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New Books in Anthropology

by New Books Network · English · Tech & Science

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000

New episodes: Daily
Typical length: 53 min
Latest: 13 Oct 2026
Language: English

Latest episode

13 Oct 2026 · 27 minNew

Chicana Spiritual Activism: Making Change, Making Soul with Brenda L. Sendejo (U Arizona Press, 2026)

Chicana Spiritual Activism: Making Change, Making Soul (U Arizona Press, 2026) explores the profound impact of spiritual activism within the Chicana feminist movement in Texas. It illuminates how a cohort of Texas Chicanas embraced spiritual activism in pursuit of social change during the movement and into the present day. The book draws on an array of qualitative methodologies—including interviews, autoethnography, testimonio, pláticas, and archival analysis—to develop what the author formulates as “methodologies of the spirit.” Focusing on the lived experiences, histories, and spiritual…

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Earlier episodes 29 most recent

E1518 · 10 Oct 2026 · 41 min
Green Thinking: Unlearning Outdated Ideas in Science, Economics and Politics with Natalie Bennett (Routledge, 2026)
Green Thinking: Unlearning Outdated Ideas in Science, Economics and Politics (Routledge, 2026) is about unlearning, discarding damaging, outdated ideas deeply rooted in our societies. It seeks to “compost” the views of dead white men (René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith, Norman Borlaugh) and of some not white or dead (Francis Fukuyama, Richard Dawkins, Richard Thaler), and explores the flowering of probiotic Green thinking, and the rediscovery in the 21st century of powerful indigenous and other previously repressed thinking. Natalie Bennett understands that the foundation of life is…
E1517 · 8 Oct 2026 · 1 hr 50 min
Immoral Traffic An Ethnography of Law, NGOs, and the Governance of Prostitution in India with Vibhuti Ramachandran (Cambridge UP, 2025)
Immoral Traffic: An Ethnography of Law, NGOs, and the Governance of Prostitution in India (Cambridge UP, 2025) delves into the complex intersection of India's anti-prostitution law and global anti-trafficking campaigns, and how they impact sex workers in both voluntary and involuntary situations. Immoral Traffic examines the role of legal actors and NGOs in implementing these interventions, revealing the mix of paternalism, humanitarianism, punitive care, bureaucracy, and morality in their efforts. Through a sequence of interventions prescribed by India's anti-prostitution law, the book…
E1516 · 7 Oct 2026 · 44 min
Down and Out in Utopia: Unemployment as Moral Education in Norway with Kelly McKowen (U Toronto Press, 2026)
Imagine that you have just lost your job. You wonder: “Who or what can I depend on now?” The answer, it turns out, varies significantly depending on where you live. In Norway, a small European social democracy, you would almost certainly turn to the country’s comprehensive public welfare system. With a work history, you could be eligible for two years of unemployment benefits that replace upwards of 62% of your previous salary. Meanwhile, you would not be too worried about covering other major expenses: annual out-of-pocket healthcare costs are capped at a few hundred dollars, parents…
E1515 · 7 Oct 2026 · 51 min
Valuing Nature at the Ends of the World: Natural Capital and Climate Disaster in Belize with Patrick M. Gallagher (Columbia UP, 2026)
Belize is often described as a “pristine” ecotourism destination with a landscape that is “naturally” valuable. Yet for much of the twentieth century, British Honduras—as the country was known under colonial rule—was seen as lacking value, an unprofitable backwater. Valuing Nature at the Ends of the World: Natural Capital and Climate Disaster in Belize (Columbia UP, 2026) explores how Belize’s precarious coastal environment has become a site for a new kind of capitalist value production, in which landscapes and ecosystems derive worth from their vulnerability or looming destruction in the…
E1514 · 30 Sep 2026 · 42 min
Transient Becoming: Self-Improvement and Capitalist Virtuousness in Contemporary China with Gil Hizi (NUS Press, 2026)
How do individuals seek to become better persons in contemporary China? How do they navigate the complex demands of personal growth given the fragmentation of China’s moral landscape? Gil Hizi’s careful ethnography on “soft skills” workshops in China examines the pursuit and enactment of virtue, termed “capitalist virtuousness,” through the expanding genre of self-improvement. Transient Becoming: Self-Improvement and Capitalist Virtuousness in Contemporary China (NUS Press, 2026) reveals how these workshops create heterotopian spaces that offer participants “transient optimism and virtue…
