New Books in Anthropology

Latest Episodes:

Lurgio Gavilán Sánchez, "When Rains Became Floods: A Child Soldier’s Story" (Duke UP, 2015) Feb 16, 2023

Show notes

When Rains Became Floods: A Child Soldier’s Story(Duke UP, 2015) is the gripping autobiography of Lurgio Gavilán Sánchez, who as a child soldier fought for both the Peruvian guerrilla insurgency Shining Path and the Peruvian military. After escaping the conflict, he became a Franciscan priest and is now an anthropologist. Gavilán Sánchez's words mark otherwise forgotten acts of brutality and kindness, moments of misery and despair as well as solidarity and love.

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Emily Hund, "The Influencer Industry: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media" (Princeton UP, 2023) Feb 15, 2023

Show notes

Before there were Instagram likes, Twitter hashtags, or TikTok trends, there were bloggers who seemed to have the passion and authenticity that traditional media lacked. The Influencer Industry: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media(Princeton UP, 2023) tells the story of how early digital creators scrambling for work amid the Great Recession gave rise to the multibillion-dollar industry that has fundamentally reshaped culture, the flow of information, and the way we relate to ourselves and each other.

Drawing on dozens of in-depth interviews with leading social media influencers, brand executives, marketers, talent managers, trend forecasters, and others, Emily Hund shows how early industry participants focused on creating and monetizing digital personal brands as a means of exerting control over their professional destinies in a time of acute economic uncertainty. Over time, their activities coalesced into an industry whose impact has reached far beyond the dreams of its progenitors--and beyond their control. Hund illustrates how the methods they developed for creating, monetizing, and marketing social media content have permeated our lives and untangles the unforeseen cultural and economic costs.

The Influencer Industry reveals how, in an increasingly fractured and profit-driven communications environment, the people we think of as "real" are merely those who have learned to exploit the industry's ever-shifting constructions of authenticity.

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Sarah Kunz, "Expatriate: Following a Migration Category" (Manchester UP, 2023) Feb 15, 2023

Show notes

Who are expatriates? How do they differ from other migrants? And why should we care about such distinctions? Expatriate: Following a Migration Category(Manchester University Press, 2023) by Dr. Sarah Kunz interrogates the contested category of 'the expatriate' to explore its history and politics, its making and lived experience. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research, the book offers a critical reading of International Human Resource Management literature, explores the work and history of the Expatriate Archive Centre in The Hague, and studies the usage and significance of the category in Kenyan history and present-day 'expat Nairobi'. Doing so, the book traces the figure of the expatriate from the mid-twentieth-century era of decolonisation to today's heated debates about migration.

The expatriate emerges as a malleable and contested category, of shifting meaning and changing membership, and as passionately embraced by some as it is rejected by others. Dr. Kunz situates the changing usage of the term in the context of social, political and economic struggle and explores the material and discursive work the expatriate performs in negotiating social inequalities and power relations. Migration, the book argues, is a key terrain on which colonial power relations have been reproduced and translated, and migration categories are at the heart of the insidious ways that intersecting material and symbolic inequalities are enacted today. Any project for social justice needs to dissect and interrogate categories like the expatriate, and this book offers analytical and methodical strategies to advance this project.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Lee D. Baker, "From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954" (U California Press, 1998) Feb 13, 2023

Show notes

On today’s podcast we are celebrating the 25th anniversary of the publication of Dr. Lee D. Baker’s book From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954 (University of California Press, 1998). From Savage to Negro examines the relationship between the discipline of anthropology and the construction of racial categories used for African Americans in the United States. He analyzes how “ideas about racial inferiority were supplanted by notions of racial equality in law, science, and public opinion” (2). Dr. Baker and I had a conversation about his intellectual foundations, how he came to write the book, his work doing public anthropology by appearing in documentaries, Zora Neale Hurston, and more.

Lee D. Baker is the Mrs. A. Hehmeyer Professor of Cultural Anthropology, African & African-American Studies, and Sociology at Duke University. He is the author of From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954 (University of California Press, 1998) and Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture (Duke University Press, 2010). He edited Life in America: Identity and Everyday Experience (Blackwell, 2004).

Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).

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Piro Rexhepi, "White Enclosures: Racial Capitalism and Coloniality Along the Balkan Route" (Duke UP, 2022) Feb 12, 2023

Show notes

In White Enclosures: Racial Capitalism and Coloniality Along the Balkan Route (Duke UP, 2022), Piro Rexhepi explores the overlapping postsocialist and postcolonial border regimes in the Balkans that are designed to protect whiteness and exclude Muslim, Roma, and migrant communities. Rather than focusing on present crises to the exclusion of the histories that have gotten us to this point, Rexhepi takes a wide lens to understand how different mechanisms and regimes of exclusion are historically intertwined. This book makes a bold and important intervention against 'colorblindness' and white assimilation in the region, pushing us instead to disturb hierarchies of power by forging solidarities with those who are most excluded and marginalized by the Euro-American colonial project.

Piro Rexhepi is a researcher based in London. He received his PhD in Politics from the University of Strathclyde. His new review essay, co-authored with Harun Buljina and Dženita Karić, is "Feel-good Orientalism and the Question of Dignity," is available to read on The Maydan. You can follow him on Twitter @pirorexhepi.

Dino Kadich is a PhD candidate in Geography at the University of Cambridge. You can follow him on Twitter @dinokadich.

