three Parts: I “The Organization of Teotihuacan Society” (Chapters 2–4); II “Iconography at Teotihuacan and Abroad” (Chapters 5–7); and III “Teotihuacan Outside the City” (Chapters 8–15); “Discussion” (Chapter 16); a list of “Contributors”; and a valuable, detailed “Index.” Microsoft Word - Kolb review revised (1).docx 1 KENNETH G. HIRTH, DAVID M. CARBALLO, AND BARBARA ARROYO (EDS.), 2020, Teotihuacan: The World Beyond the City. Keywords: chapters; city; evidence; maya; mesoamerica; teotihuacan
Film
- Living: On Silence, Speech and Witness after Hiroshima by Judd, Ellen R. (2018) - The weapon delivery in US bombers, the following military occupation and its suppression of adequate response to nuclear radiation all appear in personal and anguishing immediacy. A fellow physician, Shuntaro Hida (1917-2017), who also lived through the bombing, comments on the choices people made to protect their children and grandchildren from the stigma of being Hiroshima survivors, potentially suffering and transmitting the long-term effects of radiation. Keywords: day; film; hiroshima; radiation
- Thinking with Disaster by Khosravi, shahram (2019) - The film starts with footage from 2006 when Ms. Morrison was invited by the Louvre in Paris to curate an exhibition. With the same title, The Foreigner's Home, Ms. Morrison decided to put the focus of the exhibition on the pain of exile and displacement. Keywords: disaster; film; foreigner; morrison
- Forest Fires in the Capitalocene by Baez Ullberg, Susann (2020) - In the film, forest and fire management experts are interviewed, supporting prescribed burning rather than fire suppression, arguing that even though this contributes to global warming and health hazards through smoke, the losses produced by mega fires are a far worse scenario. Here, forest fires have shaped the landscape since ancient times, and pyrophilic species normally thrive after each fire season. Keywords: film; fires; forest
- Feelgood farming by Dahl, Gudrun (2021) - “The Bullish Farmer” is a film about ‘John Boy,’ a farmer in New York State. It focuses on John and his career choices. Keywords: film; john; production
- The Wisdom of Trauma (The Film) by L Raveendran, Prasadita (2025) - 1hr., 27 min. https://vimeo.com/762456491 Keywords: trauma-informed, addiction, compassionate inquiry, unconventional, generational trauma The documentary Wisdom of Trauma, directed and produced by Zaya Benazzo and Maurizio Benazzo, is immersed in the work and philosophy of Dr. Gabor Mate: an author, physician and distinguished figure in the field of addiction and trauma. Mate’s careful analytical observations about generational trauma, and the link between physical ailment and a disturbed mental state is one of the focal points. Keywords: addiction; film; mate; trauma
Data
- The Social Life of Data by Tuttle, Brendan Rand (2018) - Much of the book focuses on mediators of survey research worlds and the work-lives of Malawian researchers. Biruk analyzes the labor processes of data production in the ‘sanitized’ space of the office (chapter 1), ‘messy’ interactions in ‘the field’ (chapters 2-4), and in the conferences, presentations of findings, meetings, and policy debates where data is turned into evidence (chapter 5). Keywords: biruk; data; numbers; research; researchers
- Informational selves – a genealogy of how data became to increasingly define how we operate by Lenhard, Johannes (2020) - But the consequences of these processes and the related infopower as Koopman terms it can “limit our freedoms or open up our liberties” (159). Microsoft Word - Lenhard final.docx 1 Informational selves – a genealogy of how data became to increasingly define how we operate Koopman, Colin. Keywords: data; ethics; genealogy; koopman; study
- Our Data, Ourselves: A Personal Guide to Digital Privacy (2022): By Jacqueline D. Lipton by Jereza, Rae (2023) - The book also has a chapter dedicated to digital privacy laws in the EU and a concluding chapter where Lipton ruminates on the future of digital privacy given present legal challenges. Microsoft Word - Jereza_Review.docx 1 JACQUELINE D. LIPTON, 2022, Our Data, Ourselves: A Personal Guide to Digital Privacy, Oakland: University of California Press, 224 pp., ISBN 9780520390508 Keywords: digital privacy, privacy law, US, digital marketplace, individualism In Our Data, Ourselves, Lipton provides a thorough overview of digital privacy in nine domains of American life: home, work, social media, children’s data, school, the digital marketplace, health, money, and the government. Keywords: data; digital; lipton; privacy
- A Tale of Two Surrogates (2025): Author Interview by none (2025) - We allocated quotes that show different views on each theme to the main characters’ interactions with other surrogates in their online communities. Blending scholarly insight with compelling visual storytelling, A Tale of Two Surrogates bridges the worlds of academia and popular narrative, offering both a window into the lived realities of surrogacy and a model for how comics can communicate social science. Keywords: berend; data; jenn; rohrer; surrogacy; surrogates; teman
Chapters
- The adventurous fieldworker and first-rate theoretical thinker by Gaini, Firouz (2020) - New York & Oxford: Berghahn Books Keywords: Barth, boundaries, fieldwork, nomad, humanistic tradition This collection, counting just above two hundred pages authored by eleven contributors from Norway, Sweden, China, and the United States in twelve independent chapters (including the Introduction and Afterword), presents a mosaic of Fredrik Barth’s (1928-2016) original anthropological work as seen through the eyes of a diverse team of fieldworkers and anthropological peers influenced and inspired by different components of the Norwegian master’s oeuvre. This formulation is also a smart way of assembling chapters that have little in common apart from a smaller or larger debt to Barth. Keywords: barth; chapters
- Engaging with the Expansive and Eclectic Work and Legacy of Franz Boas: Review of The Franz Boas Papers, Volume 1 by Regna Darnell, Joshua Smith, Michelle Hamilton, and Robert L. A. Hancock (eds) by Weiss, Joseph J.Z. (2016) - At the same time, it inaugurates a broader reassessment of Boas’ corpus as the introductory volume of the Franz Boas Papers Documentary Edition, “an ambitious project to digitize and critically edit the Franz Boas papers” housed at the American Philosophical Society (Hamilton: 345). Boas as a scholar, as a fieldworker, as an activist and as a public intellectual cannot be encompassed within any “single perspective,” and Franz Boas as Public Intellectual seems meant both to demonstrate the wide variety of ways in which Boas’ legacy can be approached and to act as an invitation for a broadly diverse set of engagements with the Boas papers as they continue to be published (Darnell: xi-xii). Keywords: boas; chapters; darnell; franz; volume
- Communication and Articulating Identity: Review of Language and Identity across Modes of Communication by Mahboob, Djenar, & Cruickshank (eds) by Kleczek, Rafal Piotr (2015) - The chapter by Caroline Lipovsky is focused on the subject of professional identity constructed through Curriculum Vitae. The following chapter, by Zuocheng Zhang, also analyzes the subject of professional identity. Keywords: chapters; identity; research
Maya
- Chocola: An Ancient Maya Capital in a Contemporary Guatemalan Community by Davies, Gavin Roger (2018) - Greater knowledge of sites in the surrounding region would greatly enrich our understanding of Chocolá’s role as a political and administrative center. The site of Chocolá was one of several sites that rose to importance in southern Mesoamerica during Middle and Late Preclassic periods (c.600 BC – 300 AD). Keywords: chocolá; kaplan; maya; site
- Milpa, Forest, Garden: Review of The Maya Forest Garden by Anabel Ford and Ronald Nigh by Questa, Alessandro (2015) - In chapter 6, the authors pose the problem of conservation as a Eurocentric practice and the dangers for the actual continuity of Maya forests as long as a globalized economy based on intensive production and biodiversity reservoirs keep Maya people, and their profound knowledge, out of the picture. In chapter 4, Ford and Nigh describe the life of Maya people during the Late Classic period (around 1,500 years ago), in the archaeological site of El Pilar, at the border between Belize and Guatemala. Keywords: authors; forest; maya; milpa
- A Tale of Two Ek’Balams: Opportunities and Challenges of Community-based Tourism Development Among the Yucatán Maya by Miller, Jason Edward (2020) - Based on eight years of longitudinal participant observation and ethnographic fieldwork among local residents, Taylor explores how political, historical, and economic processes have created and continue to impact Maya tourism in this region in Mexico. Taylor argues that previous models of understanding Maya identity or peasant populations more broadly (such as folk-urban continuum or notions of the Maya as a homogenous community) are too limited because they look only at certain factors. Keywords: community; maya; taylor
- Salt Makes the Maya: Small Salt Kitchens in a Large Economic System by Dumas, Ashely (2021) - McKillop structures Chapters 3 through 5 as a series of questions and hypotheses about characteristics of Maya salt production. McKillop investigates the Paynes Creek complex of salt works to understand the organization of salt production and its role in the larger Maya economy. Keywords: maya; mckillop; salt; works
Authors
- “Seeking Refuge in an Era of Naturalized Borders: A Review of Migration By Boat” by Berhane, Fiori Sara (2019) - This collection of essays, adding to the scholarship of refugee and migration studies, travels through both time and space in its survey of boat migration. The authors chose to focus on boat migration because much is made in contemporary discourses of both the danger this form of migration poses for the migrants themselves and the threat that refugees who travel by boat are seen to present to societies in the Global North. Keywords: authors; boat; european; migrants; migration; refugees
- Depauperate or Not? Examining Marginality in Island Environments by Warner, Jacob Pate (2020) - In the subsequent two chapters, the native people of the islands feel distant, both through the reality of the subject (temporal and cultural distance between late Pleistocene/Early Holocene Native Americans and modern populations) and through the goals of the volume (a focus on island resources and the discourse around marginality). Particularly interesting are the potential human introduction of skunks to the islands related to ethnographically reported skunk dances, and the possible introduction of cacti and elephant trees to Gulf of California islands in relation to placental rituals. Keywords: authors; california; chapter; islands
- Ritual: What It Is, How It Works, and Why (2022): By Robbie Davis-Floyd and Charles D. Laughlin by Negro, Jesse (2023) - The authors provide a wide range of ritual examples and their associated 2 intrinsic drivers. Chapter Five analyses ritual techniques and technologies investigating both how rituals are technologized in a modern world but also how ancient techniques are deeply embedded into ritual that operate in the modern high-tech world. Keywords: authors; chapter; ritual
Water
- Book Review: Zlolniski, Christian (2019) Made in Baja: the lives of farmworkers and growers behind Mexico’s transnational agricultural boom, University of California Press: Oakland, CA by Arqueros Fernández, Francisco Mario (2020) - These types of farms had access to advanced technology, expertise, financing, and markets, which created a class polarization between them and local growers. Chapter three looks into how they are recruited through labor contractors to work in San Quintin’s commercial agriculture: in the 1980s and 1990s in the South of Mexico, when they were housed in labor camps; later, in the ‘colonias.’ Keywords: agriculture; growers; labor; water
- Water is Life by Rodineliussen, Rasmus (2020) - “Thirst for Power” starts by showing how water has been used as a de facto symbol of wealth, doing so with examples from the roman empire and its aqueducts, royal palaces 2 with their fountains and lush gardens, but also more recently with the construction of large dams to end floods, irrigate land, and provide energy – control over water equals power, and politicians and rulers knew and still know that, according to Webber. And this is where the movie ends, with Webber urging the viewer to think through the way we use water and energy so that there will be some left for generations to come. Keywords: energy; movie; water
- Border Water: The Politics of U.S.-Mexico Transboundary Water Management (2023): By Stephen Paul Mumme by Valles, Edgar (2024) - Moreover, the history of Mexico and the U.S. borderlands is magnified by an understanding of binational resource management and its resulting conflicts. The final sections comprising chapters 9 and 10 review what readers can learn from the history of binational water management. Keywords: border; management; water
- Review of The Fluvial Imagination by Stambach, Amy (2025) - While Hoag observes that prevailing narratives among engineers and administrators often blame herders for dams' sediment buildup, Hoag's own approach is more nuanced, including his assessment that conservation administrators themselves understand that resource management requires social engineering. To capture this eco-social aspect of resource management, Hoag develops the concept of fluvial imagination to describe water conservationists' implicit sociological perspectives about how water flows across the land. Keywords: hoag; lesotho; water
Human
- REVIEW: Blanchette, Alex. 2020. Porkopolis: American animality, standardized life, & the factory farm. Duke University Press by Keil, Paul Gregory (2020) - Yet the more troubling aspect, notes Blanchette, is that we have no choice in participating in the world-making processes of industrial pig. And second, the floor workers: marginalized and often non-white, migrant laborers, whose compartmentalized yet intimate and practical engagement with pigs point to gaps in, critiques of and alternative realities to those constructed at the executive level. Keywords: blanchette; factory; human; pig
- Aeolian politics and the duograph by Ojani, Chakad (2021) - At the same time, the model of wind development that dominates the isthmus has failed “to disrupt the toxic kinds of relatedness that made it necessary to build wind parks in the first place” (194). Perhaps the most emblematic symbol of petromodernity, trucks are nonetheless essential for bringing wind parks and renewable energy into existence. Keywords: boyer; chapter; human; isthmus; power; wind