E1513 · 29 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 1 min
Smuggling Law: Unsettled Sovereignties in Turkey's Kurdish Borderlands with Fırat Bozçalı (Stanford UP, 2025)
The Kurdish-populated Wan/Van Province is a major smuggling hub between Turkey and Iran. Kurdish smugglers cross this 180-mile-long land border, transporting everyday consumer goods—fuel, tobacco, sugar, and tea—as well as more illicit goods, and the province supports the financial, technical, and labor capacities that sustain these smuggling economies. As the Turkish state has enacted increasingly punitive anti-smuggling laws, smuggling has also become a site of contentious politics. Smuggling Law: Unsettled Sovereignties in Turkey’s Kurdish Borderlands (Stanford UP, 2025) explores…
E1511 · 28 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 36 min
How Real Is Race?: Unraveling Race, Biology, and Culture with Carol C. Mukhopadhyay and Rosemary Henze (Rowman & Littlefield, 2025)
Tune in to this discussion about How Real Is Race?: Unraveling Race, Biology, and Culture by Carol C. Mukhopadhyay, Rosemary Henze, and Yolanda T. Moses (Rowman & Littlefield, 2025) Biologically speaking, there is no such thing as race. Yet this seems to contradict the experiences of people in the United States and other countries where racial classification is used daily, by individuals and institutions. Race still matters, whether in wealth accumulation, educational achievement, health, the legal system, or in personal safety. How can race not be real when we experience its effects…
E1510 · 27 Sep 2026 · 37 min
Welcome to the Journal of Autoethnography
In this episode, the editors of the Journal of Autoethnography offer an inside look at the journal, discussing its origin and revisiting notable articles that have contributed to the practice of autoethnography. The Journal of Autoethnography is published four times a year by the University of California Press. For more information about the journal, including subscription and submission information, please visit here. If you are interested in supporting the work of UC Press and its Journals Program, please consider making a charitable donation to the UC Press Foundation. To learn more about…
E1509 · 26 Sep 2026 · 53 min
Spies and Other Pigeons: Hospitality and Hostility in Multispecies Pakistan with Muhammad A. Kavesh (U Washington, 2026)
Across Pakistan's rooftops, pigeon flyers devote enormous care and labor to birds that soar the skies, take part in competitions, and knit together communities otherwise divided by caste, class, language, and ethnicity. Spies and Other Pigeons: Hospitality and Hostility in Multispecies Pakistan (U Washington, 2026) follows these flyers across four provinces, revealing a world of shauq (passionate pursuits) where training, feeding, and flying become affective acts to welcome a more-than-human other into the home. When cherished birds cross the militarized India-Pakistan border, they are…
E1512 · 26 Sep 2026 · 47 min
Water Logics: Materialist Epistemologies for the Environmental Humanities with yasser elhariry and Edwige Tamalet Talbayev (U Virginia Press, 2026)
Water Logics: Materialist Epistemologies for the Environmental Humanities (U Virginia Press, 2026) examines the epistemological adjustments that take place when we make water the source and medium for thinking about the world. Eschewing metaphorical readings of rivers, seas, and oceans, it brings together leading voices from across the social sciences and the humanities to argue rather for a distinct focus on materiality, engaging posthumanism, biotheory, and other cutting-edge theoretical approaches. From the Caribbean Sea to the Indian Ocean, this rich collection is inhabited by migrants,…
E1508 · 23 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 6 min
Ru Marshall, "American Trickster: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda" (OR Books, 2026)
A gripping exposé of deception, cult power, and the long shadow of Carlos Castaneda, the man behind the biggest literary hoax of the twentieth century. Twenty years in the making, American Trickster: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda (OR Books, 2026) unravels the story of the secretive faux-anthropologist who pulled off one of the greatest literary hoaxes in modern history. Both an investigation of the techniques employed by charismatic narcissists and a study of the cult dynamics that still shape American life, “American Trickster” defies conventional biography. It emerges as a chilling…
E1507 · 17 Sep 2026 · 41 min
Sandra Rozental, "The Absent Stone: Mexican Patrimony and the Aftershocks of State Theft" (Duke UP, 2026)
Where and to whom do ancient things belong? What happens when they are stolen—not by a colonial power, but by a national museum claiming them as state patrimony? What kinds of healing and restitution can follow? In The Absent Stone: Mexican Patrimony and the Aftershocks of State Theft (Duke UP, 2026), Dr. Sandra Rozental tells the story of the Piedra de los Tecomates, the largest stone monument in the Americas, popularly identified as the pre-Hispanic rain deity Tlaloc. In 1964, the Mexican state called in the military to forcefully relocate this 167-ton carving from the town of Coatlinchan…
E1506 · 12 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 6 min
John Charles Simon and Jennalee Donian, "Understanding Laughter and Humor: Why We Laugh, Why We Don’t, and Why It Matters" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2026)
In John Charles Simon and Jennalee Donian’s Understanding Laughter and Humor: Why We Laugh, Why We Don’t, and Why It Matters (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), the authors put forward a comprehensive new theoretical approach to understanding laughter and the humour we use to inspire it. Applying an evolutionary and biological lens to these complex and universal human behaviours, the book distinguishes itself from classical and contemporary theories by focusing not simply on laughter’s causes and effects, but on what can be gleaned from considering its communicative meaning.
E999 · 7 Sep 2026 · 36 min
Francesca Sbardella, "Inhabiting Silence: An Anthropologist in the Cloister" (Berghahn Books, 2025)
Monasteries are typically characterized by physical and symbolic limitations on access as they are usually known through written texts and accounts by nuns who live in that world but do not allow others to have access. This has often resulted in research based on indirect sources. Inhabiting Silence: An Anthropologist in the Cloister (Berghahn Books, 2025) is the result of observant participation in which the ethnographer is a protagonist social actor in two French monasteries of Discalced Carmelite nuns. Francesca Sbardella experiences and narrates details of their everyday life that…
E998 · 6 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 2 min
Janaka Jayawickrama and Jerome Wright, "Under the Gaze of Global Mental Health: A Critical Reflection" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025)
What went wrong with global mental health? Under the Gaze of Global Mental Health: A Critical Reflection (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) critically examines how the globalisation of mental health through the dominant medical model has created barriers to understanding and responding to distress with reference to cases from Malawi and Sri Lanka. Its authors argue that mental health must be understood within the overall health of an individual, and individual health is located within the social, political, cultural, economic, and environmental context in which they live. Their analyses demonstrate…
E997 · 6 Sep 2026 · 54 min
Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer et al eds., "Mapping Medical Anthropology for the Twenty-First Century" (Rutgers UP, 2026)
What does medical anthropology look like in the twenty-first century? That is the central question of Mapping Medical Anthropology for the Twenty-First Century, a new edited volume by Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer, Junko Kitanaka and Eugene Raikhel, published by Rutgers University Press in 2026. Rather than simply offering an overview of the field, the book invites us to rethink where medical anthropology has been, where it is now, and where it might be going. What makes the collaboration particularly interesting is that the editors work across different geographical and intellectual locations.…
E996 · 5 Sep 2026 · 55 min
Relative Strangers: Romani Kinship and Palestinian Difference
Examining how memory, intergenerational transmission, and kinship work together, Relative Strangers (U Toronto Press, 2024) sheds light on Romani life in Palestine. Arpan Roy presents an ethnographic portrait of Dom Romani communities living between Palestine and Jordan, zooming in on everyday life in working-class neighborhoods, and under conditions of perpetual war and instability. The book focuses on how Doms are able to sustain ethnic difference through kinship, even when public performances of difference are no longer emphasized – a kind of alterity that is neither visible by obvious…
E995 · 4 Sep 2026 · 54 min
Piergiorgio Di Giminiani, "Alterhumanism: Becoming Human on a Conservation Frontier" (U Arizona Press, 2025)
In the Anthropocene, a question has become increasingly urgent: What does it mean to be human? Set against the backdrop of southern Chile’s conservation frontier, Alterhumanism: Becoming Human on a Conservation Frontier (University of Arizona Press, 2025) invites us to recognize the centrality of the human condition in the face of an increasingly uncertain world and imagine future forms of coexistence. Reflecting on more than a decade of ethnographic fieldwork with smallholding settlers, Indigenous Mapuche farmers, environmental activists, entrepreneurs, and conservation scientists,…
E994 · 4 Sep 2026 · 52 min
Chika Watanabe, "Play to Survive: Disaster Preparedness Along the Ring of Fire" (Stanford UP, 2026)
We live in a fragile world. This much is evident as stories abound of natural disasters that wipe out communities in an instant. How can we survive the future on such a planet, amid intensifying climate change? This question is particularly poignant along the Ring of Fire, a tectonic belt in the Pacific region that routinely faces some of the most devastating disasters in the world. Based on ethnographic research spanning seven years, Play to Survive: Disaster Preparedness Along the Ring of Fire (Stanford University Press, 2026) examines the work of preparedness training in Japan and Chile,…
E993 · 3 Sep 2026 · 24 min
Sarah M. Rios, "Diseases Have No Eyes: Valley Fever and Environmental Health Justice" (Temple UP, 2026)
Diseases Have No Eyes: Valley Fever and Environmental Health Justice (Temple University Press, 2026) investigates how communities in Central Valley, California deal with Valley Fever, a painful illness caused by a soil fungus. The airborne disease’s symptoms can last from two months to a patient’s lifetime and may be fatal. Nearly a third of the national cases are reported in California, where those infected are disproportionately farmworkers and people incarcerated in the region. Poverty, pollution, and prison expose these groups to cumulative environmental and health risks that deny Valley…
E992 · 2 Sep 2026 · 38 min
Linguistic Unease in Healthcare
In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Brynn Quick chats with Dr. Nicole Marinaro, a sociolinguist and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Hamburg. Her work explores how language policies shape people's experiences of accessing healthcare and other public services. Dr. Marinaro’s research focuses on linguistic justice, examining how communication barriers affect patients who speak a language other than the majority language and how these barriers can lead to unequal access to care. Today she and Brynn discuss her 2025 paper "Operationalising linguistic unease for the…
E991 · 2 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 2 min
Elizabeth Anne Davis, "Artifactual: Forensic and Documentary Knowing" (Duke UP, 2023)
In Artifactual: Forensic and Documentary Knowing (Duke University Press, 2023), Elizabeth Anne Davis explores how Cypriot researchers, scientists, activists, and artists process and reckon with civil and state violence that led to the enduring division of the island, using forensic and documentary materials to retell and recontextualize conflicts between and within the Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot communities. Davis follows forensic archaeologists and anthropologists who attempt to locate, identify, and return to relatives the remains of Cypriots killed in those conflicts. She turns to…
E990 · 31 Aug 2026 · 46 min
Karin Barber, "Much Matter in a Penny Paper: Early Yoruba Print Culture in Lagos, 1910–1930" (Ohio UP, 2026)
Much Matter in a Penny Paper: Early Yoruba Print Culture in Lagos,1910-1930 (Ohio UP, 2026) is a survey of the history and development of Yoruba print culture in Lagos, Nigeria, from the 19th to the early 20th century. The book details the emergence of the Yoruba language press, its themes, and its distinction from the English-language press. The influence of both missionary and secular presses on religion and morality as well as the socio-economic and political lives of the Nigerian people are also emphasised. The book relates the impact of the development of other machines, including…
E989 · 28 Aug 2026 · 55 min
An Honest Death: Life's End and Humanist Funerals with Matthew Engelke
