After getting all worked up about new publications via last week’s #Reviews, we thought to indulge a bit more – by revisiting podcasts on new anthropology books all week long! We have been running these podcasts for a while now, courtesy of our friends New Books in Anthropology. Each interview is an in-depth, hour-long discussion of selected authors’ latest books. Quite the treat, we must say, so enjoy – we know that we do!
Queerness in Heavy Metal Music: Metal Bent by Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone (Routledge, 2015)
Amber Clifford-Napoleone’s ethnographic study of performers and fans of heavy metal music who self-identity as queer, challenges the assumed ‘straight white male’ stereotype of metal aficionados. The book explores the links between the queer and heavy metal communities, the sub-culture’s acceptance of non-normative lifestyles, the connection to the leather scene and the history of heavy metal.
Interview by Rich Schur
Listen here or here:
“Getting By”: Class and State Formation Among Chinese in Malaysia by Donald Nonini (Cornell University Press, 2015)
In this book Donald Nonini explores the role of class in state formation amongst overseas Chinese, arguing against the dominating focus on ‘Chinese culture’. Pulling upon data gathered since the late 1970s, Getting By is a detailed political historical ethnography, that entwines analysis of class struggle and identity.
Interview by Nick Cheesman
Listen here or here:
The Anthropology of Protestantism: Faith and Crisis among Scottish Fishermen by Joseph Webster (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)
A village in north-eastern Scotland is the site for Joseph Webster’s exploration of the millennialist faith found in the village’s many Presbyterian and Brethren churches. Discussing the differences in belief between newcomers and the village’s older inhabitants, the book explodes simplistic assumptions about the decline of religion, and analyses how fishermen experience life as simultaneously enchanted and modern.
Interview by Hillary Kaell
Listen here or here:
When the World Becomes Female: Guises of a South Indian Goddess by Joyce B. Flueckiger (Indiana University Press, 2013)
Joyce B. Flueckiger’s new book analyses the Indian goddess Gangamma, her festival and her devotees. During the celebrations men take on female guises, whilst women intensify the rituals that they perform throughout the year. The book explores the ‘excess’ of the goddess and the lives of those who bear her.
Interview by Ian M. Cook
Listen here or here:
Dreaming of Money in Ho Chi Minh City by Allison Truitt (University of Washington Press, 2013)
Money is the focus of Allison Truitt’s book – not just money as exchange however, but money and the ways it intersects with relations between people, the global market place, the state and the spirit world in Ho Chi Minh City. In Truitt’s account the city is a place of ‘monetary pluralism’ enlivened with the sensuous pleasures of cash, where power is upheld and undermined by foreign currencies and counterfeits.
Interview by Nick Cheesman
Listen here or here:
Kabul Carnival: Gender Politics in Postwar Afghanistan by Julie Billaud (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015)
Julie Billaud analyses the state, women, and ‘reconstruction’ projects in postwar Afghanistan. These themes intersect in discussions over veiling in public, the role of the law, gender empowerment training programmes and the lives of young women who struggle to be both ‘modern’ and ‘modest’.
Interview by Ian M. Cook
Listen here or here:
The Clinic and Elsewhere: Addiction, Adolescents, and the Afterlife of Therapy by Todd Meyers (University of Washington Press, 2013)
This ethnography of drug dependence and treatment in Baltimore by Todd Mayer, takes the reader into the lives of young people treated with the relatively new drug buprenorphine. Tracing the experience of these ‘subjects’ during the trials and afterwards, as well as the use of the drug, the book examines the ways clinical medicine and social life cross paths.
Interview by by Monique Dufour
Listen here or here:
Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World by Gary Wilder (Duke University Press, 2015)
Freedom Time, the new book from Gary Wilder, looks into the politics and poetics of Léopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire between the years 1945-1960. Exploring notions of temporality and liberation, it analyses how these figures awaited and planned for a post-imperial order.
Interview by Roxanne Panchasi
Listen here or here:
Autobiography of an Archive: A Scholar’s Passage to India by Nicholas B. Dirks (Columbia University Press, 2015)
Nicholas B. Dirks collection of essays, loosely arranged along the line’s of the author’s scholarly life, touch upon themes such as empire and the politics of knowledge, as well as the experience of archival research.
Interview by Ian M. Cook
Listen here or here:
The Multispecies Salon by Eben Kirksey (Duke University Press, 2014)
This volume is an introduction to multispecies ethnography based on a travelling art exhibition of the same name in which anthropologists collaborated with artists and others. In it readers can discover recipes for acorn mush and human-milk cheese along with essays on matsutake worlds and bioart.
Interview by Carla Nappi
Listen here or here:
