Another Kind of Concrete
Another Kind of Concrete by Koushik Banerjea Started reading: I’ve been editing other people’s writing for a living for years, but the best writer with whom I’ve had…
Tag: books
Book Review: Preventing Dementia? Critical Perspectives on a New Paradigm of Preparing for Old Age by Barbara Pieta
Preventing Dementia? Critical Perspectives on a New Paradigm of Preparing for Old Age Edited by Annette Leibing and Silke Schicktanz Berghahn Books, 2020. 268 pages In their recently…
Another Kind of Concrete – Koushik Banerjea
being ill is my excuse for catching up with novels, but I interrupt the stream of hackery to give a progress report on this as its the best…
Ten Treasures (and a Bonus): A Selection of Anthropological Gems You Might Have Missed from the Past Few Years
I began interviewing authors of fabulous new anthropology books for this space back in 2016. While completing 11 interviews, I also amassed a backlog of more terrific books…
Cleaver: concluding thoughts
Cleaver leaves with a final bit about education in his conclusion that also seems sensible (if still US-o-centric) : ‘We have many potential allies among our schoolmates or…
Soapbox: on slips and trips.
In the business of selling cultures for quids, and other random translations Once upon a long ago, there was a time when I was more rebelliously young, and…
Pantomime Terror and Global South Asia on Screen
Cheap paperback stocking stuffers… – though I wonder if 1 left in stock contradicts that whole value-scarcity thing. Pretty sure there is more than one.
Two Robinsons, one more to come…
Robinsonades: pertaining to allegories from the East India Company in Ceylon and other islands, from Marxism to Post-structuralism, and in which, dear reader, a 300-year-old adventure book may…
‘The Inaugural John Berger Memorial Lecture’ – by Professor Nikos Papastergiadis, Uni of Melbourne
18 November 7pm Melbourne (3pm Ho Chi Minh City) Live streaming link: https://www.facebook.com/events/759576902107439/ or https://twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1RDxlgjRmLgJL Nikos Papaster…
Understated, not overlooked by Anthony Stavrianakis
A Simpler Life: Synthetic Biological Experiments Talia Dan-Cohen Cornell University Press, 2021. 174 pages. First, take a self-consciously self-aggrandizing area of bioengineering,…
Bad Marxism: Capitalism and Cultural Studies
a book from 2004 – people didn’t get the title that much, but Derrida, Bataille (the best bit is on Bataille – reclaimed for the left). From books4you.…
Introduction to Book Forum on Clara Han’s Seeing Like a Child: Inheriting the Korean War by Andrew Brandel
Clara Han’s Seeing Like a Child: Inheriting the Korean War (Fordham University Press, 2021) describes war’s dispersal into everyday life, intimacy and the domestic. Departing from genres of…
Book Forum: Reflections on Dána-Ain Davis’s Reproductive Injustice: Racism, Pregnancy, and Premature Birth by Sameena Mulla
Dána-Ain Davis’s Reproductive Injustice: Racism, Pregnancy, and Premature Birth (NYU Press, 2019) is a vividly written ethnography highlighting how medical racism shapes birth outcomes for Black …
Anthony Stavrianakis’s Leaving: A Narrative of Assisted Suicide by Ari Gandsman
Leaving: A Narrative of Assisted Suicide Anthony Stavrianakis University of California Press, 2000. 248 pages. Everyone discovers an academic doppelgänger at some point. We invest ti…
Book Forum: Therapeutic Politics of Care in Asia by Nicholas Bartlett
The six review essays in this collection emerge from a joint launch of five books and one dissertation/ book-in-progress and a panel at the recent annual meeting of…
Alexandra Brewis and Amber Wutich’s Lazy, Crazy, and Disgusting: Stigma and the Undoing of Global Health by Delaney Glass
Lazy, Crazy, and Disgusting: Stigma and the Undoing of Global Health Alexandra Brewis and Amber Wutich Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. 288 pages. Background Dr. Alexandra Br…
Pacific Anthropology Book Series on JSTOR Books
JSTOR books is an incredible resource. However, finding your way around can be a bit tricky. Here is a guide to book series which feature Pacific anthropology which…
Abou Farman’s On Not Dying: Secular Immortality in the Age of Technoscience by Purbasha Mazumdar
On Not Dying: Secular Immortality in the Age of Technoscience Abou Farman University of Minnesota Press, 2020. 360 pages. Max More, a trained philosopher and the present Ambassador and…
Class – and critique – in Bad Marxism, poking fun.
I was looking something up and stumbled upon a quote of me that I did not recognise – that class ‘does not make much sense’. I am pretty…
Book Forum: Reflections on Li Zhang’s Anxious China by Priscilla Song
This book forum brings together eight anthropologists to discuss Li Zhang’s Anxious China: Inner Revolution and Politics of Psychotherapy (University of California Press 2020). Zhang examine…
Spivak – citizen as agent
If you joined the Handbrick of Marxism book-launch with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak last evening you will have seen her talk on citizens as agents, global Marx, supplementing vanguardism…
Book forum: Julie Livington’s Self-Devouring Growth by Todd Meyers
This book forum brings together seven scholars to discuss Julie Livingston’s Self-Devouring Growth: A Planetary Parable as Told from Southern Africa (Duke 2019), a story of what grows alongside “…
Thandeka Cochrane takes the page 99 test
In the middle of the page a line jumps out: “Nthanu telling, therefore, encapsulates a moral performance”. Lying at the centre of page 99 this line also lies…
Nobody is normal: “The line between healthy and not healthy is drawn more by culture than by nature”
Who is crazy? Who is normal? Describing somebody as “not normal” has serious implications for this person, can destroy her life. From an anthropological perspective, there is nothing…