New Books in Anthropology

Darnise C. Martin's Beyond Christianity: African Americans in a New Thought Church (NYU Press, 2005) draws on rich ethnographic work in a Religious Science church in Oakland, California, to illuminate the ways a group of African Americans has adapted a religion typically thought of as white to fit their needs and circumstances. This predominantly African American congregation is an anomalous phenomenon for both Religious Science and African American religious studies. It stands at the intersection of New Thought doctrine, characterized by personal empowerment teachings,and a culturally familiar liturgical style reminiscent of Black Pentecostals and Black Spiritualists. This group challenges oversimplified concepts of the Black church experience and broadens the concept of Black religion outside the boundaries of Christianity—raising questions about what it means to be an African American congregation, and about the nature of blackness itself. Beyond Christianity adds a new dimension to the scholarship on Black religion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Drawing on the extensive empirical field research of six scholars of religion and politics, Vera Lazzaretti and Kathinka Frøystad's Beyond Courtrooms and Street Violence: Rethinking Religious Offence and Its Containment (Routledge, 2022) directs attention to frictions around religious sensitivities that are handled and often mitigated locally—either entirely outside the courts or through bottom-up initiatives that unfold in combination with, or as a reaction to, top-down measures. While documenting a range of containment modalities in diverse geographical and socio-religious settings in India and scrutinising their functioning and outcomes, the book is a first attempt to bridge research on religious offence with critical understandings of peace and scholarship on the micro-mechanisms of coexistence.Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Rita Kesselring’s important book Bodies of Truth: Law, Memory, and Emancipation in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Stanford University Press, 2017) seeks to understand the embodied and everyday effects of state-sponsored violence as well the limits of the law to produce social repair. Of particular interest in Kesselring’s theorizing of the relationship between the body and the law as a mechanism to critique South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Dr. Kesselring’s book is an innovative study of the TRC, with a focus on embodiment and the ways in which formal justice institutions do not consider the everyday violence of injustice. Her study illuminates this tension, of people craving justice from institutions that are not designed to deliver it, leading the women of the civil society organization Khulumani to file suit in the United States under alien tort laws.Kesselring recommends three books to listeners keen to dive deeper into issues of reparation, law and justice after Apartheid in South Africa. They are Charles Abrahams’ Class Action: In Pursuit of a Larger Life (Penguin South Africa, 2019); Fiona Ross’ Bearing Witness: Women and the Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa (Pluto Press, 2002); and Georg Kries’ Switzerland and South Africa 1948-1994 (Peter Lang Publishers, 2007). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

What does the collapse of India’s tea industry mean for Dalit workers who have lived, worked and died on the plantations since the colonial era? Plantation Crisis: Ruptures of Dalit life in the Indian Tea Belt (UCL Press, 2022) offers a complex understanding of how processes of social and political alienation unfold in moments of economic rupture. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Peermade and Munnar tea belts, Jayaseelan Raj – himself a product of the plantation system – offers a unique and richly detailed analysis of the profound, multi-dimensional sense of crisis felt by those who are at the bottom of global plantation capitalism and caste hierarchy.Tea production in India accounts for 25 per cent of global output. The colonial era planation system – and its two million strong workforce – has, since the mid-1990s, faced a series of ruptures due to neoliberal economic globalisation. In the South Indian state of Kerala, otherwise known for its labour-centric development initiatives, the Tamil speaking Dalit workforce, whose ancestors were brought to the plantations in the 19th century, are at the forefront of this crisis, which has profound impacts on their social identity and economic wellbeing. Out of the colonial history of racial capitalism and indentured migration, Plantation Crisis opens our eyes to the collapse of the plantation system and the rupturing of Dalit lives in India's tea belt.Garima Jaju is a Smuts fellow at the University of Cambridge. