New Books Network

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.

War has been a constant topic for feature films since the invention of the motion picture camera. These events made for interesting stories and dynamic visual representations. In their book, War on the Silver Screen: Shaping America’s Perception of History (Potomac Books, 2014),  Glen Jeansonne and David Luhrssen discussed a number of films that dealt with conflicts over the last 100 years. Beginning with World War I through the present War on Terror, the authors reviewed how selected films dealt with the issues of the particular war, the people who fought the war, and the society affected by the war. In this conversation with co-author David Luhrssen, he discusses how the book was conceived, how specific films were chosen, and the specific ways that the films represented the individual conflict.

In the decades after the Second World War, France became the foremost nudist site in Europe. Stephen L. Harp‘s new book, Au Naturel: Naturism, Nudism, and Tourism in Twentieth-Century France (Louisiana State University Press, 2014) explains how this came to be. A study of nudist ideas, activity, and sites from the interwar years to the mid-1970s, the book is a fascinating history of the people (the Durville brothers, Kienné de Mongeot, and Albert Lecocq) and places (the Ile du Levant, Montalivet, and Cap d’Agde) that made nude tourism and leisure a major phenomenon in France. Building on previous scholarship that has explored nudism in different national contexts, Au Naturel is a transnational history that illuminates the movement of bodies, beliefs, and practices across political borders, and the emergence of a postwar European community from a unique perspective. Drawing on a rich archive of materials from the local to the international, Harp reveals that nudism was both cultural and political in its meanings and effects in and beyond France. A history of the body and sexuality, Au Naturel is a story of shifting landscapes and values that will be of tremendous interest to readers across multiple fields.

Hugo Award-winner Kameron Hurley's new epic fantasy, The Mirror Empire, introduces readers to a complex universe on the brink of genocidal war. In her interview with Rob Wolf, she discusses the iterative process that resulted in a final manuscript, the importance of liberating the imagination from stereotypes and the origins of her interest in war.

Liran Razinsky’s book, titled Freud, Psychoanalysis, and Death (Cambridge University Press, 2014) came out of a decade’s long attempt to reconcile Liran’s personal search for meaning within two areas of professional inquiry: philosophy, and psychology.  These two fields are intimately related in that each asks essential questions about what it means to be a human subject that lives always in the face of death.  However divergent in their systems of logic, each runs the risk of loosing its subject to its own ethos.  Psychoanalysis is more functional theoretically when thought of as a philosophical system, but its applications were intended to be clinical.  For Razinsky, psychoanalysis succumbs to the split in these two fields in its conception of death. Those who lived to be intellectually killed by Freud as he claimed their ideas as his own, knew that Freud had no limits in refusing the limit of his life.  He would destroy individual egos—and entire careers—in building a legacy that would outlast him.  He got what he wanted but at what cost?  Where is death to be found in a system structured by a man who refused loss?  Those psychoanalytic thinkers who have survived him have had to live with his legacy and its confusing logic. Razinsky reads Freud’s conceptualizations of death against themselves, at different places in his body of work, and against those that came after him.  He argues that there is an essential problematic in the way Freud considers death which, for psychoanalysis to survive as a philosophical system with clinical applications must be addressed.  Beyond this, however, the book raises a discussion about the limits of subjectivity: both literal, as in the case of death, and symbolic, as in the ways in which we imagine ourselves in relationship to it. Liran Razinsky is a lecturer at The Program for Hermeneutics and Culture at Bar Ilan University in Israel where he conducts research at the disjuncture between philosophy, and psychoanalysis, life and death.

We often think of South Africa or America when we hear the word ‘segregation.’ Or — a popular view — that social groups have always chosen to live apart. But as Carl H. Nightingale shows in his new book, Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities (University of Chicago Press, 2012), the racial phenomenon is both modern and international. To be sure, laws and informal practices separating individuals by membership in a caste can be found everywhere in the ancient and medieval world. Those with or seeking wealth and power have always sought to preserve or increase their position by disuniting people on the grounds of social category. Yet the idea of “race” and the enduring belief that human beings can be distinguished in such terms has its origins in the rise of European colonialism, starting with British rule in Madras (Chennai) and the East India Company’s decision to split Calcutta (Kolkata) into “White Town” and “Black Town.” The word ‘segregation’ itself comes from techniques used in Hong Kong and Bombay (Mumbai) in the 1890′s, part of a viral “mania” that, Nightingale explains, pivoted around the challenges of mass urbanization and sent the institution north, south, east, and west — even to Latin American cities like Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires, where the distinction between ‘white’ and ‘black’ was murky at best. This globalization depended heavily on imperialist governments, and often just as importantly relied on multinational corporations (real estate especially) and intellectual networks, which provided in the first case institutional precedent and protocol and in the second rationalization and legitimacy for the pseudo-scientific notion of ‘race.’ Yet, as this ambitious work demonstrates, segregation appeared under every form of government, with and without the help of capitalism. The line between de facto and de jure was often hard to tell or irrelevant. (One might note here, for example, that, contrary to popular belief, most businesses in the Old South were not forced by law to put up those ‘Whites Only’ signs.) Indeed, there is more than a bit of paradox and irony in this tragic story. And while the late 1900′s saw the rise of powerful movements opposed to segregation, the world’s population is now majority-urban for the first time, and still lives with these awful legacies. Attempts to rollback segregation will have to grapple with this complex and global history. Thankfully, Nightingale has given us a very useful starting point.

