In the contemporary world, ruins, rubble, and decaying material have become increasingly iconic landscapes. They can foster a more layered theory of time, change and memory. The seven ethnographic case studies in Haunting Ruins (Berghahn Books, 2025) trace human engagements with the temporal forces of ruins, which can trace the past and transform the present. Conjuring environmental humanities, the anthropology of history, memory studies, and archaeology, this fascinating new edited volume delve...
Apr 08, 2025•47 min•Ep. 359
Although the history of Indonesian music has received much attention from ethnomusicologists and Western composers alike, almost nothing has been written on the interaction of missionaries with local culture. Missionaries, Anthropologists, and Music in the Indonesian Archipelago (U California Press, 2025) represents the first attempt to concentrate on the musical dimension of missionary activities in Indonesia. In fourteen essays, a group of distinguished scholars show the complexity of the topi...
Apr 07, 2025•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 358
Political rumors and misinformation pollute the political landscape. This is not a recent phenomenon; before the currently rampant and unfounded rumors about a stolen election and vote-rigging, there were other rumors that continued to spread even after they were thoroughly debunked, including doubts about 9/11 (an “inside job”) and the furor over President Obama’s birthplace and birth certificate. If misinformation crowds out the truth, how can Americans communicate with one another about impor...
Apr 06, 2025•45 min•Ep. 150
On the podcast today I am joined by socio-cultural anthropologist, Tuomas Tammisto, who is an academy research fellow in Social Anthropology at Tampere University. Tuomas is joining me to talk about his recently published book, Hard Work: Producing Places, Relations and Value on a Papua New Guinea Resource Frontier (Helsinki UP, 2024) Hard Work examines human-environmental relations, value production, natural resource extraction, and state formation within the context of the Mengen people of Pap...
Apr 06, 2025•2 hr 6 min
How do individuals address serious challenges in a context where organized gatherings are subject to strict government control? This new edited volume brings together a diverse group of scholars to explore the many ways people in China self-organize and create varied forms of coordination to solve important problems. Through compelling, detail-rich case studies, The Extraordinary in the Mundane (Columbia UP, 2024) shows that family structures and networks deeply shape these modes of association....
Apr 05, 2025•49 min
The debate about the impact of colonialism on the prospects for democracy and development continues to rage. Was the legacy of colonialism equally destructive everywhere? Or were some forms of colonial rule more likely to give rise to stable and effective democracies? Join Nic Cheeseman as he talks to Alexander Lee and Jack Paine about their important new book, The Colonial Origins of Democracy and Dictatorship (Cambridge UP, 2024), which makes a compelling new contribution to the debate. Find o...
Apr 02, 2025•36 min•Ep. 27
Despite progressive policy strides in health care reform, immigrant communities continue to experience stark disparities across the United States. In Not All In: Race, Immigration, and Health Care Exclusion in the Age of Obamacare (Johns Hopkins UP, 2025), Tiffany D. Joseph exposes the insidious contradiction of Massachusetts' advanced health care system and the exclusionary experiences of its immigrant communities. Joseph illustrates how patients' race, ethnicity, and legal status determine the...
Apr 02, 2025•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 410
Why does occupation reliably predict political leanings? What is social capitalism, and how does it span income classes? If social capitalists are sincerely committed to equality and “wokeness,” why do they simultaneously benefit from—and perpetuate—the very inequalities they denounce? Join us as we dive into Musa al-Gharbi’s provocative new book, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite (Princeton University Press, 2024). We explore al-Gharbi’s central argument: the d...
Apr 02, 2025•46 min
Experimental Times: Startup Capitalism and Feminist Futures in India (U California Press, 2024) is an in-depth ethnography of the transformation of Bengaluru/Bangalore from a site of "backend" IT work to an aspirational global city of enterprise and innovation. The book journeys alongside the migrant workers, technologists, and entrepreneurs who shape and survive the dreams of a "Startup India" knitted through office work, at networking meetings and urban festivals, and across sites of leisure i...
Mar 31, 2025•42 min•Ep. 411
Syaifudin Zuhri’s book Wali Pitu and Muslim Pilgrimage in Bali, Indonesia: Inventing a Sacred Tradition (Leiden, 2022) is a detailed examination of the recent emergence of the Wali Pitu (“Seven Saints”) tradition in Bali, Indonesia. The study is a multi-sited ethnography of pilgrimage traditions to the grave sites of the Wali Pitu, which is a part of a larger context of rising interest in saint veneration in Indonesia generally, and Muslim religious tourism on the Hindu-majority island of Bali i...
