New Books in Anthropology

Home Team Away: Watching European Football in Urban China(U Michigan Press, 2026) by Dr. Yuan Gong calls for a rethinking of sport fandom that is divorced from an attachment to location. As the first comprehensive account of the European football fandom in China, this book explores how the Chinese middle class subjectivity is formed through the cross-cultural, digital consumption of the Big Five leagues.

Dr. Gong captures the embodied experiences of fans and fan clubs, fan discourses and activities unfolding on digital platforms on Weibo, Weixin, and Hupu, combining fieldwork in Shanghai and virtual ethnography. Dr. Gong argues that Chinese fans’ decisions to follow and engage with European football result from their material conditions, ideological contestation, and technology appropriation as a new demographic bloc arising during China’s transition to authoritarian digital capitalism. By engaging with their home teams away, the Chinese middle class fans perform as citizens with a global vision despite the resurgence of the nationalist and anti-Western sentiments.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whosebook focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This episode features a conversation with historical anthropologist Lisa Mitchell and political theorist Hari Ramesh whose recent books make a case against anti-state thinking in social and political theory. We discussed the need to move beyond frameworks emphasizing either subordination to the state or revolt against the state in order to better understand how marginalized and oppressed groups can use the state as a means to enact transformative justice aimed at greater social equality. As Lisa and Hari point out, this requires moving beyond theories of deliberative democracy that rest on conceptions of rational communication. Instead, they argue for the need to consider the role of embodied practices, such as pulling the emergency chain on trains or blocking road traffic, and instances of “positive coercion,” such as Reconstruction Era laws and the U.S. Civil Rights Act, in expanding the parameters of democratic participation. Through Lisa’s account of what she calls a “materialist genealogy of collective action” in India and in Hari’s readings of B.R. Ambedkar, W.E.B. Du Bois, and the NAACP’s legal brief on Brown v. Board of Education, we come to understand the state as a complex terrain of power with different pressure points that allows for novel forms of relationality and maneuver. In the process, we also see political collectives, not as fixed identity groups, but as the product of shifting coalitions.

Guests

Lisa Mitchell: Professor or History and Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania

Hari Ramesh: Assistant Professor of Government, Wesleyan University

References

Lisa Mitchell, Hailing the State: Indian Democracy Between Elections (Duke University Press, 2023)

Hari Ramesh, Harnessing the State: Oppressed Groups and the Pursuit of Radical Democracy (Harvard University Press, 2026)

John Dewey: philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer who was one of the most prominent American scholars of the twentieth century.

B.R. Ambedkar, “States and Minorities” (1947)

W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (1935)

Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed (2004)

Jurgen Habermas: philosopher and social theorist whose work addressed notions of communicative rationality and the public sphere.

Adhaar card: 12-digit unique identification number tied to biometric data and demographic information issued to residents of India

Telengana movement: a decades-long political and social campaign for the creation of a separate state out of the Telugu-speaking region of Andhra Pradesh in India, which culminated in the formation of Telangana as India’s 29th state on June 2, 2014.

Iris Marion Young: political theorist and socialist feminist who focused on the nature of justice and social difference.

Sally Haslanger: philosopher and feminist theorist who work on the social construction of categories, especially of gender and race.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Eating Grasshoppers: Chapulines and the Women Who Sell Them (U Texas Press, 2025) is an approachable ethnography of how grasshoppers are harvested, sold, and consumed in Oaxaca.

Chapulines (toasted grasshoppers) are not a delicacy in Oaxaca. They are just food—good food—and a protein-rich seasonal snack that is the product of a long-standing industry based overwhelmingly on the labor of women. Jeffrey Cohen has interviewed dozens of these chapulineras, who harvest insects from corn and alfalfa fields, prepare them, and sell them in urban and rural marketplaces. An accessible ethnography, Eating Grasshoppers tells their story alongside the broader history of chapulines.

