The ethnic Chinese have had a long and problematic history in Indonesia, commonly stereotyped as a market-dominant minority with dubious political loyalty toward Indonesia. For over three decades…
What role do China and other Asian countries play in the global amber trade? And, what can we learn about the big challenges of our time by studying…
Philosophical concepts are influential in the theories and methods to study the world religions. Even though the disciplines of anthropology and religious studies now encompass communities and cultures…
Religious Minorities Online (RMO) is the premier academic resource on religious minorities worldwide, reflecting the state of the art in scholarship. It is written by leading scholars and is…
Two decades ago, a group of Indonesian agricultural workers began occupying the agribusiness plantation near their homes. In the years since, members of this remarkable movement have reclaimed…
In Photography and Making Bedouin Histories in the Naqab, 1906-2013:: An Anthropological Approach (Routledge, 2023), Emilie Le Febvre takes us to the Naqab Desert where Bedouin use photographs to make, and…
How can artists survive today? In Cultural Work and Creative Subjectivity: Recentralising the Artist Critique and Social Networks in the Cultural Industries (Routledge, 2023), Dr Xin Gu, Director of the Master of…
All over the world, people disappear from their families, communities and the state’s bureaucratic gaze, as victims of oppressive regimes or while migrating along clandestine routes. An Anthropology of…
The Spatiality and Temporality of Urban Violence: Histories, Rhythms and Ruptures (Manchester UP, 2023) asks how the city, with its spatial and temporal configuration and its rhythms, produces and shapes…
How can culture be authentic in the modern world? In The Poet’s Song: Folk and its Cultural Politics in South Asia (Rouitledge, 2023), Dr Priyanka Basu, a Lecturer in Performing Arts at…
What people ultimately want from music-drama, audience research suggests, is to be absorbed in a story that engages their feelings, even moves them deeply, and that may lead…
Compliance, namely everyday accommodations, is a practice allowing us to work and live with others. Exploring compliance from an anthropological perspective, Will Rollason and Eric Hirsch’s edited volume Compliance: Cultures…
Posthuman Gaming: Avatars, Gamers, and Entangled Subjectivities (Routledge, 2023) explores the relationship between avatar and gamer in the massively multiplayer online roleplaying game World of Warcraft, to examine notions of…
Aboveground, Manhattan’s Riverside Park provides open space for the densely populated Upper West Side. Beneath its surface run railroad tunnels, disused for decades, where over the years unhoused…
The basement of a veteran shopping mall located in the central business district of Singapore affords opportunities to a group of amateur and semi-professional musicians, of different ethnicities,…
In Tamil Nadu, the nine-night autumnal Navarātri festival can be viewed as a celebration of feminine powers in association with the goddess. Ina Marie Lunde Ilkama’s book The Play…
On the podcast today, I am joined by Mai Corlin, who is researcher at the department of cross-cultural and regional studies in the University of Copenhagen. Mai will…
Through a creative focus on skin, in Experiments in Skin: Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam (Duke UP, 2021), Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu examines the ongoing influence of…
In September of 2019, Luis Alberto Quiñonez—known as Sito— was shot to death as he sat in his car in the Mission District of San Francisco. He was…
Ingrid Piller speaks with Piers Kelly about a fascinating form of visual communication, Australian message sticks. What does a message stick look like? What is its purpose, and how has the…
Ethnographic research has long been cloaked in mystery around what fieldwork is really like for researchers, how they collect data, and how it is analyzed within the social…
Addressing practice-oriented questions, this handbook engages with both theoretical and political dimensions, unpacking the multidimensional nature of social movement research for new and established scholars alike and for…
Object Lessons is a Bloomsbury series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. This book, Relic, by Dr. Ed Simon was published in 2024. Every culture,…
Mumbai is generally recognized as an environment of extraordinary religious diversity. The city is known at one and the same time for a habitual cosmopolitanism and a series…