Mar 28, 2025•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 353
Period Matters is a groundbreaking anthology edited by Farah Ahamed that explores the cultural, social, and political dimensions of menstruation in South Asia. Through a diverse collection of essays, personal narratives, poetry, and artwork, the book sheds light on the stigma, myths, and challenges surrounding periods. Featuring contributions from writers, activists, academics, and artists, it examines issues such as menstrual health, period poverty, gender inequality, and sustainable solutions....
Mar 26, 2025•49 min•Ep. 273
Bringing concepts from critical transitional justice and peacebuilding into dialogue with education, Schooling, Conflict and Peace in the Southwestern Pacific: Becoming Enemy Friends (Bristol University Press, 2024) by Dr. David Oakeshott examines the challenges youth and their teachers face in the post-conflict settings of Bougainville and Solomon Islands. Youth in these places must reconcile with the violent past of their parents’ generation while also learning how to live with people once on ...
Mar 26, 2025•50 min•Ep. 94
For generations, American Catholics went faithfully to confession, admitting their sins to a priest and accepting through him God’s forgiveness. The sacrament served as a distinctive marker of Catholic identity, shaping parishioners’ views of their relationship to God, their neighbors, and the wider world. But starting in the 1970s, many abandoned confession altogether. Focusing on the experiences of both laypeople and priests, in For I Have Sinned: The Rise and Fall of Catholic Confession in Am...
Mar 25, 2025•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 37
Most people think about abortion in the context of the country they live in. In the U.S., abortion fuels debate, elections, and legislation. In China, abortion is often treated as a settled issue. Why and how do abortion attitudes vary across the world? In her new book, Fetal Positions: Understanding Cross-National Public Opinion about Abortion (Oxford UP, 2025), Dr. Amy Adamczyk examines the factors influencing cross-national abortion opinion, rates and individual abortion decisions. She invest...
Mar 24, 2025•1 hr•Ep. 759
Big-time college football promises prestige, drama, media attention, and money. Yet most athletes in this unpaid, amateur system encounter a different reality, facing dangerous injuries, few pro-career opportunities, a free but devalued college education, and future financial instability. In one of the first ethnographies about Black college football players, anthropologist Tracie Canada reveals the ways young athletes strategically resist the exploitative systems that structure their everyday l...
Mar 22, 2025•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 353
In this episode of Radio ReOrient, Claudia Radiven and Saeed Khan spoke to Dr Yunis Alam about cars, class and race. They discussed the role that cars play in signifying meaning in terms of status, wealth and taste. These conversations extended to the racialization of car culture in cities like Bradford (UK) and the relationship to criminalization of Muslims. Yunis is Head of Department of Sociology and Criminology, at the University of Bradford. He has particular interests in public sociology, ...
Mar 22, 2025•1 hr 1 min
Boaters of London is an ethnography that delves into the process of becoming a boater, adopting an alternative lifestyle on the water and the political impact that this travelling population has on the state. London and the Southeast of England in general is home to many people and families who live on narrowboats, cruisers and barges, along a network of canals and rivers. Many of these 'boaters' move from place to place every two weeks and form itinerant communities in the heart of some of the ...
Mar 21, 2025•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 352
The Routledge Handbook of Urban Cultural Planning (Routledge, 2024) provides a manual for planning for arts and culture in cities, featuring chapters and case studies from Africa, the Americas, Australasia, the Middle East, South and East Asia, and more. The handbook is organized around seven themes: arts and planning for equity and social development; incorporating culture in urban planning; the intersection of creative and cultural industries and tourism planning; financing; public buildings, ...
Mar 20, 2025•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 46
Religion in the twenty-first century is alive and well across the world, despite its apparent decline in North America and parts of Europe. Vigorous competition between and within religious movements has led to their accumulating great power and wealth. Religions in many traditions have honed their competitive strategies over thousands of years. Today, they are big business; like businesses, they must recruit, raise funds, disburse budgets, manage facilities, organize transportation, motivate em...
Mar 19, 2025•1 hr 14 min
China’s breathtaking economic development has been driven by bureaucrats. Even as the country transitioned away from socialist planning toward a market economy, the economic bureaucracy retained a striking degree of influence and control over crafting and implementing policy. Yet bureaucrats are often dismissed as faceless and inconsequential, their role neglected in favor of party leaders’ top-down rule or bottom-up initiatives....
