Paul A. Christensen‘s new book is a thoughtful ethnography of drinking, drunkenness, and male sociability in modern urban Japan. Focusing on two major alcohol sobriety support groups in…
Benjamin Schmidt‘s beautiful new book argues that a new form of exoticism emerged in the Netherlands between the mid-1660s and the early 1730s, thanks to a series of…
Eben Kirksey‘s wonderful new volume is an inspiring introduction to a kind of multispecies ethnography where artists, anthropologists, and others collaborate to create objects and experiences of great……
Thom van Dooren’s new book is an absolute must-read. (I was going to qualify that with a “…for anyone who…” and realized that it really needs no qualification.) Flight…
What’s not to love about Jie Li’s new book? Shanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Life (Columbia University Press, 2015) explores the history and culture of Shanghai alleyway homes…
“The chief aim of [philosopher François Laruelle’s] life’s work is to consider philosophy without resorting to philosophy in order to do so.” What is non-philosophy, what would it…
Lisa Stevenson’s new book opens with two throat-singing women and one listening king. Whether we hear them sitting down to a normal night’s dinner (as the women) or…
[Cross-posted from the New Books Network Seminar] Steven Shaviro’s new book is a wonderfully engaging study of speculative realism, new materialism, and the ways in which those fields can…
Steven Shaviro‘s new book is a wonderfully engaging study of speculative realism, new materialism, and the ways in which those fields can speak to and be informed by…
[Cross-posted from New Books in East Asian Studies] Joseph D. Hankins’s marvelous new ethnography of the contemporary Buraku people looks at the labor involved in “identifying, dismantling, and reprod……
Joseph D. Hankins‘s marvelous new ethnography of the contemporary Buraku people looks at the labor involved in “identifying, dismantling, and reproducing” the Buraku situation in Japan and beyon……
[Cross-posted from New Books in East Asian Studies] Tine Gammeltoft’s new book explores the process of reproductive decision making in contemporary Hanoi. Haunting Images: A Cultural Account of Select… Visit…
Tine Gammeltoft‘s new book explores the process of reproductive decision making in contemporary Hanoi. Haunting Images: A Cultural Account of Selective Reproduction in Vietnam (University of Cal… Visit…
[Cross-posted from New Books in East Asian Studies] “[All] I want to eat is a rice ball.” This was the last entry in the diary of a 52-year-old man…
“[All] I want to eat is a rice ball.” This was the last entry in the diary of a 52-year-old man who starved to death in an apartment…
[Cross-posted from New Books in East Asian Studies] In Songs of Seoul: An Ethnography of Voice and Voicing in Christian South Korea (University of California Press, 2013), Nicholas Harkness explores t… Visit New…
[Cross-posted from New Books in East Asian Studies] In contemporary China, the game of Weiqi (also known as Go) represents many things at the same time: the military…
In contemporary China, the game of Weiqi (also known as Go) represents many things at the same time: the military power of the general, the intellect and control…
[Cross-posted from New Books in Science, Technology, and Society] When you open Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human (University of California Press, 2013), you ar… Visit New…
When you open Eduardo Kohn‘s How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human (University of California Press, 2013), you are entering a forest of dreams: the dreams…
[Cross-posted from New Books in East Asian Studies] Globalization is locally specific: global connectivity looks different from place to place. Given that, how are global connections made? And why do ……
Globalization is locally specific: global connectivity looks different from place to place. Given that, how are global connections made? And why do they happen so differently in different…
[Cross-posted from New Books in East Asian Studies] Thinking about “Noise” in the history and practice of music means thinking in opposites. Noise is both a musical genre, and…
[Cross-posted from New Books in Science, Technology and Society] Addiction has recently emerged as an object of anthropological inquiry. In a wonderful, focused volume of ethnographies of addiction in……