New Books in Anthropology

Sanjay SrivastavaView on AmazonEntangled Urbanism: Slum, Gated Community and Shopping Mall in Delhi and Gurgaon (Oxford University Press, 2015) is the latest book by Sanjay Srivastava. A wonderfully readable piece of urban anthropology, the book explores the ways spaces and processes are interconnected in the city. From temples that resemble shopping malls, through the gates of luxury apartments and into the electricity supply networks of slums, the book pulls together the threads that entangle city dwellers with one another.

Jonathyne BriggsView on Amazon"Pop pop pop pop musik" -M Jonathyne Briggs' new book, Sounds French: Globalization, Cultural Communities, and Pop Music, 1958-1980 (Oxford University Press, 2015)  makes music the historical focus of the Fifth Republic's first two decades. What made certain sounds "French," and how did different cultural communities come together, expressing themselves in a variety of musical forms? From Françoise Hardy to Serge Gainsbourg, to the sounds of free jazz, Brittany folk, and punk, the book considers French musical production and consumption in global cultural context. Exploring the relationship between audio and national identities and communities, Briggs tracks both the influences from outside France on a range of scenes in and beyond Paris, and the reach of "French" sounds beyond the nation's borders. Sounds French is a book that examines the contributions of artists and listeners, reading "the noise" of (and surrounding) the music treated in its pages. The book also includes links to some of the songs that Briggs writes about (see the companion website developed by OUP). Fans of yé-yé, Johnny Hallyday, chanson, Jean-Michel Jarre, Alain Stivell, Métal Urbain, and/or Daft Punk will all find much to learn and enjoy here.

Amanda LuciaView on AmazonWaiting several hours in line for a hug is well worth it for thousands of people, the devotees of the Guru,  Amma, Mata Amritanandamayi. In Reflections of Amma: Devotees in a Global Embrace (University of California Press, 2014), Amanda Lucia, Associate Professor of Religion at UC Riverside, provides a rich ethnographic account of Amma's American followers and convincingly argues that there is much to learn here about gender, interpretation, and contemporary American religiosity. Amma's devotees in the United States are usually "inheritors" or "adopters" of Hindu traditions, which shapes their interpretive vantage point and understandings of Amma as Hindu goddesses or feminist. American multiculturalism and romantic orientalist attitudes frequently reifiy cultural differences further structuring the interrelations between South Asian and non-Indian devotees in the American context. In our conversation we discuss female religious leaders, darshan, gurus in American context, purity and ritual, women's empowerment, village and urban transformations, Devi Bhava, and gendered interpretations of Hinduism.

Kimberly ArkinView on AmazonIn Rhinestones, Religion, and the Republic: Fashioning Jewishness in France (Stanford University Press, 2014), Kimberly Arkin, assistant professor of anthropology at Boston University, explores the "racialization" of Jewishness among second- and third-generation North African Jewish adolescents in France. Through her interviews with students at three Jewish day schools and other members of the Paris Jewish community, she sheds light on the issue of multiculturalism in postcolonial France.

Leonard CassutoView on AmazonThe discontented graduate student is something of a cultural fixture in the U.S. Indeed theirs is a sorry lot. They work very hard, earn very little, and have very poor prospects. Nearly all of them want to become professors, but most of them won't. Indeed a disturbingly large minority of them won't even finish their degrees. It's little wonder graduate students are, as a group, somewhat depressed. In his thought-provoking book The Graduate School Mess: What Caused It and How We Can Fix It (Harvard University Press, 2015), Leonard Cassuto tries to figure out why graduate education in the U.S. is in such a sad state. More importantly, he offers a host of fascinating proposals to "fix" American graduate schools. Listen in.