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Shailaja Paik, "The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity in Modern India" (Stanford UP, 2022) Feb 12, 2023

Show notes

Shailaja Paik's book The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity in Modern India (Stanford UP, 2022) is an important reflection on the question of Dalit women and their sexuality question. Through the performance of Tamasha, Paik has relooked into the lifeworld of Dalit women and has argued about what the performance of Tamasha means in Dalit women’s everydayness rather than conventionally understanding it through a moral lens of good vs bad. The framework of ‘manuski’ and ‘assli’ reflects upon the Dalit women quest to transgress ascribed identities and it reinforces Dalit performance as a weapon for the weak. The work is a watershed as it re-centers Dalit woman’s experiences in the sex-gender-caste complex, rather than looking at them as passive recipients of male-centered Dalit assertion.

Shailaja Paik is an Associate Professor at the University of Cincinnati. She is Taft's Distinguished Professor of History and Affiliate Faculty in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Asian Studies. Her research lies at the intersection of fields concerning Modern South Asia, Dalit Studies, Women’s Studies, and oral History to mention a few.

Kalyani Kalyani is a sociologist and currently teaches at School of Arts and Sciences in Azim Premji University at Bengaluru.

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Jessica Barnes, "Staple Security: Bread and Wheat in Egypt" (Duke UP, 2022) Feb 10, 2023

Show notes

Egyptians often say that bread is life; most eat this staple multiple times a day, many relying on the cheap bread subsidized by the government. In Staple Security: Bread and Wheat in Egypt (Duke UP, 2022), Jessica Barnes explores the process of sourcing domestic and foreign wheat for the production of bread and its consumption across urban and rural settings. She traces the anxiety that pervades Egyptian society surrounding the possibility that the nation could run out of wheat or that people might not have enough good bread to eat, and the daily efforts to ensure that this does not happen. With rich ethnographic detail, she takes us into the worlds of cultivating wheat, trading grain, and baking, buying, and eating bread. Linking global flows of grain and a national bread subsidy program with everyday household practices, Barnes theorizes the nexus between food and security, drawing attention to staples and the lengths to which people go to secure their consistent availability and quality.

Jessica Barnes is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and the School of Earth, Ocean, and Environment at the University of South Carolina. She is author of Cultivating the Nile: The Everyday Politics of Water in Egypt, also published by Duke University Press, and coeditor of Climate Cultures: Anthropological Perspectives on Climate Change.

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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A New Hope? Japanese Retirement Migration to Malaysia Feb 09, 2023

Show notes

In post-growth Japan, some people are looking to Southeast Asia, especially Malaysia, as a source of new hope. A notable change in the recent pattern of global migration is the movement of people within Asia. Previous studies on Asian migration have mostly considered the movement of people from Asia to Europe and North America. Yet in recent years, countries in Asia have emerged as major receiving sites of intra-regional migration.

Joining Dr Natali Pearson on SSEAC Stories, Dr Shiori Shakuto takes a closer look at Japanese retirement migration to Malaysia, revealing some of the motivations for inter-Asian migration, and what that might tell us about their hopes and dreams for a different kind of life.

About Shiori Shakuto:

Shiori Shakuto is a Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney. Her feminist research bridges household economies with transnationalism, with a particular focus on the movement of people and (domestic) things between Japan and Malaysia. Her recent projects have focused on the rise of Japanese migration to Malaysia in the aftermath of various disasters – at the scales of personal, national and environmental. Shiori’s research shows how transnational movement destabilises heteronormative lifecourse, and how gendered household practices in turn shape and reshape the existing hegemonic geopolitical relations. She is the co-editor of the Special Issue, “Gender, Migration and Digital Communication in Asia” (2022).

For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac.

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Mary Ann Hinsdale and Stephen Okey, "T&T Clark Handbook of Theological Anthropology" (T&T Clark, 2020) Feb 09, 2023

Show notes

The T&T Clark Handbook of Theological Anthropology(T&T Clark, 2020) is a ground-breaking volume that gathers together the voices of veteran theologians and some of the most promising emerging scholars publishing in the field of theological anthropology today. The contributing essays outline the various approaches (classical, modern, postmodern) that Christian theologians have taken to present and interpret the doctrines of creation, the human person as imago dei, sin, grace, and the final destiny of humans and other creatures. In presenting theological anthropology, the editors have striven for ecumenical balance (Protestant, Roman Catholic and Orthodox), inclusion of previously neglected voices (women, African American, Asian, Latino/a and LGBTQ), revisiting authors from the “Great Tradition” (early church, medieval, modern); as well those with theological perspectives that are critical and liberationist (feminist, theological, decolonial, intersectional, critical race theory, queer performance theory, etc).

Your host, Ryan Shelton (@_ryanshelton) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast.

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Leslie Bow, "Racist Love: Asian Abstraction and the Pleasures of Fantasy" (Duke UP, 2022) Feb 08, 2023

Show notes

In Racist Love: Asian Abstraction and the Pleasures of Fantasy(Duke UP, 2022), Leslie Bow traces the ways in which Asian Americans become objects of anxiety and desire. Conceptualizing these feelings as “racist love,” she explores how race is abstracted and then projected onto Asianized objects. Bow shows how anthropomorphic objects and images such as cartoon animals in children’s books, home décor and cute tchotchkes, contemporary visual art, and artificially intelligent robots function as repositories of seemingly positive feelings and attachment to Asianness.

At the same time, Bow demonstrates that these Asianized proxies reveal how fetishistic attraction and pleasure serve as a source of anti-Asian bias and violence. By outlining how attraction to popular representations of Asianness cloaks racial resentment and fears of globalization, Bow provides a new means of understanding the ambivalence surrounding Asians in the United States while offering a theory of the psychological, affective, and symbolic dynamics of racist love in contemporary America.

Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing.

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