New Books in Anthropology

In Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums (Harvard University Press, 2022 for paperback edition), Samuel J. Redman, Associate Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, uncovers the equally fascinating and disturbing history behind the vast collections of human remains assembled by medical and natural history museums since the mid-nineteenth-century across the United States. The book shows how, in the aftermaths of the Civil War, human remains, and especially those of Indigenous people, were seen as valuable specimens for the advancement of medicine, before turning into crucial pieces of evidence for scientific racism, and eventually serving as material for the study and exhibition of human prehistory.Bone Rooms charts the trouble waters of the birth and evolution of bone rooms and offers a most timely historical account, as debates around the restitution of human remains and cultural artifacts held in museums have been gaining momentum in the recent years. Behind this important past lies the profound question of how to ensure that the quest for scientific knowledge does not, even if inadvertently, erase the humanity or cultural value of what have been seen as specimens only. As Redman advocates, “Museums can serve as key spaces to attempt to come to terms with the colonial legacy attached to archaeology and anthropology, through partially redressing past wrongs while continuing the search for new knowledge.”Victor Monnin, Ph.D. is an historian of science specialized in the history of Earth sciences. He is also teaching French language and literature to undergraduates. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Why do we feel the need to belong, and what happens when we don’t? This episode explores: What it takes to belong. Why it physically hurts to be excluded. How perspective-gathering can help create more inclusion. A Discussion of the book Belonging: The Science of Creating Connection and Bridging Divides. Today’s book is: Belonging: The Science of Creating Connection and Bridging Divides, by Dr. Geoffrey Cohen, which explores how we became so alienated from one another, the physical and emotional costs of exclusion, and what we can do to create belonging even in polarized times. Dr. Cohen applies his and others’ groundbreaking research to offer solutions for improving daily life at work, in school, in our homes, and in our communities. We all feel a deep need to belong, but most of us don’t fully appreciate that need in others. Small acts of connection such as reflecting on our core values, and a suite of practices that Cohen defines as “situation-crafting,” can lessen polarization, improve performance in school and work, and unleash the potential in ourselves and in our relationships.Our guest is: Professor Geoffrey Cohen, whose research examines processes that shape people's sense of belonging and self and implications for social problems. He studies the big and small threats to belonging and self-integrity that people encounter in school, work, and health care settings, and strategies to create more inclusive spaces for people from all walks of life. He believes that the development of psychological theory is facilitated not only by descriptive and observational research but by theory-driven intervention. He has long been inspired by Kurt Lewin's quip, "The best way to try to understand something is to try to change it."Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender.Listeners to this episode may also be interested in: Brady, S. T., Cohen, G. L., Jarvis, S. N., & Walton, G. M. (2020). A brief social-belonging intervention in college improves adult outcomes for black Americans. Science Advances, 6(18), eaay3689. Connor, Alice. How To Human: An Incomplete Manual for Living in a Mess-up World. Frank Martela, A Wonderful Life: Insights on Finding a Meaningful Existence. Milam, L. A., Cohen, G. L., Mueller, C., & Salles, A. (2019). Stereotype threat and working memory among surgical residents (vol 216, pg 824, 2018). American Journal of Surgery, 218(3), 668. Welcome to The Academic Life! On the Academic Life channel we embrace a broad definition of what it means to lead an academic life. We view education as a transformative human endeavor and are inspired by today’s knowledge-producers working inside and outside the academy. Find us on Twitter: @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

David Newheiser is a senior research fellow in the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry at Australian Catholic University. He is the author of Hope in a Secular Age: Deconstruction, Negative Theology, and the Future of Faith.The Varieties of Atheism: Connecting Religion and Its Critics (U Chicago Press, 2022) reveals the diverse nonreligious experiences obscured by the combative intellectualism of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens. In fact, contributors contend that narrowly defining atheism as the belief that there is no god misunderstands religious and nonreligious persons altogether. The essays show that, just as religion exceeds doctrine, atheism also encompasses every dimension of human life: from imagination and feeling to community and ethics. Contributors offer new, expansive perspectives on atheism’s diverse history and possible futures. By recovering lines of affinity and tension between particular atheists and particular religious traditions, this book paves the way for fruitful conversation between religious and non-religious people in our secular age. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

