New Books in Anthropology

• Is a River Alive?: A Conversation with Robert Macfarlane

  Hailed in the New York Times as "a naturalist who can unfurl a sentence with the breathless ease of a master angler," Robert Macfarlane brings his glittering style to a profound work of travel writing, reportage, and natural history. Is a River Alive? (W.W. Norton, 2025) is a joyful, mind-expanding exploration of an ancient, urgent idea: that rivers are living beings who should be recognized as such in imagination and law. Macfarlane takes readers on three unforgettable journeys teeming with extraordinary people, stories, and places: to the miraculous cloud-forests and mountain streams of Ecuador, to the wounded creeks and lagoons of India, and to the spectacular wild rivers of Canada--imperiled respectively by mining, pollution, and dams. Braiding these journeys is the life story of the fragile chalk stream a mile from Macfarlane's house, a stream who flows through his own years and days. Powered by dazzling prose and lit throughout by other minds and voices, Is a River Alive? will open hearts, challenge perspectives, and remind us that our fate flows with that of rivers--and always has. Robert Macfarlane's best-selling books include Is a River Alive? and Underland. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages and has won many prizes around the world. He is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Darius Cuplinskas is director at The Ideas Workshop of the Open Society Foundations. He is based in London. 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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• Paulette F. C. Steeves, "The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere" (U Nebraska Press, 2021)

  The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere (U Nebraska Press, 2021) is a reclaimed history of the deep past of Indigenous people in North and South America during the Paleolithic. Paulette F. C. Steeves mines evidence from archaeology sites and Paleolithic environments, landscapes, and mammalian and human migrations to make the case that people have been in the Western Hemisphere not only just prior to Clovis sites (10,200 years ago) but for more than 60,000 years, and likely more than 100,000 years. Steeves discusses the political history of American anthropology to focus on why pre-Clovis sites have been dismissed by the field for nearly a century. She explores supporting evidence from genetics and linguistic anthropology regarding First Peoples and time frames of early migrations. Additionally, she highlights the work and struggles faced by a small yet vibrant group of American and European archaeologists who have excavated and reported on numerous pre-Clovis archaeology sites. In this first book on Paleolithic archaeology of the Americas written from an Indigenous perspective, The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere includes Indigenous oral traditions, archaeological evidence, and a critical and decolonizing discussion of the development of archaeology in the Americas. To learn more about Steeves’ research, please visit The Indigenous Paleolithic Database of the Americas at https://tipdba.com/. This interview was conducted by Lukas Rieppel, a historian at Brown University. You can learn more about his research 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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• Marc Sommers, "We the Young Fighters: Pop Culture, Terror, and War in Sierra Leone" (U Georgia Press, 2023)

  We the Young Fighters: Pop Culture, Terror, and War in Sierra Leone (U Georgia Press, 2023) by Dr. Marc Sommers is at once a history of a nation, the story of a war, and the saga of downtrodden young people and three pop culture superstars. Reggae idol Bob Marley, rap legend Tupac Shakur, and the John Rambo movie character all portrayed an upside-down world, where those in the right are blamed while the powerful attack them. Their collective example found fertile ground in the West African nation of Sierra Leone, where youth were entrapped, inequality was blatant, and dissent was impossible.When warfare spotlighting diamonds, marijuana, and extreme terror began in 1991, military leaders exploited the trio’s transcendent power over their young fighters and captives. Once the war expired, youth again turned to Marley for inspiration and Tupac for friendship.Thoroughly researched and accessibly written, We the Young Fighters probes terror-based warfare and how Tupac, Rambo, and—especially—Bob Marley wove their way into the fabric of alienation, resistance, and hope in Sierra Leone. The tale of pop culture heroes radicalizing warfare and shaping peacetime underscores the need to engage with alienated youth and reform predatory governments. The book ends with a framework for customizing the international response to these twin challenges. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. 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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• Allison Christine Meier, "Grave" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

  Grave (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Allison C. Meier takes a ground-level view of how burial sites have transformed over time and how they continue to change. As a cemetery tour guide, Meier has spent more time walking among tombstones than most. Even for her, the grave has largely been invisible, an out of the way and unobtrusive marker of death. However, graves turn out to be not always so subtle, reverent, or permanent. While the indigent and unidentified have frequently been interred in mass graves, a fate brought into the public eye during the COVID-19 pandemic, the practice today is not unlike burials in the potter's fields of the colonial era. Burial is not the only option, of course, and Meier analyzes the rise of cremation, green burial, and new practices like human composting, investigating what is next for the grave and how existing spaces of death can be returned to community life. This book is part of Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused 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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• Elizabeth Anne Davis, "The Time of the Cannibals: On Conspiracy Theory and Context" (Fordham UP, 2024)

  In 2009, the body of a former president of the Republic of Cyprus, Tassos Papadopoulos, was stolen from his grave. The Time of the Cannibals reconsiders this history and the public discourse on it to reconsider how we think about conspiracy theory, and specifically, what it means to understand conspiracy theories “in context.” The months after Papadopoulos’s body was stolen saw intense public speculation in Cyprus, including widespread expressions of sacrilege, along with many false accusations against Cypriots and foreigners positioned as his political antagonists. Davis delves into the public discourse on conspiracy theory in Cyprus that flourished in the aftermath, tracing theories about the grave robbery to theories about the division of Cyprus some thirty-five years earlier, and both to longer histories of imperial and colonial violence. Along the way, Davis explores cross-contextual connections among Cyprus and other locales, in the form of conspiracy theories as well as political theologies regarding the dead bodies of political leaders. Through critical close readings of academic and journalistic approaches to conspiracy theory, Davis shows that conspiracy theory as an analytic object fails to sustain comparative analysis, and defies any general theory of conspiracy theory. What these approaches accomplish instead, she argues, is the perpetuation of ethnocentrism in the guise of contextualization. The Time of the Cannibals: On Conspiracy Theory and Context (Fordham UP, 2024) asks what better kind of contextualization this and any “case” call for, and proposes the concept of conspiracy attunement: a means of grasping the dialogic contexts in which conspiracy theories work recursively as matters of political and cultural significance in the long durée. Elizabeth Anne Davis is Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. Her research and writing, grounded in the European horizons and the Ottoman history of the Greek-speaking world, focus on the intersections of psyche, body, history, and power. She is also the author of Bad Souls: Madness and Responsibility in Modern Greece (2012, Duke Press) and Artifactual: Forensic and Documentary Knowing (2023, Duke Press). Yadong Li is a socio-cultural anthropologist-in-training. He is registered as a PhD student at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of economic anthropology, development studies, hope studies, and ecological anthropology. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found 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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