New Books in Anthropology

In this interview, we talk with Stefan Tanaka, professor emeritus of UCSD and a specialist in modern Japanese history. He is author of two books on modern Japan, Japan's Orient: Rendering Pasts into History (1993) and New Times in Modern Japan (2004), and his most recent book is History Without Chronology (Lever Press, 2019) which we discuss here! The host, Sarah Kearns, was introduced to Tanaka's work at a Digital History and Theory Conference and became very interested in becoming a "mystic" of scholarly communications and how narrative and comic books could facilitate a different understanding of history and time. The 1884 project is here. A bit about the book, which is available open access: Although numerous disciplines recognize multiple ways of conceptualizing time, Stefan Tanaka argues that scholars still overwhelmingly operate on chronological and linear Newtonian or classical time that emerged during the Enlightenment. This short, approachable book implores the humanities and humanistic social sciences to actively embrace the richness of different times that are evident in non-modern societies and have become common in several scientific fields throughout the twentieth century. Tanaka first offers a history of chronology by showing how the social structures built on clocks and calendars gained material expression. Tanaka then proposes that we can move away from this chronology by considering how contemporary scientific understandings of time might be adapted to reconceive the present and pasts. This opens up a conversation that allows for the possibility of other ways to know about and re-present pasts. A multiplicity of times will help us broaden the historical horizon by embracing the heterogeneity of our lives and world via rethinking the complex interaction between stability, repetition, and change. This history without chronology also allows for incorporating the affordances of digital media.Sarah Kearns (@annotated_sci) reads about scholarship, the sciences, and philosophy, and is likely drinking mushroom tea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

China’s news sector is a place where newsmakers, advertising executives, company bosses, and Party officials engage one another in contingent and evolving arrangements that run from cooperation and collaboration to manipulation and betrayal. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with journalists, editors, and executives at a newspaper in Guangzhou, China, The Currency of Truth: Newsmaking and the Late-Socialist Imaginaries of China's Digital Era (U Michigan Press, 2023) brings its readers into the lives of the people who write, publish, and profit from news in this milieu. The book shows that far from working as mere cogs in a Party propaganda machine, these individuals are immersed in fluidly shifting networks of formal and informal relationships, which they carefully navigate to pursue diverse goals.In The Currency of Truth, Emily H. C. Chua argues that news in China works less as a medium of mass communication than as a kind of currency as industry players make and use news articles to create agreements, build connections, and protect and advance their positions against one another. Looking at the ethical and professional principles that well-intentioned and civically minded journalists strive to uphold, and the challenges and doubts that they grapple with in the process, Chua brings her findings into conversation around “post-truth” news and the “crisis” of professional journalism in the West. The book encourages readers to set out from the preexisting assumption that news works either to inform or deceive its public(s). It also suggests researchers further explore the “post-public” social and political imaginaries emerging among today’s newsmakers and remaking the terms of their practice.Emily Chua is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the National University of Singapore, working at the intersections of digital technology, media, capital and authoritarian state politics in China and Singapore. Her articles are published in journals including JRAI, Ethnography, Science, Technology and Society, Asian Studies Review, and China Quarterly.Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. He conducts ethnography among ufologists in China. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of the paranormal, hope studies, and post-structural philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

The body of the seafarer is a fulcrum upon which global systems of power, longstanding maritime traditions, and gendered and racialised pressures all rest. In this vital new essay, scholar Laleh Khalili draws on her ongoing research and experiences of travelling on cargo ships to explore the embodied life of these labourers. She investigates an experience riddled with adversities – loneliness, loss, and violence, stolen wages and exploitative shipowners – as well as ephemeral moments of joy and solidarity. In the unique arena of the ship, Khalili traces the many forms of corporeality involved in work at sea and the ways the body is engaged by the institutions that engulf seafarers’ lives and work.Illustrated throughout with the author’s own photographs, this book takes in both scholarly and literary accounts to describe with care and imagination the material and physical realities of contemporary commerce at sea. Drawing on the insights of feminists and scholars of racial capitalism, it centres the lives of those so often forgotten or dismissed in enterprises of capital accumulation and the raced and gendered hierarchies that shape them.Laleh Khalili is an Al-Qasimi Professor of Gulf Studies at the University of Exeter. Among her published books: "Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: the Politics of National Commemoration" (Cambridge 2007) and "Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgency" (Stanford 2013), both of which delve into the representations and practices of violence. She also co-edited a volume with Jillian Schwedler titled "Policing and Prisons in the Middle East: Formations of Coercion" (Hurst 2010). Her most recent book, "Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula" (Verso 2020), explores the pivotal role of maritime infrastructures in facilitating the movement of technologies, capital, people, and cargo.Tamara Fernando is an assistant professor in the History of the Global South, at Stony Brook University, New York. Her research and teaching interests are located at the intersection of labor, environment, and science histories, with a specific focus on the nineteenth and twentieth-century Indian Ocean world. Her current book project, "Shallow Blue Empire: Knowing the Littoral across the Indian Ocean," aspires to uncover a "history below the water line" through a trans-national account of the pearling industry across the northern Indian Ocean. This work centers on the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Mannar, and the Mergui/Myeik archipelago, elucidating how modes of knowledge about the littoral zone of the ocean were determined in the context of the British Empire at the turn of the twentieth century. She is deeply committed to employing trans-regional and interdisciplinary methods in the study of the past, as well as addressing the question of how to craft global histories of science.Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law, the occult sciences, and the environment across the Western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

