New Books in Anthropology

The life of a scholar is stressful. The best way to muddle through is with a stiff drink. Balancing teaching, research, and service more than merits a cocktail at the end of a long day. So, sit back, relax, and infuse some intoxicating humor into old-fashioned academia. A humorous handbook for surviving life in higher education, The Faculty Lounge: A Cocktail Guide for Academics (Indiana University Press, provides deserving scholars with a wide range of academic-themed drink recipes. Philipp Stelzel shares more than 50 recipes for all palates, including The Dissertation Committee (rum), The Faculty Meeting (rye), The Presidential Platitude (gin), and more. Offering cocktails for every academic occasion along with spirited, amusing commentary, The Faculty Lounge is the perfect gift for graduate students, tenure-track professors, and disillusioned administrators.Philipp Stelzel is a specialist in post-World War II German, West European, and transatlantic political and intellectual history. After earning his PhD at the University of North Carolina, Stelzel taught at Duke University and Boston College before coming to Duquesne in 2014. His first book first book, History after Hitler: a Transatlantic Enterprise (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) analyzes the intellectual exchange between German and American historians of modern Germany from the end of World War II to the 1980s.Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Margaret Hillenbrand’s On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China (Columbia UP, 2023) examines the negative cultural forms that have emerged in response to China’s exclusionary contemporary socioeconomic system. Hillenbrand considers the social strain exerted on members of the “underclass,” the 300 million migrant workers whose toil has underwritten China’s economic rise since the passing of the command economy. She describes the socio-legal condition of disenfranchisement, an internal displacement or “civic-half life” experienced by marginalized workers, as “zombie citizenship,” a purposefully inflammatory definition that evokes both the workers’ experience of civic suspension and their class others’ fears of falling into similar abjection. In this compelling narrative, contemporary Chinese social, legal, and cultural life is wrapped in an ambient mood of jeopardy. Through close readings of diverse texts, performances, and films that both amplify and diffuse the violent conflicts of dispossession and dislocation, she makes the case for culture’s capacity to “intervene palpably in social experience.” The cultural forms Hillenbrand introduces and analyzes themselves teeter on the edge, on one hand, the edge of exploitation and aesthetic empowerment. The ugly feelings these works evoke affectively concretize the “ever-impending dissolution of that apparent boundary” between those already on the cliff’s edge and those who may yet come to share this precarious space. I look forward to probing the complexities of this freighted and violent cultural work with our guest.Julia Keblinska is a postdoc at the East Asian Studies Center at the Ohio State University specializing in Chinese media history and comparative socialisms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Salvaging Empire: Sovereignty, Natural Resources, and Environmental Science in the South Atlantic (Cornell University Press, 2023) by Dr. James J. A. Blair probes the historical roots and current predicaments of a twenty-first century settler colony seeking to control an uncertain future through resource management and environmental science.Four decades after a violent 1982 war between the United Kingdom and Argentina reestablished British authority over the Falkland Islands (Las Malvinas in Spanish), a commercial fishing boom and offshore oil discoveries have intensified the sovereignty dispute over the South Atlantic archipelago. Scholarly literature on the South Atlantic focuses primarily on military history of the 1982 conflict. However, contested claims over natural resources have now made this disputed territory a critical site for examining the wider relationship between imperial sovereignty and environmental governance.Dr. Blair argues that by claiming self-determination and consenting to British sovereignty, the Falkland Islanders have crafted a settler colonial protectorate to extract resources and extend empire in the South Atlantic. Responding to current debates in environmental anthropology, critical geography, Atlantic history, political ecology, and science and technology studies, Dr. Blair describes how settlers have asserted indigeneity in dynamic relation with the environment. Salvaging Empire uncovers the South Atlantic's outsized importance for understanding the broader implications of resource management and environmental science for the geopolitics of empire.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused 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

The International Labour Organization estimates that in Southeast Asia there are 30 million children engaged in paid work, 17 million in engaged in unpaid work and 50 million who don’t attend school. These figures can be a shock to people living in countries like Australia where childhood is typically a non-productive stage of life more readily associated with schooling and dependence on adults. What is the meaning of “childhood” in contexts of adversity where if you don’t work as a child, you and your family won’t survive? What does it mean where to attend school is to place your family in a precarious financial situation? To discuss these questions is Dr Maria Amigó, senior lecturer at the University of Sydney. Maria is a social anthropologist and has studied children and childhood in contexts of adversity for over 20 years.Amigó is the author of Children Chasing Money: Children's Work in Rural Lombok, Indonesia (VDM, 2010). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Across today’s America, countless people will embark on an adventure. They will prowl among overgrown headstones in forgotten graveyards, stalk through darkened woods and wildlands, and creep down the crumbling corridors of abandoned buildings. They have set forth in search of a profound paranormal experience and may seem to achieve just that. They are part of the growing cultural phenomenon, which is called legend tripping.In If You Should Go at Midnight: Legends and Legend Tripping in America (UP of Mississippi, 2023), Jeffrey S. Debies-Carl guides readers through an exploration of legend tripping, drawing on years of scholarship, documentary accounts, and his own extensive fieldwork. Poring over old reports and legends, sleeping in haunted inns, and trekking through wilderness full of cannibal mutants and strange beasts, Debies-Carl provides an in-depth analysis of this practice that has long fascinated scholars yet remains a mystery to many observers. From multiple perspectives, Debies-Carl illustrates the value of legend tripping for social scientists. In brief, legend tripping reflects the modern world, revealing both its problems and its virtues. In society as well as in legend tripping, there is ambiguity, conflict, crisis of meaning, and the substitution of debate for social consensus. Conversely, both emphasize individual agency and values, even in paranormal matters. While people still need meaningful and transformative experiences, authoritative, traditional institutions are less capable of providing them. Instead, legend trippers voluntarily search for individually meaningful experiences and actively participate in shaping and interpreting those experiences for themselves.Jeffrey S. Debies-Carl is Associate Professor of sociology at the University of New Haven. His research examines the social significance of physical spaces and space-based behaviors and has appeared in various scholarly journals. He is the author of Punk Rock and the Politics of Place (Routledge, 2014).Yadong Li is a PhD student in socio-cultural anthropology at Tulane University. 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

