New Books in Anthropology

00:50:53

Valuing Nature at the Ends of the World: Natural...

New Books in Anthropology ·

2026/10/07

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

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00:44:10

Down and Out in Utopia: Unemployment as Moral...

New Books in Anthropology ·

2026/10/07

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

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00:42:05

Transient Becoming: Self-Improvement and Capitalist...

New Books in Anthropology ·

2026/09/30

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

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01:00:37

Smuggling Law: Unsettled Sovereignties in Turkey's...

New Books in Anthropology ·

2026/09/29

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:

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01:35:56

How Real Is Race?: Unraveling Race, Biology, and...

New Books in Anthropology ·

2026/09/28

Tune in to this discussion aboutHow Real Is Race?: Unraveling Race, Biology, and CulturebyCarol 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

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00:37:12

Welcome to the Journal of Autoethnography

New Books in Anthropology ·

2026/09/27

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,

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00:52:32

Spies and Other Pigeons: Hospitality and Hostility in...

New Books in Anthropology ·

2026/09/26

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

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00:46:47

Water Logics: Materialist Epistemologies for the...

New Books in Anthropology ·

2026/09/26

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

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01:06:12

New Books in Anthropology ·

2026/09/23

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

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00:41:16

Sandra Rozental, "The Absent Stone: Mexican Patrimony...

New Books in Anthropology ·

2026/09/17

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?InThe 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

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67:50

John Charles Simon and Jennalee Donian,...

New Books in Anthropology ·

2026/09/12

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,

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01:06:05

John Charles Simon and Jennalee Donian,...

New Books in Anthropology ·

2026/09/12

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,

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38:23

Francesca Sbardella, "Inhabiting Silence: An...

New Books in Anthropology ·

2026/09/07

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

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63:49

Janaka Jayawickrama and Jerome Wright, "Under the...

New Books in Anthropology ·

2026/09/06

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,

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57:16

Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer et al eds., "Mapping Medical...

New Books in Anthropology ·

2026/09/06

What does medical anthropology look like in the twenty-first century? That is the central question ofMapping 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

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56:34

Relative Strangers: Romani Kinship and Palestinian...

New Books in Anthropology ·

2026/09/05

Examining how memory, intergenerational transmission, and kinship work together,Relative Strangers(UToronto 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

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55:39

Chika Watanabe, "Play to Survive: Disaster...

New Books in Anthropology ·

2026/09/04

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

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58:47

Piergiorgio Di Giminiani, "Alterhumanism: Becoming...

New Books in Anthropology ·

2026/09/04

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,

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26:28

Sarah M. Rios, "Diseases Have No Eyes: Valley Fever...

New Books in Anthropology ·

2026/09/03

Diseases Have No Eyes: Valley Fever and Environmental Health Justice (Temple University Press, 2026) investigateshow 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,

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66:51

Elizabeth Anne Davis, "Artifactual: Forensic and...

New Books in Anthropology ·

2026/09/02

In Artifactual: Forensic and Documentary Knowing(Duke UniversityPress,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,

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