Figures of Freedom: Representations of Agency in a Time of Crisis takes on the idea and terminology of freedom, examining our understanding of this concept and our relationship to the word itself as well as what it means to society, culture, and politics. Randy Laist and Brian A. Dixon, two scholars who often explore popular culture to better understand the society and politics all around us, have brought their admirable skills to Figures of Freedom, where they have assembled a broad array of co...
Apr 27, 2025•50 min
In The Grammar of Time: A Toolbox for Comparative Historical Analysis (Cambridge UP, 2023), political scientist Marcus Kreuzer synthesises the different strands and traditions of Comparative Historical Analysis to show how interpretive and positivist research designs might complement rather than compete with one another. Like the contents of the book, our discussion on this episode of New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science is wide-ranging and lively, addressing topics like the ma...
Apr 26, 2025•57 min•Ep. 21
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 25, 2025•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 361
Boldly going where few fandom scholars have gone before, Fandom for Us, by Us: The Pleasures and Practices of Black Audiences (NYU Press, 2025) breaks from our focus on white fandom to center Black fandoms. Alfred L. Martin, Jr., engages these fandoms through what he calls the “four C’s”: class, clout, canon, and comfort. Class is a key component of how Black fandom is contingent on distinctions between white, nationally recognized cultural productions and multicultural and/or regional cultural ...
Apr 24, 2025•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 152
Gangnam is an exclusive zone of privilege and wealth that has lured South Korean pop culture industries since the 1980s and fueled the aspirations of Seoul’s middle class, producing in its wake the “dialectical images” of the modern city described by Walter Benjamin: sweet dreams and nightmares, visions of heaven and hell, scenes of spectacular rises and great falls. In Polarizing Dreams: Gangnam and Popular Culture in Globalizing Korea (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2024), Pil Ho Kim weaves toge...
Apr 23, 2025•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 16
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 22, 2025•1 hr 42 min•Ep. 110
In uncertain times, confronting pressing problems such as racial oppression and the environmental crisis requires everyday people to come together and wield political power for the greater good. Yet, as Michael Rosino shows in Democracy Is Awkward (UNC Press, 2025), progressive political organizations in the United States have frequently failed to achieve social change. Why? Rosino posits that it is because of the unwillingness of white progressives at the grassroots level to share power with pr...
Apr 21, 2025•28 min•Ep. 202
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 20, 2025•46 min•Ep. 360
How do corporations use theater to reconcile the crises of late capitalism? In our latest interview on Ethnographic Marginalia, we speak with Dr. Sarah Saddler about her new book Performing Corporate Bodies (Routledge, 2024), where she describes how corporations have borrowed techniques from activist theater to manage their workers in India and beyond. Sarah explains how she came to ethnographic techniques from a theater background, before discussing how she managed the challenges and misunderst...
Apr 19, 2025•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 20
In Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism: South Africa in the Chinese Century (Duke UP, 2024), Mingwei Huang traces the development of new forms of racial capitalism in the twenty-first century. Through fieldwork in one of the “China malls” that has emerged along Johannesburg’s former mining belt, Huang identifies everyday relations of power and difference between Chinese entrepreneurs and African migrant workers in these wholesale shops. These relations, Huang contends, replicate and perpetuate globa...
Apr 18, 2025•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 525
Every year, millions of public school students are suspended. This overused punishment removes students from the classroom, but it does not improve their behavior. Instead, suspension disrupts their education, harming the students, their families, and their schools. Black students suffer most within this broken system, experiencing a far greater risk of school punishment and the significant harms that accompany it. Many activists and scholars have considered how school punishment increases racia...
Apr 17, 2025•28 min•Ep. 249
In Occult Hunting and Supernatural Play in Japan (Hawaii 2024), Laura Miller examines the intersections of ludic capitalism with formal and informal religious practices and beliefs in contemporary Japan. Miller shows that women―often younger women―are the primary drivers of industries of religiously flavored entertainment that offer avenues of self-exploration and spiritual capital that are marketed to appeal first and foremost to women “hunters” engaged in supernatural play. Miller’s eclectical...
Apr 16, 2025•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 169
How do young people use digital platforms? In The Kids are Online: Confronting the Myths and Realities of Young Digital Life (U California Press, 2025), Ysabel Gerrard, a Senior Lecturer in Digital Media and Society at the University of Sheffield explores the understandings and experience of young people as they navigate both the online and offline world. Drawing on a range of sociological, digital and creative methods, the book punctures many myths around young people’s digital lives, showing b...
Apr 15, 2025•41 min•Ep. 524
How do we acquire knowledge about societies? Does how we acquire social knowledge shape what we know? How conscious must we be of our own experiences as we do our research? What does feminism add to our methods and modes of research? Now in its second edition, Feminist Ethnography: Thinking through Methodologies, Challenges, and Possibilities (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022) by Drs. Crista Craven and Dána-Ain Davis answers these questions. The book is at once a how-to manual for doing feminist eth...
Apr 14, 2025•56 min•Ep. 764
Today I’m speaking with Asad L. Asad, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Stanford University. He is the author of Engage and Evade: How Latino Immigrant Families Manage Surveillance in Everyday Life (Princeton UP, 2023). A highly relevant book, Engage and Evade documents the interactions between undocumented people and the agents and institutions of government. One might expect undocumented people to avoid the IRS, but as Asad demonstrates, many engage with government institutions in the hopes ...
Apr 13, 2025•52 min•Ep. 115
Have you ever noticed that in areas of everyday life, rather than being addressed like a mature adult, you're increasingly treated like an irresponsible child in constant need of instruction and protection? Noticing society's creeping descent into infantilisation is one thing, however understanding the roots and causes of the phenomenon is not quite so easy. But in this topical and vitally important new work, cultural theorist and academic, Dr Keith Hayward, exposes the deep social, psychologica...
Apr 12, 2025•41 min•Ep. 140
Liberal democracy in America has always contained contradictions—most notably, a noble but abstract commitment to freedom, justice, and equality that, tragically, has seldom been realized in practice. While these contradictions have caused dissent and even violence, there was always an underlying and evolving solidarity drawn from the cultural resources of America’s “hybrid Enlightenment.” James Davison Hunter, who introduced the concept of “culture wars” thirty years ago, tells us in Democracy ...
Apr 11, 2025•39 min•Ep. 139
What does the history of Liverpool tell us about the future of Britain? In Liverpool and the Unmaking of Britain (Bloomsbury, 2025), Sam Wetherall, a Senior Lecturer in the History of Britain and the World at the University of York, tells the story of the city through the lens of ‘obsolesce’. This powerful framework structures a narrative that sees the story of Liverpool as both one of state ineffectiveness, indifference, and brutality, and one of solidarity and alternative forms of community an...
Apr 10, 2025•53 min•Ep. 521
In Against the Crisis: Economy and Ecology in a Burning World (Verso, 2024), Ståle Holgersen develops a conceptualization of 'crisis' that moves beyond simplistic understandings of societal turbulence or even disaster, arguing that crises have come to mean something very specific. Where previous analyses have treated economic and ecological crises as separate phenomena, Holgersen reveals their profound interconnection within capitalism's contradictions. Central to the book is the idea that both ...
Apr 09, 2025•55 min•Ep. 522
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
