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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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All Episodes

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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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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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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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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49:56

Andrew Flachs, "Feeding the World as If People...

New Books in Anthropology ·

2026/07/24

Backyard gardens flush with cucumbers, tomatoes, and peppers where bees buzz and chickens scratch. Beyond, a forest filled with blackberries and jewelweed. Inspired by childhood memories of his grandmother’s overflowing backyard garden, author Andrew Flachs has embarked on a multi-continent, decades-long look at agriculture and its value. The dominant view of agriculture has focused only on what we produce. It sees value in terms of capital gains or yield efficiency, masking how our global

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63:10

Lily Kelting, "Against Heritage: The Reinvention of...

New Books in Anthropology ·

2026/07/24

The rise of “heritage” foods—that is, the reinvention of traditional foods—has enjoyed a high profile thanks to the oft-praised efforts of chefs such as Sean Brock and René Redzepi. But Lily Kelting observes the popularity of heritage foods as something more: a global movement in response to climate catastrophe and the rise of right-wing, populist movements that center a return to the past as part of their ideology. Weaving ethnography, discourse analysis, critical theory, and sensory,

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65:47

Caste as a Material Question with Rahul Sonpimple

New Books in Anthropology ·

2026/07/20

This episode featured a conversation with Rahul Sonpimple, founder of the All-India Independent Scheduled Castes Association. Our conversation began with Rahul’s conception of Indian history and the place of anti-caste struggle within it. We delved further into Rahul’s own understanding of “anti-caste” as deeply rooted in Ambedkar’s own argument about the necessity of force in emancipatory social transformation. Rahul was especially forthright about the political cost of elevating meekness as a

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41:12

Elana Resnick, "Refusing Sustainability: Race and...

New Books in Anthropology ·

2026/07/19

Sustainability has become a touchstone for development worldwide, promising an antidote to environmental degradation and capitalism's excess: waste. Refusing Sustainability: Race and Environmentalism in a Changing Europe (Stanford University Press, 2025) presents a fundamentally different account of sustainability and waste itself by uncovering the intersections of international environmental reforms and racialized labor. In Bulgaria, Roma comprise the bulk of the country's waste workers,

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60:06

Recall This Book x The Caste Pod: a Crossover episode...

New Books in Anthropology ·

2026/07/16

In the spirit of Hannah Arendt's natality principle (that new things are always and should always be being born, each one unique and endowed with limitless potential) we at RTB love it when a new podcast appears. Especially one as thoughtful and original asThe Caste Pod, which assembles scholars and activists to make sense of what caste is, how it's experienced and how it has travelled globally. Join us to discuss and share an extended excerpt is its widely published (check out her earlier books!)

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54:43

Cécile Bishop, "Forms of Blackness: Race and...

New Books in Anthropology ·

2026/07/11

What does Blackness look like? In Forms of Blackness: Race and Visibility in the French-Speaking World (Duke University Press, 2026), Cécile Bishop argues that this seemingly simple question has no straightforward answer. Instead of treating race as something immediately visible, she explores how Blackness emerges through the interplay of perception, language, and history. A central theme of the book is that visibility is never neutral. Through examples ranging from photographs of the

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61:50

Meena Khandelwal, "Cookstove Chronicles: Social Life...

New Books in Anthropology ·

2026/07/08

Stove improvers have been designing and promoting “clean” or “efficient” biomass cookstoves in India since the 1940s and have been frustrated to find their carefully engineered stoves abandoned in trash heaps or repurposed as storage bins, while the traditional mud chulha retains a central place in the kitchen. Why do so many Indian women continue to use wood-burning, smoke-spewing stoves when they have other options? Based on anthropological research in Rajasthan, Cookstove Chronicles:

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68:32

Jay Szpilka, "BDSM Practices in Contemporary Poland:...

New Books in Anthropology ·

2026/07/07

In BDSM Practices in Poland: Barbed Wire Floggings, Rope Orgasms, and the Problem with Desire (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), cultural anthropologist and cultural studies scholar Jay Szpilka analyzes the way that BDSM is practiced in contemporary Poland. Based on extensive field research, she asks what social, cultural, and political conditions are necessary for BDSM to be possible to practice in the first place. Through a nuanced analysis of the way that practitioners navigate conflicting

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54:46

Arpan Roy, "Relative Strangers: Romani Kinship and...

New Books in Anthropology ·

2026/07/01

Examining how memory, intergenerational transmission, and kinship work together, Relative Strangers: Romani Kinship and Palestinian Difference (U Toronto Press, 2025) 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

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70:27

Chiara Formichi, "Domestic Nationalism: Muslim Women,...

New Books in Anthropology ·

2026/06/30

In her most recent publication, Domestic Nationalism: Muslim Women, Health, and Modernity in Indonesia (Stanford UP, 2025), Chiara Formichi argues that Muslim women in Java and Sumatra, from the late 1910s to the 1950s, were central to Indonesia's progress as guardians and promoters of health and piety through gendered activities of care work. While sidelined in the Dutch colonial project of hygienic modernity, women's labor of social reproduction became increasingly visible during the Japanese

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561 results

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