For tourists, chapulines are an experience—a gateway to the “real” Oaxaca. For locals, they are ordinary fare, but also a reminder of Indigenous stability and rural survival. In a sense, eating chapulines is a declaration of independence from a government that has condemned eating insects as backward. Yet, while chapulines are a generations-old favorite, eating them is not an act of preservation. Cohen shows that the business of this traditional food is thoroughly modern and ever evolving, with entrepreneurial chapulineras responding nimbly to complex and dynamic markets. From alfalfa fields to online markets, Eating Grasshoppers takes readers inside one of the world’s most fascinating food cultures.

Jeffrey H. Cohen is a professor in the department of anthropology at Ohio State University and the author or coeditor of several books, including Eating Soup without a Spoon: Anthropological Theory and Method in the Real World (UT Press, 2015).

Yadong Li is an anthropologist-in-training. He is a PhD candidate of Socio-cultural Anthropology at Tulane University. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

American Amazigh: Remaking North African Indigeneity and Belonging in the Diaspora (NYU Press, 2026) by Dr. Heide Castañeda examines the complex identity negotiations of Amazigh people—also known as Berbers—as they build community and claim visibility in the American landscape. These distinct ethnic groups, whose histories predate the arrival of Arabs in North Africa, unsettle categories of race and ethnicity in the U.S., challenging dominant assumptions about what it means to be African, Indigenous, and Muslim. Their experiences also disrupt familiar immigration narratives, revealing the complexities and challenges of legal migration processes such as family reunification and the Diversity Immigrant Visa program.

In seeking to make their struggles for recognition legible within the American context, Amazigh communities grapple with conditional belonging while also bearing the legacy of marginalization in their home countries, which is rooted in colonial divisions, postcolonial nationalism, and Arabization policies, fostering systemic discrimination. In the diaspora, Amazigh identity is being actively reshaped as individuals and organizations engage with new ideological frameworks, global Indigenous rights movements, and recent political gains in North Africa, where they have long fought for linguistic, cultural, and legal equality.

The Indigenous perspective has been largely missing from the literature on migration. Drawing on four years of ethnographic research, and framed around the concept of diasporic indigeneity, the book explores how the Amazigh people forge new anchors of belonging and create spaces of social cohesion. By uncovering both the opportunities and challenges presented in the American context, the book moves beyond conventional migration narratives to illuminate how identity and belonging are continually translated and reconfigured within new places.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whosebook focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Elizabeth Roberts has experienced the suffering wrought by addiction: her sister’s destructive alcoholism and dependency on prescription drugs, her mother’s hoarding, and her own struggles with binge eating. As for so many of us, addiction brought about self-loathing, reflecting her individual failure to exercise self-control, to keep it together. But during her fieldwork studying chemical exposure in Mexico City, her sense of addiction got turned upside down. She witnessed her neighbors, both young and old, defiantly celebrate their compulsive dependencies on alcohol, drugs, and junk food instead of hiding them in shame. Roberts began to wonder if everything she thought she knew about addiction was wrong.

In Praise of Addiction: Or How We Can Learn to Love Dependency in a Damaged World(Princeton UP, 2026) shares the unexpected journey that led Dr. Roberts to a new understanding of addiction. Taking lessons from her years in Mexico City as well as from addiction researchers, harm reduction activists, and scholars of religion, philosophy, and anthropology, Roberts pays close attention to the external forces that so often fuel the damage of addiction. As her neighbors in Mexico City suggest, the adverse health effects brought on by their dependencies on Coca-Cola, processed foods, drugs, and alcohol have more to do with the ongoing effects of the drug war and NAFTA than any personal failings. Taking up this ecological framework, Dr. Roberts draws a line between vice that isolates and addiction that connects, a distinction she movingly integrates into her own life and family, making a case for sharing in the pleasures—and suffering—of dependency.

