New Books in Anthropology

Diana Graizbord, an Assistant Professor at the University of Georgia, dives into her research on political accountability in Mexico. She reveals how evaluation expertise can enhance democratic practices amidst complex social dynamics. Graizbord discusses the evolution of Mexico's democracy through monitoring initiatives, particularly focusing on the influential conditional cash transfer program. She introduces the idea of techno-democracy, exploring the intricate balance between expert knowledge and citizen engagement in shaping social policies.

Lian Sinclair, a Postdoctoral research associate at the University of Sydney, dives deep into the world of multinational mining corporations and their strategies in her book, 'Undermining Resistance.' She discusses how these companies use participation to undermine local resistance, highlighting case studies from Indonesia. Sinclair emphasizes the dual nature of mining's impact on communities and the crucial role of grassroots activism. She also explores the complexities of corporate legitimacy and the shifting investment landscape, revealing how these factors complicate the relationship between communities and corporations.

Tim Grady, a Professor of Modern History at the University of Chester, shares insights from his book on the compassionate care of enemy dead in the World Wars. He discusses the touching acts of kindness between local communities and war graves commissions, highlighting reciprocal respect across national divides. Grady reveals the evolution of memorial practices by organizations like the VDK and explores the tensions between personal grief and institutional narratives. His narrative underscores the importance of remembering enemy lives and the emotional connections fostered through grave tending.

Factory fires, chemical explosions, and aerial pollutants have inexorably shaped South Baltimore into one of the most polluted places in the country. In Futures After Progress: Hope and Doubt in Late Industrial Baltimore (U Chicago Press, 2024), anthropologist Chloe Ahmann explores the rise and fall of industrial lifeways on this edge of the city and the uncertainties that linger in their wake. Writing from the community of Curtis Bay, where two hundred years of technocratic hubris have carried lethal costs, Ahmann also follows local efforts to realize a good future after industry and the rifts competing visions opened between neighbors. Examining tensions between White and Black residents, environmental activists and industrial enthusiasts, local elders and younger generations, Ahmann shows how this community has become a battleground for competing political futures whose stakes reverberate beyond its six square miles in a present after progress has lost steam. And yet—as one young resident explains — “that’s not how the story ends.” Rigorous and moving, Futures after Progress probes the deep roots of our ecological predicament, offering insight into what lies ahead for a country beset by dreams deferred and a planet on the precipice of change. Futures after Progress is available in Open Access here.Mentioned in this episode: Ahmann, Chloe and Anand Pandian. 2024. “The Fight Against Incineration is a Chance to Right Historic Wrongs.” Baltimore Beat, June 26. Ahmann, Chloe. 2024. “Curtis Bay Residents Deserve a Coal-free Future.” Baltimore Sun, February 18. Boym, Svetlana. 2007. “Nostalgia and Its Discontents.” Hedgehog Review 9(2). Butler, Octavia. 1993. Parable of the Sower. New York: Grand Central Publishing. Butler, Octavia. 1998. Parable of the Talents. New York: Grand Central Publishing. Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press. South Baltimore Community Land Trust. https://www.sbclt.org/ Weston, Kath. 2021. “Counterfactual Ethnography: Imagining What It Takes to Live Differently.” AIBR: Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana 16(3): 463–87. Chloe Ahmann is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University. Her work explores what efforts to think and enact environmental futures look like from the sedimented space of late industrialism. Liliana Gil is Assistant Professor of Comparative Studies (STS) at The Ohio State University. [please link my name. Special thanks to Brittany Halley, Nikoo Karimi, Abigail Musch, Kate Roos, and Koray Sackan, who helped prepare this interview in the Comparative Studies Seminar in Technology and Culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

In this episode, Maliha Safri, Marianna Pavlovskaya, Stephen Healy, and Craig Borowiak talk about their new co-authored book Solidarity Cities: Confronting Racial Capitalism, Mapping Transformation (University of Minnesota Press, 2024). This volume is part of the Diverse Economies and Livable Worlds series. Solidarity economies, characterized by diverse practices of cooperation and mutual support, have long played pivotal but largely invisible roles in fostering shared survival and envisioning alternatives to racial capitalism globally and in the United States. This book maps the thriving existence of these cooperative networks in three differently sized American cities, highlighting their commitment to cooperation, democracy, and inclusion and demonstrating the desire—and the pressing need—to establish alternative foundations for social and economic justice.  Collectively authored by four social scientists, Solidarity Cities analyzes the deeply entrenched racial and economic divides from which cooperative networks emerge as they work to provide unmet basic needs, including food security, affordable housing, access to fair credit, and employment opportunities. Examining entities such as community gardens, credit unions, cooperatives, and other forms of economic solidarity, the authors highlight how relatively small yet vital interventions into public life can expand into broader movements that help bolster the overall well-being of their surrounding communities.  Bringing together insights from geography, political economy, and political science with mapping and spatial analysis methodologies, surveys, and in-depth interviews, Solidarity Cities illuminates the extensive footprints of solidarity economies and the roles they play in communities. The authors show how these initiatives act as bulwarks against gentrification, exploitation, and economic exclusion, helping readers see them as part of the past, present, and future of more livable and just cities. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions. This episode is hosted by Elena Sobrino. Elena is a lecturer in Anthropology at Tufts University. Her research explores volunteer work, union histories, and environmentalism in the Flint water crisis. She is currently writing about the politics of fatigue and crisis, and teaching classes on science and technology studies, ethnographies of crisis, and global racisms. You can read more about her work at elenasobrino.site. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

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

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

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

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

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