‘Harvard’s Quixotic Pursuit of a New Science’ by Patrick L. Schmidt
Editor’s note: This newest addition to HAR Reviews pairs a review essay with a brief author Q&A. Our reviewer, Karen Field, drafted the essay first and then brought…
Tag: Reviews
Call for reviewers: Books on mobilities and migration!
The past decade has been increasingly marked by the movement of bodies across political borders. Whether fleeing violence or working within new labor regimes, diasporic communities have sought…
The right to dignity: Housing struggles, city-making, and citizenship in urban Chile
How do poor people in the burgeoning cities of the Global South assert their right to housing and to the city? How do they constitute themselves, and demand…
A New Precipice in Time: Maria Beatrice Di Brizio’s History of Tylorian Anthropology
Maria Beatrice Di Brizio Histoire du concept de couvade: Edward B. Tylor et l’ethnologie victorienne Histoire des sciences humaines (series) L’Harmattan, 2021 636 pages …
Invidious Comparison
Graham M. Jones Magic’s Reason: An Anthropology of Analogy University of Chicago Press, 2017 240 pp., 25 halftones, notes, bibl., index Editor’s note: This essay was origin…
Crooked Cats
This book is a rich cultural analysis of how people live with big cats in India in times of the Anthropocene and climate change. As people are increasingly…
Nicky Falkof’s ‘Worrier State’ – Part 1
Falkof’s book discusses the everyday experiences of fear and moral anxiety in the city of Johannesburg in post-apartheid state South Africa. Drawing on narrative accounts from political protests,…
Nicky Falkof’s ‘Worrier State’ – Part 2
Falkof, Nicky (2022): Worrier State. Risk, anxiety and moral panic in South Africa. Manchester: Manchester University Press. South Africa 2022 is a troubled nation: a continuing energy crisis…
Minoritarian Liberalism: A Travesti Life in a Brazilian Favela
While a graduate student in social anthropology, Moisés Lino e Silva’s curiosity about the scarcity of freedom and lack of liberty in Brazilian favelas led him to Rocinha,…
Seeking PhD theses for review!
Herbalist weighing spices. Photo: Katharina Graf Katharina Graf The Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition is seeking recent PhD theses in the anthropology of food and…
They eat our sweat
In They Eat Our Sweat, Daniel Agbiboa engages the road transport sector in Lagos, Nigeria, to reveal how corruption operates through a dialectical “double capture” of state and…
Towards a History of Philosophical Anthropology: A Review of Carroll (2018)
Jerome CarrollAnthropology’s Interrogation of Philosophy from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth CenturyLexington Books, 2018256 pp., references, index Anthropology and philosophy are today well-e…
‘Self in the World’ by Keith Hart
Keith Hart. Self in the World: Connecting Life’s Extremes. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2022. 314 pp., appendix, bibliography, index. Editor’s note: This response to Keith Hart’s new book was…
‘A Social History of Anthropology in the United States’ (revised and updated ) by Thomas C. Patterson
Thomas C. Patterson. A Social History of Anthropology in the United States. 2nd ed. Routledge, 2021. 240 pp., bibl., index. Twenty years after its first release, Thomas Patterson,…
Film Reviews: El Cacao and No Place to Grow
Emilia Noel PtakThe University of Vermont The films El Cacao and No Place to Grow, directed by Michelle Aguilar, invite viewers to consider food as a nexus, where…
Counterinsurgency in Istanbul
“Police, Provocation, Politics” by Deniz Yonucu is an ambitious text that documents the long and complicated history of dissident populations and spaces in urban Turkey in the context…
Worlds of Care
Worlds of Care: The Emotional Lives of Fathers Caring for Children with Disabilities by Aaron J. Jackson is a self-described “meditation on fathers’ everyday lived experiences surrounding care…
REVIEW: The intimate life of dissent
The Intimate Life of Dissent examines practices of refusal and resistance through the friendships, kinships and solidarities which withstand and obstruct them. The authors of this edited volume…
Making the Scientific Social, and the Social Scientific: A Review of Durba Mitra’s “Indian Sex Life”
Durba Mitra. Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020. 302 pp., 15 b/w illus., n…
‘Lévi-Strauss: A Biography’ by Emmanuelle Loyer
Emmanuelle Loyer. Lévi-Strauss: A Biography. Translated by Ninon Vinsonneau and Jonathan Magidoff. New York: Polity Press, 2018. xi+744 pp., illus., notes, list of works, archives, index. There…
REVIEW: Essays on A. L. Kroeber (1876–1960) and the Unnaming of Kroeber Hall
Editors’ note: The following review by Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt, the accomplished historian of anthropology and folklore, reflects on a collection of essays recently published about the 2020 decision b…
Review: The Automat
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, photograph by Bernard Gotfryd, Bernard Gotfryd photograph collection. David Beriss The Automat, directed by Lisa Hurwitz. 2021, 1hr 18 min…
The 21st-century flaneur as a suspect?
Smith commits a crime is a tale of an everyday man trying to find his way – not in life, but – in space. This space looks essentially…
‘Saving the Nation through Culture’ by Jie Gao
Jie Gao. Saving the Nation through Culture: The Folklore Movement in Republican China. Contemporary Chinese Studies. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2019. 364 pp., 20 b/w photos,…