Provocative and deeply humane, In Praise of Addiction invites readers to cast aside the shame, self-hatred, and judgment associated with addiction and discover how dependency can serve as a binding force worthy of our most profound devotion.\

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whosebook focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The 2011 Fukushima Dai’ichi nuclear disaster was the worst industrial nuclear catastrophe to hit Japan. It was a major event, rated at the highest severity, which released radioactive elements into the power plant’s surrounding environment when back-up systems failed and could not sufficiently cool the nuclear reactors. At least 164,000 people were permanently or temporarily displaced.

Radioactive Governance: The Politics of Revitalization in Post-Fukushima Japan (NYU Press, 2026) offers an ethnographic look at how the disaster was handled by Japan. Unlike prior nuclear-related narratives, such as those surrounding Chernobyl or Hiroshima, which focused on themes of harm, trauma, and victimization, the Japanese government consistently put forward a discourse of minimal or no radiation-related dangers, a gradual bringing home of former evacuees, a restarting of nuclear power plants, and the promotion of a resilient mindset in the face of adversity. This narrative worked to counter other understandings of recovery, such as those of worried citizens unsuccessfully fighting for permanent evacuation because they were afraid to go back to their homes.

Providing a rich theorization of how both governments and citizens shape narratives about catastrophic events, Radioactive Governance not only displays how Fukushima became a story of hope and resilience rather than of victimization, but also how radioactive governance shifted from the nuclear secrecy that characterized the Cold War era to relying on international organizations and domestic citizens to co-manage the aftermath of disasters.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Drora interviewed Dr. Eveyln Maria Dean-Olmsted about her book, Coming of Age as Syrian Jewish Mexicans: The Pragmatics of Diaspora (Brill, 2025), published by Brill in 2026. Dr. Dean-Olmsted is a linguistic anthropologist who lived with the Jewish community in Mexico City for a time to research this book. The community includes four distinct groups: Ashkenazi, Aleppans, Damascenes, and Ottoman Sephardim. She explained how these communities formed in the early 20th century following migration from the Ottoman Empire and later Syria and Lebanon, with each group maintaining separate institutions for social and religious purposes. Evelyn noted that while these communities were once strictly separated, there is now more mixing between them, though specific ethnic and geographic identifications remain important within the community.

Dean-Olmsted discussed increased social mixing and institutional collaboration between different Jewish communities, noting that intermarriages between Ashkenazi and Syrian Jews have become more normal though family dynamics can still be tense. She explained that young people are actively navigating questions about religious practice and lifestyle choices, with many experiencing a "holy struggle" she terms "Le'heavec" - referencing Jacob wrestling with an angel - as they make personalized decisions about their Judaism. She described this as an ongoing process that counters stereotypes about Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews' religiosity, while noting that community pressure remains strong, particularly for those who don't fit traditional molds.

As an example, they discussed the tebilah ceremony of immersing in a mikveh before one's wedding. In the traditional Syrian communities this is cause for a large party and in the Ashkenazi community, which has been seeping in to all communities through ultra-orthodox Rabbis and classes, it is a very quiet private affair. This struggle to understand what is one's Judaism and how do we rethink our heritage while staying true to it and our community was a key part of the discussion.

Continue to struggle with the future of our heritage by following and participating in Jewish Tapestry talks and events.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The claim to moderate or modernist Islam in Indonesia is particularly contentious today, as these labels participate in the global politics of identity for Muslims past and present. Who gets to claim to be representative of an Islam that is modernist, progressive, or tolerant? What constitutes a traditionalist Islamic orientation? And why and for whom do these distinctions matter? In her new book Theologies of Remembering: Modernity, Ambiguity, and Transcendence in Islamic Indonesia (U California Press, 2026), Dr. Verena Meyer raises these questions in an ethnographic study of two major Indonesian Muslim organizations based in Yogyakarta: the Muhammadiyya and the Nahdlatul Ulama.