Neha VoraView on AmazonNeha Vora's Impossible Citizens: Dubai's Indian Diaspora (Duke University Press, 2013) is a wonderfully rich and engaging account of middle class Indians who live and work, supposedly temporarily, in Dubai. Through an analysis of these perpetual outsiders, that are crucial to the Emirati economy, Vora sheds new light on our understanding of citizenship, belonging and Dubai itself. In the finest tradition of anthropology, the book is simultaneously minutely detailed in its descriptions and global in its analytical reach, opening up new ways of thinking about migrants in the contemporary world.

Gerard RussellView on AmazonIn this interview Gerard Russell talks about his vivid and timely new book Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys Into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East (Basic Books, 2014). Russell's experience as a British diplomat in a rapidly changing region gives the book remarkable breadth, providing a valuable insight into the lives of minority communities from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border to Egypt: Mandaeans, Yazidis, Zoroastrians, Druze, Samaritans, Copts and Kalasha. Russell's account pays particular attention to the circulation of stories, symbols and practices between these groups and reveals a history or extraordinary diversity and interdependence. His journey through this symbolic ecosystem, struggling to survive in its lands of origin, leads him eventually to diaspora communities in America and Europe. Is this the final domain of these forgotten kingdoms? Gerard Russell's account of these colourful pasts, precarious presents and unknown futures will be of interest to scholars of religion, culture, the Middle East, and a wider non-specialist readership.

Brett HendricksonView on AmazonMexican American religious healing – often called curanderismo – is a vital component of life in the US-Mexican borderlands. In his book Border Medicine: A Transcultural History of Mexican American Curanderismo (New York University Press, 2014) – Brett Hendrickson tracks healers going back to the nineteenth century and even before. He argues that these healing practices were never only Mexican American nor were they a sign of an inability to develop modern bio-medicine. They have in fact been shaped in a transcultural context where ideas about metaphysical healing and the efficacy of gifted individuals circulated among Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and Anglo-American settlers. Each population has contributed to the development and growing popularity of folk curanderismo. Brett Hendrickson is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania.

Christopher R. DuncanView on AmazonResearching the communal killings that occurred in North Maluku, Indonesia during 1999 and 2000, Christopher Duncan was struck by how participants "experienced the violence as a religious conflict and continue to remember it that way", yet outsiders–among them academics, journalists, and NGO workers–have tended to dismiss or downplay its religious features. Agreeing that we need to move beyond essentialist explanations, Duncan nevertheless insists that the challenge for scholars "is to explain the role of religion in the violence without essentializing it". In Violence and Vengeance: Religious Conflict and Its Aftermath in Eastern Indonesia (Cornell University Press, 2013) he takes up the challenge. Drawing on over a decade of research in North Maluku, and informed by time spent in the region prior to the conflict, Duncan speaks with impressive authority about the before, during and after of the bloodshed. Utilizing work by scholars of political violence and the management of memory like Stanley Tambiah and Steve Stern, he shows how participants themselves produced and reproduced master narratives of holy warfare. In the process, he critiques scholarship that overstates elite agendas and machinations, remaining too focused on the causes of violence and losing sight of how, in the words of Gerry Van Klinken, "a runaway war can become decoupled from its initial conditions". Violence and Vengeance makes a powerful case for why study of vernacular understandings of conflict matter. The book also is exemplary in demonstrating how such study can and should be done.

View on Amazon13,000-years ago, the people of the first identifiable culture in North America were hunting mammoth and mastodon, bison, and anything else they could launch their darts and spears at, and undoubtedly, most assuredly, they themselves were being hunted by gigantic short-faced bears, America lions and saber-toothed cats. Thus, in order to survive life in the Pleistocene, Clovis people developed a sophisticated tool and weapon technology. Clovis Technology (International Monographs in Prehistory, 2010) describes it in a step by step, easy to understand way using simple, common-sense terms with photos and drawings that makes a complex subject an absolute joy to read. Three (3) Paleoindian specialists, Bruce Bradley, Michael Collins and Andrew Hemmings, (with important contributions by Marilyn Shoberg, and Jon Lohse) have written a "must have" book for anyone interested in lithic, bone or ivory analysis, not just Clovis technology. The interview with Andrew Hemmings goes deep into the weeds of Clovis Technology and discusses new discoveries and information.

