#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…
Tag: book reviews
#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.…
Call for Reviews: Black Lives Matter
The brutal murder of George Floyd on 25 May 2020 has once again revealed the terrifying fissures that cut across our societies and the hashtag Black Lives Matter…
Call for reviews: Anthropology of Death and Mourning
The global pandemic has brought death uncomfortably near for many of us. The way our governments, economists, scientists, and fellow citizens have reacted and tried to govern over…
#Reviews: Fires of Gold
As of 2019, Ghana is the country with the largest gold-mining industry in Africa, overtaking South Africa, after two South African gold mining companies shifted focus on the…
#Review: Meat Planet
If the proponents of cultured meat are to be believed we might be soon headed towards a future in which bioreactors replace, or at least exist alongside, industrial…
#Review: Genocide Never Sleeps
Genocide Never Sleeps is an in-depth analysis of the inner workings of the contested terrain of international criminal law from an anthropological perspective. Targeting a broad audience that…
#Review: Sentiment, Reason and Law
What if the police were not independent from political interests? What if various citizens and influential figures constantly intervened in officers’ decision-making, influencing the outcomes and ther…
#Review: Animal Intimacies
In her book Animal Intimacies Radhika Govindrajan takes us through a series of human-animal relations in India’s Central Himalayas, the Kumaon division in the hills of Uttarakhand. Each…
#Review: Contesting Leviathan
In Contesting Leviathan, a reference on both the mythical sea-serpent and Thomas Hobbes’ political philosophy, Les Beldo seeks to provide a multi-faceted view of the Makah whaling conflict,…
#Review: An Ecology of Knowledges
Micha Rahder’s An Ecology of Knowledges: Fear, Love, and Technoscience in Guatemalan Forest Conservation is an ethnographically rich account of the dense conservation networks and politics that operat…
#Review: Genocide Never Sleeps
Established in 1994, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), along with its predecessor, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), was, at the time of…
Review: ‘Uberland: How Algorithms are Rewriting the Rules of Work’ by Alex Rosenblat
In Uberland: How algorithms are rewriting the future of work, technology ethnographer Alex Rosenblat tackles the political realities of the Silicon Valley mythos through one of its most…
Review: ‘The Gray Zone: Sovereignty, Human Smuggling and Undercover Police Investigations in Europe’ by Gregory Feldman
Irregular migration has been one of the most popular topics of the political debates in Europe for already a few years. Issues of border policing and border control…
#Reviews: Dispossessed
Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork, Dispossessed considers the 2008 subprime crisis through the eyes of Sacramento homeowners and the daily work of bank officers tasked to…
Thesis Review: Tasting in Mundane Practices
Please note: As Associate Reviews Editor, I am soliciting reviews of recent dissertations in the Anthropology of Food. So if you have written a recent thesis or would…
What is Anthropology? A Summary Review of the Second Edition by Thomas Hylland Eriksen
I found it helpful when Eriksen drew the line in the sand about the fundamental questions that anthropology concerns itself with. Here’s his Big Three: 1) What is…
Call for reviews: Law, technology, Bureaucracy
Our new Book Review Team has expanded with the arrival of Emilie Thévenoz (Thank you Emilie for joining us!), which means we are now able to publish more…
Review: #Identity: Hashtagging Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Nation
#Identity: Hashtagging Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Nation by Abigail de Kosnik and Keith Feldman (eds) serves as an exciting reminder of the illuminating potential of academic inquiry. An edited…
Review: ‘A Socialist Peace? Explaining the Absence of War in an African Country’ by Mike McGovern
In A Socialist Peace? Mike McGovern aims to explain why there was no civil war in Guinea at a time when many expected otherwise. Narrowing down on a particular time-period…