Straight from the beaches of Hawaii comes an exciting new ethnography of a community of big-wave surfers. Oahu’s Waimea Bay attracts the world’s best big wave surfers—men and…
Today Julia Keblinska and I had the pleasure of talking to Assistant Professor Jerry Zee about his book, Continent in Dust: Experiments in a Chinese Weather System, published by University of California…
From social media posts and text messages to digital government documents and archives, researchers are bombarded with a deluge of text reflecting the social world. This textual data…
France is a bellwether for the postcolonial anxieties and populist politics emerging across the world today. Postcolonial France: The Question of Race and the Future of the Republic (Pluto Press,…
Combining archival research with ethnographic fieldwork, Aniket De’s book The Boundary of Laughter: Popular Performances Across Borders in South Asia (Oxford UP, 2022) explores how spaces of popular performance have changed…
Growing up in the shadow of Hollywood, the gay sons of immigrants featured in Brown and Gay in LA: The Lives of Immigrant Sons (NYU Press, 2022) could not have…
What does gentrification look like? Can we even agree that it is a process that replaces one community with another? It is a question of class? Or of…
Folk performances reflect the life-worlds of a vast section of subaltern communities in India. What is the philosophy that drives these performances, the vision that enables as well…
In 2008, Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad invited international investors to the first-ever Palestine Investment Conference, which was designed to jump-start the process of integrating Palestine into the…
In Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets (Harper Business, 2022), Brett Scott tells an urgent and revelatory story about how the fusion of Big Finance and…
We are in the middle of a ‘desirevolution’ – a fundamental and political transformation of the way we desire as human beings. Perhaps as always, new technologies –…
Adrienne Edgar’s Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples—Ethnic Mixing in Soviet Central Asia (Cornell University Press, 2021) is an outstanding study of the evolution of intermarriage practices in Kazakhstan and…
In this path breaking work Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh : India’s Lonely Young Women and the Search for Intimacy and Independence (Harper Collins, 2021), Shrayana Bhattacharya maps the economic and…
Worrier State: Risk, Anxiety and Moral Panic in South Africa (Manchester University Press, 2022) looks at the pervasive culture of fear in South Africa. It reveals how narratives of fear…
Singing the Goddess Into Place: Locality, Myth, and Social Change in Chamundi of the Hill, a Kannada Folk Ballad (SUNY Press, 2022) demonstrates how folk narratives reflect local context…
President Rafael Correa (2007-2017) led the Ecuadoran Citizens’ Revolution that claimed to challenge the tenets of neoliberalism and the legacies of colonialism. The Correa administration promised to advance…
In Global Taiwanese: Asian Skilled Labour Migrants in a Changing World (U Toronto Press, 2021), Fiona Moore explores the different ways in which Taiwanese expatriates in London and Toronto, along…
Since the 1970s, a “Polynesian Pipeline” has brought football players from American Sāmoa to Hawaii and the mainland United States to play at the collegiate and professional levels.…
Today I spoke to anthropologist William Mathews about his new book, Cosmic Coherence: A Cognitive Anthropology Through Chinese Divination (Berghahn Books, 2021). This book explores how humans are unique in their…
Defying the conventional split between “theory” and “methodology,” Eviatar Zerubavel’s Generally Speaking: An Invitation to Concept-Driven Sociology (Oxford UP, 2020) introduces a yet unarticulated and thus far never systematised method…
In 2016, social media users in Thailand called out the Paris-based luxury fashion house Balenciaga for copying the popular Thai “rainbow bag,” using Balenciaga’s hashtags to circulate memes…
Anastasia Shesterinina begins Mobilizing in Uncertainty: Collective Identities and War in Abkhazia (Cornell University Press, 2021) with an account of Georgian troops crossing into eastern Abkhazia, in the Southern Caucasus region…
Compared to their Uyghur and Kazakh co-religionists in Xinjiang, China’s largest single Muslim group – the Hui – has received less media and scholarly attention lately, perhaps understandably…
What a Mushroom Lives For: Matsutake and the Worlds They Make (Princeton University Press, 2022) by Dr. Michael Hathaway pushes today’s mushroom renaissance in compelling new directions. For centuries, Western science…