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…
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…