New Books in Anthropology

There's so much discussion in the contemporary United States about marijuana. Debates focus on legalization and medicalization. Usually, Reefer Madness, Harry Anslinger, and race are brought into the conversation. But a big part of the larger marijuana story is missing. In Chris S. Duvall's new book, The African Roots of Marijuana (Duke University Press, 2019), he tells a distinctly non-American story that nevertheless has important lessons for current debates. Duvall helps us understand cannabis as a crop, commodity, and tool in African culture and in the history of slavery. He showcases the plant-person relationship and offers valuable lessons about colonialism and rise of 'big marijuana' in 2019.Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health. 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

Benjamin Lorr, author of 'Hell-Bent,' investigates the dark side of American supermarkets. He explores the secrets of Trader Joe's, the challenges in the trucking industry, and the struggles faced by small food producers.

Hongwei Bao’s book is a thoughtful exploration of gay identity and queer activism in China. This work stems from the term and identity tongzhi, which means “comrade” and in more recent decades has been a popular term to refer to gay people and sexual minorities more broadly. Based on ethnographic research and a solid theoretical base, Queer Comrades: Gay Identity and Tongzhi Activism in Postsocialist China (NIAS Press, 2018) explores queer identity, activism, and governmentality in China, where negotiations between socialism and neoliberalism play out. From a cultural studies perspective, Bao examines a variety of topics from queer spaces in urban centers such as Shanghai, Beijing, and Guangzhou to conversion therapy diaries to queer film festivals. This book speaks to a wide variety of humanities and social science fields and will appeal to those interested in a fresh study of postsocialist China, gay identity formation, activism, and LGBT studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Kathleen Klaus, Assistant Professor of Politics at the University of San Francisco has written a terrific book, Political Violence in Kenya: Land, Elections, and Claim-Making published in 2020 by Cambridge University Press. Kathleen’s book is richly researched and beautifully written. She draws on 15 months of survey and interview methods to center the politics of elites in crafting land narratives that lead—or not—to electoral violence. Kathleen’s book is a great example of mixed methods as a way to understand and explain what are the conditions in which individuals’ can be primed for physical violence. Political Violence in Kenya is a fascinating book that raises novel questions about the role of contentious politics in framing elite political outcomes, as well as how elites coordinate with ordinary people to try to instigate violence.For those wanting to dig deeper into Kenya politics or electoral violence, Dr. Klaus recommends:-The Elephant Blog.-The Journal of Peace Research: Special Issue on Electoral Violence, January 2020.-Violence in African Elections: Between Democracy and Big Man Politics, edited by Bjarnesen and Söderburg Kovacs (2019).-Voting in Fear: Electoral Violence in Sub-Saharan Africa, edited by Bekoe (2012) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

In There's a Disco Ball Between Us: A Theory of Black Gay Life (Duke UP, 2022), Jafari S. Allen offers a sweeping and lively ethnographic and intellectual history of what he calls “Black gay habits of mind.” In conversational and lyrical language, Allen locates this sensibility as it emerged from radical Black lesbian activism and writing during the long 1980s. He traverses multiple temporalities and locations, drawing on research and fieldwork conducted across the globe, from Nairobi, London, and Paris to Toronto, Miami, and Trinidad and Tobago. In these locations and archives, Allen traces the genealogies of Black gay politics and cultures in the visual art, poetry, film, Black feminist theory, historiography, and activism of thinkers and artists such as Audre Lorde, Marsha P. Johnson, Essex Hemphill, Colin Robinson, Marlon Riggs, Pat Parker, and Joseph Beam. Throughout, Allen renarrates Black queer history while cultivating a Black gay method of thinking and writing. In so doing, he speaks to the urgent contemporary struggles for social justice while calling on Black studies to pursue scholarship, art, and policy derived from the lived experience and fantasies of Black people throughout the world.Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelleedmonds.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Sukhmani Khorana's book Mediated Emotions of Migration: Reclaiming Affect for Agency (Bristol UP, 2023) unpacks how emotions and affect are key conceptual lenses for understanding contemporary processes and discourses around migration.Drawing on empirical research, grassroots projects with migrants and refugees, and mediated stories of migration and asylum-seeking from the Global North, the book sheds light on the affects of empathy, aspiration and belonging to reveal how they can be harnessed as public emotions of positive collective change.In the face of increasing precariousness and the wake of intersecting global crises, Khorana calls for uncovering the potential of these affects in order to build new forms of care and solidarities across differences.Sukhmani Khorana is a Scientia Associate Professor in the Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture, School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales.She is interested in media, migration and affect and her research focuses on multi-platform refugee narratives, the politics of food, the role of emotions in social change, cultural diversity in media and culture, and self-representation by young people of colour. Through her research, Sukhmani aims to create broader awareness about the lives of asylum seekers and refugees and contribute to the capacity-building of disadvantaged migrant communities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