Within a larger global discourse of Muslim belonging, and in particular anxieties about the growth of so-called radical and intolerant Islam, the labels given to these organizations (traditionalist and modernist) take on new importance. It is the question of categories—what defines them, what work they do, and how they change—that Meyer investigates through interviews with organization members, study of intellectual and genealogical traditions, and observations of institutional building within the groups. Engaging the field of memory studies and critical debates about the role of remembering and commemorating the past through history and heritage, Meyer argues that the terms and connotations of categories like modernist and traditional have shifted as Indonesian Muslims recall their formative pasts in ways that involve, and not preclude, ambiguity and contradiction. As such the book participates in debates within Islamic studies about the role of paradox and contradiction in Muslim historical and theological frameworks, constructed within temporal shifts in agency and power.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program.

Dr. Verena Meyer is Assistant Professor of Islam in South and Southeast Asia at Leiden University (NL).

Dr. Jaclyn Michael is an Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (USA).

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

At a time when artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and digital technologies increasingly shape our understanding of what it means to be human, Fuchs argues that we need to recover a richer conception of the human person. Rather than viewing ourselves as information-processing systems or collections of neural mechanisms, he develops a philosophical vision centred on embodiment, relationality, and lived experience. The result is a compelling defence of human agency, dignity, and freedom against contemporary forms of reductionism and transhumanism.

Today we'll be discussing In Defence of the Human Being: Foundational Questions of an Embodied Anthropology (Oxford UP, 2021). We discuss central arguments and their implications for philosophy, psychiatry, technology, and the future of human self-understanding.

Prof. Thomas Fuchs holds the Karl Jaspers Professorship for Philosophical Foundations of Psychiatry and is head of the section “Phenomenological Psychopathology and Psychotherapy” at Heidelberg University Psychiatric Hospital. He is also coordinator of the Marsilius Project “Embodiment as a Paradigm of an Evolutionary Cultural Anthropology” as well as research unit leader of the Karl Jaspers Edition. His main scientific interests include phenomenological anthropology and psychopathology on the one hand, and the theory and ethics of psychiatry and neuroscience on the other.

Dr. Anya Daly is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Ethics in the School of Arts and Society, University of Tasmania. Interdisciplinary collaborations are at the core of Anya’s research interests. She investigates the intersections of phenomenology with philosophy of mind, the philosophy of perception, the philosophy of psychiatry, embodied and social cognition, enactivism, ethics, aesthetics and Buddhist Philosophy.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

On the podcast today I am joined by Gareth Breen, Assistant Professor in anthropology at University of Sussex. Gareth is joining me to talk about his new book, Sublime Sociality: An (Auto)Ethnographic Theory of Chinese Christianity, out now with LSE Press.

Sublime Sociality follows the deeply influential, nameless religious movement formed by a transnational Sino-Taiwanese community of followers of Witness Li. The movement is now considered one of the first indigenous Chinese Christian groups of the twentieth century and the only one to become a global phenomenon in the twenty-first.

In this book, anthropologist Gareth Breen asks: what is ‘Chinese’ about ‘Chinese Christianity’? He locates its distinctiveness in followers’ pursuit of what they call ‘organic oneness’, which Breen describes as a form of ‘sublime sociality’ that combines spontaneous social interaction with countervailing tendencies towards conformity and routine. By examining how unity is sustained through the everyday rhythms of church life—from meetings and daily prayer to communal meals and social groups—Breen offers a compelling portrait and penetrating analysis of Chinese Christianity, while bringing a new perspective to the anthropology of religion.

Read Online and download for free here

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Who has the “right” to learn Mandarin Chinese? In Multiracial Mandarin: Asian Americans and Impossible Language(U Minnesota Press, 2026), Dr. David Shuang Song examines how matters of race and privilege shape US Mandarin language education and who has access to it. Through a two-year ethnographic study of two Bay Area high schools where diasporic and heritage speakers learn Mandarin alongside Black and Latinx students, Song advances a sociological and educational–linguistic inquiry into how language interacts with our understanding of identity and equity.