Without a doubt, the paramount duty of a municipality, of any size, is the delivery services to its constituents. These services range from the seasonal–think snow removal, to the daily–ensuring traffic lights work, to the critical–think trash removal. Cities, particularly those in large urban areas, are tasked with finding ways to respond to issues important to the people for whom they work. New technology and data collection platforms are assisting municipalities to respond to the needs of citizens, and changing the relationships between the government and the governed. In their new book, The Responsive City: Engaging Communities Through Data-Smart Governance (Jossey-Bass 2014), Stephen Goldsmith, Daniel Paul Professor of Practice at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and director of Data-Smart City Solutions, and Susan Crawford, John A. Reilly Visiting Professor in Intellectual Property at Harvard Law School and co-Director of the Berkman center, detail how urban centers are using technological solutions to engage citizens and improve services. Examining cities as diverse as Boston, Chennai, Rio de Janeiro, and others, Goldsmith and Crawford explore how engaging citizens and government with technology can increase a city’s social capital and build trust in local government.

It is widely accepted that in uttering sentences we sometimes perform distinctive kinds of acts. We declare, assert, challenge, question, corroborate by means of speech; sometimes we also use speech to perform acts such as promising, commanding, judging, pronouncing, and christening. Yet it seems that in order to perform an act of, say, promising, one must have a certain kind of normative status; at the very least, one must be accountable. Similarly, in order to issue a command, one must, in some sense, have the authority to do so. It seems, then, that the power to perform acts by means of speech depends upon the normative status and standing of speakers. In Speech and Morality: On the Metaethical Implications of Speaking (Oxford University Press, 2014), Terence Cuneo appeals to this fact in devising an original and compelling argument for moral realism. He claims that were it not for the existence of moral facts, we would not be able to perform ordinary speech acts such as promising. As we clearly do perform such acts, there must be moral facts. That’s the simple argument that lies at the heart of Cuneo’s fascinating book.

A kind of biography of the town of Annamaboe, a major slave trading port on Africa’s Gold Coast, Randy J. Sparks‘s book Where the Negroes Are Masters: An African Port in the Era of the Slave Trade (Harvard University Press, 2014) focuses on the African women and men who were the crucial middle figures in the African slave trade, the largest forced migration of people in human history. The millions of people caught up in the trade who ended up toiling on plantations in the New World (or who never made it) were victims, but the figures Sparks details were hardly that. Instead, they skillfully parlayed their superior numbers, knowledge of local conditions, and control of a crucial commodity — people — to establish themselves as major players in this bloody commerce.

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.

Sarah Mayorga-Gallo is the author of Behind the White Picket Fence: Power and Privilege in a Multiethnic Neighborhood (UNC Press 2014). She is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Cincinnati. We are joined by a guest podcaster, Candis Watts Smith, assistant professor of political science at Williams College. Behind the White Picket Fence makes a strong case that simple, statistical analyses of residential segregation may overlook more important dimensions of multiethnic neighborhood integration. Instead, Mayorga-Gallo presents a fascinating ethnography of a neighborhood in Durham, NC. She shows the various ways that different ethnic groups relate to the neighborhood, express social power, and benefit from privilege. Of particular interest is the role of the neighborhood association in the life of this neighborhood.

Planet Mercury: From Pale Pink Dot to Dynamic World (Springer, 2014) by David A. Rothery, introduces the innermost planet in our solar system and brings readers up to speed on recent spacecraft discoveries and the unsolved mysteries of Mercury.  From Mariner 10 in the 1970s to NASA’s (MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging) MESSENGER mission, which has been orbiting for the past few years, to BepiColumbo (ESA/JAXA) set to launch in 2016, Dr. Rothery describes the challenges and rewards of sending missions to Mercury, and what the variety of instruments on board can tell us about our solar system and planets orbiting other stars as well.

Sean Metzger‘s Chinese Looks: Fashion, Performance, Race (Indiana University Press 2014), examines how, in the past 150 years, China was rendered legible to Americans through items of clothing and adornment. Professor Metzger offers a rich and detailed study of Chinese fashion, calling it the “Sino/American interface” that marks political and cultural investments in America’s views of China and Chinese Americans. Professor Metzger does this by providing a cinematic and performance-based cultural history of four iconic objects: the queue, or man’s hair braid; the woman’s suit or the qipao; the Mao suit; and the tuxedo. Rather than simply provide a consumptive or trading history of these garments, professor Metzger traces their emergence as consolidating discourses of gender, race, politics and aesthetics. In doing so, he asks larger questions about how garments can and have been used to express ethnicity, and to render new meanings onto racialized bodies.