- Rethinking Subjects of Theory through Situated Matters of Eating by Linder, Elin (2021) - By demonstrating that all human beings have a body through which they are fundamentally entangled with their surroundings (33), such as through eating, Mol provides suggestions for addressing the corporeal, let alone diversified, character of what it means to be human when engaging human theory. That said, and to be fair to the purpose of the book, considering that the pursuit is to provide lessons for [T]heory, and to do so by diversely engaging notions of the human subject, not as someone set apart from the surrounding of her existence, but as particular someones enmeshed within it, the writing makes an excellent job of contextualizing the need for situated accounts when theorizing human being, knowing, doing, and relating. Keywords: eating; human
- We Think With Animals, and Thereby We Are Human: Review of Animals and Inequality in the Ancient World by Benjamin S. Arbuckle & Sue Ann McCarty (eds) by Reidinger, Melinda (2016) - He suggests following Ingold’s (2008) lead and viewing animals, therefore, as “shifting nodes of interconnected properties and relationships” (p. 252), which allows us to trace out the unique life stories of individuals. We Think With Animals, and Thereby We Are Human Review by Melinda Reidinger Animals and Inequality in the Ancient World by Benjamin S. Arbuckle & Sue Ann McCarty (eds) University Press of Colorado, 2015 As soon as I learned about the publication of Animals and Inequality in the Ancient World, I was eager to acquire a copy because of my own interests in the historical uses of animals and in food studies. Keywords: access; animals; elite; human; ibid; inequality; position; relationships; status; thing; time; volume
Care
- The Volatile Possibilities and Empty Gestures of Care Under Military Occupation by Atuk, Tankut (2021) - The introduction, Care, outlines how care and militarism are radically entangled in Kashmir and insists that their chronic inseparability exposes Kashmiris to different forms of harm in the name of humanitarian love and psychiatric care. Microsoft Word - Atuk review.docx 1 The Volatile Possibilities and Empty Gestures of Care Under Military Occupation SAIBA VARMA, 2020, The Occupied Clinic: Militarism and Care in Kashmir, Durham: Duke University Press, 304 pp, ISBN 978-1-4780-1098-2 Keywords: trauma, psychiatry, military occupation, humanitarian care, shock The Occupied Clinic could hardly be any timelier. Keywords: care; chapter; clinic; kashmiris
Workers
- Aspirations and Uncertainties of Medical Labor Migrants by Danely, Jason (2018) - Most of all, it is the way she describes the interstitial nature of medical work itself, as straddling the borders between professional and unskilled, institutional and domestic, formal and intimate, that makes Amrith’s ethnography so forceful and fascinating. While many accounts of have focused on the very real struggles of precarious labor migrants, typically from an impoverished global ‘south’ to the prosperous ‘north,’ Amrith’s ethnography brings our attention to cases that are more ambiguous, where agency is not as easy to locate as ‘resistance,’ but where is it nevertheless fundamental. Keywords: amrith; migrants; workers
- From Ruin to Revolution: Firing up the Ethnographic Imagination by Kovalyova, Natalia (2019) - But the stories that a shrinking cohort of mill workers share with the author come in sharp contrast with the official narrative and its verdict of “loss and absence” (p. 4) placed on the case of mills. What surfaces instead are ethnic tensions and persistent xenophobia towards migrant workers from the North that seem to have been driving the strike and enabling the majority to pose as vulnerable victims. Keywords: archive; mills; workers
- On Making a Living and of the Reproduction of the Working Class by Püsök, Imola (2020) - “The attempt to hold back worthlessness is their main purpose and often results in moving from place to place and creating trans-local places” (p.212), as Narotzky sums up in her concluding remarks. The tensions between place and space are analysed in anthropological work in their endeavour to comprehend the impacts of capital, corporations, and hegemonic power, whereas places are emphasised and described as distinct and different in ethnographic work to draw on (assumed) knowledge about the specifics of historical, cultural, economic and political background regarding their accounts. Keywords: bauman; place; volume; workers
Ritual
- Gods in the World: Placemaking and Healing in the Himalayas. by Patankar, Mayuri (2025) - By collaborating with jagari gurus, Dalit ritual specialists who mediate village deities across caste boundaries, Jassal charts these peripheral sacred spaces to reveal fault lines between state-sanctioned and vernacular ways of knowing. First, by centering village deities and their placemaking rituals, he reveals the processes through which deities manifest, engage with, and exert authority over social life. Keywords: caste; chapter; deities; divine; jassal; ritual
Time
- The Time and space for Earthly reckoning is here and now by gren, martin (2021) - Earth, deep time, future, climate emergency We live in planetary deeply troubling times, let us not pretend anything else. Perhaps this can be understood as a small question mark on Ialenti´s take on deep time and the future, but it is certainly also another affirmation of its contribution in envisioning alternative futures. Keywords: earth; future; time
- Andean Time by Moore, Jerry D (2022) - The editors write, “Despite considerable diversity in premodern Andean representations of time, […] it is worth identifying some general trends in Andean time reckoning and historical consciousness” (p. 14). In northern Colombia, Kaggaba (Kogi) priests (mamas) turn back the Sun at the solstices and equinoxes, a cosmic effort that involves extensive training and engagement with ritual and time. Keywords: andean; andes; past; time
- Waiting for Elijah – Time and Encounter in a Bosnian Landscape (2019): By Safet Hadžimuhamedović by Warner III, Charles O. (2023) - “Syncretic Poetry” and Particular Synergies: A review of Safet Hadžimuhamedović’s Waiting for Elijah Keywords: uncertainty, schizochronotopia, time, In-Other, syncretism, festivals, former Yugoslavia While moving through the introduction of Safet Hadžimuhamedović’s engaging work of research and resistance, readers familiar with anthropology can be forgiven for wondering what realms of the discipline the author decided not to engage with in Waiting for Elijah – Time and Encounter in a Bosnian Landscape (2018; Volume One in “Articulating Journeys: Festivals, Memorials, and Homecoming”). Indeed, “syncretic” is a concept Hadžimuhamedović returns to repeatedly in a treatise that delves into the interplay of encounter, time, and proximity with(in) one particular landscape of Bosnia today. Keywords: field; hadžimuhamedović; research; time; waiting
Violence
- Politicization of Body Processing and Manipulation by Ixta, Itzamara (2022) - Keywords: Body processing; Violence; warfare; social politics; ritualistic burials In present day Western society, the act of processing bodies is often unseen, with a body being presented to its kin once ready for burial. The Poetics Model was a theory developed by Neil Whitehead, where he applied the concept of poetics to violence and the way in which it creates identity (4). Keywords: poetics; processing; violence
- Living in a Rio de Janeiro Favela by Carneiro de Carvalho, Lucas (2017) - In Chapter 4, the author explores why and how violence is deployed by drug traffickers to reshape local ideologies, ways of being, and knowing. In this environment and permanent state of emergency, residents have to perform the act of hiding what is common knowledge in order to keep at bay acts of violence from drug traffickers and policemen. Keywords: chapter; drug; rio; violence
- Downtown Juárez: Underworlds of Violence and Abuse (2021): By Howard Campbell by Wood, Andrew (2024) - Microsoft Word - Howard Campbell Juárez review.docx Howard Campbell, Downtown Juárez: Underworlds of Violence and Abuse. Amidst many differing scholarly approaches and interpretations of the border metropolis, Campbell specifically seeks to identify the “conditions that lead to violence in central Juárez” (1). Keywords: campbell; juárez; paloma; violence
Production
- New perspectives on surplus production and inequality: surplus as relation, strategy and agency by Loeng, Martin (2017) - 1 New perspectives on surplus production and inequality: surplus as relation, strategy and agency Review by Martin Loeng Surplus: The Politics of Production and the Strategies of Everyday Life by Christopher T. Morehart & Kristin De Lucia ed. It shifts the question from what role surplus plays as an analytical object, in Grand Theories of Society for instance, to one about how social forms of surplus are employed historically. Keywords: production; strategies; surplus
- ‘White gold’: Cultivating salt and saline spaces in Senegal by Groupp, Emilia (2022) - Faye focuses in particular on the High Saloum region, a center of salt production situated towards the end of the expansive Sine-Saloum Delta. The dazzling rise of salt production has not gone unnoticed, and more and more migrants arrive each year hoping to cultivate their own salt farms in the pursuit of economic promise and social mobility. Keywords: faye; production; salt; social; socio
- Making Better Coffee. How Maya Farmers and Third Wave Tastemakers Create Value (2022): By Edward F. Fischer by Gambardella, Miria (2023) - This study observes contradictions between ideals and practice and is able to account for the ramifications, ambiguities and intermittences of coffee exchanges as “relational structures” (Le Velly, 2011: 54) and markets as “moral projects” (Fourcade and Healy, 2007: 141). There is no symmetry between Third Wave coffee producers, intermediaries, traders, buyers and tastemakers, as, “value worlds converge and collide” in the attempt to create overlapping paths towards the common goal of producing better coffee (201). Keywords: coffee; production; university
Energy
- Energy Complicity in Trinidad by Moore, Sandra (2018) - The second chapter explores the sugar industry’s transition away from slave energy toward oil energy. In Energy Without Conscience: Oil, Climate Change, and Complicity, David McDermott Hughes, a Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University, aims to better understand “cultural dispositions and discourses on oil” (p.1). Keywords: energy; hughes; industry; oil; trinidad
Power
- Rites of Participation: Popular Encounters and Democratic Ritual in Brazil by Sosa, Joseph Jay (2018) - Envisioned as a movement of movements rather than solely a political party, the PT aggressively instituted participatory democracy institutions in municipalities after they won local election. Participatory democracy has become quite a hot topic in political science and political anthropology of South America. Keywords: albert; citizen; democracy; institutions; participatory; power
- Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (2021): By Kate Crawford by Ali, Zahid (2023) - It is this orientation toward AI technologies that Kate Crawford’s book Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence introduces us to at this epochal moment. Crawford’s book differs from the aforementioned works because it points towards the planetary material infrastructures and labor that is required for modern computation and AI technologies to work on a global scale. Keywords: crawford; power; systems; technologies
Disaster
- Mind the Gap by Tuttle, Brendan Rand (2021) - Two chapters (by Terry Jeggle and Stephen Bender, respectively) provide an overview of disaster risk management, global advocacy, efforts to institutionalize disaster risk management, and the lack of investment in risk reduction. the volume is divided into three parts: five chapters about disaster risk reduction and management; five chapters on the social distribution of risk; and three big-picture chapters about the future of disaster studies. Keywords: disaster; gaps; hoffman; management; policy; risk
Religion
- Surprising Possibilities in the Study of Religion and Materiality by Helgesson Kjellin, Kristina (2020) - Chidester does not write that in order to denounce all academic research pertaining to religion. Chidester is not the first to do that, but he does so by emphasizing “religious materiality and the material study of religion” (xi) with political economy as the lens, thus stating that “religion” can never be understood outside of “the material dynamics of conditions and consequences” (210). Keywords: chidester; material; religion
- Between Animatism and Pantheism: Review of Ancient Zapotec Religion by Michael Lind by Leathem, Hilary M (2015) - As many scholars of Oaxaca and of ancient Mesoamerican religion in general know, there is a paucity of literature on Zapotec religion when compared to what is known about the Maya and Nahua belief systems. His point is not that she is “incorrect,” but rather partially correct in that there is a certain degree of animatism in ancient Zapotec religion; however, Lind maintains that scholars who argued that Zapotec religion included a pantheon and shared some similarities with other Mesoamerican religions are also correct (8-10). Keywords: lind; religion; zapotec
Migration
- (Dis)connections: migration, transnationalism, and global capitalism between Haiti and the United States by Cearns, Jennifer Helen (2020) - Ritual songs (also presented on the accompanying CD) capture this tension, and Richman uses textual analysis of these verbal contests to document these changing relations of ritual and kinship in the light of increased migration. Jennifer Cearns is a postdoctoral researcher at University College London, whose own research has centred upon transnational migrant communities between Cuba and South Florida, and the informal circuits of material and digital exchange that underpin these communities. Keywords: haiti; migration; richman
- Moving the Study of Mobility and Migration to New and Better Places by Foster, Cheryl M (2021) - In Part 2 of the volume, Elizabeth Graham and Linda Howie study the scale, direction, and causes of population mobility in Chapter 5. Mesoamerica, population movement, archaeology, Maya, urbanization Mobility and Migration in Ancient Mesoamerican Cities should be considered a seminal work for the topic of mobility and migration studies in Mesoamerica. Keywords: chapter; mesoamerican; migration; mobility; population
Identity
