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PODCAST

New Books in Anthropology

New Books Network

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+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox:

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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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43:52

Karin Barber, "Much Matter in a Penny Paper: Early...

New Books in Anthropology ·

2026/08/31

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

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54:48

An Honest Death: Life's End and Humanist Funerals...

New Books in Anthropology ·

2026/08/28

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

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38:46

Ashanté M. Reese, "Gather: Black Food, Nourishment,...

New Books in Anthropology ·

2026/08/21

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?InGather: 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

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56:31

A Cure for Loneliness: On Homecoming with Ian Marcus...

New Books in Anthropology ·

2026/08/19

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

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63:50

Ting Hui Lau, "Decolonial Endurance: Lisu Worldmaking...

New Books in Anthropology ·

2026/08/17

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,

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51:31

Máximo Badaró, "Pedagogies of Value: Marketing...

New Books in Anthropology ·

2026/08/16

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

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62:14

Sophie Chao, "Land of Famished Beings: West Papuan...

New Books in Anthropology ·

2026/08/15

InLand 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

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67:52

Dalit Studies with Ramnarayan Rawat, K. Satyanarayana...

New Books in Anthropology ·

2026/08/10

This episode featured a conversation with Ramnarayan Rawat, K. Satyanarayana, and Sanal Mohan, three scholars in the burgeoning field of Dalit Studies. We began with the significance of the 1990s as a point of departure for new work in this field and segued to the interventions made by their two edited volumes published in 2016 and 2025. We discussed the paths opened up by earlier radical historiographical paradigms, such as Subaltern Studies, which nonetheless failed to address the caste question

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36:50

Margaret E. Farrar and Adam Kaul, "Becoming Utopia:...

New Books in Anthropology ·

2026/08/10

Becoming Utopia: History, Heritage, and Sustainability in the American Midwest(UNebraska Press, 2026) centers on the tiny community of Bishop Hill, Illinois, whose marketing materials call it “Utopia on the Prairie,” home to a radical communal religious sect that emigrated from Sweden in the 1840s. Through rich textual and ethnographic analyses, Dr. Margaret E. Farrar and Dr. Adam Kaul tell the story of what happens when a small, historically significant Midwestern community negotiates the

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52:27

Ka-ming Wu, "Infrastructural Urbanism in Contemporary...

New Books in Anthropology ·

2026/08/09

Infrastructural Urbanism in Contemporary China: Volunteering, Infrastructures and Civic Imaginations(Leiden University Press, 2026)examineshow Chinese citizens negotiate their everyday experiences with urban spaces, improved city infrastructure, and an increasingly tight surveillance regime through volunteering. This book asks how citizens connect to city spaces where facilities for transit, culture, and leisure have been substantially upgraded. Drawing on extensive research, Ka-ming Wu

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56:11

Marisa Karyl Franz, "Near and Desired Things:...

New Books in Anthropology ·

2026/08/09

Near and Desired Things: Shamanism in Late Imperial Local Siberian Museums(Cornell University Press, 2026) reveals nineteenth-century Siberian museums, built on Indigenous land and increasingly populated by political exiles, as active sites of ethnographic knowledge-making and centers of scientific research, regional identity, and colonial authority. Rather than collecting from distant colonies, these institutions concentrated on surrounding communities, their tools, beliefs, and everyday lives, to

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58:04

Beyond Free Speech: Why AI Governance Demands Freedom...

New Books in Anthropology ·

2026/08/09

Are we driving our technology, or is it starting to drive us? In this thought-provoking conversation, Eli Karetny sits down with researcher and author Eduardo Albrecht to explore the invisible, rapidly encroaching frontier of AI governance and data surveillance.Moving far beyond traditional debates about data privacy, Albrecht warns of a near future where the state and corporate partners bypass human speech entirely, relying instead on "sentiment detection" to ascribe thoughts and make decisions

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0:00

The Microbiopolitics of Novel Foods

New Books in Anthropology ·

2026/08/07

What role do microbes play in aquaponic farming and cultivated meat production, and how might such novel food technologies impact microbiomes? In this episode, Ishita Dey ofGastronomicahosts Lukáš Senft, Tereza Stöckelová, and Varvara Borisova in a conversation about their new article, “The Microbiopolitics of Novel Foods: The Pro- and Antibiotic Implications of Cultivated Meat and Aquaponic Farming.” In a discussion that connects food futures with environment, sustainability, health, and

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56:03

Magdalena E. Stawkowski, "Atomic Collective:...

New Books in Anthropology ·

2026/08/03

In the aftermath of the Soviet Union's collapse, Kazakhstan inherited the remnants of one of the world's most contaminated landscapes: the Semipalatinsk Test Site, known locally as the Polygon. Resigned to dispossession, residents have chosen to remain on the abandoned nuclear test site, despite the isolation and the radioactive environment, rather than face marginalization or the rigors of a neoliberal world. Atomic Collective: Radioactive Life in Kazakhstan (University of Toronto Press,

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31:30

Katie Barclay, "The Kiss: A History of Passion and...

New Books in Anthropology ·

2026/08/01

The Kiss: A History of Passion and Power (Reaktion, 2026) by Professor Katie Barclay tells the surprising history of our most intimate gesture: the kiss. Richly illustrated, it explores a millennium of kisses, asking how and why the kiss has retained its power over the centuries, and what it might mean today. From the furtive kisses of fated lovers Heloise and Abelard to The Godfather’s ‘kiss of death’, Professor Barclay shows how the kiss can be romantic, peaceful, transgressive, intimate, erotic

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76:58

Isabel Heger-Laube, "China’s Landless Peasants and...

New Books in Anthropology ·

2026/07/31

As part and parcel of China’s compressed modernization, processes of state-led rural urbanization through land expropriation and rural-to-urban relocation have been transforming rural Chinese people’s lives in unprecedented ways. This has led to different, often adverse outcomes for the affected populations – China’s “landless peasants” - as well as to the construction of divergent narratives about the role of the Chinese state’s measures for them. To provide a so-far missing perspective to

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64:05

David Zeitlyn and Chihab El Khachab eds.,...

New Books in Anthropology ·

2026/07/27

In this episode I discuss the bookUnderstanding Social Images: Essays on Visual Methods and Teaching Anthropology(Berghahn, 2025) with co-editors David Zeitlyn and Chihab El Khachab, a posthumous collection of writings by the late anthropologist Marcus Banks. Banks was a key the figures in development of visual anthropology, but his work remains of continuing relevance. This volume brings together several of his essays on film, photography, archive work, as well as reflections of visual methods

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64:39

Victoria Donovan, "Life in Spite of Everything: Tales...

New Books in Anthropology ·

2026/07/26

Life in Spite of Everything: Tales from the Ukrainian East(Daunt Books Publishing, 2025)isa unique reflection on the much-mythologised Donetsk and Luhansk regions of the Ukrainian east, the old and recent history of the region as seen by an esteemed academic multi-disciplinary scholar Victoria Donovan in her numerous travels to the region prior to the full-scale invasion. Seen through a deeply empathetic lens of conversations with local curators, historians, museum workers, and artists, the

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60:27

Michelle Bigenho and Henry Stobart, "Heritage Fever:...

New Books in Anthropology ·

2026/07/26

The early twenty-first century ushered in a period of change in Bolivia. The country welcomed its first Indigenous president, a new constitution, and a profusion of laws that recognized individual music and dance expressions as intangible cultural heritage. Using cultural heritage lawmaking as a window through which to view the de-centered workings of the Indigenous-focused Plurinational Bolivian State, Heritage Fever: Law and Cultural Politics in a Decolonizing State (Oxford University Press,

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