New Books in Anthropology

Interviews with Anthropologists about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

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Episodes

Katie Rose Hejtmanek, "The Cult of CrossFit: Christianity and the American Exercise Phenomenon" (NYU Press, 2025)

CrossFit in the United States has become increasingly popular, around which a fascinating culture has developed which shapes everyday life for the people devoted to it. CrossFit claims to be many things: a business, a brand, a tremendously difficult fitness regimen, a community, a way to gain salvation, and a method to survive the apocalypse. In The Cult of CrossFit: Christianity and the American Exercise Phenomenon (NYU Press, 2025), Dr. Katie Rose Hejtmanek examines how this exercise program i...

Apr 20, 2025•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 361

Christof Lammer, "Performing State Boundaries: Food Networks, Democratic Bureaucracy and China" (Berghahn, 2024)

On the podcast today I am joined by Christof Lammer, a social anthropologist based at the University of Klagenfurt and inherit fellow at Humboldt University of Berlin. Christof is joining me to talk about his new book, Performing State Boundaries: Food Networks, Democratic Bureaucracy and China published in Open Access by Berghahn Books in 2024. The book delves into intricate political processes in an eco-village in Sichuan, revealing the multiple ways in which the boundary between state and non...

Apr 19, 2025•2 hr 42 min•Ep. 110

Political Mythmaking in Nepal

How and why do local political processes in rural Nepal become an arena for political mythmaking? And, how do political myths obscure their own historical construction, thereby making hierarchical power structures appear inevitable? In this episode we discuss these questions with Ankita Shrestha whose ethnographic explorations into these issues foreground the persistent centrality of caste, gender and indigeneity to everyday forms of domination and hierarchy in contemporary rural Nepal. Ankita S...

Apr 18, 2025•33 min•Ep. 244

Agnieszka Pasieka, "Living Right: Far-Right Youth Activists in Contemporary Europe" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Radical nationalism is on the rise in Europe and throughout the world. Living Right: Far-Right Youth Activists in Contemporary Europe (Princeton University Press, 2024) provides an in-depth account of the ideas and practices that are driving the varied forms of far-right activism by young people from all walks of life, revealing how these social movements offer the promise of comradery, purpose, and a moral calling to self-sacrifice, and demonstrating how far-right ideas are understood and lived...

Apr 17, 2025•46 min•Ep. 360