- Producing Difference Between Anthropology and Ethnography by Park, Theodore (2019) - Despite the fact that Aly eschews concepts like identity and ethnicity as British multiculturalist categories rather than as naturally emerging from Arabs, he cannot help but notice that, at least in Arab student societies, “being Arab […] was now about ‘Arab ethnicity’ in Britain” and not, for instance, about Arab politics (135). However, he is quick to stress that local Arabs do not perceive themselves as simply enacting an “Arab identity”, rather, “becoming an ‘Arab man’ or ‘Arab woman’ is part of a project of cultural survival and social intelligibility, and […] Arab identity is not an essence or a cause of behaviors and dispositions but an instrumental reaction to being hailed and subjected by social institutions, hegemonic gendered norms, national and international politics and media representations” (70). Keywords: arab; identity; london
- The Children of Solaga: Indigenous Belonging across the U.S.-Mexico Border by Caple, Zoe (2025) - By leveraging the legal status of U.S.-born individuals to sustain kinships and collectives across borders, Solagueños transgress state control and practice convivencia in diaspora, strengthening ties to their homeland, Indigenous identity, and the vitality of their community. This monograph offers an insightful lens for those interested in decolonizing ethnography, illuminating the possibilities of community-rooted scholarship and Indigenous epistemologies in unpacking transnational and intergenerational identity formation. Keywords: belonging; community; identity; sanchez
- Liminal Spaces within the Caribbean Plantation Landscape by Tricarico, Anthony R. (2017) - These areas provided a sense of sovereignty over one’s mobility, contradicting earlier epistemological constructions of structure, and order on plantation landscapes (Delle 2016). European culture was in a sense adopted and adapted by enslaved Africans and that of the enslaved Africans by European Planters, “indigenizing” non-local cultural traditions (Appadurai 2007). Keywords: caribbean; identity; landscape; spaces
Year
- Year in Review - 2020 by Rodineliussen, Rasmus (2020) - The new site will facilitate the expansion of review formats, 2 cross-disciplinary conversations as well as provide a space for ongoing experimentation and dialogue. Looking Forward: 2021 As delineated above, we believe book reviews are not just summaries of academic texts; they are engagements with scholarship, ideas and authors. Keywords: review; year
- Year in Review 2021 by Groupp, Emilia (2021) - Microsoft Word - Year-in-Review 2021.doc 1 Year in Review Beloved readers and authors, we are happy to, for the third time, reach out to you with a summary of the year that has passed, and present you with our plans for the future. Summing up Last, but not least, we want to thank our readers, authors, contributors and the increasing number of publishers offering us their titles for review. Keywords: forum; review; year
Children
- At the Intersection of Medical and Linguistic Anthropology: Review of Uncertain Futures by Ignasi Clemente by Bonanno, Letizia (2016) - Uncertain Futures is a complex text which actively engages with the legacies informing the author’s framing of the lives of young cancer patients and their relatives. Using extensive conversation excerpts to sustain his ethnographic inquiry, Clemente traces the dynamics and trajectories of the diagnostic process and the treatment children with cancer undergo and engage with on a daily basis. Keywords: children; clemente; patients; treatment
- Fixations, Charismatic technologies and the perennial enthusiasm of techno-solutionism by del Nido, Juan M. (2021) - Infrastructurally speaking, the computers cost almost twice as much as originally advertised, spare parts were hard to find, computers froze and broke down regularly, batteries were deficient, children uninstalled software, schools and village homes 3 had no or little electricity and there were not enough qualified trainers to provide IT support. In a despairing, brilliant vignette tracing a single morning at school, Ames shows how ¾ of already preciously scarce lesson time was lost trying to get enough computers to work as intended (81-92). Keywords: charisma; children; promise; school; sims; techno
- Drawing Deportation. Art and Resistance among Immigrant Children (2023): By Silvia Rodriguez Vega by borelli, caterina (2023) - Chapters 2 to 5 present the analysis of the rich material – mainly drawings and transcriptions of theater performances - Rodriguez Vega collected during her work in Arizona and California with immigrant children and are organized by the following themes: first is “fear” (as an outcome of the policies described in the previous chapter: family disintegration, police abuse, and structural racism), followed by “response” (of the children of Arizona to those threats, embodied by “America’s toughest sheriff” Joe Arpaio), “resistance” (of the California youth to anti-immigrant policies, notably during the 2016 presidential campaign and after Donald Trump got elected) and finally, “resilience” (reflecting how, through the employed creative methods, children were able to overcome their righteous indignation – which mirrored back societal violence – and come up with their solutions and alternatives). That is not the case with Rodriguez Vega, though: she proves to be neither shy nor looking for shortcuts. Keywords: art; children; research; rodriguez; vega
- Children of the Rainforest: Shaping the Future in Amazonia (2023): By Camilla Morelli by Lancy, David F. (2023) - Not only do Matses children provide a significant addition to the family’s food supply, they contribute through working in the family’s garden, and looking after the home and caring for younger siblings. As distant as they are from any urban setting, Matses children seek glimpses of the modern world like a miner panning for gold. Keywords: children; forest; morelli
Change
- Misreading the Bengal Delta: Climate Change, Development, and Livelihoods in Coastal Bangladesh by Dowler, Calynn (2023) - “Climate change is a fact” (p. 74). Dewan finds that development practitioners generally follow an official script about climate change when undertaking projects, even though informal “hidden transcripts” (p. 62) reveal more critical opinions. Keywords: change; climate; development; dewan
- Mathews, Andrew S. 2022. Trees Are Shape Shifters: How Cultivation, Climate Change, and Disaster Create Landscapes. Yale Agrarian Studies Series. New Haven: Yale University Press, 320 pp., ISBN 978-0-300-26037-3 by Cyr, Emma (2025) - New Haven: Yale University Press, 320 pp., ISBN 978-0-300-26037-3 Keywords: Italy, landscape politics, climate change, historical ecology, biomass energy, disasters, care In the Monte Pisano, a mountain range in Tuscany, Italy, people have been living in human-altered landscapes for millennia. Unlike ‘climate change,’ these changes implicate local histories, political responsibility, and landscapes that are intensely social. Keywords: change; climate; landscape; trees
Science
- To Love and To Kill: Everyday Moralities in the Parallel Lives of Human and Non-human Laboratory Animals by Friese, Carrie (2021) - But these practices also include memorializing the life and death of particular laboratory animals as individuals or laboratory animals as a general class. By exploring the multiplicity of laboratory animals, Sharp is able to see and name the everyday moralities engendered in science, which she probes through three themes that structure the book: intimacy, sacrifice and animal exceptionalism. Keywords: animal; science; sharp
- The struggle for capacity: a historical ethnography of toxicology in Senegal by Destree, Pauline (2021) - An important contribution to studies of toxicity, science and public health infrastructure in West Africa, the book offers a painstaking account of local toxicologists’ frustrated yet creative efforts at establishing a routine regulatory science – a work fraught by dwindling public investment, deteriorating equipments and facilities, and dependence on foreign assistance. Chapter 3 describes the longstanding effects of the 1980s structural adjustment programs’ funding cuts to public health on the working of the lab, increasingly dependent on short-lived projects and temporary foreign funding. Keywords: capacity; exposure; science
- Ancient DNA Under Scrutiny: Review of Interdisciplinary Reflections on Knowledge, Power, and Identity by Marti Gil, Irene (2025) - They trace the exponential growth of aDNA research over the past fifteen years, enabled by advances in bioinformatics and innovations such as next-generation sequencing, and situate this trajectory within the broader recognition paleogenetics has received in both scientific and public arenas—culminating in the awarding of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Medicine to Svante Pääbo for his groundbreaking work. This framing establishes the book’s core argument: that aDNA research, shaped by contextual demands, scientific and social pressures, and expectations of revolutionary discovery, has often been misapplied. Keywords: adna; archaeogenetics; chapter; research; science
Class
- Masking hierarchies in Bangkok by Johnson, Andrew (2020) - Seeing, navigating, and negotiating these distinctions is central to the experience of being “middle class.” Vorng’s research is based upon interviews with a wide variety of interlocutors, most of which (with some exceptions) identify as “middle class.” Keywords: bangkok; class; guard; thai
- Late-Capitalist Reasoning and the Foreclosure of Disagreement by Frey, Bronwyn (2022) - To do so, they draw on “logics, rhetorics, and affects” to create “a common experience where a certain kind of disagreement is foreclosed,” namely, challenges from the courts and taxi industry to the consumer’s right to choose and the virtue of economic competition (8). To do so, he marshals over a year of fieldwork with taxi drivers, exchanges with fellow middle-class porteños, news media, social media campaigns, and court documents. Keywords: class; industry; taxi; uber
Oil
- In the Shadows of the Palm: More-than-Human Becomings in West Papua. by Dewan, Camelia (2023) - Chapter 4 on the ‘Plastic Cassowary’ focuses on how wild animals that due to habitat loss caused by oil palm plantations become ‘domesticates’ that lack both wetness and animal skin and are neither food nor pets. Here, Chao points out how oil palm plantation and settler (plastic) life sows fissures from within: those that do not dream, are traitors. Keywords: chao; chapter; marind; oil; palm
- Enclaves of exception: Special economic zones and extractive practices in Nigeria: By Omolade Adunbi by Costa, Ana (2025) - For this reason, the author argues that sovereignty has become a commodity in the context of searching for Nigerian economic prosperity. Omolade Adunbi’s work has focused on the processes of oil extraction in Nigeria. Keywords: enclaves; extraction; nigeria; oil
Section
- New Outlooks in Paleothnobotany: Review of Method and Theory in Paleoethnobotany by John M. Marston, Jade d’Alpoim Guedes & Christina Warinner (eds) by Perrotti, Angelina Giovanna (2015) - Henry discusses formation of the starch record, and elaborates on the applications of starch analysis. Henry also discusses the susceptibility of starch analysis to contamination, which may minimize just how problematic contamination can be, given the pervasiveness of modern starches (Laurence et al. 2011). Keywords: analysis; chapter; paleoethnobotany; pearsall; section
- Meaning upon meaning, mediating space and place by Fazzino, David V (2017) - The political climate for graffiti in New York City during the 1980s was less than welcoming as NYC authorities worked to eliminate graffiti production; despite this, artists produced 'wildstyle' on subway cars that further defied efforts by rendering a public text as unreadable by those in mainstream society (Gopinath, Chapter 8). The contributors and editors to Understanding Graffiti seek to highlight the agency and artistry of those who produce graffiti highlighting the importance of studying the phenomena of graffiti production, interpretation, and commodification from a multitude of disciplinary perspectives. Keywords: chapter; editors; graffiti; section; understanding
Heritage
- Clarifying Heritage: Review of Heritage Keywords by Kathyrn Lafrenz Samuels & Trinidad Rico (eds) by Baram, Uzi (2015) - There are more terms in heritage studies than are covered, with the volume encouraging several productive approaches to thinking carefully about the words we use for heritage studies and preservation of the past. Heritage Keywords will prove useful for students grappling with anthropological heritage studies and should encourage even more productive investigations of the continuing expanding heritage phenomenon. Keywords: chapter; heritage; keywords; rhetoric
Development
- Enduring Aymara Cosmovision in the Context of Development in Chile: Review of Aymara Indian Perspectives on Development in the Andes by Amy Eisenberg by Haynes, Nell (2015) - Enduring Aymara Cosmovision in the Context of Development in Chile Review by Nell Haynes Aymara Indian Perspectives on Development in the Andes by Amy Eisenberg University of Alabama Press, 2013 In Aymara Indian Perspectives on Development in the Andes, Amy Eisenberg demonstrates how certain kinds of development—specifically those related to mining, highway construction, and the diversion of water sources—have impinged on the “social fabric” of Aymara communities in northern Chile. Nonetheless, Aymara Indian Perspectives on Development in the Andes provides strong encouragement for integrating Aymara voices into development projects, giving hope that the gulf between tradition and progress might not be impossible to overcome. Keywords: aymara; chile; development; eisenberg
Ethics
- With business consultants in China towards the economic anthropology of ethics by Lenhard, Johannes (2019) - Here, Chong’s analysis of the ethics of Chinese business consultants comes in very elegantly. Chong’s analysis leads us through some of these conflicts to paint a vivid picture of the daily struggles of business consultants in China. Keywords: chong; consultants; consulting; ethics
Place
- The Ends of Research: Indigenous and Settler Science After the War in the Woods (2023): By Tom Özden-Schilling by Lennon, Gabriel (2024) - The Ends of Research is a stimulating ethnography that productively lingers on the ambiguities of environmental research, unveiling how ‘rural researchers’ and indigenous researchers alike make and contest place through detailed research despite increasing disregard by the state in British Columbia. Özden-Schilling overviews these ‘paths to professionalization’ through two interlocutors, 3 giving a sense of the distinct modes indigenous researchers have understood and wielded their responsibilities to collectives alongside their scientific authority (p. 103). Keywords: place; research; researchers; schilling
