New Books in Anthropology

Latest Episodes:

Dimitris Xygalatas, "Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living" (Little, Brown Spark, 2022) Apr 10, 2023

Show notes

Ritual is one of the oldest, and certainly most enigmatic, threads in the history of human culture. It presents a profound paradox: people ascribe the utmost importance to their rituals, but few can explain why they are so important. Apparently pointless ceremonies pervade every documented society, from handshakes to hexes, hazings to parades. Before we ever learned to farm, we were gathering in giant stone temples to perform elaborate rites and ceremonies. And yet, though rituals exist in every culture and can persist nearly unchanged for centuries, their logic has remained a mystery—until now.

In Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living (Little, Brown Spark, 2022), pathfinding scientist Dimitris Xygalatas leads us on an enlightening tour through this shadowy realm of human behavior. Armed with cutting-edge technology and drawing on discoveries from a wide range of disciplines, he presents a powerful new perspective on our place in the world. In birthday parties and coronations, in silent prayer, in fire-walks and terrifying rites of passage, in all the bewildering variety of human life, Ritual reveals the deep and subtle mechanisms that bind us together.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il. She's on Twitter @embracingwisdom. She blogs here.

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Jennifer Lynn Kelly, "Invited to Witness: Solidarity Tourism Across Occupied Palestine" (Duke UP, 2023) Apr 09, 2023

Show notes

In Invited to Witness: Solidarity Tourism Across Occupied Palestine(Duke UP, 2023), Jennifer Lynn Kelly explores the significance of contemporary solidarity tourism across Occupied Palestine. Examining the relationships among race, colonialism, and movement-building in spaces where tourism and military occupation operate in tandem, Kelly argues that solidarity tourism in Palestine functions as both political strategy and emergent industry. She draws from fieldwork on solidarity tours in Palestine/Israel and interviews with guides, organizers, community members, and tourists, asking what happens when tourism is marketed as activism and when anticolonial work functions through tourism. Palestinian organizers, she demonstrates, have refashioned the conventions of tourism by extending invitations to tourists to witness Palestinian resistance and the effects of Israeli state practice on Palestinian land and lives. In so doing, Kelly shows how Palestinian guides and organizers wrest from Israeli control the capacity to invite and the permission to narrate both their oppression and their liberation.

Fulya Pinar is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Center for Middle East Studies at Brown University. Her work focuses on alternative solidarities, displacement, and refugee care in Turkey and the Middle East.

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Gwen Burnyeat, "The Face of Peace: Government Pedagogy Amid Disinformation in Colombia" (U Chicago Press, 2022) Apr 09, 2023

Show notes

Colombia’s 2016 peace agreement with the FARC guerrillas sought to end fifty years of war and won President Juan Manuel Santos the Nobel Peace Prize. Yet Colombian society rejected it in a polarizing referendum, amid an emotive disinformation campaign. Gwen Burnyeat joined the Office of the High Commissioner for Peace, the government institution responsible for peace negotiations, to observe and participate in an innovative “peace pedagogy” strategy to explain the agreement to Colombian society. Burnyeat’s multi-scale ethnography reveals the challenges government officials experienced communicating with skeptical audiences and translating the peace process for public opinion. She argues that the fatal flaw in the peace process lay in government-society relations, enmeshed in culturally liberal logics and shaped by the politics of international donors. The Face of Peace: Government Pedagogy Amid Disinformation in Colombia(U Chicago Press, 2022) offers the Colombian case as a mirror to the global crisis of liberalism, shattering the fantasy of rationality that haunts liberal responses to “post-truth” politics.

Alex Diamond is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Texas, Austin.

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Frenchy Lunning, "Cosplay: The Fictional Mode of Existence" (U Minnesota Press, 2022) Apr 04, 2023

Show notes

Cosplay, a portmanteau of “costume” and “play,” emerged from geeky Japanese subcultures to become a popular hobby, and even profession, around the world. Frenchy Lunning dives into the reasons why people cosplay through interviews, pictures, and her own firsthand experience of cosplay events in America and Japan. She distills the essence of cosplay to performance and the negotiation of identity, a pair of concepts that she interrogates in part by contrasting cosplay practices in America and Japan.

Cosplay: The Fictional Mode of Existence (U Minnesota Press, 2022) is livened with extensive photographs and fascinating tidbits about key figures in cosplay, such as Mari Kotani. Cosplayers are allowed to speak for themselves, describing what cosplay means to them and how they use it to negotiate their social roles and identities in fascinating detail. Lunning layers individuals’ testimony on a history of cosplay that highlights the changing settings, technologies, and communities supporting cosplay over the decades to leave readers debating what role cosplay will play in the construction of future identities.

Frenchy Lunning is Professor Emeritus of Liberal Arts at Minneapolis College of Art and Design and has written two books: Subcultural Fashion: Fetish Style (2013), and Cosplay: The Fictional Mode of Existence (2022). She is working on a third book, Revolutionary Girl: Shōjo. The director of the US- and Japan-based academic conferences Mechademia Conference on Asian Popular Cultures, she is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the new biannual Mechademia: Second Arc journal.