Comparing classroom activities in two public schools, Dr. Song investigates teachers who seek to make Mandarin accessible while detaching it from its cultural roots. As he explores the difficulties of limited resources, racial inequality, and pedagogical practices inherent in multiracial Mandarin instruction, Dr. Song shows how language education complicates how educators understand Asian American students and troubles conventional conversations around race and racial equity in schools.

Arguing that language practice and instruction must always be considered in relation to diaspora, ethnicity, and racialization, Multiracial Mandarin offers a frank analysis of the risks and benefits of teaching a diasporic language and asks if this practice ought to be replicated in more schools. As he applies innovative conceptual frameworks for talking about language among Asian Americans, Dr. Song’s timely and theoretically sophisticated analysis has wide-ranging implications for how students, teachers, and administrators approach essential questions around education, privilege, and language survival.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whosebook focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Dr Raluca Bianca Roman's book is an ethnography of the Finnish Kaale, Finland's national Roma community, and of the impact of Evangelical Christianity on their social and political lives. It is based on more than a decade of fieldwork and on archival research from the early twentieth century onwards. The book follows Kaale families as they handle the consequences of settlement, urbanisation and a turn towards the nuclear household, and as many convert to Pentecostalism. It moves from family homes and prayer groups in Helsinki to small towns in Eastern Finland, and on to Roma settlements in Western Romania where Kaale believers carry out missionary work. Kaale life emerges as a set of attachments and detachments, to kin and to the Finnish nation, to custom and to faith, and to other Roma at home and abroad.

Kaale Belongings and Evangelical Becomings: An Ethnography of Finnish Roma (Brill Schöningh, 2025) brings the anthropology of Roma into conversation with the anthropology of Christianity. Its first section, on Kaale belongings, looks at life in the city, at the silence surrounding sexuality, marriage and birth that shapes Kaale morality, and at "inbetweeners" who live apart from Kaale norms. The second section, on Evangelical becomings, turns to Kaale prayer groups within mixed Pentecostal congregations, to conversion as a repeated process of entering and leaving faith, and to Roma-to-Roma missionary work in Romania. Roman shows how religious identity becomes entangled with community identity, and how Pentecostalism can both bring Kaale together with non-Kaale Finns and draw new lines between believers and non-believers.

About the author

Raluca Bianca Roman is a Lecturer in Anthropology at Queen's University Belfast, where she is a member of the Centre for the Study of Ethnic Conflict and the Centre for Creative Ethnography. Her research focuses on religion, particularly Christianity, as well as ethnicity, nationalism, migration and humanitarianism, with a focus on Roma communities in Finland and Romania. She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of St Andrews, where she was later a Lecturer in Social Anthropology and a postdoctoral researcher on the ERC Advanced Grant project RomaInterbellum. She was also a researcher on the Academy of Finland project Roma and Nordic Societies at the University of Helsinki. She co-edited Roma Writings in History (Brill, 2021) and a special issue of the Journal of Finnish Studies, Counter-readings on Finnish Nationhood: Minority Strategies and the Making of the Nation (2021). She is now developing research on artificial intelligence and transhumanism.

About the host

Niall Herron is a PhD researcher in Anthropology at Queen's University Belfast. His ethnographic work examines queer experience during the Northern Ireland Troubles, taking the everyday as a focal point for how queerness and space were assembled across the period, and how sexuality, gender, region, ethnonational identity, and class were bound up together. His writing has appeared in the anthropology journal Ethnos and the academic queer history blog NOTCHES.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Fictions of Freedom: Migration, Modern Slavery and Bureaucracy in India (Cambridge UP, 2026) emerges from the fact of anti-trafficking interventions having led to newer forms of oppressions and entanglements of bureaucracy. Situating the lives of sex workers and daily-wage earning labourers through a multi-sited ethnography in India, this book opens up an examination of the rescue industry alongside migration and informality, and how the lived reality of the workers is crowded with sociopolitical unfairness, individual and state-sponsored violence, informal debt, gender and caste-based hierarchies, and limited livelihood options. It aims to offer a critical lens into the practices, modalities, and contestations through which freedom is lived and asserted in India. The book is open access here.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Chicana Spiritual Activism: Making Change, Making Soul(U Arizona Press, 2026) explores the profound impact of spiritual activism within the Chicana feminist movement in Texas. It illuminates how a cohort of Texas Chicanas embraced spiritual activism in pursuit of social change during the movement and into the present day.