Kinship
- Kinship as Continuity and Transformative Process in Pacific Island Societies: Review of Living Kinship by Christina Toren & Simonne Pauwels (eds) by Barlow, Kathleen (2015) - The volume begins with three chapters that provide striking examples of contemporary kinship sustained in and adapted to contexts heavily influenced by nation-state politics and global economy. Overall, we are offered ethnographically rich insights into contemporary kinship as grounded in longstanding traditions and persisting in the face of tremendous forces of change. Keywords: brother; kinship; sister
- Interrogating non-innocent kinship by Bose, Chandan (2020) - She follows and works with social workers who, like all brokers, occupy a liminal space that allows them access to the houses of middle- and upper-class White Americans, and low-income neighbourhoods where expectant mothers usually reside. Mariner’s focus is pre-birth adoption, where a contract is drawn between expectant mothers (predominantly African American and ethnic minority women) and prospective parents. Keywords: adoption; child; kinship; mariner
- Brothers and Sisters in Christ by Helgesson Kjellin, Kristina (2021) - Despite the reproduction of these traditional gender roles and norms of family patterns, Thomas argues that the study of black evangelical spiritual kinship can help us to deconstruct and be critically conscious of “the contexts and frames of conventional Western heteronormative notions of kinship” (p. 19). Rather, “family,” in the context of these evangelical congregations, is constituted collectively, through spiritual bonds that create spiritual kinship, and in relation to experiences of migration and of belonging to a transnational diaspora. Keywords: family; kinship; thomas
- Queer Kinship: Race, Sex, Belonging, Form by Rehnström, Rebecka (2022) - The interview spans between the then and there and the now and here of queer kinship to discussions on how queer kinship research opens up possibilities for academic routes that may not be obvious in their ties to kinship theory. The essays give a “conceptual frame” to address “the kincoherence, kin-aesthetics and/or kinematics of queer kinship” (18). Keywords: form; kinship; queer; trans; volume
North
- Dreams of wealth: finance and dystopia in the European periphery by Bytyqi, Tringa (2022) - At the same time, women often worked to ensure that construction workers received some material recompense for their work and generally supported the idea of the construction business as a male-dominated space. However, several of its effects analyzed in Dark Finance, namely the slow social death and the devaluation of the social worth of construction workers, is also observed in other western countries (Pinçon and Pinçon-Charlot 2014; Guilhot 2006), bringing attention to larger patterns observable in such processes. Keywords: construction; european; north
- The Undercurrent of Female Power in the North Atlantic by Russell, Olivia Noel (2021) - For instance, she often cites textile studies conducted by Walton Rogers (1998) and Østergård (2004), who notably analyzed textile remains from Greenland. The book begins with an overview of the terminology used for textile analysis. Keywords: atlantic; north; smith
- Fisher-Hunter-Gatherer Complexity in North America (2023): Edited by Christina Perry Sampson, Victor D. Thompson, and Scott M. Fitzpatrick by Marti Gil, Irene (2025) - Likewise, T. Pluckhan et al. (Chapter 6) delve into the dynamics of social complexity. In conclusion, this volume demonstrates that aquatic environments were not passive backgrounds but active agents in the formation and development of social complexity among prehistoric societies in North America. Keywords: america; chapter; complexity; gatherer; north; organization
King
- Brazil’s “Nation” of St. Francis: Review of Spiritual Currency in Northeast Brazil by Lindsey King by Meyer, Matthew (2015) - King catalogs, in both the text and the dozens of black-and-white photographs that accompany it, the variety of subjects (animals, houses, or occupational equipment materials) and media (clay, paper, cloth, wax, Styrofoam, and others) that figure in the devotional forms she observed in Canindé, but she’s most interested in the carved wooden representations of the human body made by pilgrims to repay St. Francis for healing their afflictions. In the backlands of Northeastern Brazil, where Vatican Catholicism has long vied with “folk” religious practices for the loyalty of the people, there is a saying that the Holy Trinity is not the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, but instead St. Francis, God, and Padre Cícero. Keywords: brazil; francis; king
Field
Documentary
- na by Senécal-Lirette, Véronique (2019) - Review by Véronique Senécal-Lirette Zero Weeks Director: Ky Dickens Video Project, 2017 Key words: Paid Leave; Maternity Leave; Paternity Leave; Workers Rights; Family Planning Ky Dickens is the director and the producer of the documentary Zero Weeks which aims to inform and raise awareness about paid family leave in the United States. The documentary is very clear: the reality is that, in the United States, people don’t think about paid family leave until they need it. Keywords: documentary; family; leave; weeks
- The sunset of human rights and working with emotions by Arqueros, Francisco Mario (2021) - It consists of video fragments (stories, or pieces of visual story telling) pinned together and showing a Palestinian perspective on the occupation and the Israelis. you have land … — The settler knows he’s being filmed but keeps going until Israeli soldiers appear, though not to stop him. Keywords: documentary; land; palestinian; soldiers
Medicine
- Medical Imperialism: Examining DiMoia's account of the Proliferation of Western Medicine in Modern South Korean history by Anderson, Bryce (2021) - The ambivalence created by this categorical confusion (2), has resulted in the unequal power relationship between Korean Traditional medicine and Western biomedicine. Moreover, upon the end of Japanese occupation, the American Military adopted a deeply ambivalent attitude towards traditional practitioners of Korean medicine (52), consequently replicating many of the choices made under Japanese colonialism (66). Keywords: dimoia; medicine
- Mixing Medicines: Ecologies of Care in Buddhist Siberia (2021): By Tatiana Chudakova by Huhn, Arianna (2025) - The messiness of making and remaking of Tibetan medicine as medicine is illustrated in Chapter Two through the case study of the “pulsometer” – a scientifically engineered machine meant to mimic and objectivize the use of pulse (or, pulses) for diagnostic purposes beyond the cardiovascular system. Conversely, Tibetan medicine (Sowa Rigpa) and “modern” medicine are deeply intertwined in Siberia, “mixed” and cohabitating, even if they fail to achieve state-sponsored integration. Keywords: center; emchi; medicine; practitioners
Complexity
- Building Community in Coastal Deserts: Perspectives from Western South America by Warner, Jacob Pate (2021) - In Chapter 12, Stothert et al. discuss increasing social complexity and economic specialization and intensification in coastal Ecuador from 700 – 1,500 CE. The editors trace the history of coastal research in Andean archaeology, including questions regarding the timing of human migration into the region, human-environment interactions, the emergence of economic specialization, and the development of social complexity from the exploitation of abundant marine resources. Keywords: amcs; chapter; complexity; valley
French
- State, Republic and the Minority: The (un)making of Muslims in France by Salim, Simi K (2019) - The diverse experientiality and privilege locations among French Muslims in response to Fredette’s interview is significant – with white Muslims narrating a significant lack of discrimination as compared to Arab men who are often vilified in public discourses. Cardinal in Fredette’s study is her analysis of the lack of a shared counter narrative among Muslims - with multiple Muslims in her ethnographic interview embracing French republicanism while many others struggling with the hybrid identities of being French and a Muslim. Keywords: fredette; french; muslims
- Analyzing the Performance of Youth Identities in French Cités: Review of Transcultural Teens by Chantal Tetreault by Vegel, Anton P (2016) - Externally, these subjects are ideologically constructed and expressed by North African descendant teens from le français ordinaire in how teens negotiate membership to different groups (stigmatized la recaille and/or français ordinaire) and express “others” through the performative discourse of French social personas and the revoicing of stereotypes about les cités and les Arabes (the Arabs). However, the analyses quickly become much more specifically relevant to Chemin del l’Ile by focusing on how discourse regarding le bled, le respect, and la racaille and how North African descendant and modern French gender expectations are negotiated and expressed, how parental name-calling shows evidence of hybridity in social identity creation, and how youth performative discourse of French social personas to revoice stereotypes about les Arabes provides evidence of youth’s critical reflection of dominant racism and stigma. Keywords: french; les; teens
- Sideways Migration: Being French in London (2025): By Deborah Reed-Danahay by Wulff, Helena (2025) - In Sideways Migration she develops Bourdieu’s ideas by “placing understandings of capital and habitus in the wider contexts of social space” (p.37) and, importantly, shows how French social space reaches beyond the borders of France – to “Paris-on-Thames” – both when it comes to affiliations and practices of French citizens in London and to how institutions, the “French emigration apparatus,” operates. While “there is a strong theme of ambivalence about France among French people who choose to live outside of its geographic territory (p. 3), there is also the extensive “emigration apparatus” that supports the French migration to London. Keywords: danahay; french; london; reed
Case
- When a Victory: A Long Road to Restoring Trust in Government by Kovalyova, Natalia (2019) - While the film starts with Elouise Cobell talking about patronizing attitudes towards Indians, it eventually offers a quite conventional story of an ordinary, albeit brave, person standing up to the system, a narrative that generally affirms the all too familiar ideological framework according to which American government works and self-corrects in the court of law. Still, it took fifteen years and three presidential administrations for Elouise Cobell and her legal team to finally prevail in the largest class action suit and win a settlement of $3.4 billion. Keywords: case; cobell; government; indian
- Historical Forensics: The use of Medicine and Forensic principles in Bioarchaeological and Historic Research by Hair, Amy Lynn (2021) - The book, while in no way intended for specialists, provides readers with case studies spanning from Mesolithic Morocco (9,000 BC) through nineteenth century colonial encounters while simultaneously exposing the audience to a range of relevant ethical considerations. The third part entitled the “Middle Ages” discusses a range of case studies throughout the era. Keywords: case; chapter; research
Land
- Statehood or Sovereignty? Unearthing Hawaiian History and Politics through the Lens of the Contemporary Sovereignty Movement by Calnitsky, Naomi (2019) - The idea that indigenous sovereignty stems from the land itself is foregrounded in the author's discussion of indigenous sovereignty discourses, which often refer not only to historical facts and events (i.e. the fact of the monarchy) but also to indigenous constructions of sovereignty through language and ideas. Historical and contemporary articulations of Hawaiian sovereignty are, as a result, explored here side-by-side with fruitful results. Keywords: hawaiian; land; press; sovereignty; university
Past
Ocean
- Pirates, Insurers, Traders, Diviners: Encountering Economies of Somali Piracy by Lu, Vivian Chenxue (2020) - The rise of Somali piracy in the waters off the Horn of Africa between 2007 and 2012 represented a peculiar form of global interruption; rather than simply the seizure of cargo, whose value is limited to the cargo itself, the hijack-and-ransom of ships and crew instead generated millions of dollars of value through ransom, demurrage, and negotiation. We quickly see that Somali piracy is less a story of desperate ragtag handfuls of men making do with state failure, as popular media and academic accounts portray, but rather one that emerges from a long history of making livelihoods along the “pastoral commons” of the Indian Ocean and its coasts (44). Keywords: ocean; piracy; sea; somali
- DEEPWATER ALCHEMY by Gentilucci, Marta (2025) - Corporate strategies for legitimising deep sea mining”, Political Geography 74, 102060. Her analysis culminates in a call for ethical ocean mediation, including the imperative to !make space for the unknown” (199). Keywords: han; mining; ocean; seafloor
Belonging
- Claiming indigeneity in precarious landscapes: Race, economic globalization and climate change in Rooibos land by Arosoaie, Aida (2020) - However, while belonging in the rooibos-region was unequivocally predicated upon the plant, contingent perception of endemism and foreignness in the rooibos landscape meant that “even rooibos, the very symbol of indigeneity, could move in and out of these moral certainties: Rooibos is good because it is endemic; cultivated rooibos is bad because it leads to plowing in the fragile ecosystem. Chapter Two delves deeper into the “region’s fraught history of cultural indigeneity” (67), using the framework of symbiopolitics to note that both colored and white farmers linked their subjectivities, nature and religion “in ways that were not just metaphorical but also informed by a deification of nature and by a need for economic livelihoods” (94). Keywords: belonging; farmers; indigeneity; ives; rooibos
- Refugee youth seeking social belonging in the context of Australian multiculturalism by Pinar, Fulya (2021) - Young refugees in Brisbane, then, absorb, negotiate, and respond to the competing messages about integration and tolerance and forge a sense of who they are and where they belong. Moran argues that the reflections of colonial and anti-immigrant histories of Australia can be observed in the everyday lives of young refugees. Keywords: belonging; moran
