In 2013, the Journal of Burma Studies published an article titled “An Introduction to Wa Studies.” It seems that even within the last decade the Wa, an upland people living predominantly on…
A special bonus episode in honor of the 93rd Academy Awards on April 25, 2021! One of the most-nominated films at this year’s Oscars is “Nomadland,” adapted from…
In his new book, Natura Urbana: Ecological Constellations in Urban Space (MIT Press, 2022), Mathew Gandy explores urban nature as a multilayered material and symbolic entity. The book examines the…
This episode looks at the main types and categories of nomads, how they live, and the similarities and differences between them. Music in this episode: Desert City by…
For some, automation will usher in a labor-free utopia; for others, it signals a disastrous age-to-come. Yet whether seen as dream or nightmare, automation, argues Munn, is ultimately…
In her latest book, Life in Citiations: Biblical Narratives and Contemporary Hebrew Culture (Routledge, 2019), Ruth Tsoffar studies several key biblical narratives that figure prominently in Israeli culture. Life in Citations provides a close…
Where do the spices we find in our kitchen cabinets come from? What can we learn from tracing spices and their commodities and how does their trade impact…
The American Midwest is often thought of as uniformly white, and shaped exclusively by Christian values. However, this view of the region as an unvarying landscape fails to…
Today I talked to Holly Walters about her new book Shaligram Pilgrimage in the Nepal Himalayas (Amsterdam UP, 2020). For roughly two thousand years, the veneration of sacred fossil ammonites, called…
In The Dancer’s Voice: Performance and Womanhood in Transnational India (Duke UP, 2022) Rumya Sree Putcha theorizes how the Indian classical dancer performs the complex dynamics of transnational Indian womanhood.…
Qatar, an ambitious country in the Arabian Gulf, grabbed headlines as the first Middle Eastern nation selected to host the FIFA World Cup. As the wealthiest country in…
Can the study of religion be justified? Scholarship in religion, especially work in “theory and method,” is preoccupied with matters of research procedure and thus inarticulate about the…
A conceptual update of affordance theory that introduces the mechanisms and conditions framework, providing a vocabulary and critical perspective. Technological affordances mediate between the features of a technology…
What worlds take root in war? In A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Resistance and Survival in South Lebanon (U California Press, 2022), anthropologist Munira Khayyat describes life along the…
Psychic Investigators: Anthropology, Modern Spiritualism, and Credible Witnessing in the Late Victorian Age (U Pittsburgh Press, 2022) examines British anthropology’s engagement with the modern spiritualist movement during the late…
When viewed through the context of an interactive play, a video game player fulfills the roles of both actor and spectator, watching and influencing a game’s story in…
Cultivating the Past, Living the Modern: The Politics of Time in the Sultanate of Oman (Cornell UP, 2021) explores how and why heritage has emerged as a prevalent force in…
How far did post-UNTAC Cambodia exemplified an expanded Habermasian public sphere? What happened when a range of aid agencies, private donors, activists and academics showed up with all…
Why do we feel the need to belong, and what happens when we don’t? This episode explores: What it takes to belong. Why it physically hurts to be…
In Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums (Harvard University Press, 2022 for paperback edition), Samuel J. Redman, Associate Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts,…
A pioneer of cultural psychology argues that emotions are not innate, but made as we live our lives together. We may think of emotions as universal responses, felt…
David Newheiser is a senior research fellow in the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry at Australian Catholic University. He is the author of Hope in a Secular Age: Deconstruction,…
This book addresses the recent transformations of popular Hinduism by focusing upon the religious cum artistic practice of Ramkatha, staged narratives of the Ramcharitmanas. Focusing on the sensory and media…
For decades, scholars have been calling into question the universality of disciplinary objects and categories. The coherence of defined autonomous categories—such as religion, science, and art—has collapsed under…