New Books in Anthropology

S. Lochlann JainView on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in Medicine] Cancer pervades American bodies–and also habits of mind. Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us (University of California Press, 2013) is a sharp, adventurous book by the established legal anthropologist, S. Lochlann Jain. The book simultaneously complicates and clarifies the multiple ways in which cancer and patient-hood gets appropriated, embodied and reproduced through seemingly quotidian activities–from opening an insurance bill to enjoying yoga class. Jain shows, in other words, exactly how and in what way cancer becomes you and me. The book draws together interviews, observations, and Jain's first-hand experience as a cancer patient, as well as a range of cultural remains, from literature to law to life tables. In doing so, Jain holds a mirror to corporate stakeholders, to everyday Americans, and to herself in order to show, paradoxically, how modern Americans reinvest in cancer in the very practices designed to promote health. The book is a critique of the ways of life and "ways of knowing" that drive twenty-first century America–and an uncomfortable, necessary look at ourselves. Just when you think scholars have protested too much about the hidden costs of better health, Jain shows that Americans have not protested nearly enough.

Sarah BeskyView on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in South Asian Studies] In this wonderful ethnography of Darjeeling tea, Sarah Besky explores different attempts at bringing justice to plantation life in north east India. Through explorations into fair trade, geographic indication and a state movement for the Nepali tea workers, Besky critically assesses the limits of projects that fail to address underlying exploitative structures. The Darjeeling Distinction: Labor and Justice on Fair-Trade Plantations in India (University of California Press, 2014) is a readable and theoretically nuanced book that should be of interest to many.

David E. SuttonView on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in Food] David E. Sutton's book beguiles. Secrets From the Greek Kitchen: Cooking, Skill, and Everyday Life on an Aegean Island (University of California Press, 2014) seems like a simple chronicle of the most basic food practices on the island of Kalymnos. But what practices they are. Cutting boards are not used. Cooks cut food while holding it and the ingredients drop directly into a bowl or a pot. Just that simple action reveals a connection to what is eaten that opens up a world. It is a world worth a visit – and certainly a listen – as Prof. Sutton and I discuss some of our favorite places on earth, the ancient and ebullient islands of the Aegean sea.

Matt TomlinsonView on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in Religion] Religious ritual has been a staple of anthropological study. In his latest monograph, Ritual Textuality: Pattern and Motion in Performance (Oxford University Press 2014), cultural anthropologist Matt Tomlinson takes up the topic anew through a set of four case studies drawn from his fieldwork in Fiji. Each one illustrates a component of what Tomlinson calls ritual entextualization, the process by which discourse becomes texts that are detachable from their original contexts and thus replicable. Through this framework, Tomlinson explores how rituals are patterned, repeated events that are also in "motion," flexible and dynamic. Along the way, readers are introduced to linguistic performances in Pentecostal revivals, semiotic similarities between kava drinking and Christian communion, spectacles of a "happy death" in nineteenth-century missions, and political wrangling following the recent military coup d'état.

Joseph D. HankinsView on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in East Asian Studies] Joseph D. Hankins's marvelous new ethnography of the contemporary Buraku people looks at the labor involved in "identifying, dismantling, and reproducing" the Buraku situation in Japan and beyond. Taking readers on a journey from Lubbock, Texas to Tokyo, India, and back again, Working Skin: Making Leather, Making a Multicultural Japan (University of California Press, 2014) brings a diverse range of ethnographic experiences to bear on understanding the conception, management, recognition, and experience of the burakumin, a "contagious category" of minority identity in today's Japan. In three major sections that each advance a particular argument, Hankins's book considers the production and non-production of signs of modern Buraku identity. These fascinating chapters offer thoughtful accounts of the making and remaking of bodily markers and ties of kinship, occupation, and residence that can be mobilized to make Buraku identity, the political strategies and embodied practices through which abstract ideals like "multiculturalism" and "human rights" are produced in that context, and the ways that international legal standards and political solidarity have been mobilized in the course of the labor that produces Buraku selfhood and otherhood. Working Skin also pays special attention to the ways that an impulse toward multiculturalism disciplines the subjects and objects of contemporary representations of social difference in Japan.

Alex NadingView on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in Latin American Studies] Dengue fever is on the rise globally. Since it is transmitted by mosquitoes which reside and reproduce in human environments, eradication efforts involve households and the people who keep them clean as well as moral and persuasive campaigns of surveillance and invigilation. In his new book Mosquito Trails: Ecology, Health and the Politics of Entanglement (University of California Press, 2014), Alex Nading follows the trails of garbage collectors and recyclers, local health care workers, and the mosquitoes themselves in this fascinating ethnography of Nicaragua's Ciudad Sandino's efforts to deal with dengue fever. He argues that these efforts are better understood as a series of entanglements and attachments that bring human and more than human actors together in intimate relationships. Nading's book offers readers new ways to think about the relationships among the state and local actors as mediated through a series of objects: houses, viruses, immune systems, insects, and allocation budgets. This is a story about stories, and how they matter to health and urban environments.