The book draws on an array of qualitative methodologies—including interviews, autoethnography, testimonio, pláticas, and archival analysis—to develop what the author formulates as “methodologies of the spirit.” Focusing on the lived experiences, histories, and spiritual activism of sixteen Chicanas/Tejanas, Sendejo shows how these trailblazing women confronted the enduring impacts and repercussions of colonial legacies in Texas through their involvement in movement initiatives such as electoral politics through Mujeres Por La Raza, the cultural arts movement, developing Chicana feminist thought, and the establishment of bilingual education and Chicana/o studies programs.

The activists highlighted in the book include well-known figures such as Santa Barraza, Norma E. Cantú, Rosie Castro, Martha P. Cotera, Inés Hernández-Ávila, and others. Through their work, these activists emerged as architects of their own healing and transformation. Simultaneously, they opened avenues for others to embark on similar journeys reshaping religious practices and unearthing and disseminating spiritual, feminist, and ancestral knowledges.

This interview was conducted by Mary Reynolds, publicity manager for The University of Arizona Press. Her book, The Quake That Drained the Desert, investigates the 1887 borderlands earthquake that forever changed surface water and groundwater in Arizona and Sonora, Mexico.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Green Thinking: Unlearning Outdated Ideas in Science, Economics and Politics (Routledge, 2026) is about unlearning, discarding damaging, outdated ideas deeply rooted in our societies. It seeks to “compost” the views of dead white men (René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith, Norman Borlaugh) and of some not white or dead (Francis Fukuyama, Richard Dawkins, Richard Thaler), and explores the flowering of probiotic Green thinking, and the rediscovery in the 21st century of powerful indigenous and other previously repressed thinking.

Natalie Bennett understands that the foundation of life is cooperation, not competition; that diversity is essential to resilience and health of systems; that humans are just one more species of animal, or, rather, holobiont; that reductionism has to be replaced by relational thinking; that financialising society has destroyed – as it was meant to do – relationships essential to wellbeing; and, perhaps most crucially of all, that we have to draw on the knowledge and wisdom of indigenous societies that have maintained themselves and their environments in healthy balance for tens of thousands of years. This means acknowledging that the time, energy and talents of all life must contribute to a new way for humans to live in balance with the more-than-human world.

This book will appeal to fans of David Graeber, Kate Raworth, Tyson Yunkaporta, Jason Hickel, Anna Tsing, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Ursula Le Guin, Bruno Latour, Wangarii Maathai, Merlin Sheldrake, Vandana Shiva, Lynn Margulis, Kim Stanley Robinson, as well as listeners to the New Books Network, Past Present Future, and HPS podcasts.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whosebook focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Immoral Traffic: An Ethnography of Law, NGOs, and the Governance of Prostitution in India (Cambridge UP, 2025) delves into the complex intersection of India's anti-prostitution law and global anti-trafficking campaigns, and how they impact sex workers in both voluntary and involuntary situations. Immoral Traffic examines the role of legal actors and NGOs in implementing these interventions, revealing the mix of paternalism, humanitarianism, punitive care, bureaucracy, and morality in their efforts. Through a sequence of interventions prescribed by India's anti-prostitution law, the book follows the experiences of sex workers, from rescues to courts to carceral shelters. It sheds light on the ways in which donor-driven NGOs draw upon this law to implement anti-trafficking agendas, and how these interventions are navigated by women removed from the sex trade. Detailed and eye-opening, this book is a valuable resource for scholars and students of anthropology, law and society, gender and sexuality studies, South Asian studies, global studies, and critical studies of NGOs and humanitarianism.