Ethnography
- Rocking the Boat by Danely, Jason (2021) - This is the sort of boat I imagine that Foucault had in mind when he wrote his essay ‘On Other Places’ (1986), in which he writes, “a ship is the heterotopia par excellence,” a “place without a place” that is “given over to the infinity of the sea” (1986:27). The image was borrowed from a line in Rimbaud’s poem, “The Drunken Boat,” and indeed, the poetic urge that seems to animate the “Paper Boat Collective” is one that sways and surfs on waves of words and images, deep and bracing. Keywords: boat; ethnography; paper; writing
Politics
- How to Make a Wetland: Water and Moral Ecology in Turkey by Lennon, Gabriel (2022) - Conceptually, political ecology is present, but foggily, only openly addressed in the closing pages where it is asserted that moral ecology may be an aid to political ecology’s longevity in the present era through its changed focus to moral claims (p. 170). Lacking this more substantive case, the moral ecology’s contribution is left somewhat imprecise, instead seeming more to be an advancement of political ecologies already extant emphasis on moral claims implicit in ‘politics.’ Keywords: ecology; politics
- Freedom in Captivity: Negotiations of Belonging along Kashmir's Frontier (2023): By Radhika Gupta by Mir, Khalid Yaqoob (2025) - 232pp ISBN:9781009201629 Keywords: Ethnography, Politics of Belonging, Borderland, Kashmir Conflict, South Asia A vignette from the 2004 Bollywood film Lakshya depicts a young army major’s discovery of lifelong commitment on the distant hill of Kargil, the site of the fourth Indo-Pak war. This is equally true for Kargil Shias, a “double minority, engulfed in this sense of despair” (195). Keywords: gupta; kargil; kashmir; politics
Landscape
- A Glocal Perspective on Native American Landscapes by Marti Gil, Irene (2022) - The history of Native American landscapes is defined by transformation in the event of major social, cultural, economic, and religious ruptures. The value of this book primarily resides in the creative outlook that Cobb takes on the study of Native American history at the structural, theoretical, and thematic levels. Keywords: american; cobb; landscape; southeast
Relations
- Relations: An Anthropological Account (2020): By Marilyn Strathern by Bravo, Arthur Ivan (2023) - While such relations were before considered in the context of a historical analysis of modern and contemporary Britain or on-site fieldwork in Melanesia, in the present investigation, the source word-concept is the very subject of attention, with implications abounding for all. In Chapter 1, she invokes Pina-Cabral’s “objection to anthropological socio-centrism, that is, to using social relations as a prototype for all relations…[furthermore to] the long line of ‘Anglo American philosophers’ who treated ‘all relations as being akin to paternal filiation,’ succumbing to the sociocentric trap of seeing every relation as propositionally instituted in the way kin relations are” (pg. 28). Keywords: inquiry; relations; strathern
Sex
- Mythbusting Bodies, Genders, and Sexualities by Robertson, William J (2017) - Chapter 1 focuses on body parts and addresses myths concerning penis size, vaginal odor, penile circumcision, testosterone, and binary biological sex. Chapter 7 deals with relationships and addresses myths about hooking up, feeling attracted to other people while in monogamous relationships, female sexual fantasies, infidelity, and (mis)matches in couple’s sexual desires. Keywords: chapter; myths; sex
Movements
- Native Faith Movements in Europe: Intersections, Collisions, and Transformations of Religious Sensibilities by Glazier, Stephen D. (2017) - Contributors point out that while Native Faith movements seem nationalistic in tone, most groups are accepting and inclusive of outsiders. Chapter 6, “In Search of Genuine Religion: The Contemporary Estonian Maausulised Movement and Nationalist Discourse” by Ergo-Hart Vastrik traces continuity between Estonian Native Faith movements and the followers of Maausk (Maausk = “the faith of the earth”) -- a religion that was banned by the Soviets in 1940. Keywords: chapter; faith; movements; pagan; paganism
Men
- Fullness of Life: Male Potency and Loss in Contemporary China by Gossage, Mollie (2017) - In the first, Society and the State, he tackles the shifting social context of impotence, applying Deleuze and Guattari's notion of desiring production to highlight how, in post-Mao China, impotence is a positive sign of reemergence from repression (13). Meanwhile, even as the rise of biomedicine in China downplays the holistic or moral aspects of impotence (as in loss of jing), there is a limit to how far Chinese men are willing to understand their erectile failure mechanistically. Keywords: impotence; men; zhang
Egypt
- Review of Egypt’s football revolution: Emotion, Masculinity, and Uneasy Politics by Nygren, Victor (2023) - Rommel describes how a new professional system around football, largely based on public funding, was reported on through new media infrastructures and supported by pop cultural productions, a generation of talented football players and seemingly limitless footballing success, created a national ‘bubble’ of hope, joy, and celebratory victory in a time of deep neoliberal reforms and crony capitalism in an Egypt that was otherwise characterized by a stand-still, frustration, boredom and increasing labor migration to the Gulf. The intense rivalry between the Cairene clubs did not carry on into national team games. Keywords: egypt; football; rommel
China
- No longer far from the ruler: A "then and now" portrayal of the indigenous Lisu of Mainland Southeast Asia and Southwest China by Morton, Micah F. (2018) - Part two of the book, entitled The Lisu by Country: Contemporary Sketches, offers a richer, more intimate portrayal of Lisu culture via a string of vignettes and ethnographies of the particular drawing on Zack's experiences in the multi-sited field of Lisu country. The first part offers a portrayal of the Lisu in classical anthropological style with each sub- chapter covering different aspects of Lisu culture, such as Mythic Origins, Migration, and Childhood: Learning by Doing. Keywords: china; lisu; thailand; zack
- Film review of Americaville by Pan, Darcy (2021) - He tells that Jackson Hole embodies such American values as freedom, the country lifestyle, equality, and fraternity adding that most importantly, it is ‘a place where your dreams can come true.’ While enjoying eating American food and watching cowboys dance, the residents also celebrate American holidays such as the Independence Day, Halloween and Christmas. Keywords: american; china; hole; jackson
Democracy
- Thinking Against the Blackmail of Democracy by Dogan, Sinan (2020) - Overall, Red Hangover provides an immensely valuable contribution to the literature on post-socialist futures and critiques of liberal democracies. Crises of the recent years, such as the annexation of Crimea by Russia, the Syrian Civil War, the rise and fall of the DAESH, and authoritarian leaders’ global rise to power, can be traced back to legacies of “really existing socialism” and the triumph of liberal democracies over socialism. Keywords: democracy; ghodsee; post; socialism
Institutions
- An Evolved Perspective on Fairness by Birch, Jennifer (2021) - Microsoft Word - Birch review.docx 1 An Evolved Perspective on Fairness JUSTIN JENNINGS, 2021, Finding Fairness: From Pleistocene Foragers to Contemporary Capitalists, Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 321 pp., ISBN: 9780813066745 (hardback) Keywords: Anthropological archaeology; biological and cultural evolution; social institutions; equality and inequality What is fairness? While Jennings’ core thesis is about fairness, this book is also about social institutions. Keywords: fairness; institutions; jennings; societies
Palestine
- Articulation as a Political Act? On a Study of Palestinian Shrines by HadžiMuhamedović, Safet (2018) - Muslim shrines in Palestine and the region, he notes, are usually, but not exclusively, burial places (7), which have been variously politically endorsed or resisted during their history. His examples are compelling: from the seventeenth-century account of a merchant of the English Levant Company, through the visitors scavenging for biblical associations of the region, the scholars looking for signals of “primitive religion” (33) and the “persistence of ancient and universal impulses” (35) in Muslim shrines, to the detailed Orientalist mappings and the academic study of the region after Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1799 and the founding of the Palestine Exploration Society in 1863. Keywords: muslim; notes; palestine; petersen; shrines
- Screen Shots: State Violence on Camera in Israel and Palestine (2021): By Rebecca Stein by Castellano, Neixé (2024) - Chapter 3 explores the credibility of Palestinian visual evidence within Israeli society, analysing the appearance of a repudiation script which emerged from the Zionist social margins (Israeli settler media outlets and pro-Israeli bloggers in the United States) and has gradually been consolidated and normalised, reaching Israeli mainstream Media and even political discourses. These struggles hindered the arrival of the pictures to Israeli media or human rights organisations. Keywords: chapter; israel; palestine
Public
- Can the Digital Revolutionize Academic Scholarship? by Kovalyova, Natalia (2019) - None of the examples of public scholarship mentioned in the book suggest new innovations in methodology or analytical techniques, nor do they shake the epistemic foundations of academic research. Yet, this enthusiasm for public scholarship is not universally embraced in academia and a decision to “go public” with one’s scholarship comes with a price. Keywords: academic; public; research; scholarship
Andean
- Deciphering Wak’as: Review of The Archaeology of Wak’as by Tamara L. Bray (editor) by Piscitelli, Matthew (2015) - In Chapter 7, Dean provides one of the most convincing examples of non-human personhood by focusing on wank’as (or huancas), which are stone features that Andean communities perceived as guardians watching over the people and land within their viewsheds. In Chapter 2, Allen draws on her own extensive body of ethnographic fieldwork to emphasize how wak’as were animated objects with “capacities, moods, and appetites” (p. 24). Keywords: andean; chapter; inka; wak’as
Residents
- Life Among Urban Planners: Practice, Professionalism, and Expertise in the Making of the City by Lindblad, Jenny (2022) - In working towards the idea of planning practice that acknowledge and works with the incompleteness of its control and knowledge, Holston suggests, ethnographic knowledge on the present can contribute to a planning practice that advances possibilities for social change based on “people’s practice” rather than “utopian speculation” (p. 236). Her doctoral research was an ethnographic study of planning practices in Bordeaux, France, to the backdrop of reforms for flexible planning. Keywords: chapter; planners; planning; residents
Israel
- Teaching the Holocaust in an Uncertain World: Review of Anxious Histories by Jordana Silverstein by Calnitsky, Naomi (2015) - The author situates Jewish migration to Australia in its formerly racialized immigration climate in which quotas defined Jewish migration before and after the war, to probe connections between whiteness and Jewishness in Australia. Stories of Jewish migration to the “settler-colonial” societies under study are given little attention. Keywords: histories; holocaust; israel
Sovereignty
- Kapila, Kriti. 2022. Nullius: The Anthropology of Ownership, Sovereignty, and the Law in India. by del Nido, Juan M. (2023) - The Foucauldian and Agambean approaches the author chooses to sideline are by now a wholly unreflexive toolkit when studying states and sovereignty, and time and again one sees how the narrative could have fallen back on that track. Chicago: HAU Books, 195 pp., ISBN: 9781912808472 Keywords: India, sovereignty, gift, ownership, property Since Marcel Mauss’ The Gift, our discipline has been concerned with a kind of excess: that created by the act of giving, that extra something that could not be reduced to the actual things being exchanged. Keywords: nullius; sovereignty
Theory
Islands
- Peoples, Place and Performing Arts of the Riau Islands by Pugh-Kitingan, Jacqueline (2020) - “Who cares about Malay music?” by Nicholas Long concludes the book by examining of the changing sociocultural profile of Riau through the composition and performance of contemporary Riau Malay music by the group Trio Komodo—a group made up, not of Malay musicians, but of members of the immigrant Florinese community. Copenhagen: NIAS Press; xx-340 pp., ISBN: 978- 87-7694-259-5 Dispersed from the Straits of Malacca across the South China Sea, from Sumatra, Peninsular Malaysia and Singapore to west Kalimantan, the 2,408 Riau Islands or Kepri (Kepulauan Riau) comprise Indonesia’s largest province. Keywords: arts; chapter; islands; lingga; malay; music; orang; riau; suku
Death
- The ‘Truth’ Behind Haitian Zombies by Basta, Natalie Anne (2020) - In Zombies: An Anthropological Investigation of the Living Dead, Philippe Charlier uses biomedicine and physical anthropology to discuss the presence and cultural significance of zombies in Haiti. Zombies: An Anthropological Investigation of the Living Dead and translated by Richard J. Gray II. 2017. Keywords: charlier; death; zombies
Culture
- Business Culture and Rediscovery of Difference by Krutikova, Anastasia (2020) - Through generous descriptions of the environment, rituals and experiences that MBA students encounter during their training, the author paints a fascinating cultural portrait of future middle and senior managers as key players in global business. The following chapters contain ethnographic descriptions of two signature components of MBA international business curriculum. Keywords: business; culture; mba
Use
- The power of drugs: Implications from substance-use in ancient cultures by Blomqvist Mickelsson, Tony (2020) - Once again, the volume delicately highlights how psychoactive substances may have been utilized with greater purpose than one could initially imagine. For example, the authors touch upon Greek perceptions of “Scythians” (25) and their peculiar use of cannabis in funeral ceremonies, highlighting cultural differences and contrasts in relation to how substances are, perhaps, “supposed” to be utilized. Keywords: substances; use; volume
Allen
