Hi there pod-pickers, here’s another earful of podcasts for you to squeeze into your drums, freshly prepared by our audiophile associates New Books in Anthropology. As ever each interview is around an hour’s conversation with an anthropologist about their latest offering. Download, stream and subscribe (if you’re so inclined).
Paper Tiger: Law, Bureaucracy and the Developmental State in Himalayan India by Nayanika Mathur
(Cambridge University Press 2015)
A village terrorized by a man eating tiger and a state struggling to implement possibly the largest social security program in the world coalesce in this wonderful ethnography of bureaucracy by Nayanika Mathur. Paper Tiger: Law, Bureaucracy and the Developmental State in Himalayan India is a detailed account of paper that reveals the unintended consequences of reforms, the problems with implementing new programs and the inability of state officials to act when faced with crises.
Interview by Ian Cook
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The Han: China’s Diverse Majority by Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi
(University of Washington Press 2015 )
What does being Han mean? Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi’s new book argues that being Han is a “historically contingent narration” and does so by taking the readers through a history of such a narration from a pre-modern culturalist mode of Han-ness to modern modes of racialised nationalism. The book further explores the roles of language, education, home-place identities and collective labels in making contemporary narratives of Han-ness, opening up new ways of thinking about identity in China.
Interview by Carla Nappi
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Rituals of Ethnicity: Thangmi Identities Between Nepal and India by Sara Shneiderman
(University of Pennsylvania Press 2015)
Sara Shneiderman’s book is the first comprehensive ethnography of the Thangmi, a Himalayan community who move between Nepal, India and the Tibetan Autonomous Region of China. Through an analysis of orality, funerary rituals, the practices of gurus and circular migration (to name just a few of the topics covered) the book makes a forceful case for ethnicity as something people do rather than are and explores how such performances of ethnicity speak to questions of citizenship and belonging across national borders.
Interview by Ian Cook
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Mobile Selves: Race, Migration, and Belonging in Peru and the U.S. by Ulla Berg
(NYU Press 2015)
Ulla Berg’s new book explores the lives of migrants from the central highlands of Peru, including how migration is used as a strategy for social mobility as well the ways in which it forms identities of those who leave. Examining the moral, material and aspirational factors surrounding such migratory practices the book analyses the “transgressiveness of Andean mobility.”
Interview by David-James Gonzales
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Atheist Secularism and its Discontents: A Study of Religion and Communism in Eurasia by Ngo, T., Quijada, J. (eds.)
(Palgrave 2015 )
What was the communist project of atheism in Eurasia, and what are its legacies today? Editors Tam Ngo and Justine Quijada bring together a collection of papers that complicate the western notions of state secularism premised on the separation of secular and religious spheres to analyse states which sought to explicitly dominate the religious areas of life. From Poland to China and many more places in between the chapters show how the legacies of state interference in religious matters continue today.
Interview by Todd Weir
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Sensational Movies : Video, Vision, and Christianity in Ghana by Birgit Meyer
(University of California Press 2015)
Sensational Movies: Video, Vision, and Christianity in Ghana analyses the changing processes surrounding filmmaking in Ghana as the medium interweaves economic, technological, cultural, social, and religious aspects in its production. Moving into the space left by the moribund state film industry, video movies negotiate the imaginaries deployed by both state cinema and Pentecostal Christianity.
Interview by Hillary Kaell
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