In Unseen Flesh: Gynecology and Black Queer Worth-Making in Brazil (Duke University Press, 2023) Nessette Falu explores how Black lesbians in Brazil define and sustain their well-being and self-worth against persistent racial, sexual, class, and gender-based prejudice. Focusing on the trauma caused by interactions with gynecologists, Falu draws on in-depth ethnographic work among the Black lesbian community to reveal their profoundly negative affective experiences within Brazil’s deeply biased medical system. In the face of such entrenched, intersectional intimate violence, Falu’s informants actively pursue well-being in ways that channel their struggle for self-worth toward broader goals of social change, self care, and communal action. Demonstrating how the racist and heteronormative underpinnings of gynecology erase Black lesbian subjecthood through mental, emotional, and physical traumas, Falu explores the daily resistance and abolitionist practices of worth-making that claim and sustain Black queer identity and living. Falu rethinks the medicalization of race, sex, and gender in Brazil and elsewhere while offering a new perspective on Black queer life through well-being grounded in relationships, socioeconomic struggles, the erotic, and freedom strivings.Nessette Falu is Assistant Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.Reighan Gillam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

The Everyday Lives of Gay Men in Hainan: Sociality, Space and Time (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) by Dr. James Cummings explores the everyday lives of gay men in Hainan, an island province of the People’s Republic of China. Taking an ethnographic and phenomenological approach, it asks how these men construct and experience ways of ‘sexual being’ – as gay, homosexual, tongzhi and/or in the scene – and what these mean for the ways of living they see as possible within a socio-cultural, political and material context characterised by pervasive heteronormativity. It explores what it means for gay men in Hainan to ‘come into the scene’, how internet and mobile technologies figure in their everyday processes of sexual categorisation and how these men negotiate orientations and disorientations towards the future in relation to dominant heterosexual life scripts of marriage and reproduction.This book offers vital insights into the production and restriction of non-heterosexual lives in diverse settings, while addressing universal questions of how certain ways of living are enabled and curtailed in living together with others through powerful conditions of uncertainty and precarity.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Despite their literary and cultural significance, Afro-Latino memoirs have been marginalized in both Latino and African American studies. Trent Masiki remedies this problem by bringing critical attention to the understudied African American influences in Afro-Latino memoirs published after the advent of the Black Arts movement. In The Afro-Latino Memoir: Race, Ethnicity and Literary Interculturalism (University of North Carolina Press, 2023) Masiki argues that these memoirs expand on the meaning of racial identity for both Latinos and African Americans. Using interpretive strategies and historical methods from literary and cultural studies, Masiki shows how Afro-Latino memoir writers often turn to the African American experience as a model for articulating their Afro-Latinidad. African American literary production, expressive culture, political ideology, and religiosity shaped Afro-Latino subjectivity more profoundly than typically imagined between the post-war and post-soul eras. Masiki recovers this neglected history by exploring how and why Black nationalism shaped Afro-Latinidad in the United States.Trent Masiki is assistant professor of Africana Studies at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Reighan Gillam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology