New Books in Anthropology

Jan 04 2025 1000 ep. 55 mins 4k
New Books in Anthropology Podcast artwork

Interviews with Anthropologists about their New Books

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Nara Milanich, "Paternity: The Elusive Quest for the Father" (Harvard UP, 2019)

Jan 04 2025 69 mins  
Nara Milanich’s Paternity: The Elusive Quest for the Father (Harvard University Press, 2019) explains how fatherhood, long believed to be impossible to know with certainty, became a biological “fact” that could be ascertained with scientific testing. Though the advent of DNA testing might seem to make paternity less elusive, Milanich’s book invites readers to think about pa

Sujatha Fernandes, "Cuban Hustle: Culture, Politics, Everyday Life" (Duke, UP 2020)

Jan 04 2025 45 mins  
Cuban resourcefulness is on full display in Cuban Hustle: Culture, Politics, Everyday Life (Duke 2020), as sociologist Sujatha Fernandes presents an array of strategies not just for survival but for the invention of expressive practices and community-building spaces. Enduring years of Special Period economics and a transition away from Fidel Castro’s leadership as well as shiftin

Fernando Domínguez Rubio, "Still Life: Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Jan 03 2025 63 mins  
How do you keep the cracks in Starry Night from spreading? How do you prevent artworks made of hugs or candies from disappearing? How do you render a fading photograph eternal—or should you attempt it at all? These are some of the questions that conservators, curators, registrars, and exhibition designers dealing with contemporary art face on a daily basis. In Still Life: Ecologi

Swethaa S. Ballakrishnen, "Accidental Feminism: Gender Parity and Selective Mobility Among India’s Professional Elite" (Princeton UP, 2021)

Jan 03 2025 72 mins  
In India, elite law firms offer a surprising oasis for women within a hostile, predominantly male industry. Less than 10 percent of the country's lawyers are female, but women in the most prestigious firms are significantly represented both at entry and partnership. Elite workspaces are notorious for being unfriendly to new actors, so what allows for aberration in certain workspace

Shannon Mattern, "A City Is Not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences" (Princeton UP, 2021)

Jan 03 2025 47 mins  
Computational models of urbanism—smart cities that use data-driven planning and algorithmic administration—promise to deliver new urban efficiencies and conveniences. Yet these models limit our understanding of what we can know about a city. A City Is Not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences (Princeton UP, 2021) reveals how cities encompass myriad forms of local and indigenous

Joanna Mizielińska, "Queer Kinship on the Edge?: Families of Choice in Poland" (Routledge, 2024)

Jan 01 2025 50 mins  
Queer Kinship on the Edge? Families of Choice in Poland (Routledge, 2024) explores ways in which queer families from Central and Eastern Europe complicate the mainstream picture of queer kinship and families researched in the Anglo-American contexts. The book presents findings from under-represented localities as a starting point to query some of the expectations about queer kinshi

Charles Foster, "Being a Human: Adventures in Forty Thousand Years of Consciousness" (Metropolitan Books, 2021)

Dec 29 2024 62 mins  
How did humans come to be who we are? In his marvelous, eccentric, and widely lauded book Being a Beast, legal scholar, veterinary surgeon, and naturalist extraordinaire Charles Foster set out to understand the consciousness of animal species by living as a badger, otter, fox, deer, and swift. Now, he inhabits three crucial periods of human development to understand the consciousne

Mukulika Banerjee, "Cultivating Democracy: Politics and Citizenship in Agrarian India" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Dec 28 2024 67 mins  
Cultivating Democracy: Politics and Citizenship in Agrarian India (Oxford UP, 2021) by Dr. Mukulika Banerjee offers a groundbreaking rethinking of democracy, moving beyond its institutional frameworks to focus on its lived, everyday dimensions. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the villages of Madanpur and Chishti in India, the book examines how agrarian communities cultivate demo

Rachel Emily Taylor, "Illustration and Heritage" (Bloombury, 2024)

Dec 27 2024 27 mins  
In Illustration and Heritage (Bloomsbury, 2024), Rachel Emily Taylor explores the re-materialisation of absent, lost, and invisible stories through illustrative practice and examines the potential role of contemporary illustration in cultural heritage. Heritage is a 'process' that is active and takes place in the present. In the heritage industry, there are opposing discourses and

Melissa Johnston, "Building Peace, Rebuilding Patriarchy: The Failure of Gender Interventions in Timor-Leste" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Dec 21 2024 61 mins  
Over the two decades since the adoption of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security, peacebuilding interventions around the globe have increasingly incorporated gender perspectives. These initiatives have used both development programs and gender mainstreaming to advance women's empowerment, with the aim of making peacebuilding more effective as