Lene AuestadView on AmazonLene Auestad, PhD, is Research Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Oslo, and affiliated with the Centre for Studies of the Holocaust and Religious Minorities, Oslo. She currently resides in the UK to pursuing long-standing interests in British psychoanalysis. Working at the interface of psychoanalytic thinking and ethics/political theory, her writing has focused on the themes of emotions, prejudice and minority rights. Her books include: Respect, Plurality, and Prejudice: A Psychoanalytical and Philosophical Enquiry into the Dynamics of Social Exclusion and Discrimination (Karnac, 2015) Nationalism and the Body Politic. Psychoanalysis and the Rise of Ethnocentrism and Xenophobia (Karnac, 2014) Psychoanalysis and Politics – Exclusion and the Politics of Representation (Karnac, 2012) Action, Freedom, Humanity – Encounters with Hannah Arendt (in Norwegian) Auestad founded and co-directs the interdisciplinary conference series "Psychoanalysis and Politics," which aims to address how crucial contemporary political issues may be fruitfully analyzed through psychoanalytic theory and vice versa – how political phenomena may reflect back on psychoanalytic thinking. In the book we'll be discussing today, Respect, Plurality, and Prejudice: A Psychoanalytical and Philosophical Enquiry into the Dynamics of Social Exclusion and Discrimination (Karnac, 2015), Auestad brings together psychoanalytic theory, philosophy, and sociology to create a bold and lively study of prejudice and its causes and effects at personal and social levels. The scope of her work is thrilling, moving from a clear investigation of how the unconscious and primary process play out in the phenomena of racism and prejudice; to the ethical issues of hate speech; to an exciting mash-up of Adorno and Bion on the implications of the authoritarian personality. But, following the example of Hannah Arendt, Auestad does not rest in the realm of detached theory, rather, she draws lessons from experience and current news headlines, exploring abuses and prejudice related to treatment of asylum seekers and migrants. Auestad is rigorous and thorough intellectually, but also uncommonly willing to consider how everyone plays a role in the workings of prejudice– including philosophers and psychoanalysts. During the interview, we attempt both to consider the content of Auestad's study, but also to tell the intellectual story of her efforts to work across disciplines in ways that hold great promise for using psychoanalytic theory to understand social space.

Kristin PetersonView on AmazonKristin Peterson's new ethnography looks carefully at the Nigerian pharmaceutical market, paying special attention to the ways that the drug trade links West Africa within a larger global economy. Speculative Markets: Drug Circuits and Derivative Life in Nigeria (Duke University Press, 2015) takes reads into a story that is part medical anthropology, part careful analysis of global economy, and shows that understanding one is vital to understanding the other in the modern West African pharmaceutical landscape. Peterson pays special attention to the Idumota market, an area that was strictly residential in the 1970s and has since become one of the largest West African points of drug distribution for pharmaceuticals and other materials from all over the world. Peterson looks at the consequences of major local and global historical factors in that transformation, including civil war in the late 1960s and migration that followed, a 1970s oil boom and bust, and changes in the global pharmaceutical market in the 1980s. By the early 1980s, Nigeria was deep into an economic crisis that had profound implications for the production, circulation, and marketing of pharmaceuticals. The pharmaceutical industry remade itself by becoming tied to the speculative marketplace, with wide-ranging implications that included the rise of new professional relationships & market formations in Nigeria, new relationships with firms in China and India, new forms of speculation, and new questions about the ontology of markets. Peterson demonstrates that these transformations continue to have important consequences for the bodies of individual Nigerians, including major problems with drug resistance and a mismatch between existing drug therapies and existing diseases. The book avoids the usual discourse of corporate greed, instead focusing on the "structural logics of pharmaceutical capital through which corporate practices can be understood." It is a timely and fascinating study.