- Marketing to Potential Soldiers Through Video Games by Bikowski, Kyle S. (2020) - He then provides a brief history of the Army Game Project (AGP), before positioning himself as an avid player of the First-Person Shooter (FPS) genre of video games. After describing his ethnographic approach to this project, he provides the social context of his research in relation to the rise in popularity and use of video games since the 1980s. Keywords: allen; army; military
- Sounds at the End/Beginning of the World: Black Gay Habits of Mind by Rehnström, Rebecka (2022) - Sounds at the End/Beginning of the World: Black Gay Habits of Mind Review by Rebecka Rehnström JAFARI S. ALLEN, 2021, There's a Disco Ball Between Us: A Theory of Black Gay Life , Durham and London: Duke University Press, 448 pp., ISBN: 978-1-4780-2189-6 Keywords: Black gay life, Black history, queer history, Blackfullness, blackness In his recent book, There's a Disco Ball Between Us, Jafari S. Allen presents a history of what he names “Black gay habits of mind.” The chapter also emphasizes the importance of bringing forward the 1980s as a historically significant “break,” when analyzing relations between Black people. Keywords: allen; black; chapter; gay
Military
- Stone, Nomi. 2022. Pinelandia: An Anthropology and Field Poetics of War and Empire by Warner III, Charles (2023) - While Stone repeatedly (and persuasively) returns to the impossibility of what such training and strategies seek to accomplish, a military affiliated reader may come away with an entirely different set of conclusions: “lessons learned” to be added to a playbook assembled to deflect us from seeing the impossibility of the desired military praxis and performance (a deflection especially desired, as Stone notes, when there are congress(wo)men courting voters and military contractors courting Congress). Role-players that come to be seen as sought-after tools in American military efforts to militarize or weaponize culture. Keywords: american; military; pineland; poetry; stone
Plantation
- The Plantation Spaces in Black and White: Review of Ancestors of Worthy Life by of Teresa Moyer by LaVoy, Catherine Elizabeth (2015) - This economic inequality has been recently highlighted in litigation about unethical lending practices, which resulted in the high foreclosure rate in Baltimore for African American residents during the recent economic crisis (ElBoghdady 2008). Over a decade after Eichstedt and Small (2002) completed their study on the interpretation of slavery on plantation museums across the southern United States, Moyer’s book reveals that the practice of symbolic annihilation of slavery is still a problem at plantation museum sites. Keywords: african; moyer; plantation
- Plantation Worlds (2024): By Maan Barua by Karlsson, Bengt (2024) - In the Plantation Worlds book, we learn about Adivasi farmers, elephants, feral plants, forest reservation, oil extraction, and identity politics; stories that rarely figure in accounts of tea plantations in Assam and elsewhere. As we learn, survival in the Assam Plantationocene is hard for both people and elephants (and other non-humans) that inhabit a landscape compartmentalized into separate spaces for tea plantations, agriculture villages, forest reserves, and wildlife sanctuaries. Keywords: assam; barua; plantation; tea
Capitalism
- A Collaborative Ethnography on Transnational Capitalist Collaborations by Kuiper, Gerda (2020) - Whereas Italian firms and their joint ventures with Chinese firms initially sourced material and produced in China for foreign markets, they at a later stage also produced for the domestic market. Rofel argues that the ambiguous relation between the state, family and business has to be seen in the light of the legacies of the socialist past yet is also shaped by the entrance of Italian firms that evaluate family firms positively. Keywords: capitalism; chinese; firms
War
Child
- Transformation and Rehabilitation: Review of Cruel Attachments by John Borneman by Sardella, Molly A (2016) - It is more difficult to state whether or not Borneman is “convincing” in the other two sections of Cruel Attachments as neither the prolegomenon nor “Loose End” revolve around research questions, goals, or arguments per se. Furthermore, according to Borneman, the treatments are designed in order to enact social change through the process of reforming individuals. Keywords: borneman; child; research; text
Mumbai
- Mumbai Taximen: Autobiographies and Automobilities in India (2022): By Tarini Bedi by Andrew Kerr (2024) - The book’s attention to chillia drivers, specifically, and to their taxis as integral extensions of them, offers a rich and sensuously curious ethnography that pushes readers beyond classical issues of the city about poverty and the politics of labor. Since the chapters are hyper-focused to the specific experiences of chillia drivers in Mumbai, one might be left wanting more extended engagement with other studies of neoliberal infrastructure and modern subjectivity within India and elsewhere. Keywords: bedi; chillia; drivers; mumbai; taximen
Danahay
- The power of epistemological principles by Galli, Raoul (2020) - The problem that American anthropologist Deborah Reed-Danahay sets out to solve in Bourdieu and Social Space (2020) is, as the title suggests, what Pierre Bourdieu really meant and did with the notion of social space. Locating Bourdieu. Keywords: bourdieu; danahay; reed; space
Body
- How Global is Obesity? by Roy, Meghna (2021) - Obesity, Culture, and Symbolic Body Capital, Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 272 pp., ISBN 978-0-82635-800-4 Keywords: Gender studies, body image, obesity, fat stigma, body capital She thus contends that a profound account of obesity stigma and social body capital among African American females should investigate this question of “exception.” Keywords: body; chapter; fat; obesity
- Extreme Weight Loss: Life Before and After Bariatric Surgery by Mathur, Jaya (2022) - Studying these patients is useful because these are individuals who after having lived with obesity, undergo a complex procedure that subjects their bodies to a rapid transformation, and makes them undergo a range of experiences related to body weight in a very short period. The book is a valuable addition to the rich body of writing on the complex status of body weight in human societies. Keywords: body; loss; surgery; weight
Jackson
- Worlds of Care: The Emotional Lives of Fathers Caring for Children with Disabilities (2021): By Aaron Jackson by Nazmia Ebrahim (2024) - Chapter Two, ‘The Depths of Time: Past Becomings and Habitable Worlds,’ explores the arrival stories of children of Jackson’s participants, illustrating how past experiences and future projections shape caregiving practices. When men perform caregiving, particularly the type of caregiving that requires vulnerability and emotional intimacy, they are remaking themselves as fathers and as men, echoing Bell Hooks’ concept of dominator models of masculinity. Keywords: caregiving; fathers; jackson; masculinity
Art
- The Interconnectedness of Objects and Imagination: Review of Objects and Imagination by Øivind Fuglerud & Leon Wainwright (eds) by Keeling, Lin Bentley (2016) - Focusing on contemporary contexts for diverse objects within the framework of the volume’s theoretical discussion, these chapters provide nuanced and rich explorations of the relationships between objects, individual imaginations and social imaginaries. The Interconnectedness of Objects and Imagination Review by Lin Bentley Keeling Objects and Imagination: Perspectives on Materialization and Meaning by Øivind Fuglerud & Leon Wainwright (eds) Berghahn Books, 2015 Physical objects have tremendous associative power embodying more than remembrance and mental connections. Keywords: art; imagination; objects
Caribbean
- Practicing Death by Escalante, Alejandro Stephano (2021) - By reorienting our attention to other communities and practices within the Caribbean, this volume reiterates a centrally important point: the Caribbean has never been one thing. Potential, then, exists to consider the rites of Caribbean peoples through photo essays, sustained engagements with ritual objects, and poetry. Keywords: caribbean; dead; volume
Activism
- From Lead through activism to activism through lead by del Nido, Juan M. (2021) - From Lead through activism to activism through lead Reviewer: Dr. Juan M del Nido Life Without Lead: Contamination, Crisis and Hope in Uruguay, by Daniel Renfrew, Oakland, CA, University of California Press, 2018, 296 pp., $85.00 (hardback), ISBN 978- 0520295469, $29.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-0520295476 Keywords: lead, Uruguay, environmental anthropology, activism, Latin America Life Without Lead examines how lead poisoning became the first environmental problem to reach mass awareness in Uruguay, a self-styled continental haven of stable, middle class, “it can’t happen here” industriousness. When health protocols were finally set up, contamination tolerance thresholds were exceptionally lenient in international terms, downplaying the seriousness of lead poisoning as an epidemic and reducing the number of cases in need of an assistance already insufficient. Keywords: activism; lead; poisoning; renfrew
Societies
- Challenging Ideas of Abundance by Verstraete, Emma (2021) - Other chapters of the book cover symbolic abundance, social status, and the way abundance impacts a society’s ability to expand or become more complex. Microsoft Word - Verstraete_final.docx 1 1 Challenging the Idea of Abundance MONICA L. SMITH, 2017, Abundance: The Archaeology of Plentitude, Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 261 pp., ISBN: 978-1-60732-593-2 Keywords: Economic anthropology, economic archaeology, North America, social institutions, social interactions Concepts of large-scale consumption and complex trade routes are not new entries into how anthropologists and economic historians view pre-colonial societies. Keywords: abundance; societies; volume
Mesoamerican
- The artworld(s) of the Mesoamerican antiquities market by Marti Gil, Irene (2021) - Adam Sellen also reacts to the dispersion of looted antiquities around the globe. Joyce defines the market in Mesoamerican antiquities as “art world(s),” or a complex network of mutually-dependent, and thus equally responsible, actors that once created and now perpetuate the traffic in antiquities. Keywords: antiquities; artifacts; market; mesoamerican
Youth
- Liquifying Categories in a Palestinian Refugee Camp by Berk, Elizabeth (2022) - Finally, Barbosa includes pictures he took with one of the shabāb, Hisham, images which today they can no longer discern which are Hisham’s and which Barbosa’s. During my fieldwork in Lebanon I, as Barbosa, found myself searching for an Arabic word for agency and curious as to why conversations otherwise held in Arabic often employed the English for both gender and agency. Keywords: barbosa; gender; shabāb; youth
U.s
- Fallout, security, and alternative planetary futures by Ojani, Chakad (2021) - While the term terraformation is often associated with outer space, Masco suggests that nuclear nationalism and petrochemical capitalism, through their various cumulative and recursive effects, have already conducted a 2 terraforming project here on Earth. Against this backdrop, Part I, “Dreaming Deserts and Death Machines,” foregrounds an amalgamation of nuclear nationalism and settler colonial visions of empty space. Keywords: fallout; masco; security; u.s
- Deported to Death: How Drug Violence is Changing Migration on the U.S.-Mexico Border (2019): By Jeremy Slack by Wood, Andrew (2023) - As Jeremy Slack’s Deported to Death makes abundantly clear, undocumented migrants unfortunate enough to be caught by U.S. immigraBon and deported to Mexico o[en fall vicBm to predatory officials and criminal groups. Microsoft Word - Jeremy Slack Deported to Death.docx Jeremy Slack, 2019, Deported to Death: How Drug Violence is Changing MigraBon on the U.S.- Mexico Border. Keywords: border; slack; u.s
Fisher
- Microcosms of power dynamics: The hidden world of pharmaceutical testing by Ahlness, Ellen A. (2022) - In talking about the human experience, Fisher seems to be particularly conscientious about inferring participants’ explicitly communicated motivations for participating in trials, cognizant to not ascribe secondary meanings. Fisher asserts that a society characterized by stigmas, 3 especially intersectional stigmas, means that there will always be healthy volunteers willing to undergo risks for financial compensation. Keywords: fisher; phase; trials
- Microcosms of power dynamics: The hidden world of pharmaceutical testing by Ahlness, Ellen A. (2022) - The introduction assumes that readers have little background knowledge about clinical trials, explaining the difference between various testing stages in the pharmaceuticals industry, and notes two critical features of the industry. In talking about the human experience, Fisher seems to be particularly conscientious about inferring participants’ explicitly communicated motivations for participating in trials, cognizant to not ascribe secondary meanings. Keywords: fisher; phase; trials
Images
- Dressing up: Menswear in the Age of Social Media (2022): By Joshua Bluteau by rice, emma (2025) - Bluteau also reflects on the difficulty of leaving the Instagram fieldsite, noting that digital engagement does not end neatly with the conclusion of fieldwork. Such actions effectively set the stage for the book’s main argument: the crafting of the sartorial self is a performance that extends beyond the physical act of dressing to include habitual engagement within digital spaces. Keywords: bluteau; digital; images; instagram
Pollution
- Colonial, Decolonial, Anticolonial – the How in Doing Science by Rodineliussen, Rasmus (2022) - Pollution Is Colonialism is an intriguing read, written in a clear and sometimes joking language (which, at least for this reader, really allowed points to go through with a laugh), on a very important and timely topic: plastics pollution, science, and colonial relations. The research focuses on plastics pollution and how scientists map its impact on wildlife. Keywords: colonialism; liboiron; pollution
- Underwater Worlds: An Ethnography of Waste, Pollution, and Marine Life (2024): By Rasmus Rodineliussen by Sangkhamanee, Jakkrit (2025) - Palgrave Macmillan, 248 pp., ISBN 978-3-031-63372-0 Keywords: Aquabiopolitics, Environmental Anthropology, Marine Pollution, Scuba Diving, Underwater Ethnography, Waste Rasmus Rodineliussen’s Underwater Worlds is a vivid and thought-provoking ethnography that plunges into the complex entanglements of underwater waste, pollution, marine life, and our recognitions. Another chapter examines how the Rena Mälaren trash-diving group makes underwater waste visible to the public through installations and media campaigns. Keywords: pollution; rodineliussen; underwater; waste
