A historian of science examines key public debates about the fundamental nature of humans to ask why a polarized discourse about nature versus nurture became so entrenched in…
Beyond simplistic binaries of the dark continent or Africa Rising, Africans at home and abroad articulate their identities through their quotidian practices and cultural politics. Amongst the privileged…
In Beyond Heaven and Earth: A Cognitive Theory of Religion (MIT Press, 2022), Gabriel Levy argues that collective religious narratives and beliefs are part of nature; they are the basis…
In A Ritual Geology: Gold and Subterranean Knowledge in Savanna West Africa (Duke University Press, 2022), Robyn d’Avignon, Assistant Professor of History at NYU, retraces the history of gold mining…
For much of America’s rapidly growing secular population, religion is an inescapable source of skepticism and discomfort. It shows up in politics and in holidays, but also in…
A Critical Theory of Police Power: The Fabrication of Social Order (Verso, 2021) offers a critical look at policing and the power of the state, examining the relationship between our ideas…
Games are a unique art form. Games work in the medium of agency. Game designers tell us who to be and what to care about during the game.…
Muhtars, the lowest level elected political position in Turkey, hold an ambiguously defined place within the administrative hierarchy. They are public officials, but local citizens do not always…
In The Metabolic Museum (Hatje Cantz, 2020), Clémentine Deliss, a curator, researcher, and former director of the Frankfurt Weltkulturen Museum, explores possible functions for anthropological museums in a postcolonial culture.…
The phenomenon of “war brides” from Japan moving to the West has been quite widely discussed, but this book tells the stories of women whose lives followed a…
Today, we speak with Waleed Ziad, about his book Hidden Caliphate: Sufi Saints beyond the Oxus and Indus, published in 2021 with Harvard University Press. Ziad is an assistant…
In Queer and Trans Madness: Struggles for Social Justice (Palgrave Macmillan), Merrick D. Pilling urges those invested in social justice for 2SLGBTQ people to interrogate the biomedical model of mental…
In Dispossession as Delivery: Land Occupation and Eviction in the Postapartheid City (Oxford University Press; 2022), Zachary Levenson explains why post-Apartheid South Africa continues to evict land occupations. Levenson shows…
In Hospital Land USA: Sociological Adventures in Medicalization (Routledge, 2016), Wendy Simonds analyzes the wide-reaching powers of medicalization: the dynamic processes by which medical authorities, institutions, and ideologies impact our everyday…
Franz Boas is remembered today as one of the most important figures in the history of anthropology. In the United States, he is widely created with creating the…
Greg Marchildon interviews historian and ethnographer Jennifer Brown on her two most recent books. The first, Ojibwe Stories from the Upper Berens River: A Irving Hallowell and Adam Bigmouth…
The city of Tel Aviv presents itself as a bastion of liberal values, tolerance, and ultimately of freedom. But like many self-definitions, there is something of a gap…
How do metrics and quantification shape social science? In The Quantified Scholar: How Research Evaluations Transformed the British Social Sciences (Columbia UP, 2022), Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, an Associate Professor in sociology at the University…
Latinx Studies has long been overdue for a revamp – a different orientation to the questions with which we concern ourselves. Critical Dialogues in Latinx Studies: A Reader (New York…
Stories, Senses and the Charismatic Relation: A Reflexive Ethnography of Christian Experience (Routledge, 2020) offers a uniquely intimate and auto-ethnographic exploration of Christian experience, rendering a deep, phenomenological account…
Throughout his career, the internationally renowned Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot unsettled key concepts in anthropology, history, postcolonial studies, Black studies, Caribbean studies, and beyond. From his early critique…
Decolonisation has lost its way. Originally a struggle to escape the West’s direct political and economic control, it has become a catch-all idea, often for performing ‘morality’ or…
A Sephardi Sea: Jewish Memories Across the Modern Mediterranean (Indiana UP, 2022) tells the story of Jews from the southern shore of the Mediterranean who, between the late 1940s…
Based on fieldwork among state officials, NGOs, politicians, and activists in Costa Rica and Brazil, A Future History of Water (Duke UP, 2019) traces the unspectacular work necessary to make…