Richard Brian Miller, “Why Study Religion?” (Oxford UP, 2021)
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
Suspect Others: Spirit Mediums, Self-Knowledge, and Race in Multiethnic Suriname (U Toronto Press, 2021) explores how ideas of self-knowledge and identity arise from a unique set of rituals in…
Migration is typically seen as a transnational phenomenon, but it happens within borders, too. Oaxaca in Motion: An Ethnography of Internal, Transnational, and Return Migration (U Texas Press, 2022), documents…
In 2014, the island of Ahamb in Vanuatu became the scene of a startling Christian revival movement led by thirty children with ‘spiritual vision.’ However, it ended dramatically…
The episode features Anca Parvulescu and Manuela Boatca, co-authors of an extraordinary, field-shifting new book – Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania across Empires (Cornell University Press, 2022). Dr. Boatca is a Professor…
Entitled People, Place, Race, and Nation in Xinjiang, China: Territories of Identity (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022), David O’Brien and Melissa Shani Brown’s new book focuses upon the ways in which ethnic difference…
Without the State: Self-Organization and Political Activism in Ukraine (U Toronto Press, 2022) explores the 2013-14 Euromaidan protests – a wave of demonstrations and civil unrest in Ukraine –…
Inna Perheentupa’s book Feminist Politics in Neoconservative Russia: An Ethnography of Resistance and Resources (Policy Press, 2022) is a nuanced and compelling analysis of grassroots feminist activism in Russia in the…
Today I talked to Ted Conover, author of Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America’s Edge (Knopf, 2022) In May 2017, Conover went to Colorado to explore firsthand a rural way of…
Margret Grebowicz’s Rescue Me: On Dogs and Their Humans (U Minnesota Press, 2022) is a little book about the oldest relationship we humans have cultivated with another large animal—in something…
Anthropological Lives: An Introduction to the Profession of Anthropology (Rutgers UP, 2020) introduces readers to what it is like to be a professional anthropologist. It focuses on the work…
Bodies Out of Place: Theorizing Anti-Blackness in U.S. Society (U Georgia Press, 2022) asserts that anti-Black racism is not better than it used to be; it is just performed…