Daniel CloudView on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in Big Ideas] One of the most puzzling things about humans is their ability to manipulate symbols and create artifacts. Our nearest relatives in the animal kingdom–apes–have only the rudiments of these abilities: chimps don't have language and, if they have culture, it's extraordinarily primitive in comparison to the human form. What we have between apes and humans is not really a continuum; it's a break. So how did this break occur? The answer, of course, is evolutionarily. It stands to Darwinian reason that our distant ancestors must have been selected for symbolic use and cultural production, and it was in this natural selective way that they became human. That's fine as far as it goes, but it presents us with another puzzle: why is human language and culture so astoundingly complex? In order to prosper in the so-called "era of evolutionary adaptation," neither needed to have been complex at all. A Hominin with a smallish fraction of the symbolic and cultural abilities of Homo sapiens would easily have emerged (and maybe did emerge) as a completely dominant alpha predator. Imagine, if you will, a chimp that could talk a bit and produce reasonably effective missile weapons. How much selection pressure would such a talking, armed chimp face? Not much, at least from other animals. Such an Hominin would not, ceteris paribus, need to evolve new and more complex linguistic and cultural abilities and forms. But complex linguistic and cultural abilities and forms did evolve. So, we have to ask, where do Shakespeare and Large Hadron Colliders come from? Daniel Cloud has an answer: domestication. In his fascinating and thought-provoking new book The Domestication of Language: Cultural Evolution and the Uniqueness of the Human Animal (Columbia University Press, 2014), Cloud argues that over the millennia proto-humans and humans have been selecting mates who were good with symbols and selecting symbols themselves. This process–a kind of runaway sexual selection and domestication–rapidly (in evolutionary time-scales) produced both a huge expensive brain and an ornate culture to match. Listen in.

Thom Scott-PhillipsView on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in Language] I hope I'm not being species-centric when I say that the emergence of human language is a big deal. John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry it as one of the "major transitions in evolution", placing it in exalted company alongside the evolution of multicellularity, sociality, sexual reproduction, and various other preoccupations of ours. But the nature of the transition is hotly disputed: is there a sudden shift involving the emergence of complex syntax, or is the process more gradual and socially driven? In his entertaining and approachable volume Speaking Our Minds (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Thom Scott-Phillips argues for a different approach. On his view, there is a categorical difference between human language and its precursors, but the critical ingredient is ostensive-inferential communication – that is, the ability to express and recognise intentions – and this underlies the expressive power of language. His view calls for a reappraisal of the role of pragmatics in linguistics, from being a communicatively useful add-on to being much nearer the heart of the enterprise. In this interview, we discuss the motivations and implications of this idea, for both evolutionary and more traditional approaches to linguistics, and we look at how comparative studies of other species – not only great apes, but even bacteria – might tell us something useful about the nature of human communication.

Jamie CrossView on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in South Asian Studies] Dream Zones: Anticipating Capitalism and Development in India (Pluto Press, 2014), the excellent new book by Jamie Cross, explores the ways in which dreams of the future shape the present. Centring in and around a large Special Economic Zone in south India, the book analyses anticipation amongst politicians, managers, workers, land-owners and activists.  

Lisa L. GezonView on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in Alcohol, Drugs, and Intoxicants] Khat, the fresh leaves of the plant Catha edulis, is a mild psycho-stimulant. It has been consumed in Yemen, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia for over one thousand years. Khat consumption is an important part of Yemeni social and political life.  During the early part of the twentieth century, Yemeni dockworkers brought khat to Madagascar, where  other members of the Malagasy population have adopted its use. In her excellent book Drug Effects: Khat in Biocultural and Socioeconomic Perspective (Left Coast Press, 2012), Lisa L. Gezon, Professor and Chair in the Department of Anthropology, University of West Georgia, analyzes the production and consumption of Khat on the island nation of Madagascar.  Taking a cultural, medical, and anthropological approach, Gezon looks at the use of khat in pharmacological, cultural, political, economic and environmental contexts.  As a student of plant drugs/medicines/intoxicants, her summary of the manner in which khat's effects have been mischaracterized by many so called experts has echoes of reefer madness inspired characterizations of cannabis and its users.  Like so many drugs, khat is a powerful force in the local economy, and the factors that have allowed khat to provide income for small hold farmers rather than becoming part of a centralized and commercial monoculture are worthy of further analysis. In addition to teaching me about the specifics of khat consumption in Madagascar, the background material provided a great primer on CMA approaches to substance use, as well as on the history, pharmacology and policy surrounding Catha edulis. I have been thinking a great deal about the economic forces that influence the consumption and availability of drugs.  There are similarities and differences between poppy production in Afghanistan or the Golden Triangle, cannabis production in the Emerald Triangle, and khat production in Madagascar.  The peaceful and widely distributed economic benefits of smallholder farming on Madagascar make this study particularly fascinating. Lisa Gezon was a pleasure to interview, and was very patient with my still developing interviewing skills.  Her research included extensive field work as well as research, and the book is almost encyclopedic in its synthesis of the literature, the findings of her studies as well as her excellent and insightful analysis.