Mar 18, 2025•49 min•Ep. 410
For most of human history, we were rural folk. Our daily lives were bound up with working the land, living within the rhythm of the seasons. We poured our energies into growing food, tending to animals and watching the weather. Family, friends and neighbours were often one and the same. Life revolved around the village and its key spaces and places – the church, the green, the school and the marketplace. And yet rural life is oddly invisible our historical records. The daily routine of the peasa...
Mar 17, 2025•32 min•Ep. 162
The vast majority of people who stream themselves playing videogames online do so with few or no viewers. In Streaming by the Rest of Us: Microstreaming Videogames on Twitch (MIT Press, 2025) Dr. Mia Consalvo, Dr. Marc Lajeunesse, and Dr. Andrei Zanescu investigate who they are, why they do so, and why this form of leisure activity is important to understand. Unlike the esports athletes and streaming superstars who receive the lion's share of journalistic and academic attention, microstreamers a...
Mar 17, 2025•43 min•Ep. 42
Memoirs attract millions of readers with their compelling life stories, vivid details, and often startling revelations. Beyond entertainment value, however, Margaret K. Nelson argues that memoirs hold potential as powerful resources for sociologists to engage with, analyze, and teach. Sociology Meets Memoir is a short and accessible guide to the significance of memoirs for the field of sociology, from their many possible uses to the numerous challenges they pose. This guide enables sociologists ...
Mar 16, 2025•49 min•Ep. 409
Eco-anxiety. Climate guilt. Pre-traumatic stress disorder. Solastalgia. The study of environmental emotions and related mental health impacts is a rapidly growing field, but most researchers overlook a closely related concern: reproductive anxiety. Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question (U California Press, 2024) is the first comprehensive study of how environmental emotions influence whether, when, and why people today decide to become parents—or not. Jade S. Sasser argues that we can and should ...
Mar 15, 2025•1 hr•Ep. 205
Why have dynamic and shifting hairstyles, from Katniss Everdeen’s Power Plait to JoJo Siwa’s outsize bows, become such a significant part of how girlhood is articulated in contemporary visual cultures? What do they tell us about how girlhood combines the qualities of resilience and sparkle needed to survive and thrive in turbulent post-recessionary times? Drawing together analysis of popular film franchises, Disney animation, ground-breaking TV shows, music videos, girl celebrity personas and gl...
Mar 14, 2025•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 147
What is the future of reading? In Reading Audio Readers: Book Consumption in the Digital Age (Bloombury, 2024), Karl Berglund, Assistant Professor in Literature at Department of Literature and Rhetoric at Upsala University, examines the rise of audiobooks as a new mode of reading books. The analysis draws on digital humanities methods and a detailed industry case study to show who are the readers of audiobooks, how those readers engage and consume books, what sort of genres are most popular, and...
Mar 13, 2025•39 min•Ep. 517
Everyday items found at the sites of atrocities possess a striking emotional force. Victims’ garments, broken glasses, wallets, shoes, and other such personal property that are recovered from places of death including concentration camps, mass graves, and prisons have become staples of memorial museums, exhibited to the public as material testimony in order to evoke sympathy and promote human rights. How do these objects take on such power, and what are the benefits and pitfalls of deploying the...
Mar 11, 2025•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 63
Today I’m speaking with Chryl Laird, Associate Professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland College Park. We are discussing her co-authored book with Ismail White, Steadfast Democrats: How Social Forces Shape Black Political Behavior. Published in 2020, this book remains highly relevant for understanding American political behavior. While Trump did make significant gains among black voters in 2024, particularly male voters, African American voters still overwhelmingly suppo...
Mar 10, 2025•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 115
Mass violence comes not only from states, but also from people. By analyzing mass violence as social interaction through survivor accounts and other sources, Conditions of Violence (de Gruyter, 2024) presents understudied agents, aims and practices of direct violence and ways of action of those under persecution. Sound history – examining the noises of mass violence and persecution – is particularly telling about such practices. This volume shows that violence can become socially hegemonic, and ...
Mar 06, 2025•39 min•Ep. 220
Aiming to explore the Sino-Tibetan border region, which is renamed “Shangri-La” by the Chinese government for tourism promotion, Crafting a Tibetan Terroir (U Washington Press, 2025) examines how the deployment of the French notion of terroir creates new forms of ethno-regional identities and village landscapes through the production of Tibetan wine as a commodity. In Shangri-La, a rapidly developing international ethno-travel destination, European histories and global capitalism are being reest...
Mar 06, 2025•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 350