From the overloaded courts with their constantly changing dates and appointments to the need to prove oneself the “right" kind of asylum seeker, the asylum system in the United States is an exacting and drawn-out immigration process that itself results in suffering. When anthropologist Rhoda Kanaaneh became a volunteer interpreter for Arab asylum seekers, she discovered how applicants learned to craft a specific narrative to satisfy the system's requirements.Kanaaneh tells the stories of four Arab asylum seekers who sought protection in the United States on the basis of their gender or sexuality: Saud, who relived painful memories of her circumcision and police harassment in Sudan and then learned to number and sequence these recollections; Fatima, who visited doctors and therapists in order to document years of spousal abuse without over-emphasizing her resulting mental illness; Fadi, who highlighted the homophobic motivations that provoked his arrest and torture in Jordan, all the while omitting connected issues of class and racism; and Marwa, who showcased her private hardships as a lesbian in a Shiite family in Lebanon and downplayed her environmental activism. The Right Kind of Suffering: Gender, Sexuality, and Arab Asylum Seekers in America (U Texas Press, 2023) is a compelling portrait of Arab asylum seekers whose success stories stand in contrast with those whom the system failed.Rhoda Kanaaneh has taught anthropology and gender and sexuality studies at Columbia University, American University, New York University, and Fordham University. She is the editor of Displaced at Home: Ethnicity and Gender Among Palestinians in Israel and author of Surrounded: Palestinian Soldiers in the Israeli Military and Birthing the Nation: Strategies of Palestinian Women in Israel.Alize Arıcan is a Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Scholar at Boston University and an incoming Assistant Professor of Anthropology at CUNY—City College, focusing on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Dr Pierce Salguero talks with Rev. Nathan Jishin Michon, a postdoctoral fellow at Ryukoku University and an ordained priest in the Shingon Buddhist tradition. Our conversation touches on diverse Buddhist healing rituals and the role of light in Shingon practice and cosmology. We discuss the playfulness and innovation in modern Japanese Buddhism, and the rise of chaplaincy after the 3.11 tsunami and nuclear disaster. We also talk about Nathan’s ethnographic work in Japan, as well as their experiences volunteering in a “listening cafe.”Resources mentioned in the episode: Pierce Salguero, Buddhism and Medicine: An Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Sources (2019) Jivaka Project Nathan’s dissertation: “Awakening to Care: Formation of Japanese Buddhist Chaplaincy” (2020) Nathan Michon, A Thousand Hands: A Guidebook to Caring for Your Buddhist Community (2016) Nathan Michon, Refuge in the Storm: Buddhist Voices in Crisis Care (2023) Dr. Pierce Salguero is a transdisciplinary scholar of health humanities who is fascinated by historical and contemporary intersections between Buddhism, medicine, and crosscultural exchange. He has a Ph.D. in History of Medicine from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (2010), and teaches Asian history, medicine, and religion at Penn State University’s Abington College, located near Philadelphia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

An accessible and engaging introductory text on homelessness and housing policy, this timely book uses a sociopolitical framework for understanding issues of homelessness in the United States.The authors, leading sociologists in their field, use data from over 250 interviews and field notes to demonstrate that homelessness is rooted in the structure of our society. They identify and describe the structural barriers faced by people who become homeless including the lack of affordable housing, the stigmatization and criminalization of homelessness, inadequate access to healthcare, employment that does not pay a living wage, and difficulty accessing social services. Despite seemingly insurmountable odds, most of the people included in this book believe strongly in the American Dream. Stephanie Southworth and Sara Brallier's book Homelessness in the 21st Century: Living the Impossible American Dream (Routledge, 2023) examines how the belief in the American Dream affects people experiencing homelessness. It also highlights individuals' experiences within the social institutions of the economy, the criminal justice system, and the health care system. Furthermore, this book explores how stereotypes of people experiencing homelessness affects individuals and guides social policy. The authors examine policy changes at the local, state, and national levels that can be made to eradicate homelessness, but argue that there must be a political will to shift the narrative from blaming the victim to supporting the common good.Expertly combining history, theory and ethnography, this book is an invaluable resource for those with an interest in housing policy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

What can collaborative research with Colombian campesino leaders teach us about building peace? In this episode, I talk with Angie Lederach, author of Feel the Grass Grow: Ecologies of Slow Peace in Colombia (Stanford UP, 2023). Angie describes how a background in international peacebuilding led her to work with grassroots Colombian peacebuilders and how they co-constructed a research design drawing on the principles of Participatory Action Research. She explains how engaging in PAR affected her theoretical findings, as the concept of “slow peace” came out of social leaders’ frustrating engagements with a hurried state. Finally, she describes how both her ethnography and grassroots peacebuilding changed with the signing of a 2016 peace agreement, before sharing the ethnographic parable of the dying donkey.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

Zeynep K. Korkman, author of Gendered Fortunes: Divination, Precarity, and Affect in Postsecular Turkey, discusses how Turkey's fortunetelling cafés provide shelter from societal pressures. She explores the use of divination as a tool for feminist politics, the significance of feeling labor for gender and sexual minorities, and the interplay of gender, labor, affect, and politics in postsecular Turkey.