Pamela KlassenView on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in Christian Studies] Liberal Protestants are often dismissed as reflecting nothing more than a therapeutic culture or viewed as a measuring rod for the decline of Christian orthodoxy. Rarely have they been the subjects of anthropological inquiry. Pamela Klassen, Professor of Religion at the University of Toronto, wants to change that. Her recent book, Spirits of Protestantism: Medicine, Healing, and Liberal Christianity (University of California Press, 2011), charts a transition in liberal Protestant self-understanding over the course of the twentieth century whereby "supernatural liberalism," as Klassen calls it, enabled imaginative shifts between Christianity, science, and secularism. In the process, she explores how Protestants went from seeing themselves as Christians who combined medicine and evangelism to effect 'conversions to modernity' among others, including Native Americans and colonized people, to understanding themselves as complicit in an oftentimes racist imperialism. At the same time, they have recombined forms of healing in new ways, drawing on practices such as yoga and reiki in order to continue the search for a universalized type of wholeness – both spiritual and physical. Focusing on Canadian Protestants in the Anglican and United churches, Spirits of Protestantism combines rich historical examples and four years of ethnographic study to show how liberal Protestants have exerted a major influence in public life and even on anthropology itself.

Amrita PandeView on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in South Asian Studies] Amrita Pande's Wombs in Labor: Transnational Commercial Surrogacy in India (Columbia University Press 2014) is a beautiful and rich ethnography of a surrogacy clinic. The book details the surrogacy process from start to finish, exploring the intersection of production and reproduction, complicating and deepening our understanding of this particular form of labour.

Marcia OchoaView on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in Latin American Studies] Marcia Ochoa's book Queen for a Day: Transformistas, Beauty Queens, and the Performance of Femininity in Venezuela (Duke University Press, 2014) is a detailed ethnography of Venezuelan modernity and nationhood that brings two kinds of feminine performances into the same analytical frame. Her focus on transformistas and beauty queens allows her to draw relationships among power, beauty, violence, and space. The book uses different orders of magnitude, moving from the national and transnational through the street and the runway and coming to rest finally on the body to work through arguments about mediation and the production of femininity. Ochoa's work contributes to scholarship on politics and gender in Venezuela by understanding them as bound together and mutually constitutive. Along the way there are some searing and moving portraits of the people who are her subjects.

Amy Evrard[Cross-posted from New Book in Gender Studies] Amy Evrard's first book, The Moroccan Women's Rights Movement (Syracuse University Press, 2014), examines women's attempts to change their patriarchal society via their movement for equality and rights. At the center of Evrard's book is the 2004 reform of the Family Code known as the Mudawwana, in which Moroccan women made important gains in marriage, divorce, and custody rights. Combining historical analysis of legal codes, nuanced surveys of the complicated political arena, and richly developed stories of individual women, Evrard demonstrates how women's integration is stymied by poverty and illiteracy, as well as by nationalist and anti-modernization forces. At the same time, women activists are learning how to navigate among political and civic actors to achieve their goals, and in the process, convincing more and more Moroccan women of their rights.

Dalits and Adivasis in India's Business Economy: Three Essays and an Atlas (Three Essay Collective, 2013) is a wonderful new book by Barbara Harriss-White and small team of collaborators – Elisabetta Basile, Anita Dixit, Pinaki Joddar, Aseem Prakash and Kaushal Vidyarthee – published by the Three Essays Collective. The book explores the ways in which economic liberalisation interacts with caste, specifically in reference to scheduled castes and scheduled tribes, otherwise known as Dalits and Adivasis. A truly unique book, both in terms of how the data has been gathered and presented, the essays are variously wide and deep and ask a host of questions to inspire future research.