New Books in Anthropology

Katherine Davies' book Siblings and Sociology (Manchester UP, 2023) draws upon innovative qualitative data sources to explore the significance of siblings throughout the life course, demonstrating why sociologists ought to pay attention to siblingship. Focussing on four themes central to the discipline of sociology - self, relationality, imagination and time - the book shows why siblings matter. Grounded in theories of relatedness but spanning theoretical work on generation, life course, emotion, sensory worlds, normativity and identity, Siblings and Sociology explores the importance of siblings in everyday life and how they inform wider social processes: the relational construction of identity, the inculcation of capital, experiences of institutions like schools and the meanings of relatedness. Siblings tap into profound questions about who we are and who we can become. This book shows how the intrigue of siblingship renders them an important lens through which to think in new ways about familiar sociological ideas.Siblings and Sociology demonstrates why siblings are a fascinating subject for sociologists: a relationship that can influence all aspects of life, as well as an object of scrutiny capable of firing the sociological imagination and directing the analytical gaze.Rituparna Patgiri is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

In recent years the authors of a slew of books and articles have debated whether China is moving toward or away from the rule of law. Against this end-of-history approach to legal inquiry, Ke Li advocates for an approach that attends to the circumstances in which state actors select legal methodologies for the purposes of statecraft, and those in which they prefer nonlegal, extralegal and illegal ones. She demonstrates this approach in Marriage Unbound: State Law, Power, and Inequality in Contemporary China (Stanford University Press, 2022), in which she offers a sophisticated “historically charged, culturalist perspective” of state legal practice in China, worked out over 15 years of immersive research and careful writing.Ke Li joins this episode of New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science to discuss why research on authoritarian legality fails to give culture its due, the differences between practice-oriented inquiry and studies that concentrate on intersubjective meaning-making, causal inference in interpretive research, and descriptive and creative writing in the social sciences. Ke also has some great fieldwork tips for budding ethnographers.Nick Cheesman is associate professor in the Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University and in Fall 2022 was a fellow at the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy, University at Buffalo. He is a committee member of the Interpretive Methodologies and Methods group of the American Political Science Association and co-convenes the Interpretation, Method, Critique network at the ANU. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

A provocative theoretical synthesis by renowned folklorist and anthropologist Charles L. Briggs, Unlearning: Rethinking Poetics, Pandemics, and the Politics of Knowledge (Utah State UP, 2021) questions intellectual foundations and charts new paths forward. Briggs argues, through an expansive look back at his own influential works as well as critical readings of the field, that scholars can disrupt existing social and discourse theories across disciplines when they collaborate with theorists whose insights are not constrained by the bounds of scholarship.Eschewing narrow Eurocentric modes of explanation and research foci, Briggs brings together colonialism, health, media, and psychoanalysis to rethink classic work on poetics and performance that revolutionized linguistic anthropology, folkloristics, media studies, communication, and other fields. Beginning with a candid memoir that credits the mentors whose disconcerting insights prompted him to upend existing scholarly approaches, Briggs combines his childhood experiences in New Mexico with his work in graduate school, his ethnography in Venezuela working with Indigenous peoples, and his contemporary work—which is heavily weighted in medical folklore.Unlearning offers students, emerging scholars, and veteran researchers alike a guide for turning ethnographic objects into provocations for transforming time-worn theories and objects of analysis into sources of scholarly creativity, deep personal engagement, and efforts to confront unconscionable racial inequities. It will be of significant interest to folklorists, anthropologists, and social theorists and will stimulate conversations across these disciplines.Dr. Charles Briggs is co-director of the Medical Anthropology Program, co-director of the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine, and the Alan Dundes Distinguished Professor of Folklore in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of numerous books, including Learning How to Ask, Voices of Modernity, Stories in the Time of Cholera, Making Health Public, and Tell Me Why My Children Died. He has received such honors as the James Mooney Award, the Chicago Folklore Prize, the Edward Sapir Book Prize, the J. I. Staley Prize, the Américo Paredes Prize, the New Millennium Book Award, and the Cultural Horizons Prize. 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, we discuss Arve Hansen’s new book Consumption and Vietnam’s New Middle Classes: Societal Transformations and Everyday Life (Springer, 2022). In this book, Hansen studies the dramatic changes in consumption patterns in Vietnam over the past decades, focusing on how everyday life changes in the context of rapid economic development and capitalist transformations.How does a consumer society emerge and take shape in Vietnam’s socialist market economy? What is consumer socialism? Why should we study the consumption patterns of Asia’s new middle classes, and are there similarities between the middle classes in Vietnam and India? To discuss these questions, we are joined by the author and Manisha AnantharamanManisha Anantharaman, associate professor of Justice, Community and Leadership at Saint Mary's College of California in the Bay Area. She teaches and does research on the politics of sustainability, and has among many other things written extensively on the ‘environmentalism’ of India’s middle classes.Arve Hansen is a human geographer at the Centre for Development and the Environment at the University of Oslo, teaching and researching consumption and sustainability with particular focus on Vietnam. He also leads the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies with Kenneth Bo Nielsen.Kenneth Bo Nielsen is an Associate Professor at the dept. of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and one of the leaders of the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies.The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo.We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

For this instalment, we had the pleasure of hosting Teri Silvio, who works as Research Fellow at the Academia Sinica Institute of Ethnology. We chatted about Teri’s recently published book, Puppets, Gods and Brands. Theorizing the Age of Animation from Taiwan (2019), her previous work and current projects.To find out more about performance and animation, a Taiwan-centered mode of animation (ang-a), cute gods and designer toys, please listen to this episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

