New Books in World Affairs

Secularism is an increasingly hot topic in public, political, and religious debate across the globe. It is embodied in the conflict between secular republics—from the US to India—and the challenges they face from resurgent religious identity politics; in the challenges faced by religious states like those of the Arab world from insurgent secularists; and in states like China where calls for freedom of belief are challenging a state-imposed non-religious worldview. In Secularism: Politics, Religion, and Freedom (Oxford University Press, 2017), Andrew Copson tells the story of secularism, taking in momentous episodes in world history, such as the great transition of Europe from religious orthodoxy to pluralism, the global struggle for human rights and democracy, and the origins of modernity. Andrew Copson is Chief Executive of Humanists UK (formerly the British Humanist Association). He became Chief Executive in 2010 after five years coordinating Humanists UKs education and public affairs work. He is also President of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU). His writing on humanist and secularist issues has appeared in The Guardian, The Independent, The Times, and New Statesman as well as in various journals. Copson has represented Humanists UK and the humanist movement extensively in national news including on BBC, ITV, Channel 4, and Sky, as well as on programs such as Newsnight, The Daily Politics, the Today programme, Sunday Morning Live, and The Big Questions. Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Universite Laval in Quebec City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

It seemed that everyone wanted Bosnia in the late nineteenth century: Serbian and Croatian nationalists; Ottoman, Habsburg, Muslim and Yugoslav movements. At the same time, they all felt frustration with the Bosnian peasants for not living up to their nationalist and political imaginations. In Whose Bosnia? National and Political Imagination in the Balkans (Cornell University Press, 2015),Edin Hajdarpasic makes a number of arguments about how we understand nationalism and political movements in contested spaces. By exploring how these different movements defined Bosnia and Bosnians, crafted narratives of suffering and engaged youth, he argues that nationalism was a productive, open-ended force even in the face of seeming failures to achieve the nationalists’ goals. Hajdarpasic discusses these themes, as well as “nation-compulsion” which he defined as “a set of political and moral imperatives that one grapples with as part of becoming and maintaining oneself as a proper patriot.” Edin Hajdarpasic is Associate Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago, where he teaches courses in Western Civilization; the modern Balkans; nineteenth-century Europe; and the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Beer has been a part of human civilization dating back to its beginnings. In summarizing the role it has played over the millennia, Johan Swinnen and Devin Briski’s book Beeronomics: How Beer Explains the World (Oxford University Press, 2017) reveals how the evolving roles the beverage has played exposes broader trends in the economy and society. As Briski explains in this podcast, while beer has been consumed since at least as early as Sumerian times, it wasn’t until the addition of hops as a preservative by brewers in Europe during the Middle Ages that beer became commercially viable. The development of the industry reflected more general trends, from the economies of scale that took place during the Industrial Revolution to the impact of television on small brewers in the United States in the mid-20th century. Today the industry is characterized both by a few multinational conglomerates and numerous craft brewers whose products provide a diverse counterpoint from the mass-produced lagers of the large companies. Briski reveals how these products reflect the different trends of consumption throughout the world, from the increased focus upon quality consumption in the United States and western Europe to the rapid expansion of beer consumption in places like Russia, China, and Brazil. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Ricardo D. Salvatore‘s new book, Disciplinary Conquest: U.S. Scholars in South America, 1900-1945 (Duke University Press, 2016) offers an alternative narrative on the origins of Latin American Studies in the United States. Salvatore claims that during the first half of the twentieth century scholars defined the contours of Latin American studies. Scholars did so both in the context of the ‘dollar diplomacy’ and the ‘good neighbor’ policy towards the region. Salvatore argues that, in contrast to the military interventions in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, the approach toward South America was defined by scholarly “disciplinary interventions.” Salvatore follows the life and work of five field-defining scholars who approached the South-American “terra incognita” from the vantage point of the hegemonic hemispheric power. An archaeologist (Hiram Bingham), a historian (Clarence Haring), a political scientist (Leo S. Rowe), a sociologist (Edward A. Ross), and a geographer (Isaiah Bowman), defined spaces of inquiry that were transnational in scope and scale. Salvatore argues that the creation of transnational fields of inquiry intended to render the region “visible” to audiences in the United States. The definition of new disciplinary spaces such as “South-American studies” contrasted with the then-prevalent domestic narratives focused on “national” topics. These new transnational spaces, Salvatore claims, were the product of the “imperiality” of the knowledge produced by the five scholars studied in Disciplinary Conquest. Nonetheless, the narrative proposed by the author defies a simplistic depiction of Haring, Rowe, Bingham, Ross, and Bowman as mere pawns of empire. Salvatore shows how some of them produced works that grappled with “anti-American” sentiment in the region while others tried to create alternatives to official policy designs. Moreover, Salvatore shows how these men approached South America as progressive intellectuals interested in democratic governance, social justice, and progress in the region. Salvatore notes how these concerns led to envisioning two different South Americas. One South America, positively appraised by these scholars, was made up of the “ABC powers” (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and by extension, Uruguay). The ABC countries showed promise, from the scholars point of view, regarding democratic development and social equality. Scholars construed another, less-promising from the U.S. perspective, South America by placing focus on the Andean region. Salvatore thus shows how these early iterations of Latin American studies resulted in the creation of various scholarly-defined, and externally-imposed, transnational fields of inquiry. Alvaro Caso Bello is a Ph.D. Candidate at Johns Hopkins University. He can be reached at acasobe1@jhu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

