New Books in Peoples & Places – Page 10 – The Anthropology Newspaper

Jon Mooallem, “Wild Ones” (Pengiun, 2013)

Jon Mooallem‘s book Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals In America (Penguin, 2013) is a tour of a few…

Post date 19th March 2014
Post author By Jason Schwartz

Marc L. Moskowitz, “Go Nation: Chinese Masculinities and the Game of Weiqi in China” (University of California Press, 2013)

In contemporary China, the game of Weiqi (also known as Go) represents many things at the same time: the military power of the general, the intellect and control…

Post date 2nd March 2014
Post author By Carla Nappi

Thomas H. Guthrie, “Recognizing Heritage: the Politics of Multiculturalism in New Mexico” (University of Nebraska Press, 2013)

New Mexico is a cultural borderland, marked by the interaction of Indian, Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo-American peoples over the past four hundred years. The question of how to…

Post date 20th February 2014
Post author By Brice Bongiovanni

Afsar Mohammad, “The Festival of Pirs: Popular Islam and Shared Devotion in South India” (Oxford University Press, 2013

Several studies about Islam in Asian contexts highlight the pluralistic environment that Muslims inhabit and interplay of various religious traditions that color local practice and thought. In The…

Post date 18th February 2014
Post author By Kristian Petersen

Eduardo Kohn, “How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human” (University of California Press, 2013)

When you open Eduardo Kohn‘s How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human (University of California Press, 2013), you are entering a forest of dreams: the dreams…

Post date 9th February 2014
Post author By Carla Nappi

David N. Livingstone, “Adam’s Ancestors: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Human Origins” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2011)

A report to the General Assembly of Scottish Presbyterians of 1923 contains the following passage: “God placed the people of this world in families, and history which is…

Post date 30th January 2014
Post author By Todd Weir

Erica Cusi Wortham, “Indigenous Media in Mexico: Culture, Community, and the State” (Duke University Press, 2013)

Videography is a powerful tool for recording and representing aspects of human society and culture, and anthropologists have long used – and debated the use of – video…

Post date 14th January 2014
Post author By Brice Bongiovanni

Michael J. Hathaway, “Environmental Winds: Making the Global in Southwest China” (University of California Press, 2013)

Globalization is locally specific: global connectivity looks different from place to place. Given that, how are global connections made? And why do they happen so differently in different…

Post date 28th December 2013
Post author By Carla Nappi

Jennie Burnet, “Genocide Lives in Us: Women, Memory and Silence in Rwanda” (University of Wisconsin Press, 2012)

In our fast-paced world, it is easy to move from one crisis to another. Conflicts loom in rapid succession, problems demand solutions (or at least analysis) and impending…

Post date 27th December 2013
Post author By Marshall Poe

David Novak, “Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation” (Duke UP, 2013)

Thinking about “Noise” in the history and practice of music means thinking in opposites. Noise is both a musical genre, and is not. It both produces a global…

Post date 3rd December 2013
Post author By Marshall Poe

Kim TallBear, “Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science” (University of Minnesota Press, 2013)

Is genetic testing a new national obsession? From reality TV shows to the wild proliferation of home testing kits, there’s ample evidence it might just be. And among…

Post date 23rd November 2013
Post author By Marshall Poe

Sienna R. Craig, “Healing Elements: Efficacy and the Social Ecologies of Tibetan Medicine” (University of California Press, 2012)

Two main questions frame Sienna R. Craig‘s beautifully written and carefully argued new book about Tibetan medical practices and cultures: How is efficacy determined, and what is at…

Post date 3rd November 2013
Post author By Carla Nappi

Rachel Prentice, “Bodies in Formation: An Ethnography of Anatomy and Surgery Education” (Duke UP, 2013)

Rachel Prentice‘s new book blends methodological approaches from science studies and anthropology to produce a riveting account of anatomical and surgical education in twenty-first century North… Visit New…

Post date 28th August 2013
Post author By Carla Nappi

Christine Yano, “Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty’s Trek across the Pacific” (Duke UP, 2013)

This cat has a complicated history. In addition to filling stationery stores across the globe with cute objects festooned with little whiskers and bowties, Hello Kitty has inspired…

Post date 28th August 2013
Post author By Carla Nappi

John Osburg, “Anxious Wealth: Money and Morality Among China’s New Rich” (Stanford UP, 2013)

John Osburg‘s new book explores the rise of elite networks of newly-rich entrepreneurs, managers of state enterprises, and government officials in Chengdu. Based on extensive fieldwork that incl……

Post date 9th August 2013
Post author By Carla Nappi

Alisha Rankin, “Panaceia’s Daughters: Noblewomen as Healers in Early Modern Germany” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

Dorothea was a widow who treated Martin Luther, the Duke of Saxony, and throngs of poor peasants with her medicinal waters. Anna was the powerful wife of the…

Post date 18th July 2013
Post author By Carla Nappi

Martha C. Howell, “Commerce Before Capitalism in Europe, 1300-1600″ (Cambridge UP, 2010)

When I was an undergraduate, I was taught that merchants in early modern Western Europe were “proto-capitalists.” I was never quite sure what that meant. If it meant…

Post date 17th July 2013
Post author By Marshall Poe

Barbara R. Ambros, “Bones of Contention: Animals and Religion in Contemporary Japan” (University of Hawai’i Press, 2012)

It opens with a parakeet named Homer, and it closes with a dog named Hachiko. In the intervening pages, Barbara Ambros explores the deaths, afterlives, and necrogeographies of…

Post date 30th January 2013
Post author By Marshall Poe

Michael David Kaulana Ing, “The Dysfunction of Ritual in Early Confucianism” (Oxford University Press, 2012)

How did the authors of the one of the most important Confucian ritual texts in early China recognize, explain, and cope with mistakes and dysfunction in ritual? The…

Post date 3rd December 2012
Post author By Marshall Poe

Karen Ruffle, “Gender, Sainthood, and Everyday Practice in South Asian Shi’ism” (University of North Carolina Press, 2011)

What does a wedding in Karbala in the year 680 have to do with South Asian Muslims today? As it turns out, this event informs contemporary ideas of…

Post date 10th October 2012
Post author By Kristian Petersen

Giusi Tamburello, “Concepts and Categories of Emotion in East Asia” (Carocci editore, 2012)

What is the relationship between language and the emotions? Where ought we look for evidence of emotion in historical and literary texts? Is it possible to talk about…

Post date 4th October 2012
Post author By Marshall Poe

Sandra Chait, “Seeking Salaam: Ethiopians, Eritreans and Somalis in the Pacific Northwest” (University of Washington Press, 2011)

In the Pacific Northwest, immigrants from Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia coexist, making a life for themselves and their family in a new country. In the book Seeking Salaam…

Post date 18th September 2012
Post author By Marshall Poe

Franck Salameh, “Language, Memory, and Identity in the Middle East: The Case for Lebanon” (Lexington Books, 2010)

Franck Salameh achieves his goal of revealing “another” version of the Middle East with his book. Language, Memory, and Identity in the Middle East: The Case for Lebanon…

Post date 27th July 2012
Post author By Astrid Willis Countee

Merry White, “Coffee Life in Japan” (University of California Press, 2012)

Merry (Corky) White‘s new book Coffee Life in Japan (University of California Press, 2012) opens with a memory of stripping naked and being painted blue in an underground…

Post date 15th June 2012
Post author By Marshall Poe