An ethnographic study based on decades of field research, Pilgrimage to Broken Mountain: Nahua Sacred Journeys in Mexico's Huasteca Veracruzana (UP of Colorado, 2023) explores five sacred journeys to the peaks of venerated mountains undertaken by Nahua people living in northern Veracruz, Mexico. Punctuated with elaborate ritual offerings dedicated to the forces responsible for rain, seeds, crop fertility, and the well-being of all people, these pilgrimages are the highest and most elaborate form of Nahua devotion and reveal a sophisticated religious philosophy that places human beings in intimate contact with what Westerners call the forces of nature. Alan and Pamela Sandstrom document them for the younger Nahua generation, who live in a world where many are lured away from their communities by wage labor in urban Mexico and the United States.Pilgrimage to Broken Mountain contains richly detailed descriptions and analyses of ritual procedures as well as translations from the Nahuatl of core myths, chants performed before decorated altars, and statements from participants. Particular emphasis is placed on analyzing the role of sacred paper figures that are produced by the thousands for each pilgrimage. The work contains drawings of these cuttings of spirit entities along with hundreds of color photographs illustrating how they are used throughout the pilgrimages. The analysis reveals the monist philosophy that underlies Nahua religious practice in which altars, dancing, chanting, and the paper figures themselves provide direct access to the sacred.In the context of their pilgrimage traditions, the ritual practices of Nahua religion show one way that people interact effectively with the forces responsible for not only their own prosperity but also the very survival of humanity. A magnum opus with respect to Nahua religion and religious practice, Pilgrimage to Broken Mountain is a significant contribution to several fields, including but not limited to Indigenous literatures of Mesoamerica, Nahuatl studies, Latinx and Chicanx studies, and religious studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Governing Death, Making Persons: The New Chinese Way of Death (Cornell UP, 2023) tells the story of how economic reforms and changes in the management of death in China have affected the governance of persons. The Chinese Communist Party has sought to channel the funeral industry and death rituals into vehicles for reshaping people into "modern" citizens and subjects. Since the Reform and Opening period and the marketization of state funeral parlors, the Party has promoted personalized funerals in the hope of promoting a market-oriented and individualistic ethos. However, things have not gone as planned.Huwy-min Lucia Liu writes about the funerals she witnessed and the life stories of two kinds of funeral workers: state workers who are quasi-government officials and semilegal private funeral brokers. She shows that end-of-life commemoration in urban China today is characterized by the resilience of social conventions and not a shift toward market economy individualization. Rather than seeing a rise of individualism and the decline of a socialist self, Liu sees the durability of socialist, religious, communal, and relational ideas of self, woven together through creative ritual framings in spite of their contradictions.Huwy-min Lucia Liu is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at George Mason University.Victoria Oana Lupașcu is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at University of Montréal. Her areas of interest include medical humanities, visual art, 20th and 21st Chinese, Brazilian and Romanian literature and Global South studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Through compelling ethnography, Homelessness and Housing Advocacy: The Role of Red-Tape Warriors (Routledge, 2022) reveals the creative and ambitious methods that social service providers use to house their clients despite the conflictual conditions posed by the policies and institutions that govern the housing process.Combining in-depth interviews, extensive fieldwork, and the author's own professional experience, this book considers the perspective of social service providers who work with people experiencing homelessness and chronicles the steps they take to navigate the housing process. With assertive methods of worker-client advocacy at the center of its focus, this book beckons attention to the many variables that affect professional attempts to house homeless populations. It conveys the challenges that social service providers encounter while fitting their clients into the criteria for housing eligibility, the opposition they receive, and the innovative approaches they ultimately take to optimize housing placements for their clients who are, or were formerly, experiencing homelessness.Weaving as it does between issues of poverty, social inequality, and social policy, Homelessness and Housing Advocacy will appeal to courses in social work, sociology, and public policy and fill a void for early-career professionals in housing and community services. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Transgender Refugees and the Imagined South Africa: Bodies Over Borders and Borders Over Bodies (Palgrave MacMillan, 2018) tracks the conceptual journeying of the term ‘transgender’ from the Global North—where it originated—along with the physical embodied journeying of transgender asylum seekers from countries within Africa to South Africa and considers the interrelationships between the two. The term 'transgender' transforms as it travels, taking on meaning in relation to bodies, national homes, institutional frameworks and imaginaries. This study centres on the experiences and narratives of people that can be usefully termed 'gender refugees', gathered through a series of life story interviews. It is the argument of this book that the departures, border crossings, arrivals and perceptions of South Africa for gender refugees have been both enabled and constrained by the contested meanings and politics of this emergence of transgender. This book explores, through these narratives, the radical constitutional-legal possibilities for 'transgender' in South Africa, the dissonances between the possibilities of constitutional law, and the pervasive politics/logic of binary ‘sex/gender’ within South African society. In doing so, this book enriches the emergent field of Transgender Studies and challenges some of the current dominant theoretical and political perceptions of 'transgender'. It offers complex narratives from the African continent regarding sex, gender, sexuality and notions of home concerning particular geo-politically situated bodies.B Camminga (they/them) received a PhD from the Institute for Humanities in Africa (HUMA), University of Cape Town, in 2016. They have since held a postdoctoral fellowship at the African Centre for Migration & Society, Wits University, and several visiting fellowships, including at the Universities of Edinburgh and Oxford. They work on issues relating to gender identity and expression on the African continent with a focus on transgender migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers.Clayton Jarrard is a Research Project Coordinator at the University of Kansas Center for Research, contributing to initiatives at the nexus of research, policy implementation, and community efforts. His scholarly engagement spans the subject areas of Cultural Anthropology, Queer Studies, Disability Studies, Mad Studies, and Religious Studies. Clayton is also a host for the Un/Livable Cultures podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

