Let us face it: most anthropologists in Europe and North America, this author included, are leftist-liberal, cosmopolitan people. It regularly escapes my colleagues’ and my comprehension, how people…
When Vladimir Nalivkin, a Russian officer who had served in several military campaigns, and his wife, Maria Nalivkina, took up farming in 1878 in the village of Nanay…
I was excited to dig into the book by the sociologist Kenneth A. Kolb. Why? I was keen to read something analytically powerful, critical and innovative about domestic…
Fashion is deeply expressive of social and individual identities, and thus, changes in fashion trends reveal much about changes in culture. This contention is a familiar one within…
Masculinities Under Neoliberalism (2016), edited by Andrea Cornwall, Frank G. Karioris and Nancy Lindisfarne is the successor of the groundbreaking work ‘Dislocating Masculinity’ (1994). Twenty years …
Within the past several years, prenatal testing has significantly advanced, developing numerous methods of non-invasive prenatal testing such as examining fetal cell-free DNA in maternal blood. These …
Following up on Felix Girke’s review of Rogers Brubaker’s book #trans, this #reviews week is dedicated to more new publications that explore #gender at the intersection of a…
As Allegra’s reviews editor, I am not only dealing with awesome new publications every week, but also get to think and talk a lot with authors and editors…
Politics, law and global agendas all actively shape the kinship bonds that are formed and sometimes dissolved in marriage. To study marriage― what it is across cultures, how…
In early 2015, I followed the case of Rachel Dolezal, the Spokane woman who attempted to pass as black. She went to considerable length to affirm her blackness…
Nayanika Mathur’s Paper Tiger. Law, Bureaucracy and the Developmental State in Himalayan India is an ethnography of the everyday life of law and bureaucracy. It reveals the complexity of…
After a well deserved break during the holiday season, Allegra is back and full of energy for yet another exciting year! We have lots of wonderful stuff –…
Today we continue our revisitation of 2016 via a review that has – sadly – only grown more topical since it was first published in October 2016: ‘The Borderlands…
Underlying the domain of human rights is the conception of the human on which we predicate, and advocate for, human rights’ recognition. But what are we actually lobbying…
When the picture of Alan Kurdi’s drowned body first hit the headlines, it was instantly iconic. For many, the simple horror of the image suddenly made the refugee…
While Western political leaders overtly inflame followers by ascribing innate difference to Others, the lucidity and coherence of Marshall Sahlins’ 2013 monograph What Kinship Is – And Is…
The tile of the book itself informs its readers that it is an interrogation of women as class ‘subjects.’ Although studies of class are not new in Sociology,…
While gender remains a mostly female domain of inquiry, our list of recent publications features not only male authors, but also discusses contemporary masculinities. In What Makes a…
As stated on its back cover, in this book the influential French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) investigates the state’s ‘extraordinary power of producing a socially ordered world without…
On 22 March 2016, the Belgian city of Brussels suffered three calculated and co-ordinated terrorist attacks in the name of the so-called Islamic State. As with the Paris…
To what degree can our biological, genetic and reproductive systems be considered the basis for family relationships? Marshall Sahlins divides his answer to this question into two sections…
The second book by Gardner and Lewis, Anthropology and Development: Challenges for the Twenty-First Century, is both an update and a rewrite of their 1996 publication, Anthropology, Development…
The Color of Modernity. São Paulo and the Making of Race and Nation in Brazil is an ambitious effort to rethink the formation of a regional identity and perceptions…
During my recent fieldwork in Myanmar, I fell in love with books allover again. Myanmar is a country where everyone reads all the time, and with pleasure. The…