On a blustery fall morning back in 2019, RTB welcomed Christine Walley, anthropologist and author of Exit Zero: Family and Class in Postindustrial Chicago. In the early 1980s Chris’s father, along with thousands of other steel workers, lost his job when the mills in Southeastern Chicago closed. The book is part of a multimodal project, including the documentary film, “Exit Zero: An Industrial Family Story,” (with director Chris Boebel) and an NEH-funded digitization project of the Southeastern Chicago Historical Museum, a community-based archive of materials related to the neighborhood.How can academics begin conversations about class and deindustrialization with those most negatively affected by the precarious economic present? What is the secret to unpacking the great diversity hidden behind the phrase “white working class”? This episode’s signature RTB move (fleeing the present, only to discover echoes of its misery back in the past) takes us to Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel North and South, published in 1854 just as industrialization in the North of England was taking off.In Recallable Books, Elizabeth lingers in England’s North to recommend George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier. Chris points out how Jane Addams’s Twenty Years at Hull House (though perhaps patronizing in some ways) shows us 19th century projects for combating the dislocation and suffering of deindustrialization. John goes against type by anteing up the most current of our recallable books, Joseph O’Neill’s The Dog.Mentioned in this episode: Exit Zero: Family and Class in Postindustrial Chicago, Christine J. Walley The Jungle, Upton Sinclair Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Benedict Anderson Chicago School of Sociology Suspended Dreams: the Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Album, Martha Langford Trump’s Election and the ‘White Working Class’: What We Missed, Christine J. Walley North and South, Elizabeth Gaskell My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh Give a Man a Fish, James Ferguson The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell Twenty Years at Hull House, Jane Addams The Dog, Joseph O’Neill Listen to the episode here:Walley Transcript Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

The play element at the heart of our interactions with computers—and how it drives the best and the worst manifestations of the information age.Whether we interact with video games or spreadsheets or social media, playing with software shapes every facet of our lives. In Playing Software: Homo Ludens in Computational Culture (MIT Press, 2023), Miguel Sicart delves into why we play with computers, how that play shapes culture and society, and the threat posed by malefactors using play to weaponize everything from conspiracy theories to extractive capitalism. Starting from the controversial idea that software is an essential agent in the information age, Sicart considers our culture in general—and our way of thinking about and creating digital technology in particular—as a consequence of interacting with software's agency through play.As Sicart shows, playing shapes software agency. In turn, software shapes our agency as we adapt and relate to it through play. That play drives the creation of new cultural, social, and political forms. Sicart also reveals the role of make-believe in driving our playful engagement with the digital sphere. From there, he discusses the cybernetic theory of digital play and what we can learn from combining it with the idea that playfulness can mean pleasurable interaction with human and nonhuman agents inside the boundaries of a computational system. Finally, he critiques the instrumentalization of play as a tool wielded by platform capitalism.Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

In this podcast, the host, Lara Momesso, interviews Dr Beatrice Zani, author of the book Women Migrants in Southern China and Taiwan. Mobilities, Digital Economies and Emotions, published by Routledge in 2021. The two scholars chat about novel ethnographic methods, such as itinerant ethnography and digital ethnography, solidarity between migrant women, the role of emotions in research. This episode can’t be missed by those interested in understanding globalisation from the perspective of contemporary Chinese migrant women, e-entrepreneurship and petit-capitalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Timothy Benedict’s Spiritual Ends: Religion and the Heart of Dying in Japan (U California Press, 2023) is an exploration of spiritual care in the context of the Japanese hospice. The book is rooted in Benedict’s experience as a hospice chaplain in Japan and his extensive fieldwork and interviews with patients, medical personnel, and other chaplains. The author thoughtfully problematizes the application of ideas about spiritual care in end-of-life care that are not necessarily well rooted in the culture and life experience of Japanese patients, and proposes that greater attention should be paid to the care of the heart-mind (kokoro) as a central concept for attending to their needs. In this sense, Spiritual Ends contributes to a better understanding of the ways in which specific beliefs and practices of religion, spirituality, and medicine affect both patients and their loved ones on the one hand and the institutions providing end-of-life care on the other.This book is available open access here. 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

The Perfect Fit: Creative Work in the Global Shoe Industry (The University of Chicago Press, 2022) shows us how globalization works through the many people and places involved in making women’s shoes.We know a lot about how clothing and shoes are made cheaply, but very little about the process when they are made beautifully. In The Perfect Fit, Claudio E. Benzecry looks at the craft that goes into designing shoes for women in the US market, revealing that this creative process takes place on a global scale. Based on unprecedented behind-the-scenes access, The Perfect Fit offers an ethnographic window into the day-to-day life of designers, fit models, and technicians as they put together samples and prototypes, showing how expert work is a complement to and a necessary condition for factory exploitation.Benzecry looks at the decisions and constraints behind how shoes are designed and developed, from initial inspiration to the mundane work of making sure a size seven stays constant. In doing so, he also fosters an original understanding of how globalization works from the ground up. Drawing on five years of research in New York, China, and Brazil, The Perfect Fit reveals how creative decisions are made, the kinds of expertise involved, and the almost impossible task of keeping the global supply chain humming.Claudio E. Benzecry is Professor of Communication Studies and Sociology (courtesy) at Northwestern University.Jun (Philip) Fang is an incoming Assistant Professor of Sociology at Colby College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology