Material Vernaculars Series Launches with Jon Kay’s Folk Art and Aging
This fall I will be talking a lot about the new book series that the Indiana University Press and the Mathers Museum of World Cultures are jointly publishing.…
Tag: books
Top of the Heap: Zoë H. Wool by Hannah Gibson
For this installment of the Top of the Heap series, I spoke with Zoë H. Wool, who is a medical anthropologist and assistant professor at Rice University in…
Cultivating the Nile: An Interview with Jessica Barnes
Cultivating the Nile: The Everyday Politics of Water in Egypt By Jessica Barnes 248pp. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. § Colin Hoag (UC Santa Cruz and Aarhus University)…
Tobias Rees’s Plastic Reason: An Anthropology of Brain Science in Embryogenetic Terms by Nima Bassiri
Plastic Reason: An Anthropology of Brain Science in Embryogenetic Terms by Tobias Rees University of California Press, 2016, 352 pages In the prefatory pages of Plastic Reason,…
Susan Reynolds Whyte’s Second Chances: Surviving AIDS in Uganda by Jason Johnson Peretz
Second Chances: Surviving AIDS in Uganda Susan Reynolds Whyte, editor Contributions by Godfrey Etyang, Phoebe Kajubi, David Kyaddondo, Lotte Meinert, Hanne Mogensen, Jenipher Twebaze, Michael A. Whyte …
Sarah Richardson’s Sex Itself: The Search for Male and Female in the Human Genome by Paula Martin
Sex Itself: The Search for Male and Female in the Human Genome Sarah Richardson University of Chicago Press, 2013, 320 pages In Sex Itself: The Search for…
Mara Buchbinder’s “All In Your Head: Making Sense of Pediatric Pain” by Joanna Kempner
All In Your Head: Making Sense of Pediatric Pain by Mara Buchbinder University of California Press, 2015, 256 pages Pain has a famously intangible quality. To paraphrase…
Island Story: Journeys Through Unfamiliar Britain, JD Taylor
Just started JD Taylor’s book, bought in Waterstones sociology section yesterday. Brilliant. I mean, the placing of this book in that shelving – shame its four floors up…
Book Forum––Sabine Arnaud’s On Hysteria by Todd Meyers
Sabine Arnaud’s On Hysteria: The Invention of a Medical Category Between 1670 and 1820 focuses on the socio-medical category before its better-known (and more heavily studied) late ninet…
Joanna Kempner’s Not Tonight: Migraine and the Politics of Gender and Health by Christine Labuski
Not Tonight: Migraine and the Politics of Gender and Health Joanna Kempner University of Chicago Press, 2014, 232 pages In her thoroughly engaging new book, Not Tonight: Migraine…
Open Access Book: Indiana Folk Arts
This year is a big year for the Mathers Museum of World Cultures in a number of respects. Two of these weave together. Its the state bicentennial for…
Looking forward to a week of #Reviews
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…
Thom van Dooren’s Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the End of Extinction by Eva Giraud
Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the End of Extinction by Thom van Dooren Columbia University Press, 2014. 208 pages. Flight Ways begins with a question: at what moment should…
Sadeq Rahimi’s Meaning, Madness and Political Subjectivity: A Study of Schizophrenia in Turkey by Ayşecan Terzioğlu
Meaning, Madness and Political Subjectivity: A Study of Schizophrenia in Turkey By Sadeq Rahimi Routledge, 2015, 248 pages This book is issued by “The International Society for Psychological…
Book Forum–Jeanne Favret-Saada’s The Anti-Witch by Eugene Raikhel
In The Anti-Witch, Jeanne Favret-Saada revisits fieldwork she first described in her classic Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage in a more reflective mode and conceptually ambitious…
Robert Michael Brain’s “The Pulse of Modernism: Physiological Aesthetics in Fin-de-Siècle Europe” by Ashley Bowen-Murphy
The Pulse of Modernism: Physiological Aesthetics in Fin-de-Siècle Europe by Robert M. Brain University of Washington Press, 2016, 384 pages Given the growing divide between STEM and the arts…
How did we get here? A review of Yasmin Gunaratnam’s “Death and the Migrant: Bodies, Borders and Care” by Branwyn Poleykett
Death and the Migrant: Bodies, Borders and Care by Yasmin Gunaratnam Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013, 208 pages David Tasma, a Polish Jew and survivor of the Warsaw ghetto,…
Theories of Material Culture: Three Highlights
I am now concluding my graduate course Theories of Material Culture. I have taught this course several times previously and I always enjoy it. This year, the students…
Michele Friedner’s “Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India” by Cassandra Hartblay
Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India by Michele Friedner Rutgers University Press, 2015, 216 pages An Indian coffee shop franchise advertises their practice of hiring deaf baristas –…
Book Forum––Carlo Caduff’s The Pandemic Perhaps by Todd Meyers
Carlo Caduff’s The Pandemic Perhaps: Dramatic Events in a Public Culture of Danger (University of California Press, 2015) is a story of the influenza pandemic that never…
John Foot’s The Man Who Closed the Asylums: Franco Basaglia and the Revolution in Mental Health Care by Nirmala Jayaraman
The Man Who Closed The Asylums: Franco Basaglia and the Revolution in Mental Health Care by John Foot Verso Press, 2015, 404 pages Embracing change is the best…
When Risk, Doubt, and Difference Converge: A Review Essay by Elizabeth Lewis
On Immunity: An Inoculation By Eula Biss Graywolf Press, 2014, 205 pp. The End of Normal: Identity in a Biocultural Era By Lennard J. Davis University of Michigan…
Bad Marxism
Filed under: books
La ligne d’écume: Encountering the French beach
new book from pavement with chapters by Ffrench, Collier, Launchbury, Gledhill, Fuggle etc.,… \ Edited by Sophie Fuggle and Nicholas Gledhill As a trope, theme, myth and very…