Remains
- Repatriation and Erasing the Past (2020): By Elizabeth Weiss and James W. Springer by Marti Gil, Irene (2024) - For instance, they contend that the acceptance of oral tradition as judicial evidence proves that the legal system exerts religious and racial discrimination to favor Native American communities over non-Native American individuals (p.183). These chapters give an overview of the scientific methods of research used (1) to learn about different aspects of Paleoindian lifestyles, such as diet, health, migration patterns, and culture, and (2) to discredit false narratives and misconceptions, including the original peopling of the Americas, the pre-contact population size, and the violent behavioral trends among and between Native American communities. Keywords: american; nagpra; remains; repatriation
Animals
- Teaching and learning interspecies etiquette in the city by von Essen, Erica (2022) - This failure to communicate with urban wild animals is owed to several things, we learn throughout. Just as domesticated animals become ‘friend-shaped’ (neotenous and round), urban animals quite quickly differentiate from their wildland cousins by often becoming fatter, having more offspring, living longer, becoming bolder, louder and more curious. Keywords: accidental; alagona; animals; ecosystem; encounters; wildlife
Economy
- Humans and their Households: Review of Oikos and Market by by Stephen Gudeman & Chris Hann (eds) by Green, Adam (2016) - These studies show that household efforts to foster self-sufficiency are locally constituted. To the informants who made these studies possible, self-sufficiency can be about giving all household members meaningful work, engaging in feasts and social rituals, providing assistance to other households, distinguishing themselves from other households, or drawing in tourists to sustain the local community. Keywords: economy; households; ideal; self; sufficiency
- Rubbish Belongs to the Poor: Hygienic Enclosure and the Waste Commons (2022): By Patrick O’Hare by Renfrew, Daniel (2023) - This lucid and engaging, at times amusing, ethnography of waste-pickers in Montevideo, Uruguay, challenges readers to think critically about the role of waste in contemporary society, the nature of informality within the local and global economies of advanced capitalism, and perhaps most poignantly, whether people should have a “right” to urban waste as a resource and as a commons. Urban waste, the symbolically stigmatized material substance which normative assumptions suggest no one wants, is instead subject to at times intensely disputed political claims between the urban clasificadores, the state, and private corporations. Keywords: clasificadores; economy; o’hare; urban; waste
Mining
- Casting Things as Actors in the Peruvian Landscapes of Mining Conflict: Review of Unearthing Conflict by Fabiana Li by Baines, Kristina Linda (2015) - Casting Things as Actors in the Peruvian Landscapes of Mining Conflict Review by Kristina Baines Unearthing Conflict: Corporate Mining, Activism, and Expertise in Peru by Fabiana Li Duke University Press, 2015 In Unearthing Conflict, Fabiana Li presents a purposeful and careful opening up of the concept of “conflict” to include “people, places and things,” and the complex relationships between them, in the context of mining conflict in Peru. Showing that the technical language, devices and measurement associated with the scientific monitoring and explanation of environmental impacts compare to other ways of knowing and inhabiting the landscape, she proposes that this “ontological multiplicity” can somehow be reconciled for mining conflicts, opening up the potential of grassroots movements to work within this flexible space to make real changes in national politics. Keywords: conflict; discussion; mining
Dance
- Writing the Hamatsa: Ethnography, Colonialism, and the Cannibal Dance (2021): By Aaron Glass by Kail, Anthony (2023) - Images of the masks and dances surrounding the Hamatsa are now used in tourism advertisements and museum depictions. Canada’s first Prime Minister John A. McDonald would go on to share with Parliament a number of ethnocentric messages about the spiritual condition of indigenous communities claiming that men, women and children of these communities were to be considered ‘savages’ until they became Christians. Keywords: dance; hamatsa
- Defending Rumba in Havana: The Sacred and Black Corporeal Undercommons (2025): By Maya J. Berry by Kail, Anthony (2025) - Defending Rumba in Havana: The Sacred and Black Corporeal Undercommons. In Defending Rumba in Havana: The Sacred and Black Corporeal Undercommons author Maya J. Berry takes readers into the etic physical realm of Rumba in Havana Cuba while leading us on the journey to the emic where we learn of the significance of Rumba as a conduit of the human experience. Keywords: berry; dance; rumba; shares
Crisis
- Vertiginous Life: An Anthropology of Time and the Unforeseen (2021): By Daniel Knight by Banquiles, Venes Carmelo (2024) - Entrapped in the throes of enduring crisis, individuals adapt by learning to adeptly maneuver through it, often enduring hardship while mustering courage, skills, and strategies to confront the situation. 1 KNIGHT, DANIEL, 2021, Vertiginous Life: An Anthropology of Time and the Unforeseen, New York: Berghahn Books, 163 pp., ISBN 978-1-80073-194-3 Daniel Knight’s Vertiginous Life delves into the concept of crisis, drawing from personal experiences and extensive ethnographic data collected over years of fieldwork. Keywords: crisis; knight; vertigo
- Island in the storm: Iceland and the financial crisis of 2008 by Johnson, Alix (2017) - As it is, however, Gambling Debt is an important contribution: a multi-faceted analysis of Iceland’s recent financial crash, and a toolkit for social scientists considering crisis writ large. The volume’s final section, “The Crash and Communities,” offers nuanced analyses of the aftermath of crisis on specific sectors of society: Gu∂björnsdóttir and Davidsdóttir take up the response of the school system; Skaptadóttir considers the impact on immigrants; Innes examines government- sponsored language education, and Rice tracks changes in material aid charity. Keywords: crash; crisis; iceland; volume
Duch
- Pol Pot's Willing Executioner? Criminal Accountability at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal by Wilson, Richard Ashby (2017) - He is the author or editor of 10 books on international human rights, humanitarianism, truth and reconciliation commissions and international criminal tribunals. The Trial of a Khmer Rouge Torturer by Alexander Laban Hinton Duke University Press 2016 Alexander Laban Hinton has written a highly engaging and experimental ethnography of international justice that narrates the criminal trial of Kaing Guek Eav (aka “Duch”), a central figure in the “killing fields’ of 1970s Cambodia. Keywords: duch; genocide; hinton; law; trial
Boredom
- Boredom in Bucharest by Kloth, Christopher (2018) - Shelters are themselves boring and create boredom for those inside of them. It is through these feelings of hope and desire that the emotional importance of boredom becomes more apparent. Keywords: boredom; o’neill
Metaphysics
- In the Gilded Realm of Ideas: Review of Cannibal Metaphysics by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro by Mentore, George (2015) - Clearly it is not indigenous thought which we should be seeking to take seriously but rather that which makes the indigenous obviously human. Hence many of us have not been surprised by the content of Cannibal Metaphysics, not because it repeats earlier works in a more expansive rendering, but rather because it familiarly advocates the disputed primacy of at least one side of Amerindian thought long considered foundational to an understanding of indigenous sociality. Keywords: metaphysics; thinking; thought
Globalization
- Globalization of the local: Agency, shifting identities, and a community that sticks together by Leiter, Sarah (2018) - The core of the book consists of a comparative study of different Mixtec villages in which members have converted away from Catholicism. Most Mixtec villages are governed by the usos y costumbres system in which each resident family is required to contribute to and participate in civil and religious duties, including the sponsoring and planning of fiestas honoring Catholic saints. Keywords: globalization; mixtecs; o’connor
Cayenne
Fennell
- Resistance and Insistence: Studying Identity Through Commodity Trends Review by Latham, Sarah (2018) - In chapter 5, Fennell uses oral history accounts, archaeological excavations, and documentary evidence from the Demory site in Loudoun County to explore how ethnic, social networks can be consistent and well-established in a specific area for generations, and yet, as the result of a variety of environmental and social factors, then become porous, making room for new emergent identities. Today, new Philadelphia Illinois exists only as a state historical marker and a site for archaeological research. Keywords: chapter; fennell; new; philadelphia
Anna
- An EthnoGRAPHIC Entrance by Sargent, Christine Ann (2018) - Lissa follows the intersecting lives of Anna and Layla, using their friendship to explore how individuals embody health, illness, agency, and chance in contexts of structural inequality and social injustice. While Anna contemplates the meaning and implications of this information, visiting a local “previvors” group to think through her options, the story switches back to Layla. Keywords: anna; layla; lissa; revolution
Derivative
- The Socialization of the Financial Instruments by Lor Afshar, Ehsan (2018) - 1 The Socialization of the Financial Instruments Review by Ehsan Lor Afshar The Social Life of Financial Derivatives: Markets, Risk, and Time Edward LiPuma Duke University Press, 2017 2 Having argued crises can best illuminate the hidden sociality of financial markets and the performativity of those markets, he takes the financial crisis of 2008 as his departing point. Keywords: derivative; lipuma; markets
Country
- Embracing democracy and market economy: lessons from Kyrgyzstan by Bytyqi, Tringa (2018) - Nowadays wide accepted and valued, social mobility is encouraged by the Kyrgyz government. If the local NGOs are independent of the state, their legitimacy in return is not dependent on local social forces. Keywords: country; kyrgyzstan; petric
Ageism
- #StillHuman: Re-Imagining the Ageing Self by Hatten, Zoe (2018) - Recognizing ageism can help us transcend our netherworlds – be they a valley in northern California, a field in Shandong, or an urban farm in Havana – and “emerge to see the stars” (p.204). Ageism must be taken seriously, like other isms – racism and sexism – because it is, Gullette argues, a category that is socially constructed in the same way, with equally dire consequences for humanity. Keywords: ageism; gullette; way
Danely
- The Art of Aging: Review of Aging and Loss by Jason Danely by Hall, Sarah (2015) - The Art of Aging Review by Sarah Hall Aging and Loss: Mourning and Maturity in Contemporary Japan by Jason Danely Rutgers University Press, 2014 Jason Danely’s exploration of the experiences of Japanese elders and their negotiation of aging in his book follows along what one would very much imagine was his natural progression of thought, throughout his years of research on the topic. Over and over again, informants relate to Danely a desire to not burden others, in terms of both physical need, but also, in the case of one man, Sato-san, an emotional burden. Keywords: danely
Individuals
- Two heads are better than one: a brief demonstration of the value of interdisciplinary approaches to archaeological inquiry at Teopancazco by Lythe, Andrew (2019) - Chapter Eight reveals that children were generally overrepresented at Teopancazco grave sites, constituting 27% of the formal burials (176). Microsoft Word - 175-527-1-RV.docx 1 Two heads are better than one: a brief demonstration of the value of interdisciplinary approaches to archaeological inquiry at Teopancazco Review by Andrew Lythe, Université de Montréal Multiethnicity and Migration at Teopancazco: Investigations of a Teotihuacan Neighborhood Center Edited by Linda R. Manzanilla University Press of Florida, 2017 Key words: interdisciplinary research, paleodiet, migration, pathologies, isotopes Multiethnicity and Migration at Teopancazco provides its readers with a glimpse into the socioeconomic fabric of Classic period (CE 200–550) Keywords: chapter; individuals; teopancazco
Differences
- Immigrant spaces: experiences from Maryland by Velez-Ibanez, Carlos (2019) - Using multiple methods including 70 ethnographic interviews, surveys, media, archival research, and population data of especially the Prince George’s County area, the book is organized around three major parts. Borders, in short, are metaphors for power differences that result in mechanisms invisible to policy documents that stratify populations along an inclusion-exclusion continuum” (373). Keywords: differences; freidenberg; populations
- Which type of Bigfoot do you believe in?: Strategies for managing deviance by Clark, Tom (2020) - These 2 are the people who prefer to seek out deviant subcultures rather than be part of more mainstream ones. They attempt to keep their deviant status from public view and will typically avoid making strong connections with deviant subcultures because they fear that discovery will result in public shame. Keywords: bigfoot; deviance; deviant; outsiders
Contagion
- Contagious Narratives: Vaccines, Zombies, and Pandemics by Haarstick, Kimberly A. (2020) - Kitta stresses that contamination narratives are not only physical in nature, but also moral. She ends this chapter by discussing the Disneyland measles outbreak of 2015, arguing that the speculation surrounding patient zero’s medical history (vaccinated or not?) and country of origin (American or “outsider”) leads to distinct contagion narratives 3 depending on the presumed answers. Keywords: contagion; contamination; kitta
Aoluguya
Johnson
- Living with Uncertainty: The Potency of ‘Maybe’ on the Mekong by Taylor, Erin (2020) - ISBN: 978-1-4780-1082-1 Keywords: Mekong, Thailand, environment, economy, uncertainty Mekong Dreaming is an ethnography of a town on the Mekong river that has undergone rapid change in the last two decades, not only in the town itself but also in national and transnational circuits. At first glance Mekong Dreaming appears to focus on an environmental/economic issue—the damming of the Mekong and its effects on ecology and livelihood—but I would not consider this to be a book about ‘the environment.’ Keywords: johnson; mekong; river
