The concept of transhumanism emerged in the middle of the 20th century, and has influenced discussions around AI, brain–computer interfaces, genetic technologies and life extension. Despite its enduring…
Over the last several decades, life in Lahore has been undergoing profound transformations, from rapid and uneven urbanization to expanding state institutions and informal economies. What do these…
Nerina Weiss. Erella Grassiani, and Linda Green’s book The Entanglements of Ethnographic Fieldwork in a Violent World (Routledge, 2022) focuses on the emotional hazards of conducting fieldwork about or within…
Grave (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Allison C. Meier takes a ground-level view of how burial sites have transformed over time and how they continue to change. As a cemetery tour…
Sebanti Chatterjee’s book Choral Voices: Ethnographic Imaginations of Sound and Sacrality (Bloomsbury, 2023) is about sacred and secular choirs in Goa and Shillong across churches, seminaries, schools, auditoriums, classrooms, reality…
In the past two decades, the consumption of beauty services and cosmetic surgery in Turkey has developed from an elite phenomenon to an increasingly common practice, especially among…
In When Forests Run Amok: War and Its Afterlives in Indigenous and Afro-Colombian Territories (Duke University Press, 2023) Daniel Ruiz-Serna follows the afterlives of war, showing how they affect the variety…
In the powerful book Among the Eunuchs: A Muslim Transgender Journey (Hurst Publishers, 2022), Leyla Jagiella reflects on her story as a trans Muslim living among a third-gender community known as Khwajasira…
Landlocked and surrounded by South Africa on all sides, the mountain kingdom of Lesotho became the world’s first “water-exporting country” when it signed a 1986 treaty with its…
How is religious conversion transforming American democracy? In one corner of Appalachia, a group of American citizens has embraced the Russian Orthodox Church and through it Putin’s New…
In Fearing Together: Ethics for Insecurity (Oxford UP, 2023), Ami Harbin explores how fearing is a central part of how we relate to each other and the unpredictable world. Fearing…
Brian Valente-Quinn is an Associate Professor of Francophone African studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. His book, Senegalese Stagecraft: Decolonizing Theater-Making in Francophone Africa, was published at Northwestern University…
In Semiotics of Rape: Sexual Subjectivity and Violation in Rural India (Duke UP, 2022), Rupal Oza follows the social life of rape in rural northwest India to reveal how rape…
In her moving, sophisticated, and analytically groundbreaking new book Rebuilding Community: Displaced Women and the Making of a Shia Ismaili Muslim Sociality (Oxford UP, 2023), Shenila Khoja-Moolji recounts and engages…
Today I had the pleasure of talking to Jay Ke-Schutte on his just released book, Angloscene: Compromised Personhood in Afro-Chinese Translations (U California Press, 2023). Angloscene examines Afro-Chinese interactions within Beijing’s aspirationally…
How can scholars employ the practices and techniques of investigative journalism? Susan Hartman provides an answer in her intimate look at refugee experience in the United States. In City…
In Mirrors of Whiteness: Media, Middle-Class Resentment, and the Rise of the Far Right in Brazil (U Pittsburgh Press, 2023), Mauro P. Porto examines the conservative revolt of Brazil’s white…
Caste, Knowledge, and Power: Ways of Knowing in Twentieth-Century Malabar (Cambridge UP, 2023) investigates the transformations of caste practices in twentieth century India and the role of knowledge in this transformation…
The social consequences of anti-parasitic urbanism, as efforts to expunge supposedly biological parasites penalize those viewed as social parasites. According to French philosopher Michel Serres, ordered systems are…
On March 11, 2011, a 9.1 magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of northeastern Japan triggering a massive tsunami and shifting the earth on its axis. Nearly 20,000…
Kūṭiyāṭṭam, India’s only living traditional Sanskrit theatre, has been continually performed in Kerala for at least a thousand years. David Shulman and Heike Oberlin’s Two Masterpieces of Kuttiyattam: Mantrankam and Anguliyankam (Oxford…
How do objects become contested in settings characterized by (violent) conflict? Why are some things contested by religious actors? How do religious actors mobilize things in conflict situations,…
Hello, this is Eric LeMay, a host on the New Books Network. Today I interview Susan Stryker and Dylan McCarthy Blackston about The Transgender Studies Reader Remix (Routledge, 2023). This…
Passport Entanglements examines the problems with documents issued to Indonesian migrant workers in Hong Kong and explores the larger role that passports and other types of documentation play in…