Amanda Kennell is an Assistant Teaching Professor of International Studies at North Carolina State University. Her book, Alice in Japanese Wonderlands: Translation, Adaptation, Mediation, is forthcoming in July 2023 from the University of Hawai’i Press. It examines the contemporary media environment through Japanese adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland novels.

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Brian Villmoare, "The Evolution of Everything: The Patterns and Causes of Big History" (Cambridge UP, 2023) Apr 03, 2023

Show notes

Big History seeks to retell the human story in light of scientific advances by such methods as radiocarbon dating and genetic analysis. Brian Villmoare's book The Evolution of Everything: The Patterns and Causes of Big History (Cambridge UP, 2023) provides a deep, causal view of the forces that have shaped the universe, the earth, and humanity. Starting with the Big Bang and the formation of the earth, it traces the evolutionary history of the world, focusing on humanity's origins. It also explores the many natural forces shaping humanity, especially the evolution of the brain and behaviour. Moving through time, the causes of such important transformations as agriculture, complex societies, the industrial revolution, the enlightenment, and modernity are placed in the context of underlying changes in demography, learning, and social organization. Humans are biological creatures, operating with instincts evolved millions of years ago, but in the context of a rapidly changing world, and as we try to adapt to new circumstances, we must regularly reckon with our deep past.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

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Alexa Hagerty, "Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains" (Crown, 2023) Apr 02, 2023

Show notes

In Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains(Crown, 2023), anthropologist Alexa Hagerty learns to see the dead body with a forensic eye. She examines bones for marks of torture and fatal wounds—hands bound by rope, machete cuts—and also for signs of identity: how life shapes us down to the bone. A weaver is recognized from the tiny bones of the toes, molded by kneeling before a loom; a girl is identified alongside her pet dog. In the tenderness of understanding these bones, forensics not only offers proof of mass atrocity but also tells the story of each life lost.

Working with forensic teams at mass grave sites and in labs, Hagerty discovers how bones bear witness to crimes against humanity and how exhumation can bring families meaning after unimaginable loss. She also comes to see how cutting-edge science can act as ritual—a way of caring for the dead with symbolic force that can repair societies torn apart by violence.

Weaving together powerful stories about investigative breakthroughs, histories of violence and resistance, and her own forensic coming-of-age, Hagerty crafts a moving portrait of the living and the dead.

Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University.

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Eli Elinoff, "Citizen Designs: City-Making and Democracy in Northeastern Thailand" (U Hawaii Press, 2021) Apr 01, 2023

Show notes

What does it mean to design democratic cities and democratic citizens in a time of mass urbanization and volatile political transformation?

Citizen Designs: City-Making and Democracy in Northeastern Thailand (U Hawaii Press, 2021) addresses this question by exploring the ways that democratic urban planning projects intersect with emerging political aspirations among squatters living in the northeastern Thai city of Khon Kaen. Based on ethnographic and historical research conducted since 2007, Citizen Designs describes how residents of Khon Kaen’s railway squatter communities used Thailand’s experiment in participatory urban planning as a means of reimagining their citizenship, remaking their communities, and acting upon their aspirations for political equality and the good life. It also shows how the Thai state used participatory planning and design to manage both situated political claims and emerging politics.

Through ethnographic analysis of contentious collaborations between residents, urban activists, state planners, participatory architects, and city officials, Eli Elinoff’s analysis reveals how the Khon Kaen’s railway settlements became sites of contestation over political inclusion and the meaning and value of democracy as a political form in the first decades of the twenty-first century. Elinoff examines how residents embraced politics as a means of enacting their equality. This embrace inspired new debates about the meaning of good citizenship and how democracy might look and feel. The disagreements over citizenship, like those Elinoff describes in Khon Kaen, reflect the kinds of aspirations for political equality that have been fundamental to Thailand’s political transformation over the last two decades, which has seen new political actors asserting themselves at the ballot box and in the streets alongside the retrenchment of military authoritarianism. Citizen Designs offers new conceptual and empirical insights into the lived effects of Thailand’s political volatility and into the current moment of democratic ambivalence, mass urbanization, and authoritarian resurgence.

Eli Elinoff is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Anthropology at the Victoria University of Wellington. He is also the co-editor of Disastrous Times: Beyond Environmental Crisis in Urbanizing Asia and the co-founder of Commoning Ethnography which is an off-centre, annual, international, peer-engaged, open access, online journal dedicated to examining, criticizing, and redrawing the boundaries of ethnographic research, teaching, knowledge, and praxis.

Amir Sayadabdi is a Lecturer in Anthropology at Victoria University of Wellington. He is mainly interested in anthropology of food and its intersection with gender studies, migration studies, and studies of race, ethnicity, and nationalism.

