God in the Machine

The Ganesh Yourself Experiment

Emmanuel Grimaud

A teleoperated robot roaming in the streets of Mumbai enables anyone to put oneself in the place of the Hindu god Ganesha and have a conversation. God in the Machine explores the Ganesh Yourself experiment, a fascinating exercise in anthropology that leads to a radical deconstruction of religion, politics, and technology.

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Theory and Methodology Sociology

Water, Scale and Materiality

Anthropological Perspectives on Hydrosocial Relations

Edited by Veronica Strang and Franz Krause

Anthropology plays a key role in articulating people’s engagement with water and showing how local relationships with waterways and marine areas translate into larger impacts on regional and global ecosystems. Traversing Scales in Material Relations with Water explores diverse relationships with waterbodies, and considers how these are expressed in art, material culture, and infrastructures.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General) Sustainable Development Goals

Single Mother by Choice

A Story of Politics and Parenting in Twenty-first Century Middle America

Linda L. Layne

Single Mother by Choice chronicles the journey of Ann, a 41-year-old woman throughout her intensive mothering of three donor-conceived children from infancy to tween years. This analysis of one family’s life illuminates the complexities of twenty-first, middle-class American motherhood, whether single or not, and the synergies between 2^nd wave feminism and neoliberalism.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality Sociology

Practices of Care in an Italian Eating Disorder Clinic

Rethinking Food, Family and Ethics

Giulia Sciolli

The relational complexities between food and kinship are highlighted in eating disorders. This book is an ethnographic account of a public treatment centre for eating disorders in Italy, examining how food and family emerge aligned in the production and treatment of these conditions.

Subjects: Medical Anthropology Food & Nutrition Sociology

Decentering Anthropology, by Way of Malinowski

Critical Perspectives on Power, Place and Colonialism

Edited by Chandana Mathur and Dorothy L. Zinn

Through reference to one of its most canonical figures: Bronislaw Malinowski, this volume de-centres anthropology seemingly in a paradox. Featuring scholars across various locations, genders and generations, this book neither celebrates nor “cancels” Malinowski. Instead, it offers an eccentric space of reconsideration and a prism for reflecting on power configurations in anthropology today.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Theory and Methodology

Zora Neale Hurston

Ana Gretel Echazú Böschemeier and Peti Mama Gomes

Exploring Zora Neale Hurston’s life and work through a decolonial lens, this book traces Hurston’s journey from her early life (1891–1919) and struggles at the margins (1920–1930) to her peak as a pioneering ethnographer and writer (1931–1956) and her later years (1957–1960).

Subject: Anthropology (General)

Occupied Istanbul

Urban Politics, Culture and Society, 1918-1923

Edited by Yaşar Tolga Cora, Daniel-Joseph MacArthur-Seal and Gizem Tongo

British, French, and Italian forces arrived in Istanbul in 1918, marking the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War. An almost five-year-long occupation of the city followed, a period largely ignored in history writing and marginalised in Anatolia-centric narratives of the Turkish War of Independence. By bringing this tumultuous period back into focus, this book makes a significant contribution to First World War studies, research on European imperialism, and the modern history of Istanbul, Turkey, and the Middle East.

Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present History: World War I

The Politics of Appointment

The Czech Minister and the Transformation of Habsburg Administration

Martin Klečacký

A unique study on the relationship between state administration and politics, examining how the office of the Czech Landsmannminister became the primary vehicle for the politicization of the Habsburg state.

Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

Entangled Reactionaries

Nationalists, Conservatives, and Fascists in the Iberoamerican Atlantic (1900-1960)

Edited by Xosé M. Núñez Seixas and Vicent Sanz Rozalén

Between 1898 and 1939, Spain saw the emergence of political and social identities shaped by the concepts of Hispanidad, catholicism, race, tradition and the Spanish language. This collection explores how such identities were reshaped during Spain’s major political shifts and how they intersected with Latin American discourses.

Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

The Hunted

The Holocaust through the Experiences of Twenty European Jews

Susan Welch

A ground-level history of the Holocaust, told through the voices of twenty European Jews. Drawing from diaries and memoirs, it reveals a multiplicity of experiences across countries, classes, and religious backgrounds. Each chapter traces a single year in the protagonists’ lives, placing personal decisions within the context shifting Nazi policies.

Subjects: Jewish Studies Genocide History History: World War II

Pedagogies of Value

Marketing Foreign Goods in China

Máximo Badaró

Pedagogies of Value explores how China is reshaping global hierarchies of worth. This book investigates how value is taught, contested, and transformed in everyday encounters and reveals how foreign intermediary attempts to ‘educate’ Chinese consumers only confronts shifting power dynamics that challenge Western authority.

Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General)

Terrorism in Question

Decolonizing Anthropology and the Study of Islam

Irfan Ahmad

Terrorism in Question crafts a political anthropology of post-9/11 “new terrorism” by investigating who needs the category of terrorists and offering a global framework to understand anthropology, Islam and terrorism. Marshalling fieldwork, participant observation and encounters with terrorists, this book aims to exemplify knowledge decolonized.

Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology of Religion Peace and Conflict Studies

Pierre Fatumbi Verger

From Detached Look to Knowledge through Initiation

Jérôme Souty

With biographical undertones, Pierre Verger: From Detached Look to Knowledge through Initiation is an anthropological essay that offers a singular and nuanced reflection on the originality and scope of Pierre Verger’s experience as a photographer in search of otherness in the black cultures of Africa and Brazil and the transatlantic world of the Orisha Vodun deities.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Sociology

Authoritarianism, Displacement and Syrian Family Life

Reckoning with the State

Birgitte Stampe Holst

Authoritarianism, Displacement and Syrian Family Life analyses how Syrians living in refuge in Lebanon and Turkey during the war in Syria continued to reckon with the Syrian State as a direct and indirect force in their lives. Through an ethnographic account of everyday life in Syrian families with a variety of political standpoints, the book demonstrates how the experience of displacement was shaped by ongoing deliberations and provides new perspectives on displacement in a Middle East context.

Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Refugee and Migration Studies

Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining Formalization in Ghana

A Decolonial and Legal Pluralist Analysis

Linda Mensah

The historical emergence of centralised mineral resource governance in Ghana can be tied to its failed colonially transplanted legal system. This book offers a reflection of artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) formalisation, with a focus on its complex operationalisation in formerly colonized societies, to consider environmental responsibility and accountability in the administration of access to mineral rights.

Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Colonial History Sustainable Development Goals

The Inequity of Caribbean Spaces and Designed Places

Race, Class and Gender

Edited by Ian Bethell-Bennett and Jessica Minnis

Through interconnected perspectives on environment, gender inequality, identity and Caribbean spatial re-colonisation influences on social, cultural and environmental landscapes, The Inequity of Caribbean Spaces and Designed Places: Race, Class and Gender examines socio-spatial (in)justices beyond physical and geographical boundaries that Caribbean societies face.

Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology Cultural Studies (General)