Emma Backe
Claire Laurier
Decoteau, Ancestors and Antiretrovirals: The Biopolitics of HIV/AIDS in
Post-Apartheid South Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
Jorge Benavides
Merill Singer, The Anthropology
of Infectious Diseases (Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2015).
Jeffrey Blomster
George Lau, Andean Expressions:
Art and Archaeology of the Recuay Culture (Iowa City: University of Iowa
Press, 2011).
“Lau uses a social agency approach to objects, looking at
how objects make chiefs in this poorly understood but aesthetically vibrant
civilization. Exploring material culture both from excavations as well as
private collections, Lau's presentation is both innovative and theoretically
engaging.”
Dave Braun
Ditchfield K. 2016, An experimental approach to distinguishing
different stone artefact transport patterns from debitage assemblages. J
Archaeol Sci 65:44-56.
Franklin J,
Potts AJ, Fisher EC, Cowling RM, and Marean CW, 2015. Paleodistribution modeling in archaeology and paleoanthropology.
Quaternary Science Reviews 110:1-14.
Pop CM. 2015, Simulating Lithic Raw Material Variability
in Archaeological Contexts: “A Re-evaluation and Revision of Brantingham’s
Neutral Model. Journal of
Archaeological Method and Theory:1-35.
Haley Bryant
Terry Cook, Evidence, memory, identity, and community: four shifting archival
paradigm. Archival Science, 13.2-3 (2013).
"Archivist Cook advocates for a four-stage co-evolution
of the role of the archivist and the archive. He takes a critical look
at when and where reflexivity entered archival practice and how this has
impacted the production of history from archival materials across time."
Liam Buckley, Objects of Love and Decay: Colonial Photographs in a Postcolonial
Archive. Wiley, 20.2 (2005).
“Buckley challenges the notion that the path from the past
to the present is a straight, visible, and navigable line and situates this
idea as a particularly colonial one. Specifically, he complicates the idea that
archival materials must stand in the present as a testament to past in
perpetuity into the future. Different closely-held interpretations of “past”,
“history”, and “future” (for many and overlapping reasons) lead to differential
treatments of archival materials.”
Alexander Dent
David Foster Wallace, Infinite
Jest (New York: Back Bay Books, 2006).
“This
book explores the addictive power of media.”
Allan Megill, The Prophets of
Extremity (Berkley: University of California Press, 1985).
“This book traces the history of a performative approach to
social life by way of Nietzsche, Derrida, Heidegger, and Foucault.”
Ghonva Ghauri
Stanley I.
Thangaraj, Desi Hoop Dreams: Pickup Basketball and the Making of Asian
American Masculinity (New York: New York University Press,
2015).
Hugh Gusterson
Alisse Waterston, My
Father's Wars (New York: Routledge, 2014).
Alisse Waterston, Love, Sorrow,
Rage: destitute women in a Manhattan residence (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1999).
Corey Heyward
Jon Bernard Marcoux, Pox,
Empire, Shackles, and Hides: The Townsend Site, 1670-1715 (Tuscaloosa:
University of Alabama Press, 2010).
Ella Cara Deloria,
Waterlily (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988)
It's a narrative fiction about a Sioux girl
and her grandmother who are the only ones of their tribe to escape a massacre.
They are adopted by the Dakota, and the book describes the various intricacies
and difficulties that the two women face in learning the new customs and
kinship rules. Deloria is a member of Yankton Dakota, and is a Sioux scholar,
anthropologist, and ethnographer. She also worked with Franz Boas. The book is
a phenomenal and entertaining read.
Becky Hirsch
Rick Bass, The
Hermit’s Story (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002).
Annie
Dillard, “The Wreck of Time”. Harper’s Magazine, (January, 1998).
Jonathan Higman
Pat Shipman, The Invaders: How
Humans and Their Dogs Drove the Neanderthals to Extinction (Cambridge:
Belknap Press, 2015).
Ray Atkinson, The Guns at Last
Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-45 (New York: Henry Holt &
Company, 2013).
Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
(New York: Knopf, 1995).
Susan Johnston
Mike Parker Pearson, Stonehenge: A New
Understanding: solving the
mysteries of the greatest stone age monument (New
York: The Experiment, 2013).
“A terrific overview
of the most recent research written for non-specialists.”
Jackie Cahill-Wilson, Late Iron
Age and 'Roman' Ireland.
“It's
the latest research in what I do.”
Barbara Myerhoff, Peyote Hunt: The Sacred Journey of the Huichol Indians
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974).