For decades, scholars have been calling into question the universality of disciplinary objects and categories. The coherence of defined autonomous categories—such as religion, science, and art—has collapsed under the weight of postmodern critiques, calling into question the possibility of progress and even the value of knowledge. Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm aims to radicalize and move beyond these deconstructive projects to offer a path forward for the humanities and social sciences using a new model for theory he calls metamodernism.Metamodernism: The Future of Theory (U Chicago Press, 2021) works through the postmodern critiques and uncovers the mechanisms that produce and maintain concepts and social categories. In so doing, Storm provides a new, radical account of society’s ever-changing nature—what he calls a “Process Social Ontology”—and its materialization in temporary zones of stability or “social kinds.” Storm then formulates a fresh approach to philosophy of language by looking beyond the typical theorizing that focuses solely on human language production, showing us instead how our own sign-making is actually on a continuum with animal and plant communication.Storm also considers fundamental issues of the relationship between knowledge and value, promoting a turn toward humble, emancipatory knowledge that recognizes the existence of multiple modes of the real. Metamodernism is a revolutionary manifesto for research in the human sciences that offers a new way through postmodern skepticism to envision a more inclusive future of theory in which new forms of both progress and knowledge can be realized. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

This book addresses the recent transformations of popular Hinduism by focusing upon the religious cum artistic practice of Ramkatha, staged narratives of the Ramcharitmanas.Focusing on the sensory and media experiences, the author examines the aesthetics and dynamics of the Ramkatha ethnoscape through participant-observation in everyday practices, and how it particularly, translates politics from the realm of religion. Besides being socially constructed, the Ramkatha heavily relies on technologies for its production and continuation. Negotiated through a telling of Hindu religious stories, the mediated voice of Morari Bapu, a former school-teacher turned narrator, is a major medium of performance transposed into multiple media such as theatre, stage, music and spectacle. The book engages with voice as a vehicle of meaning to scrutinize its discursive production, imagination and re-production across mobile contexts. It investigates how the transnationally disseminated practices re-contextualize religious subjectivities of an affective community enmeshed in spatio-sensorial modes.Mrinal Pande's Popular Hinduism, Stories and Mobile Performances: The Voice of Morari Bapu in Multiple Media (Routledge, 2022) will be of interest to academic audiences in the fields of South Asian Studies, Anthropology, Sociology, as well as Performance Studies and Religious Studies.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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

