New Books in Anthropology

• Violent Majorities 2.1: Peter Beinart on Long-Distance Israeli Ethnonationalism (LA, AS)

  Political anthropologists Ajantha Subramanian and Lori Allen are back to continue RTB's Violent Majorities series with a set of three episodes on long-distance ethno-nationalism. Today, they speak with Peter Beinart (an editor at Jewish Currents and Professor of Journalism and Political Science at the City University of New York) about his just-released book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning (Knopf, 2025). It aims to mobilize Jewish religious ethics and teachings to reach a Jewish-American audience shaped by Zionism. Beinart seeks to debunk myths that prevent many from realizing that the moral abominations committed against Palestinians are part of the Israeli settler-colonial-nation-state project. Peter is haunted by the fact that some of the most ardent opposition to apartheid in his parents’ country of South Africa came from secular Jewish people, and is troubled by the nationalistic tendency of religiously observant Jews there in the apartheid era. The three also discuss questions of solidarity against and among authoritarians, Israel’s threat to international law, the dangers of minority alliances with majoritarian politics, campus politics, and the importance of seeing Gaza and Palestine as connected to us all. Peter’s Recallable Book is Accepting the Yoke of Heaven: Commentary on the Weekly Torah Portion, by Orthodox scientist, philosopher, and Judaica scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903-1994), who emphasized the idolatry of investing the state with anything more than a supportive role in Jewish life. Mentioned in the Episode: 119 Violent Majorities, Indian and Israeli Ethnonationalism. Episode 2: Natasha Roth-Rowland with Ajantha and Lori Aparna Gopalan, "The Hindu Nationalists Using the Pro-Israel Playbook," Jewish Currents. Isabella Hammad, Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative. Martin Luther King, Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message. The Beinart Notebook podcast Listen and Read Here. 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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• Magic, Death, and Necromancy with Justin McDaniel

  **Warning: This episode contains potentially disturbing content!** On this episode of the Black Beryl, I sit down with Justin McDaniel, a scholar of Theravada Buddhist literature and art. Together we explore the darker side of Thai Buddhism, including meditation on decomposing bodies, fetus spirits, corpse oil, and the spectrum of white and black magic. We discuss the logics of rituals, their role in Thai communities, and how a misfit Catholic punk from Philly found himself in a rural Thai monastery. If you want to hear scholars and practitioners engaging in deep conversations about the dark side of Asian religions and medicines, then subscribe to Black Beryl wherever you get your podcasts. You can also check out our members-only benefits on Substack.com. Enjoy the show! Resources mentioned in this episode: Thai movie Necromancer (2005) Justin McDaniel, The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magical Monk: Practicing Buddhism in Modern Thailand (2011) Justin McDaniel, Architects of Buddhist Leisure: Socially Disengaged Buddhism in Asia’s Museums, Monuments, and Amusement Parks (2018) Justin McDaniel, Wayward Distractions: Ornament, Emotion, Zombies and the Study of Buddhism in Thailand (2021) Justin McDaniel, Cosmologies and Biologies: Illuminated Siamese Manuscripts of Death, Time and the Body (2024) Press coverage of monasticism course Press coverage of existential despair course Pierce Salguero is a transdisciplinary scholar of health humanities who is fascinated by historical and contemporary intersections between Buddhism, medicine, and crosscultural exchange. He has a Ph.D. in History of Medicine from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (2010), and teaches Asian history, medicine, and religion at Penn State University’s Abington College, located near Philadelphia. www.piercesalguero.com. 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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• Eva Van Roekel and Fiona Murphy, "A Collection of Creative Anthropologies" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2024)

  In this NBN episode, I am joined by anthropologists Eva van Roekel (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) and Fiona Murphy (Dublin City University) to talk about theit edited book, A Collection of Creative Anthropologies: Drowning in Blue Light and Other Stories. This beautiful collection brings together a series of creative work of anthropologists who share the art of writing that arises from ‘ordinary’ engagement and reveals its potential for the reimagining of anthropological futures and alternative worlds. This is a collection of creative anthropology anchored in experimentality and encouragement. A book that defies imaginaries of academic convention through the cultivation of a mundus imaginalis requiring moments of pause, of introspection, and of discomfort. This centring of creativity at the heart of anthropology subtly conveys how the complex ethical and moral issues around fieldwork and anthropological theorising can be reflected on through writing otherwise, in creative spaces such as this book. A Collection of Creative Anthropologies fits the current call for radical revisions of the academic canon in anthropology, and the social sciences and humanities more broadly. 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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• Rachel Marie Niehuus, "An Archive of Possibilities: Healing and Repair in Democratic Republic of Congo" (Duke UP, 2024)

  In An Archive of Possibilities: Healing and Repair in Democratic Republic of Congo (Duke UP, 2024), anthropologist and surgeon Rachel Marie Niehuus explores possibilities of healing and repair in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo against a backdrop of 250 years of Black displacement, enslavement, death, and chronic war. Niehuus argues that in a context in which violence characterizes everyday life, Congolese have developed innovative and imaginative ways to live amid and mend from repetitive harm. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and the Black critical theory of Achille Mbembe, Christina Sharpe, Alexis Pauline Gumbs and others, Niehuus explores the renegotiation of relationships with land as a form of public healing, the affective experience of living in insecurity, the hospital as a site for the socialization of pain, the possibility of necropolitical healing, and the uses of prophesy to create collective futures. By considering the radical nature of cohabitating with violence, Niehuus demonstrates that Congolese practices of healing imagine and articulate alternative ways of living in a global regime of antiblackness. Rachel Marie Niehuus is an anthropologist and a surgeon currently on faculty in the Department of Surgery at University of North Carolina. Her next project continues this study of world-making through an analysis of the role of medicine in what might come after the world of Man. Atalia Israeli-Nevo is an anthropology PhD student at the University of Texas at Austin. 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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• Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, "Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement" (Duke UP, 2023)

  Environments associated with migration are often seen as provisional, lacking both history and architecture. As Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi demonstrates in Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement (Duke UP, 2023), a refugee camp’s aesthetic and material landscapes—even if born out of emergency—reveal histories, futures, politics, and rhetorics. She identifies forces of colonial and humanitarian settlement, tracing spatial and racial politics in the Dadaab refugee camps established in 1991 on the Kenya-Somalia border—at once a dense setting that manifests decades of architectural, planning, and design initiatives and a much older constructed environment that reflects its own ways of knowing. She moves beyond ahistorical representations of camps and their inhabitants by constructing a material and visual archive of Dadaab, finding long migratory traditions in the architecture, spatial practices, landscapes, and iconography of refugees and humanitarians. Countering conceptualizations of refugee camps as sites of border transgression, criminality, and placelessness, Siddiqi instead theorizes them as complex settlements, ecologies, and material archives created through histories of partition, sedentarization, domesticity, and migration. This interview was conducted by Dr. Hannah Pool, whose research focuses on human mobilities. She is a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Studies of Societies. 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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