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Social networks existed and shaped our lives long before Silicon Valley startups made them virtual. For over two decades economist Matthew O. Jackson, a professor at Stanford University, has studied how the shape of networks and our positions within them can affect us. In this interview, he explains how network structures can create poverty traps, exacerbate financial crises, and contribute to political polarization. He also explains how a new awareness of the role of networks has been used to improve financial regulation, promote public health knowledge, and guide vaccination strategy.Jackson also discusses how he first began to study networks, previously neglected by economists, and how economists can both learn from and contribute to the exciting cross-disciplinary dialogue among researchers from sociology, math, physics, and other fields.Professor Jackson's website provides free access to the chapter on contagion, of particular interest in this time of pandemic. For those who want to learn even more than the book can cover, he offers a free online course on the topic.Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new digital economy-focused Master's program in Applied Economics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Ajantha Subramanian and Lori Allen turn from hosts to interlocutors in an episode that ties a bow on our Violent Majorities conversations about Indian (episode 1) and Israeli (episode 2) ethnonationalism. The three friends discuss commonalities between Balmurli Natrajan’s charting of the "slippery slope towards a multiculturalism of caste" and Natasha Roth-Rowland's description of the "territorial maximalism" that has been central to Zionism. The role of overseas communities loomed large, as did the roots of ethnonationalism in the fascism of the 1920s, which survived, transmuted or merely masked over the subsequent bloody century, as other ideologies (Communism and perhaps cosmopolitan liberalism among them) waxed before waning.The conversation also examines the current-day shared playbook of the long-distance far-right ideologies of Zionism and Hindutva. And it concludes with a reflection on the suitability of the term fascism to describe such organizations and their historical forebears as well as other contemporary movements.Mentioned in the episode Snigdha Poonam’s recent book Dreamers investigates the “angry young men” engaged in Hindutvite attacks, including those who are economically and educationally marginalized, as well as those who resent what they see as their wrongful decline from privilege. Yuval Abraham’s “The IDF unit turning ‘Hilltop Youth” Settlers into Soldiers” is an investigation into how Israeli settlers from violent outposts are being inducted into a new military unit responsible for severe abuses of Palestinians across the West Bank. (However, in describing Israel’s “hilltop youth” as coming from “lower rungs,” Lori feels she may have overstated their marginalization. Although one report describes Israel’s hilltop youth as young men recruited from unstable homes, others point to the Israeli state’s unwillingness to stop them.) Daniel Kupfert Heller, Jabotinsky's Children, on the rise of the transnational youth movement, Betar. A correction: Jabotinsky was from Odessa (modern Ukraine), but much of his support was in Poland. RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) as the first institutionalization of the Hindutva project and a living remnant of 1920s fascism. The BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) arises as the political wing of the RSS and comes to prominence around the destruction of the Ayodhya Mosque. Lori's interview with Zachary Lockman in MERIP about historical changes in American Jewish attitudes towards Zionism. Ajantha refers to the argument in Natasha Roth-Rowland's recent dissertation ("'Not One Inch of Retreat': The Transnational Jewish Far Right, 1929-1996"), that the turn towards Zionism is linked in the US with a turn away from Communism as another transnational movement, waning as Zionism was waxing. Lori mentions the grim effects of the redefinition of anti-Semitism put forward in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Association (IHRA), one response to which is the 2020 Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism. Azad Essa, Hostile Homelands discusses Zionist support of Hindutva activism and lobbying in the US. One group that has modelled its congressional activism on that of the American Jewish Committee and AIPAC is the Hindu American Foundation. Ajantha mentions Hindutvites repurposing their online Islamophobia in support of Israel after Hamas’s October 7th military operation. Alberto Toscano, “The Long Shadow of Racial Fascism” discusses radical Black thinkers who have argued that racial slavery was a form of American fascism. Robert Paxton’s “The Five Stages of Fascism” makes the case that the KKK may be the earliest fascist organization. Recallable Books Alain Brossat and Sylvie Klingard, Revolutionary Yiddishland: A History of Jewish Radicalism. Joshua Cohen The Netanyahus (John spoke with Cohen about the novel in Recall This Book 110) Susan Bayly's Saints, Goddesses and Kings. Christophe Jaffrelot, Modi's India. Read transcript here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Paul Radin was one of the founding generation of American cultural anthropologists: A student of Franz Boas,  and famed ethnographer of the Winnebago. Yet little is known about Radin's life. A leftist who was persecuted by the FBI and who lived for several years outside of the United States, and a bohemian who couldn't keep an academic job, there are many chapters in Radin's life which have not been told. In Anthropology and Radical Humanism: Native and African American Narratives and the Myth of Race (Michigan State University Press, 2020), Jack Glazier tells the story of Radin's work at