Hajj
Armelagos
- Six decades of collaborative bioarchaeological research on the Nile by Stark, Robert James (2020) - The research presented by Van Gerven and Armelagos utilizes the lens of dam building and associated threats of flooding to the destruction of sites as the initial impetus for undertaking bioarchaeological research at Wadi Halfa, and subsequently at Kulubnarti. This volume will be of the greatest benefit to individuals interested in the history of biological anthropology in Sudan and to biological anthropologists seeking a broad synthesis and retrospective of research findings from Wadi Halfa and Kulubnarti. Keywords: armelagos; research; volume
Activists
- Consider the Whale by Searles, Edmund (2020) - In Chapter Three, Beldo engages with Makah spirituality, particularly as it “surrounds local conversations on Makah whaling” (86). “Any discussion of the spiritual aspect of Makah whaling must acknowledge,” Beldo writes, “that some Makah whalers engage in no spiritual practices at all” (92). Keywords: activists; beldo; makah; whale
Aztec
- Weaving the Dynamic Cosmos: Review of Aztec Philosophy by James Maffie by Parker, Megan Dakota (2016) - As he demonstrates, Aztec philosophy is rich and dynamic, conveying a sense of connection to the greater cosmos not found in Western philosophy. In Western philosophy, that which is sacred is pure and enduring, at odds with a changing, perishable world. Keywords: aztec; maffie
Alexander
- An Unseen Side of our Global Migrant Crisis by Kamara, Mohamed (2021) - Ċetta Mainwaring’s At Europe's Edge: Migration and Crisis in the Mediterranean (OUP 2019), which focuses on European migration policies and the maritime danse macabre unfolding off the coasts of small countries like Malta, is one good example. An Unseen Side of our Global Migrant Crisis Review by: Mohamed Kamara March 29, 2021 ISABELLA ALEXANDER-NATHANI, 2020, Burning at Europe's Borders: An Ethnography on the African Migrant Experience in Morocco, London and New York: Oxford University Press, 288 pp., ISBN 9780190074647. Keywords: alexander; burning; europe; nathani
Articles
Langlitz
- Primatology on Display by Moss, Benjamin H (2021) - Langlitz’s rather humanistic approach to the examination of primate researcher culture will not agree with those who prefer more empirical forms of ethnographic research, but the approach was warranted given the nature of his research subjects and the ever-changing field of ethnographic research. The field workers tend to argue for the possibility of primate culture because they observe in-person the diffusion of behaviors through geographic groups and through generations. Keywords: langlitz; primate; research
Fox
Noise
- To Hear and Feel the Noise through the Glitch by Rodineliussen, Rasmus (2022) - In the last chapter, Indefinite Urbanism, Peterson draws out what she calls Indefinite Urbanism, engaging the edge space of infrastructure to show how airport noise has an effect also beyond the airport. Chapter 3, Environmental Imaginaries, takes on the topic of noise pollution. Keywords: noise; peterson; sound
Clovis
- Early Human Life on the Southeastern Coastal Plain by Marti Gil, Irene (2022) - Chert procurement patterns in Florida show that Paleoindians and Early Archaic populations depended on local sources and had a relatively restricted foraging range, although they also accessed exotic stones via exchange. In Chapter 1, Goodyear and Moore introduce the natural and geomorphologic features of the Southeastern Coastal Plain and early human arrivals. Keywords: chapter; clovis; plain; pleistocene; pre
Davis
- Plastic Matter by O'Hare, Patrick (2022) - There are of course more conventional redemptive features of plastics, yet few are to be found in this book because there is little about human attachment to plastics in everyday life, about the “social life of plastic” in Appadurai’s sense. In fairness, that is clearly not where Davis’s main interest lies, which is instead centred not only on plastic matter but on plastic time: the ways that plastic connects us with both our planetary ancestors and future generations. Keywords: davis; matter; milk; plastic
High
- Projectland: Life in a Lao Socialist Model Village (2021): By Holly High by Pangallozzi, Laura (2023) - The state later allocates more New Kandon land to a Vietnamese rubber operation. For Kandon, its westward re-siting put it more firmly within the orbit of the Laos state, and the move from Old Kandon to New Kandon is narrated by High as a transformation from tradition to modernity. Keywords: high; kandon; katu; laos; new; village
Parenting
- Ramos-Zayas, Ana Y. 2020. Parenting Empires: Class, Whiteness, and the Moral Economy of Privilege in Latin America. by Valente, Juliana (2023) - Microsoft Word - Valente review .docx 1 ANA RAMOS-ZAYAS, 2020, Parenting Empires: Class, Whiteness, and the Moral Economy of Privilege in Latin America, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 296pp., ISBN: 978-1-4780- 0821-7 Keywords: moral economy; parenting and childcare; Latin America; US empire; studying up Ramos-Zayas’ (2020) ethnography Parenting Empires examines upper class parenting practices in Brazil and Puerto Rico. Though Ramos-Zayas grew up in a neighborhood of Puerto Rico that was not surrounded by the 2 affluent people she studies, her degree and appointment as professor at an acclaimed university in the US moved her close to the elite status of her interlocutors. Keywords: parenting; parents; ramos; zayas
Perpetrators
- Antonius C. G. M. Robben and Alexander Laban Hinton, 2023, Perpetrators Encountering Humanity’s Dark Side by Bahceci, Sergen (2023) - These “banisters” are particularly unhelpful when addressing subjects as difficult as perpetration, for “the first lesson of perpetrator research” – that researchers should always beware that the metaphorical figure of Medusa is always present in the room during perpetrator research - requires ample room for movement to be properly applied. The book begins with a desire to address “anthropology’s lack of methodological reflection on encounters with perpetrators of mass violence in the field,” but is far more than a methods guide. Keywords: perpetrators; research; robben
Fjeld
- The Return Of Polyandry: Kinship And Marriage In Central Tibet (2022): Heidi E. Fjeld by Moon-Little, Edward (2023) - Fjeld then provides an orderly overview of notions of belonging within Panam households, such as adoption, and, of course, marriage. Fjeld’s discussion of Tibetan kinship idioms around rü (bones) reminds anthropologists of the breadth of theories of relatedness, and why kinship used to be so central to the discipline. Keywords: chapter; fjeld; panam; polyandry
Collaborative
- Sharing the Camera. A Guide to Collaborative Ethnographic Filmmaking (2022): Martub Gruber by Uimonen, Paula (2023) - A Guide to Collaborative Ethnographic Filmmaking, Sean Kingston Publishing, 182 pp., ISBN: 978-1-912385-44-77 Keywords: collaboration, ethnographic film, Indigenous media, participatory video, toolkit This book offers a comprehensive and inspiring introduction to what Gruber describes as collaborative ethnographic filmmaking, which combines ideas and methods from the fields of ethnographic film, Indigenous media and participatory video. A Guide to Collaborative Ethnographic Filmmaking, Sean Kingston Publishing, 182 pp., ISBN: 978-1-912385-44-77 Keywords: collaboration, ethnographic film, Indigenous media, participatory video, toolkit This book offers a comprehensive and inspiring introduction to what Gruber describes as collaborative ethnographic filmmaking, which combines ideas and methods from the fields of ethnographic film, Indigenous media and participatory video. Keywords: collaborative; ethnographic; gruber; video
Theater
- State of the Arts: An Ethnography of German Theatre and Migration (2023): By Jonus Tinius by Tang, Jenny (2024) - Theatre, performance, ethics, migration, Germany Jonas Tinius’s State of the Arts (2023) tells the story of Theater an der Ruhr (“the Theater” hereafter), a public repertory theatre ensemble based in the Ruhr Valley in North Rhine- Westphalia founded by Roberto Ciulli, an émigré philosopher and self-taught director who moved from Italy to Germany in the 1960s. The Theater is committed first and foremost to the art of theatre, for which ethical self-cultivation must be enacted and through which political engagement would be facilitated. Keywords: theater; theatre; tinius
Hannerz
- Afropolitan Horizons: Essays toward a Literary Anthropology of Nigeria (2022): By Ulf Hannerz by Filani, Ibukun (2024) - Afropolitan Horizons appears to be a valid approach to studying Nigerian writings sideways, because journalistic writings from foreign newsmen and colonial notes on Nigeria by white colonial administrators do not constitute Nigerian literary writings. Starting with a cosmopolitan city roughly located at the center of Nigeria, Kafanchan, Hannerz meticulously presents to the readers his personal but insightful and analytical essays on various settings and themes in Nigerian writings. Keywords: hannerz; nigerian; writings
Street
- Redefining Street Vending as a Global Practice by Hinrichsen, Megan Bond (2017) - The themes that emerge from this volume include urban planning as a hegemonic project that “[amplifies] structural discrimination (95),” the use and (re)claiming of urban space, strategies of resistance to urban planning projects that limit or criminalize street vending, and new challenges and barriers that street vendors must contend with in the contemporary world. Not only is street vending declared illegal and forced removal of street vendors disguised as ensuring public security, but the people who make their living through vending are also made illegal and vulnerable to direct violence and discrimination. Keywords: street; vending; vendors; volume
Design
- Ethnographer's Way: A Handbook for Multidimensional Research Design (2024): By Kristin Peterson and Valerie Olson by Durán-Valis, María Gabriela (2024) - 1 KRISTIN PETERSON and VALERIE OLSON, 2024, The Ethnographer’s Way: A Handbook for Multidimensional Research Design, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 338 pp., ISBN 978-1-4780-2590-0 Keywords: Ethnography, research design, research methodology, qualitative methods, multidimensional design. Peterson and Olson provide an innovative approach that breaks with traditional practices and opens new avenues for research design. Keywords: design; module; research
Fieldnotes
- naked field notes by Luck, Kirsten (2024) - Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 320 pp., ISBN 978-1-5179- 16145 In Naked Fieldnotes: A Rough Guide to Ethnographic Writing, editors Denielle Elliott and Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer seek to fill a gap in ethnographic instruction and literature on how to record and capture fieldnotes divorced from rigid pedagogy and how-to guides that provide little insights into the actual mechanisms and techniques. Elliott and Wolf-Meyer intended for Naked Fieldnotes to elucidate the process of learning how to take fieldnotes by “demystifying” a practice that is often private and intimate (xxiii). Keywords: fieldnotes; meyer; wolf; writing
Fort
- Fort San Juan: the relations between Spaniards and Natives during the 18 months the Fort San Juan lasted by Marguirault, Ihintza (2017) - 1 Fort San Juan: the relations between Spaniards and Natives during the 18 months the Fort San Juan lasted Review by Ihintza Marguirault Fort San Juan and the Limits of Empire: His task was to explore the area, to claim its lands for Spain while pacifying local Indians, and to forge an overland road from Santa Elena to the valuable silver mines in Zacatecas, Mexico (p.5) and so he built Fort San Juan at Joara. Keywords: fort; juan; natives; spaniards
Chica
- review by Wood, Andrew (2025) - Mee@ngs took place in Costa Chica town centers where ac@vity saw government types seeking to uncover “cultural elements that were imagined to be unique to Black Mexican communi@es” (2). “The official conversa@ons,” Jerry writes, “rarely involved deep discussions about slavery in Mexico, or the manner in which African descendants arrived in the Costa Chica or racial discrimina@on or the historic roles that Black people and Blackness had played in the produc@on of the Mexican na@on” (2). Keywords: chica; costa; jerry
Batz
Education
- The succeeders: How immigrant youth are transforming what it means to belong in America. by Lenkart, Katherine (2025) - This insight is especially valuable for advisors in higher education, as it underscores the importance of supporting students in discovering and affirming their own identities, both inside and outside the classroom. The Succeeders: How Immigrant Youth Are Transforming What It Means to Belong in America is an intriguing and insightful ethnographic study of a program called “The Succeeders,” which supports Latino high school students in Nashville, Tennessee. Keywords: education; flores; students
Covering
- The Mask: A History of Breathing Bad Air (2025): By Bruno J. Strasser & Thomas Schlich by Barnes, Jessica (2025) - They examine the use of masks to mediate the flow of air in and out of bodies, drawing on a wide range of sources, from comics and novels to medical texts and paintings, with rich illustrations throughout. The book made me ponder the resonances attached to different body parts and the culturally and politically shaped ideas of what we should, or should not, bare to others. Keywords: covering; masks
Dairy
- lennon review by Lennon, Gabriel (2025) - Paul Hansen’s Hokkaido Dairy Farm gives us a rich ethnography of a Japanese dairy farm in Tokachi, Hokkaido, pseudonymously named the ‘Grand Hopes Diary Farm.’ Microsoft Word - lennon 2024_GuL (1).docx Paul Hansen, Hokkaido Dairy Farm: Cosmopolitics of Otherness and Security on the Frontiers of Japan. Keywords: dairy; hansen; hokkaido
India
- Pharmaceutical markets in India: Questioning "monopoly" by Ecks, Stefan (2017) - According to Sunder Rajan, Indian pharmaceutical companies exemplify a different logic of capital altogether, one that is not focused on monopoly but on a postcolonial nationalist free market (p. 154). In turn, Kaushik Sunder Rajan's Pharmocracy (2017) coins the same term to argue that multinational pharmaceutical companies should be prevented from establishing hegemony: Pharmocracy is a term I coin to refer to the global regime of hegemony of the multinational pharmaceutical industry (p. 6). Keywords: india; pharmocracy; rajan; sunder
Epilogue
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Created: 2025-12-24