“One
of those classic ethnographic books that I've always meant to read.”
Benjamin Zeller, Heaven's
Gate: America's UFO Religion (New York: New York University Press, 2014).
“A really good discussion and analysis of this religion.”
Chloe Ahmann
Sheila
Jasanoff, The Fifth Branch: Science Advisers
as Policymakers (Cambridge, Harvard University
Press, 1998).
Mutual Chemical
Company of America Chromium
Chemicals: Their Discovery, Development, and Use (New York: Mutual Chemical Company of America, 1941) [Found
in the Baltimore Museum of Industry's "Chemical Industry" research
files.]
Mutual Chemical
of America, Chromium Chemicals: Their Uses and Technical Properties
(New York: Mutual Chemical of America, 1941).
Shweta Krishnan
Lucinda Ramberg, Given
to the Goddess (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).
“It recently won awards for best feminist anthropology and
queer anthropology.”
Joel Kuipers
Saba Mahmood, Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962).
Stephen Lubkemann
Baptist, Edward
2014. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American
Capitalism. Basic Books.
"This should be required reading for
every American and if it doesn't win the AHA book award this year it will be a
true crime. Who knew that NYC was so implicated in financing King Cotton that
it tried to secede with the South? Turns a lot of current historiography on its
head--and (consulting my crystal ball) in the next twenty years will be
amplified/scaled up from the American case to the global condition in the 19th
century. Read with Shama's Rough Crossings, it recasts
understandings of US history in the most profound ways."
Bloch, Maurice
2012. Anthropology and the Cognitive Challenge. Cambridge
University Press.
"His most cogent assault on the
anthropological tradition that stretches back to Sapir and takes language as
the strongest analogue for culture. Wish Geertz was still around to think aloud
about this."
Kohn, Eduardo.
2013. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human.
University of California Press.
"Latour's actancy on steroids, still too
early to say much...however an aside-archaeologists may also find something
here to mull over."
Carrier. James and
Kalb, Don (Eds.) 2015. Anthropologies of Class: Power, Practice, and
Inequality.
"Cambridge University Press. Also very
early--but Kalb lays out in the intro a sophisticated case for why class
matters and what it is that rips into the narrow operationalizations that hold
sway and represent a too-often unrecognized departure from Marx and Engels--and
finally the consequences of the discipline's reflexive rejection of 'grand
narratives'. Like Bloch--whether you agree or not--this is the kind of argument
that (in my view) we would benefit from much more of. By the way-also perhaps
the best (or most provocative at least) history of post-WWII anthropology I
have run across. So far 2 essays in and both reach the threshold of 'this
really makes me (re?)think'."
Beth Moretzky
S. Lochlann Jain,
Malignant (Oakland: University of California Press, 2013).
Scott Ross
Louisa Lombard,
"Threat economies and armed conservation in northeastern Central African
Republic," Geoforum (2015).
“The article complicates armed actors being
either rebels or state actors by focusing on the conflict between armed
conservationists and illegal poachers. Lombard also discusses armed actors'
ability to carry out violence and to hide (physically and metaphorically),
which is a useful analytic for studying violence in the rural spaces.”
Robert Shepherd
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
(New York: Viking Press: 1973).
“It is huge, complicated, and one of the great novels ever
written in American English.”
James Ferguson, Give
a Man a Fish (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2015).
“This is an insightful analysis of the
current state of cash transfer payments and a wonderful response to the vacuous
clamor of teaching 'skills' as a way to avoid dependency, a rhetorical claim
usually made by people (such as professors and IR students) who have no clue
how to fish, and indeed would not fish because this is something others do for
you.”
Frederic Gros, A
Philosophy of Walking (London: Verso, 2014).
“We all should
walk.”
Sarah Wagner
Tom Laqueur, The
Work of the Dead (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015)
“Masterpiece.”
Yuting Yin
Herman Hesse:
1. Demian: The Story of Emil Sinclair's Youth (London: Peter Owen & Vision Press, 1960).
2. Siddhartha
(New York: Penguin, 1998)
3. Gertrude (New
York: Picador, 2005)
4. The Glass Bead Game (New York: H Holt, 1969)
“This is not exactly
anthropological- but I fell in love with Hermann Hesse recently. I finished a
couple of his novels. They are great! Hesse's novels are soulful and depict the
journey of an individual's search for authenticity and self-knowledge.”
“I have always believed,
and I still believe, that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way we can
always give it meaning and transform it into something of value.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
