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New Books in Anthropology

By: New Books Network
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  • Summary

  • Interviews with Anthropologists about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology
    New Books Network
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Episodes
  • Neena Mahadev, "Karma and Grace: Religious Difference in Millennial Sri Lanka" (Columbia UP, 2023)

    Neena Mahadev, "Karma and Grace: Religious Difference in Millennial Sri Lanka" (Columbia UP, 2023)
    Jul 6 2024
    Around the turn of the millennium, Pentecostal churches began to pepper majority-Buddhist Sri Lanka, setting off a sense of alarm among Buddhists who saw Christianity as a neocolonial threat to the nation. Rumors of foul play in the death of a Buddhist monk, as well as allegations of proselytizing in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami and during the final stages of civil war, spurred nationalist anxieties, moral panics, and even episodes of violence by Buddhists against Christians suspected of facilitating “unethical” conversions. Through vivid ethnography and keen observations of media events, Karma and Grace: Religious Difference in Millennial Sri Lanka (Columbia UP, 2023) illuminates disputes over religious freedom and pluralism amid the rise of charismatic Christianity in Sri Lanka. Neena Mahadev explores the dueling efforts of Buddhist nationalists and Christian evangelists to reshape Sri Lanka’s religious, economic, and political landscapes. She considers theological and political impasses between Buddhism’s vast timescales of karma and Christians’ promises of the immediacy of their God’s salvific grace. While Christian missions spread “the Good News,” subsets of Buddhists produced bad press, sting operations, and disparaging media to impede born-again churches from taking root. In gripping detail, Mahadev recounts how modernist and traditionalist Theravāda Buddhists, Pentecostal newcomers, long-established Christian denominations, local deity and spirit cults, and the innovations of mavericks intermingle in a multireligious public sphere. Even amid trenchant conflicts, Karma and Grace demonstrates that social proximity between rivals is also conducive to religious experimentation and the ambiguities of identity that allow Sri Lankans to live with difference. Neena Mahadev is an assistant professor of anthropology at Yale-NUS College and holds a courtesy appointment with the National University of Singapore. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology
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    1 hr and 24 mins
  • Jessie Abrahams, "Schooling Inequality: Aspirations, Opportunities and the Reproduction of Social Class" (Bristol UP, 2024)

    Jessie Abrahams, "Schooling Inequality: Aspirations, Opportunities and the Reproduction of Social Class" (Bristol UP, 2024)
    Jul 6 2024
    Despite a mass expansion of the higher education sector in the UK since the 1960s, young people from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds remain less likely to enter university than their advantaged counterparts. Drawing on unique new research gathered from three contrasting secondary schools in England, including interviews with children from three year groups and careers advisors, Schooling Inequality: Aspirations, Opportunities and the Reproduction of Social Class (Bristol University Press, 2024) by Dr. Jessie Abrahams explores the aspirations, opportunities and experiences of young people from different social-class backgrounds against a backdrop of continuing inequalities in education. By focusing both on the stories of young people and the schools themselves, the book sheds light on the institutional structures and practices that render young people more, or less, able to pursue their aspirations. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology
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    56 mins
  • Amanda McMillan Lequieu, "Who We Are Is Where We Are: Making Home in the American Rust Belt" (Columbia UP, 2024)

    Amanda McMillan Lequieu, "Who We Are Is Where We Are: Making Home in the American Rust Belt" (Columbia UP, 2024)
    Jul 5 2024
    Half a century ago, deindustrialization gutted blue-collar jobs in the American Midwest. But today, these places are not ghost towns. People still call these communities home, even as they struggle with unemployment, poverty, and other social and economic crises. Why do people remain in declining areas through difficult circumstances? What do their choices tell us about rootedness in a time of flux? Through the cases of the former steel manufacturing hub of southeast Chicago and a shuttered mining community in Iron County, Wisconsin, Amanda McMillan Lequieu traces the power and shifting meanings of the notion of home for people who live in troubled places. Building from on-the-ground observations of community life, archival research, and interviews with long-term residents, she shows how inhabitants of deindustrialized communities balance material constraints with deeply felt identities. McMillan Lequieu maps how the concept of home has been constructed and the ways it has been reshaped as these communities have changed. She considers how long-term residents navigate the tensions around belonging and making ends meet long after the departure of their community’s founding industry. In Who We Are Is Where We Are: Making Home in the American Rust Belt (Columbia UP, 2024), Amanda McMillan Lequieu links the past and the present, rural and urban, to shed new light on life in postindustrial communities. Beyond a story of Midwestern deindustrialization, this timely book provides broader insight into the capacious idea of home—how and where it is made, threatened, and renegotiated in a world fraught with change. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is in the areas of social construction of experience, identity, and place. He is currently conducting research for his next project that looks at nightlife and the emotional labor that is performed by employees of bars and nightclubs. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology
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    42 mins
Social Sciences Science
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