How can we use comics to present ethnographic research in new and unique ways? In this episode, we talk with Dr V Chitra about the fieldwork and comics in her soon-to-be-released book Drawing Coastlines. She talks about the ethnographic insights on contamination and climate change that came from sorting fish, and her process of developing comics that portray the everyday experiences and environmental degradation of coastal communities in Mumbai. She also discusses future problems on human-insect and human-dog relations, questioning our own capacity to accept the feral. Finally, she ends with a few recommendations of ethnographies for our listeners: Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds, Marisol de la Cadena; Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India's Central Himalayas, Radhika Govindrajan; On Line and On Paper: Visual Representations, Visual Culture, and Computer Graphics in Design Engineering, Kathryn Henderson; and When Species Meet, Donna Haraway. And related to comics: Making Comics, Lynda Barry; Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud; and Forecasts: A Story of Weather and Finance at the Edge of Disaster, by Caroline E. Schuster and illustrated by Enrique Bernardou and David Bueno.Sneha Annavarapu is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Yale-NUS College. Alex Diamond is Assistant Professor of sociology at Oklahoma State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

The Work of Gender: Service, Performance and Fantasy in Contemporary Japan (NIAS Press, 2022) is an edited volume of ethnographic research organized around a cluster of key themes such as affective labor and the commodified performance of gender in contemporary Japan. Refreshingly, the chapters consist exclusively of the work of early-career scholars, tied together with an introductory chapter and epilogue by the book’s editors, Gitte Marianne Hansen and Fabio Gygi. The authors are attentive to the spatial and temporal boundaries of gender performance, and the interactions between fantasy, play, performance, and identity in the marketplace of gendered service.Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

How did humans, a species that evolved to be cooperative and egalitarian, develop societies of enforced inequality? Why did our ancestors create patriarchal power and warfare? Did it have to be this way? These are some of the key questions that Dr. Nancy Lindisfarne and Dr. Jonathan Neale grapple with in Why Men? A Human History of Violence and Inequality (Hurst, 2023).Elites have always called hierarchy and violence unavoidable facts of human nature. Evolution, they claim, has caused men to fight, and people—starting with men and women—to have separate, unequal roles. But that is bad science.Why Men? tells a smarter story of humanity, from early behaviours to contemporary cultures. From bonobo sex and prehistoric childcare to human sacrifice, Joan of Arc, Darwinism and Abu Ghraib, this fascinating, fun and important book reveals that humans adapted to live equally, yet the earliest class societies suppressed this with invented ideas of difference. Ever since, these distortions have caused female, queer and minority suffering. But our deeply human instincts towards equality have endured.This book is not about what men and women are or do. It’s about the privileges humans claim, how they rationalise them, and how we unpick those ideas about our roots. It will change how you see injustice, violence and even yourself.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