Liz McFallView on AmazonThe role of financial services in individuals' and communities' everyday lives is more important than ever. In Devising Consumption: Cultural Economies of Insurance, Credit and Spending (Routledge, 2014), Liz McFall charts the rise of one particular element of financial services, door-to-door sales, to understand the role of insurance and credit in society. In doing so McFall aims to 'ventriloquise the lives and consumption practices of the silent poor', as well as charting a the history of a very neglected element of the story of finance's role in contemporary life. The book contains a wealth of historical data, alongside a theoretical engagement with the meaning of 'the device' within current social theoretical literature. Moreover the book offers reflections on the role and workings of markets and states, both with regard to finance and more broadly to the government of social life. The combination of these perspectives offers an important new lens through which to understand the sociology of consumption and thus, more generally, the social world itself.

Douglas BamforthView on AmazonIt's the ultimate cold case: a mountain of 10,000-year old evidence excavated and stored in hundreds of boxes that sat unopened and nearly forgotten in the basement of a museum for nearly 60-years. The Allen Site: A Paleoindian Camp in Southwestern Nebraska  (University of New Mexico Press, 2007) by Douglas Bamforth is the site report of an early excavation in southwestern Nebraska, a Paleoindian camp site on Medicine Creek, now permanently submerged under the waters of Harry Strunk reservoir. An extraordinary example of dedication and professionalism in the field of archaeology, The Allen Site combines the work of eleven (11) contributors. Superbly written in clear, easy to understand language, and illustrated with photos, maps and drawings, The Allen Site documents the earliest presence of freshwater mussels in the Paleoindian diet, compelling evidence of Paleoindian children learning the craft of flintknapping, and intriguing evidence for Paleoindian fishing and netting. If you are interested in Paleoindian camp life, the archaeology beyond the massive bison bonebeds, this interview is a gem, and most definitely, you need a copy of The Allen Site in you library.

Stefan EcksView on AmazonDrugs exist that are meant to help people feel better. The doctors who prescribe them might believe that they work, while their patients do not. In explaining the drugs to their patients, should those doctors use the medical terminology they themselves use – which might not be immediately understandable to their patients – or should they translate the description into terms more comfortable and familiar to the patient? And what are the practical and ethical consequences of each decision? Stefan Ecks' new book carefully considers these problems in the context of health-related practices in modern Calcutta. Eating Drugs: Psychopharmaceutical Pluralism in India (NYU Press, 2013) looks successively at the different and overlapping medical and healing contexts that together make up a significant part of the medical marketplace in Calcutta. Ch. 1 treats popular notions that include the importance of the belly as the "somatic center of good health," the power of the mind to regulate good health, and the connection between modernity and pollution as causes of illness. Ch. 2 looks at Ayurvedic practices in Calcutta. It reflects on some of the most important ways that Ayurveda is changing in India – especially at the levels of practitioner training, language, and the patient-physician relationship – despite the fact that the centrality of food and digestion has remained constant. Ch. 3 looks closely at homeopathy, the second most popular type of medicine in Bengal, and focuses on the principles, histories, and pluralities of homeopathic practices in Calcutta. Ch. 4 looks at the ways that Calcutta psychiatrists position themselves with respect to popular beliefs about psychopharmaceuticals, general physicians, practitioners of non-biomedical treatments, and the pharmaceutical industry. This chapter pays special attention to how Bengali doctors use metaphors to help patients understand and respond to psychiatric diagnoses, with comparisons to nature, the Ganges river, fairytales, everyday over-the-counter drugs, diabetes, and food. The conclusion explores a key argument of the book, proposing that "patients' suspicions of psychopharmaceuticals are based on suspicions of biomedicine's 'magic bullet' model of drug effects," looking at the implications of this conclusion, and considering the possible broader impacts of this study beyond Calcutta. It's a fascinating study of potential interest to historians and anthropologists of medicine and healing, as well as readers interested in learning more about the medical marketplace of modern India and anyone interested in modern psychopharmaceuticals.