A fascinating, behind-the-scenes look at non-religious funerals in contemporary London, An Honest Death: Life's End and Humanist Funerals (Princeton UP, 2026) is an intimate and moving ethnographic account of funerals for people who don’t believe in God or an afterlife. Focusing on secular funeral celebrants of the British Humanist Association (now called Humanists UK), the book examines how their ritual work is geared toward helping realize a secular world. There is a strong ethical commitment behind this effort, which is to face death with honesty based on the belief that this life is all…
E988 · 21 Aug 2026 · 36 min
Ashanté M. Reese, "Gather: Black Food, Nourishment, and the Art of Togetherness" (W. W. Norton, 2026)
Food justice is defined as the understanding that our food system is unequal and that something needs to be done about it. But how can we create a world where everyone has enough? What does it mean to truly nourish ourselves and our communities? In Gather: Black Food, Nourishment, and the Art of Togetherness (Norton, 2026), anthropologist Ashanté M. Reese argues for a vibrant new vision of food justice that places Black communities at the center and offers us a visionary, delicious path forward. Reese reveals that to truly create equity in our food systems, we must embrace the abundance that…
E987 · 19 Aug 2026 · 57 min
A Cure for Loneliness: On Homecoming with Ian Marcus Corbin
Americans are more isolated, polarized, and depressed than ever in recent memory, and yet many citizens share a deep desire for community and friendship across political lines and in new creative ways. How may we bridge that gap? To help answer that most pressing question, in Episode 2 of Season 6, I have as our guest the philosopher, essayist, and author, Ian Marcus Corbin. A graduate of Yale Divinity School and Boston College, Mr. Corbin is a senior fellow at Capita, the program director of Harvard University’s Public Culture Project, and the author of To Arrive Where We Started (2026).…
E986 · 17 Aug 2026 · 59 min
Ting Hui Lau, "Decolonial Endurance: Lisu Worldmaking Against Chinese Settler Colonialism" (Stanford UP, 2026)
A series of questions have been sparked by the indigenous urgency of the moment: What does it mean to live through a world coming undone? How do people carry on amid rupture, loss, and grief? Decolonial Endurance: Lisu Worldmaking Against Chinese Settler Colonialism (Stanford University Press, 2026) explores these questions through the turbulent lives of Indigenous Lisu subsistence farmers in China’s Eastern Himalayas, bordering Myanmar and Tibet. Like many of China’s Indigenous borderlands, this mountainous region has long borne the force of encroaching Chinese state power. Since the…
E985 · 16 Aug 2026 · 47 min
Máximo Badaró, "Pedagogies of Value: Marketing Foreign Goods in China" (Berghahn, 2026)
Pedagogies of Value: Marketing Foreign Goods in China (Berghahn, 2026) by Dr. Máximo Badaró explores how China is reshaping global hierarchies of worth. Through ethnographic research among marketers, consultants, and brokers who promote foreign goods in Shanghai, Beijing, and beyond, this book investigates how value is taught, contested, and transformed in everyday encounters. From luxury brands and consumer ethnography to real estate, wine, and organic food, the book reveals how foreign intermediaries attempt to ‘educate’ Chinese consumers, only to confront shifting power dynamics that…
E984 · 15 Aug 2026 · 1 hr 5 min
Sophie Chao, "Land of Famished Beings: West Papuan Theories of Hunger" (Duke UP, 2025)
In Land of Famished Beings: West Papuan Theories of Hunger (Duke UP, 2025), Sophie Chao examines how Indigenous Marind communities understand and theorize hunger in lowland West Papua, a place where industrial plantation expansion and settler-colonial violence are radically reconfiguring ecologies, socialities, and identities. Instead of seeing hunger as an individual, biophysical state defined purely in nutritional, quantitative, or human terms, Chao investigates how hunger traverses variably situated humans, animals, plants, institutions, infrastructures, spirits, and sorcerers. When…

About New Books in Anthropology

New Books in Anthropology is a English tech & science podcast from New Books Network. Melo plays each episode straight from the publisher's own feed — no ads added, no account needed — and remembers where you stopped, in this browser only.

Publisher: New Books Network
Language: English
Category: Tech & Science
New episodes: Daily
Typical length: 53 min
Latest episode: 13 Oct 2026
Feed: RSS — paste into any podcast app
Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id425195053
Rights: New Books Network

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