Vibhuti Ramachandran is an anthropologist of law, gender and sexuality, and South Asia. She serves as an Associate Professor at University of California-Irvine's Department of Global and International Studies, School of Social Sciences.

Saumya Dadoo is a PhD Candidate at Columbia University's Department of Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS). Her dissertation focuses on the history of policing and punishment in colonial North India.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 landscapes and ecosystems derive worth from their vulnerability or looming destruction in the era of climate change.

Drawing on a decade of ethnographic research, Dr. Patrick M. Gallagher offers a critical account of market-oriented conservation in the Caribbean that ranges across everyday coastal life, emergent ecological science, and climate policy spaces. He shows how the long material and social histories of racialized colonialism shape the making of technocratic tools for valuing nature. Gallagher traces how new forms of capitalist value emerge from the interaction among colonial pasts, contemporary conservation practices, and vivid scenarios of imminent climate change–driven disaster and loss. He also examines how people and policymakers in Belize imagine and create new ways of life in a changing environment. Ethnographically grounded and rich in theoretical insight, this book illuminates how the Anthropocene environment, newly visible and valuable at the moment of its presumed disappearance, came into being in Belize and around the world.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whosebook focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 expenses: annual out-of-pocket healthcare costs are capped at a few hundred dollars, parents receive monthly payments per child, public education is tuition-free, and pensions are guaranteed. What would this experience teach you about government, work, taxes, and freedom?

In Down and Out in Utopia: Unemployment as Moral Education in Norway(U Toronto Press, 2026), anthropologist Dr. Kelly McKowen explains what happens to those without jobs in one of the world’s wealthiest and most egalitarian countries. Following the daily lives of a diverse group of unemployed individuals during the “oil crash” of the mid-2010s, he shows that being “down and out” in a social democracy offers people a unique moral education with lessons about the nature and value of the state, labor, welfare, and belonging.

Engaging, timely, and illuminating, Down and Out in Utopia makes the case that through social policy, we shape life’s hardships – and these hardships, in turn, shape us and how we view the world.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whosebook focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 workshops create heterotopian spaces that offer participants “transient optimism and virtue realization,” in which individuals experientially exceed their social reality. They perform an idealized sense of self-worth and autonomy, even if these transformations remain short-lived and bounded. Through this volume, Hizi illuminates how self-improvement becomes a constant state of incompleteness, requiring self-validation, in the context of aspiration for a “purified and moral image” of global capitalism.

With a deep appreciation of the moral turn, this book offers insights into Chinese studies, affect studies, anthropology and sociology, by meticulously detailing the lived experiences of person-making amidst globalizing forces and the contradictions inherent in modern aspirations.

Gil Hizi is a sociocultural anthropologist working as a lecturer and researcher at University of Cologne. His research is about ongoing social transformations in China with the focus on concepts of personhood, interpersonal ethics and emotions.

Yadong Li is an anthropologist-in-training. He is a PhD candidate of Socio-cultural Anthropology at Tulane University. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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: Unsettled Sovereignties in Turkey’s Kurdish Borderlands (Stanford UP, 2025) explores anti-smuggling law enforcement and criminal prosecutions to reveal a key site—the criminal court—where borders and claims of sovereignty are simultaneously remade and disrupted.

Taking readers from border villages, mountain passes, and road checkpoints to courtrooms, law offices, and forensic laboratories, Fırat Bozçalı examines how Kurdish smugglers, with the help of their lawyers, legally disrupt state sovereignty in criminal courts. Kurdish smugglers and lawyers adopt and rework procedures, rules, and reasonings in ways that interrupt the courts' capacity to coopt, discipline, and oppress. Bozçalı theorizes this evasive engagement with the legal system as a strategy of techno-legal politics among marginalized and persecuted groups, one that extends beyond the Kurdish case. Smuggling Law holds profound relevance in today's world, where ever-expanding regimes of surveillance, oppression, and dispossession unfold in the broader contexts of the global war on terror and data-driven capitalism.

Fırat Bozçalı is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.