The government of the Philippines has for decades encouraged its citizens to seek work abroad and send money back to the country in remittances. But in recent years it has increasingly sought to entice Filipinos who have settled abroad to come home, not only for tourism but also for retirement. In Migrant Returns: Manila, Development, and Transnational Connectivity (Duke University Press, 2017), Eric J. Pido travels with Filipino Americans as they try to reimagine their lives and lifestyles in the gated communities and malls of Manila, and beyond. Along the way he encounters real estate agents, bureaucrats, investors and family members of returnees, or balikbayan, all in one way or another participating in attempts at selling an idea of home, one that for balikbayan from the US in particular evokes feelings both of homecoming and of a homeliness that they associate with their years spent on the other side of the Pacific. Eric J. Pido joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to talk about histories of departing from and returning to the Philippines, segregated suburbs and walled megacities, the balikbayan economy, returning migrants’ anxieties and hopes, medical tourism, and 1950s nostalgia. You may also be interested in: Megha Amrith, Caring for Strangers: Filipino Medical Workers in Asia Ulla Berg, Mobile Selves: Race, Migration, and Belonging in Peru and the US Nick Cheesman is a fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University. He can be reached at nick.cheesman@anu.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, there has been a widespread affirmation of economic ideologies that conceive the market as an autonomous sphere of human practice. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, this idea has been countered by calls for reforms of financial markets and for the consideration of moral values in economic practice. Religion and the Morality of the Market: Anthropological Perspectives (Cambridge University Press, 2017) intervenes in these debates by showing how neoliberal market practices engender new forms of religiosity, and how religiosity shapes economic actions. Daromir Rudnyckyj, one of the volumes editors, is Associate Professor of anthropology at the University of Victoria. Hillary Kaell co-hosts NBIR and is Associate Professor of Religion at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Ryan Enos is the author of The Space Between Us: Social Geography and Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Enos is associate professor of government at Harvard University. Scholars have long wrestled with the impact of segregation on politics. The difficulty of connecting the causal dots between various forms of segregation and political outcomes has frustrated the solid social science conclusions desired by researchers. Does racial animus follow or lead segregation? Do residential patterns reflect or perpetuate bias? It has been hard to know. Enos’ new book applies cutting-edge experiments to this difficult task. Through laboratory and field experiments, he is able to test difficult questions about the impact of social geography on group interactions. From Boston to Arizona to Israel, The Space Between Us shows how distance and proximity have effects on perceptions of others and difference. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

In The Unchosen: The Lives of Israel’s New Others (University of Chicago/Pluto Press, 2017), Mya Guarnieri-Jaradat offers her readers an intimate, often devastatingly gloomy portrait of the lives of Southeast Asian migrant workers and African asylum seekers in Israel. She depicts an image of a reality of poverty, harassment, and abuse that often goes largely unseen. Based on a decade’s worth of experience in the field, The Unchosen sheds light on Israel’s often brutal treatment of these marginalized and frequently silenced peoples, providing them with a space where their voices can be heard. Mya Guarnieri Jaradat is a journalist and writer who spent nearly a decade covering Israel and the occupied Palestinian Territories. Her work has been published in a number of literary and media outlets, including the Nation, Al Jazeera English, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, Narrative, Kenyon Review, and Boston Review. Yaacov Yadgar is the Stanley Lewis Professor of Israel Studies at the University of Oxford. His most recent book is Sovereign Jews: Israel, Zionism and Judaism (SUNY Press, 2017). You can read more of Yadgar’s work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

In 2017 half of the world’s wealth belongs to the top 1% of the population. In his new book, The Great Leveler Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press, 2017), Walter Scheidel explores economic inequality and sets forth the provocative thesis that only violence and catastrophes have truly reduced it throughout history. Scheidel delves in what he labels as the “Four Horsemen” of leveling—mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic plagues—and how they have persisted in history and proved the most efficient ways in reducing what seems to be an inevitable trend in human history. Walter Scheidel teaches at Stanford University. The interview is part of a series produced by the Crisis, Extremes, and Apocalypse Research Network and the New Books Network. Audrey Borowski is a historian of ideas and a doctoral researcher at the University of Oxford. She is also the founder and lead convener of the ‘Crisis, extremes and Apocalypse’ Research Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

In Narratives from the Sephardic Atlantic: Blood and Faith (Indiana University Press, 2016), Ronnie Perelis, Chief Rabbi Dr. Isaac Abraham and Jelena (Rachel) Alcalay Chair and Associate Professor of Sephardic Studies at the Bernard Revel Graduate School of Jewish Studies of Yeshiva University, looks at three autobiographical texts by New World crypto-Jews. Perelis presents the fascinating stories of three men who were caught within the matrix of inquisitorial persecution, expanding global trade, and the network of crypto-Jewish activity. There is no other book quite like this sensitive, fascinating and penetrating look at identity, family and community. Max Kaiser is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at kaiser@student.unimelb.edu.au Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs