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…
Dr. Tim Hutchings is a sociologist of digital religion. His Ph.D. (Durham University, 2010) was an ethnographic study of five online Christian churches. Dr. Hutchings is interested in…
In Academic Outsider: Stories of Exclusion and Hope (Stanford University Press, 2022), sociologist Victoria Reyes combines her personal experiences with research findings to examine how academia creates conditional citizenship for its…
The Lebanese state is structured through religious freedom and secular power sharing across sectarian groups. Every sect has specific laws that govern kinship matters like marriage or inheritance.…
Paul A. Djupe, Anand Edward Sokhey, and Amy Erica Smith, The Knowledge Polity: Teaching and Research in the Social Sciences (Oxford UP, 2022) explores a more holistic understanding of knowledge production…
The Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity (Routledge, 2020) brings the ecological turn to sociocultural understandings of self. Tema Milstein and José Castro-Sotomayor introduce a broad, insightful assembly of original theory and…
This is part two of a two part interview. Mark Solovey’s ‘Social Science for What?’ is essential reading for anyone in either the history of science policy or the…
Today I talked to Jin Feng of Grinnell College about her fascinating book Tasting Paradise on Earth: Jiangnan Foodways (U Washington Press, 2019). Preparing and consuming food is an integral part of…
Bridging the gap between migration studies and the anthropological tradition, Ghassan Hage illustrates that transnationality and its attendant cultural consequences are not necessarily at odds with classic theory.…
Suman Nath’s book Democracy and Social Cleavage in India: Ethnography of Riots, Everyday Politics and Communalism in West Bengal (2012-2021) (Routledge, 2022) explores the emergence of identity politics and violence…
The health care sector frequently emphasizes “Cultural competence”, an elastic concept that stretches from the simplest recognition of diversity of patient populations, to include policy implications of patients’…
Our times of crumbling structures and decaying social bonds are often depicted as apocalyptic. Monika Kostera’s book After The Apocalypse: Finding Hope in Organizing (John Hunt, 2020) takes the apocalypse…
Today, the majority of the world’s population lives in a country with falling marriage rates, a phenomenon with profound impacts on women, gender, and sexuality. In Being Single in…
Why are we working harder? In The Flexibility Paradox: Why Flexible Working Leads To (Self-)Exploitation (Polity Press, 2022), Heejung Chung, a professor of sociology and social policy at the University of Kent, looks a…
Are you a born, revert, or convert Muslim who is trying to navigate the puzzle that is Muslim marriage in America? Do you want an egalitarian and fair…
Radical Resilience: Athenian Topographies of Precarity and Possibility (Cornell UP, 2022) relates narratives of Athenians struggling to survive the impoverishment of relentless austerity measures, compounding emergencies, and human disasters…
Today I had the pleasure of talking to Professor Gonçalo Santos (University of Coimbra), about his new book, Chinese Village Life Today: Building Families in an Age of Transition, which was published…
This is part one of a two part interview. “The social sciences have prospered best in the federal government where they have been included under broad umbrella classifications…
In his book Why Humans Fight: The Social Dynamics of Close-Range Violence (2022, Cambridge University Press), Siniša Malešević emphasises the centrality of the social and historical contexts that make fighting…
At its beginning in 2007, the Southern Movement in South Yemen was a loose merger of different people, most of them former army personnel and state employees of…
“Confronting the past” has become a byword for democratization. How societies and governments commemorate their violent pasts is often appraised as a litmus test of their democratization claims.…
In this podcast Laura A. Ogden, cultural anthropologist at Dartmouth College, introduces her beautifully crafted book Loss and Wonder at the World’s End (Duke University Press, 2021). In Loss and Wonder at the World’s…
In 2005, Tony Perman attended a ceremony alongside the living and the dead. His visit to a Zimbabwe farm brought him into contact with the madhlozi, outsider spirits that Ndau…