#BookReview: Being a parent in the field
Ethnographic fieldwork resembles a dance on the wire between distance and closeness, seesawing between participant immersion and analytical retreat that turns the anthropologist into a tool of data…
Tag: book reviews
#Bookreview: Dying to Eat
Dying to Eat: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Food, Death, and the Afterlife (2018), edited by Candi K. Cann, is an interdisciplinary study that cuts across various approaches, including the…
Wanted: Book Reviews
By Alissa Whitmore, Book Reviews Editor Ah, summer. There are few things better than relaxing with a good book in the park, on the beach, or inside under…
#BookReview: Me, Not You
In Me, Not You, Alison Phipps uses the #MeToo Movement as a backdrop to her work to illustrate how privileged white women using mainstream feminism as a conduit,…
#BookReview: Being a Parent in the Field
In 2017, my colleague Philipp Zehmisch and I had to cancel a panel on love and family relationships in ethnographic fieldwork, due to a lack of participants. Fabienne…
Thesis Review and Discussion: The Metamorphosis of Greek Cuisine
Kapari Deli in Athens city centre, Greece Photographs by Nafsika Papacharalampous If you have written a recent thesis in the Anthropology of Food or would like to review…
#BookReview: Terraformed
Terraformed by Joy White aims at making sense and contextualising the vulnerability and inequality experienced by the Afrodiasporic population of the UK. The author describes her effort as…
#Review: Whose Life Is Worth More?
During the Second World War, the British government, with the invaluable assistance of Alan Turing, deciphered Enigma (the Nazi code war machine) and thus gained access to key…
#Review: The Kiss of Death
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to ravage many places in the world, it is hard to imagine a book that is more timely or prescient than Andrea Kitta’s…
#Review: Suicidal
In “Suicidal – why we kill ourselves” Jesse Bering asks what drives some of us to die by a self-directed fatal act. According to him, “there are no…
#BookReview: Just Transitions
November 2018. A wave of nearly 300,000 women and men in yellow vests floods France. A protest without leaders or spokespersons, rises from the poorest regions affected by…
Review: Seafood: Ocean to the Plate
Shingo Hamada and Richard Wilk, Seafood: Ocean to the Plate, Routledge Series for Creative Teaching and Learning in Anthropology, Routledge. 2019. Pp. 138. ISBN: 9781138191877 (paperback). Dav…
#Book Review: Animal Intimacies
The creative disentanglement of human-animal relationships in Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas by Radhika Govindrajan is an important addition to the multispeci…
Review: Our Daily Bread
Our Daily Bread: A Meditation on the Cultural and Symbolic Significance of Bread Throughout History Predrag Matvejević. Translated from the Croatian by Christina Pribichevich-Zorić. 2020. London…
Review: The Labor of Lunch
Gaddis, Jennifer E. (2019). The Labor of Lunch: Why We Need Real Food and Real Jobs in American Public Schools. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. ISBN #…
Thesis Review: Ethical Constellations of Muslim Food Practice in Mumbai
Photograph: coming soon I’m delighted to post this exciting PhD thesis review, which nicely complements the recently posted review of the book Food, Faith and Gender in South-east…
Review: Food Festivals
Food Festivals and Local Development in Italy: A Viewpoint from Economic Anthropology. Michele Filippo Fontefrancesco. London: Palgrave MacMillan. ISBN #978-3-030-53321-2. Xli + 179 pp Dav…
#Book Symposium: Tasting Qualities
How does one reproduce the taste, smell and appearance of any craft based/ industrially produced food commodity? Tea is one of the many beverages with roots in colonialism.…
#BookSymposium: Tasting Qualities
Sarah Besky’s ethnographically and historically rich study of the Indian tea industry begins with a deceptively simple question: what makes a good cup of tea? The answer, it…
#BookSymposium: Tasting Qualities
As I write this, in the uncertain and tumultuous times of early June 2020, there is a storm brewing in the world of British tea drinkers. On June…
Introducing Cultural Anthropology: A Christian Perspective Textbook Review
Christian but not ideological? Doesn’t promote perspectives in controversy but centers theological devotion? Biblical differences of opinion, but not anthropological ones? The centrality of “belief” a…
#Book Symposium: Landscapes of Power
The cover of Dana Powell’s book, Landscapes of Power, taken from a painting by Diné teacher and muralist James B. Joe titled Bleeding Sky, is our first glimpse…
#Book Symposium: Landscapes of Power
In her monograph Landscapes of Power, Powell takes the proposed – at the time of her initial fieldwork – development project of the coal plant Desert Rock on…
#Book Symposium: Landscapes of Power
In Landscapes of Power, Dana Powell maps a failure: the proposed Desert Rock power plant which never came into being beyond paper thin promises made via PowerPoint presentations.…