“How do you govern a country that produces 365 kinds of cheese?” What puzzled Charles de Gaulle inspired Françoise Branget, the author of French Country Cooking: Authentic Recipes from Every Region (Arcade Publishing, 2012). She too is a politician, yet she managed to achieve consensus among a group better known for dissent. She asked 180 of her fellow deputies in the French General Assembly to provide a traditional recipe from their region. (Don’t be surprised if one of them is now the prime minister of France.) What emerges through the most cunning means is a portrait of “deep France” (la France profonde). No matter how many French cookbooks you have read, this book is the food of a France you do not know. It is the France of past generations and poorer times, when one ate only what one grew or raised. Yet the limited ingredients, combined with ingenuity of country women feeding their families, produced remarkable flavors. This is the genius upon which all French cuisine rests. The book contains the common (18 different recipes using potatoes), the delectable (salmon steamed over cabbage, duck pot-au-feu, Breton apple cake) and the adventurous (roasted pig’s head). Nothing is out of bounds. Our interview is with the book’s English translator, Jeannette Seaver, herself the author of four cookbooks. A Parisian who is the publisher of Arcade Publishing, she received France’s highest citizen award, the Legion of Honor, in 2012 for her services to French culture. And culture is what this book conveys, through its unique format of haunting photography, a map on each page, and evocative introductions from contributors (“made by my grandmother,” “enjoyed since early childhood at Sunday dinners”). These are the recipes that shape the life of the table in France.

Jacob Dalton’s recent book, The Taming of the Demons: Violence and Liberation in Tibetan Buddhism (Yale University Press, 2011), examines violence (both symbolic and otherwise) in Tibetan Buddhism.  Dalton focuses in particular on the age of fragmentation (here 842–986 CE), and draws on previously unexamined Dunhuang manuscripts to show that this period was one of great creativity and innovation, and a time when violent myths and rituals were instrumental in adapting Buddhism to local interests, thereby allowing Buddhism to firmly establish itself in Tibet.  While much twentieth-century scholarship faithfully followed Tibetan historiography’s assertion that the age of fragmentation was a dark time during which the light of Buddhism faded completely, Dalton not only confirms that Buddhism continued throughout this period, but also looks to the Dunhuang materials to show that it was in fact the age-of-fragmentation narratives of demon taming that laid the groundwork for the emergence of a new, pan-Tibetan Buddhist identity beginning in the eleventh century. Central to Dalton’s project are a myth and a ritual.   The myth is that of the subjugation of the demoness Rudra, in which a compassionate but wrathful Buddhist deity violently defeats the wild Rudra, using a means that Buddhism condemns (violence) and yet is used as a force for good in this case.  This narrative encapsulates a theme that runs throughout the book: the Buddhist ambivalence towards violence, an ambivalence present in the tradition from its earliest days but which found its fullest expression in Tantric Buddhism.  The ritual, on the other hand, is the so-called liberation ritual, in which a victim—usually an effigy is prescribed—is ritually murdered and then purified.  Dalton focuses in particular on a Dunhaung ritual manual, which, incidentally, makes no mention of an effigy, thus leaving some doubt as whether or not the manual intends an actual human victim. This rite and the story of Rudra constitute a pair of sorts, and together served as a theoretical, historical, mythic, and practical model whereby the native, evil demons of Tibet could be tamed (i.e., ritually murdered and purified) and employed in the service of Buddhism. Dalton also demonstrates how the themes of violence and demon taming continued beyond the age of fragmentation.  For example, a composite work called the Pillar Testament (late-eleventh to mid-twelfth c.) contains a legend in which the seventh-century king Songtsen Gampo had to subjugate the land of Tibet—envisioned as (and thus identified as none other than) a huge rākṣasī demoness lying on her back—by pinning this demoness down with thirteen temples.  In this way the legend carries the model of demon subjugation that was used at the local level during the age of fragmentation to a national level during the second imperial period.  Later on, as Tibetans ceased to think of their own evil nature and autochthonous demons as the greatest threat to Buddhism and instead shifted their attention to peoples and powers at the periphery of their realm, the same model of demon subjugation was applied, with Tibet’s perceived enemies (particularly the Mongols) taking the role of sacrificial victim. The book’s content is wide ranging yet skillfully woven together through the dual themes of violence and liberation (i.e., demon subjugation).  Along the way we hear about the differences between Chinese and Tibetan receptions of Buddhist scriptural attitudes toward violence, Padmasambhava as a demon tamer, the Indian Kālikā Purāṇa, King Yeshe Ö’s late tenth-century attempts to prohibit the liberation rite, the fifth Dalai Lama’s use of demon-quelling rites for military success, and eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth-century British and Tibetan views of, and condemnations of, what appeared to be sacrificial rituals.  These are but a few of the many topics covered in this books’ seven chapters.  Three appendices provide a translation of the Rudra m[...]