Fisk University in the late 1920s. During his three-year appointment, he and graduate student Andrew Polk Watson collected autobiographies and religious conversion narratives from elderly African Americans. That innovative, subject-centered research complemented like-minded scholarship by African American historians reacting against the disparaging portrayals of black people by white historians. In this book, Glazier describes Radin's commitment to documenting people's own stories as they told them and his respect for them as people as a form of 'radical humanism' and sets Paul Radin's findings within the broader context of Boasian anti-racism, African American culture, and his career-defining work among the Winnebago.In this episode of the podcast Jack Glazier talks to host Alex Golub about Radin and the Boasians, the influence of Charles S. Johnson at Fisk, and how contemporary activists might view the strengths and limitations of Radin's radical humanism. Alex Golub is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

The moorlands of Gascony are often considered one of the most dramatic examples of top-down rural modernization in nineteenth-century Europe. From an area of open moors, they were transformed in one generation into the largest man-made forest in Europe.Body and Tradition in Nineteenth-Century France: Félix Arnaudin and the Moorlands of Gascony, 1870-1914 (Oxford University Press) explores how these changes were experienced and negotiated by the people who lived there, drawing on the immense ethnographic archive of Felix Arnaudin (1844-1921).The study places the songs, stories, and everyday speech that Arnaudin collected, as well as the photographs he took, in the everyday lives of agricultural workers and artisans. It argues that the changes are were understood as a gradual revolution in bodily experiences, as men and women forged new working habits, new sexual relations, and new ways of conceiving of their own bodies.Rather than merely presenting a story of top-down reform, this is an account of the flexibility and creativity of the cultural traditions of the working population. William G. Pooley tells the story of the folklorist Arnaudin and the men and women whose cultural traditions he recorded, then uncovers the work carried out by Arnaudin to explore everyday speech about the body, stories of werewolves and shapeshifters, tales of animal cunning and exploitation, and songs about love and courtship.The volume focuses on the lives of a handful of the most talented storytellers and singers Arnaudin encountered, showing how their cultural choices reflect wider patterns of behaviour in the region, and across rural Europe. William G. Pooley, Lecturer in Modern European History, University of Bristol is a historian of France in the long nineteenth century, interested in popular and folk cultures.Rachel Hopkin PhD is a UK born, US based folklorist and radio produce. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

How social scientists' disagreements about their key words and distinctions have been misconceived, and what to do about itSocial scientists do research on a variety of topics--gender, capitalism, populism, and race and ethnicity, among others. They make descriptive and explanatory claims about empathy, intelligence, neoliberalism, and power. They advise policymakers on diversity, digitalization, work, and religion. And yet, as Gabriel Abend points out in Words and Distinctions for the Common Good: Practical Reason in the Logic of Social Science (Princeton UP, 2023), they can't agree on what these things are and how to identify them. How to tell if something is a religion or a cult or a sect? What is empathy? What makes this society a capitalist one? Disputes of this sort arise again and again in the social sciences.Abend argues that these disagreements have been doubly misconceived. First, they conflate two questions: how a social science community should use its most important words, and what distinctions it should accept and work with. Second, there's no fact of the matter about either. Instead, they're practical reason questions for a community, which aim at epistemically and morally good outcomes. Abend calls on social science communities to work together on their words, distinctions, and classifications. They must make collective decisions about the uses of words, the acceptability of distinctions, and the criteria for assessing both. These decisions aren't up to individual scholars; the community gets the last word. According to Abend, the common good, justice, and equality should play a significant role in the logic of scientific research.Gabriel Abend is professor of sociology at University of Lucerne and the author of The Moral Background: An Inquiry into the History of Business Ethics (Princeton). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Matthew Gutmann, author of 'Are Men Animals? How Modern Masculinity Sells Men Short,' discusses the harmful stereotypes of masculinity perpetuated by societal expectations. He explores the correlation between culture and biology in understanding male behavior and emphasizes the malleability of gender roles. The podcast also covers topics such as the dangers of drawing assumptions from the animal kingdom, cultural barriers faced by women in consuming adult content, the variations in fatherhood across cultures, and the concept of toxic masculinity.