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Ioannis Gaitanidis, "Spirituality and Alternativity in Contemporary Japan: Beyond Religion?" (Bloomsbury, 2022) Mar 31, 2023

Show notes

Ioannis Gaitanidis' book Spirituality and Alternativity in Contemporary Japan: Beyond Religion? (Bloomsbury, 2022) critically examines the spirituality phenomenon in contemporary Japan by looking at the main actors involved in the discourse: spiritual therapists as practitioners, scholars of spirituality studies, and the people in the publishing industry. Ioannis Gaitanidis challenges the common understanding of spirituality as simply a new emergent form of “religion” by considering alternativity as a framework to understand how it has been framed in relation to something else.

This book critically analyses the creation and effects of spirituality as both discourse and practice in Japan. It shows how the value of spirituality has been sustained by scholars who have wished for a more civic role for religion; by the publishing industry whose exponential growth in the 1980s fashioned those who later identified as the representatives of this “new spirituality culture”; by “spiritual therapists” who have sought to eke out a livelihood in an increasingly professionalized and regulated therapeutic field; and by the cruel optimism of an increasingly precarious workforce placing its hopes in the imagined alternative that the supirichuaru represents.

Ioannis Gaitanidis offers a new transdisciplinary conceptualisation of 'alternativity' that can be applied across and beyond the disciplines of religious studies, media studies, popular culture studies and the anthropology/sociology of medicine.

Raditya Nuradi is a Phd student at Kyushu University. He works on religion and popular culture, particularly anime pilgrimages. His research explores pilgrims' experiences through space and materiality.

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Laurah E. Klepinger, "Transnational Yoga at Work: Spiritual Tourism and Its Blind Spots" (Lexington Books, 2022) Mar 30, 2023

Show notes

Transnational Yoga at Work: Spiritual Tourism and Its Blind Spots (Lexington Books, 2022) is an ethnography about local wageworkers in the Indian branches of a transnational yoga institution and about yoga practitioners and spiritual tourists who visualize peace through yoga. Practitioners' aspirations for peace situate them at the heart of an international movement that has captured the imagination of cosmopolitans the world over, with its purported benefits to mind, body, and spirit. Yoga is thought to offer health, vitality, and relief from depression through control of body and breath. Yet, the vision of peace in this institution is a partial vision that obscures the important but seemingly peripheral others of its self-conception.

Through in-depth ethnographic analysis, this book explores the processes through which global spiritual movements can have peace front and center in their vision and yet condone and perpetuate cycles of injustice and social inequality that form the critical and problematic foundations of our global economy. The book privileges the experiences and hardships faced by Indian wageworkers--most of them women --but it also offers a sympathetic portrayal of international yoga practitioners and of the complex patterns of work and worship central to a global mission.

Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com.

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The Good Enough Life Mar 30, 2023

Show notes

Today’s book is: The Good-Enough Life(Princeton UP, 2022) by Avram Alpert. We live in a world oriented toward greatness, one in which we feel compelled to be among the wealthiest, most powerful, and most famous. This book explains why no one truly benefits from this competitive social order, and reveals how another way of life is possible—a good-enough life for all. Dr. Alpert shows how our obsession with greatness results in stress and anxiety, damage to our relationships, widespread political and economic inequality, and destruction of the natural world. He describes how to move beyond greatness to create a society in which everyone flourishes. By competing less with each other, each of us can find renewed meaning and purpose, have our material and emotional needs met, and begin to lead more leisurely lives. Alpert makes no false utopian promises, however. Life can never be more than good enough because there will always be accidents and tragedies beyond our control, which is why we must stop dividing the world into winners and losers and ensure that there is a fair share of decency and sufficiency to go around.

Visionary and provocative, The Good-Enough Life demonstrates how we can work together to cultivate a good-enough life for all instead of tearing ourselves apart in a race to the top of the social pyramid.

Our guest is: Dr. Avram Alpert, a writer and teacher. He is currently a research fellow at The New Institute, Hamburg. He previously taught at Princeton and Rutgers Universities. He is the author of three books, most recently The Good Enough Life. His work has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Aeon.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender.

Listeners to this episode may also be interested in:

A Partial Enlightenment: What Modern Literature and Buddhism Can Teach Us about Living Well without Perfection, by Avram Alpert
Global Origins of the Modern Self, from Montaigne to Suzuki, by Avram Alpert
How to Human: An Incomplete Manual for Living in a Mess-up World, by Alice Connor
Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving, by Celeste Headlee
Find the Good, by Heather Lende
A Wonderful Life: Insights on Finding a Meaningful Existence, by Frank Martela
Podcast on making a meaningful life
Podcast on belonging and the science of creating connection and bridging divides
Podcast on the knowledge unlocked by facing failure
Podcast on the benefits of doing less, and stressing less

Welcome to The Academic Life! Join us each week, where we learn directly from experts. We embrace the broad definition of what it means to lead an academic life, and are informed and inspired by today’s knowledge-producers working inside and outside the academy.

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