In 2014, the island of Ahamb in Vanuatu became the scene of a startling Christian revival movement led by thirty children with ‘spiritual vision.’ However, it ended dramatically when two men believed to be sorcerers and responsible for much of the society’s problems were hung by persons fearing for the island’s future security. Based on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork on Ahamb between 2010 and 2017, Tom Bratrud's book Fire on the Island: Fear, Hope and a Christian Revival in Vanuatu (Berghahn Books, 2022) investigates how upheavals like the Ahamb revival can emerge to address and sometimes resolve social problems but also carry risks of exacerbating the same problems they arise to address.Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on ‘Anthropology of Religion’ at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Migration is typically seen as a transnational phenomenon, but it happens within borders, too. Oaxaca in Motion: An Ethnography of Internal, Transnational, and Return Migration (U Texas Press, 2022), documents a revealing irony in the latter sort: internal migration often is global in character, motivated by foreign affairs and international economic integration, and it is no less transformative than its cross-border analog.Iván Sandoval-Cervantes spent nearly two years observing and interviewing migrants from the rural Oaxacan town of Santa Ana Zegache. Many women from the area travel to Mexico City to work as domestics, and men are encouraged to join the Mexican military to fight the US-instigated “war on drugs" or else leave their fields to labor in industries serving global supply chains. Placing these moves in their historical and cultural context, Sandoval-Cervantes discovers that migrants' experiences dramatically alter their conceptions of gender, upsetting their traditional notions of masculinity and femininity. And some migrants bring their revised views with them when they return home, influencing their families and community of origin. Comparing Oaxacans moving within Mexico to those living along the US West Coast, Sandoval-Cervantes clearly demonstrates the multiplicity of answers to the question, “Who is a migrant?"Iván Sandoval-Cervantes is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. You can find him on Twitter @IvanAntropologoAlize Arıcan is a Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Scholar at Boston University, focusing on urban anthropology, futurity, care, and migration. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, JOTSA, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Suspect Others: Spirit Mediums, Self-Knowledge, and Race in Multiethnic Suriname (U Toronto Press, 2021) explores how ideas of self-knowledge and identity arise from a unique set of rituals in Suriname, a postcolonial Caribbean nation rife with racial and religious suspicion. Amid competition for belonging, political power, and control over natural resources, Surinamese Ndyuka Maroons and Hindus look to spirit mediums to understand the causes of their successes and sufferings and to know the hidden minds of relatives and rivals alike. But although mediumship promises knowledge of others, interactions between mediums and their devotees also fundamentally challenge what devotees know about themselves, thereby turning interpersonal suspicion into doubts about the self.Through a rich ethnographic comparison of the different ways in which Ndyuka and Hindu spirit mediums and their devotees navigate suspicion, Suspect Others shows how present-day Caribbean peoples come to experience selves that defy concepts of personhood inflicted by the colonial past. Stuart Earle Strange investigates key questions about the nature of self-knowledge, religious revelation, and racial discourse in a hyper-diverse society. At a moment when exclusionary suspicions dominate global politics, Suspect Others elucidates self-identity as a social process that emerges from the paradoxical ways in which people must look to others to know themselves. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

The episode features Anca Parvulescu and Manuela Boatca, co-authors of an extraordinary, field-shifting new book – Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania across Empires (Cornell University Press, 2022). Dr. Boatca is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Freiburg in Germany, where she teaches and publishes widely on world-systems analysis, decolonial perspectives on global inequalities, gender and citizenship in modernity/coloniality, and the geopolitics of knowledge in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Dr. Parvulescu joins us from St. Louis where she teaches at the Washington University’s English Department. A prolific author, she has worked in the fields of literary theory and criticism, visual culture, female labor and migration, and the East-West relations in contemporary European history. The result of their sustained collaboration, Creolizing the Modern develops a comparative, multidisciplinary method for engaging with areas of the world that have inherited multiple, conflicting imperial and anti-imperial histories. Transylvania, one such historical region at the intersection of the Habsburg Empire, the Ottoman Empire, Austria-Hungary, and Russia, has offered Boatca and Parvulescu a platform for a multi-level reading of topics that include the region's capitalist integration into global commercial circuits, antisemitism and slavery, multilingualism, gender relations, and religion. Using Liviu Rebreanu’s 1920 modernist novel Ion as an analytical point of departure and a chronicle of Transylvania’s modernities, the co-authors provide innovative decolonial perspectives that aim to creolize modernity and the modern world-system.Vladislav Lilic is a doctoral candidate in Modern European History at Vanderbilt University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Without the State: Self-Organization and Political Activism in Ukraine (U Toronto Press, 2022) explores the 2013-14 Euromaidan protests - a wave of demonstrations and civil unrest in Ukraine - through in-depth ethnographic research with leftist, feminist, and student activists in Kyiv. The book discusses the concept of self-organization and the notion that if something needs to be done and a person has the competence to do it, then they should simply do it.Emily Channell-Justice reveals how self-organization in Ukraine came out of leftist practices but actors from across the spectrum of political views also adopted self-organization over the course of Euromaidan, including far-right groups. The widespread adoption of self-organization encouraged Ukrainians to rethink their expectations of the relationship between citizens and their state. The book explains how self-organized practices have changed people's views on what they think they can contribute to their own communities, and in the wake of Russia's renewed invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it has also motivated new networks of mutual aid within Ukraine and beyond. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, including the author's first-hand experience of the entirety of the Euromaidan protests, Without the State provides a unique analytical account of this crucial moment in Ukraine's post-Soviet history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology