2021
Multisituated - Ethnography as Diasporic Praxis
Kaushik Sunder Rajan
In Multisituated Kaushik Sunder Rajan evaluates the promises and potentials of multisited ethnography with regard to contemporary debates around decolonizing anthropology and the university. He observes that at the current moment, anthropology is increasingly peopled by diasporic students and researchers, all of whom are accountable to multiple communities beyond the discipline.
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American Afterlives: Reinventing Death in the Twenty-First Century
Shannon Dawdy
Death in the United States is undergoing a quiet revolution. You can have your body frozen, dissected, composted, dissolved, or tanned. Your family can incorporate your remains into jewelry, shotgun shells, paperweights, and artwork. Cremations have more than doubled, and DIY home funerals and green burials are on the rise. American Afterlives is Shannon Lee Dawdy’s lyrical and compassionate account of changing death practices in America as people face their own mortality and search for a different kind of afterlife.
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Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern - Political Oratory and the Social Imaginary in South Asia
E. Annamalai, Francis Cody, Malarvizhi Jayanth, and Constantine V. Nakassis (eds)
Throughout history, speech and storytelling have united communities and mobilized movements. Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern examines this phenomenon in Tamil-speaking South India over the last three centuries, charting the development of political oratory and its influence on society. Supplementing his narrative with thorough archival work, Bernard Bate begins with Protestant missionaries' introduction of the sermonic genre and takes the reader through its local vernacularization.
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The Future of Fallout, and Other Episodes in Radioactive World-Making
Joseph Masco
The Future of Fallout, and Other Episodes in Radioactive World-Making (2021, Duke University Press) gathers writings that examine the strange American intimacy with and commitment to existential danger. Tracking the simultaneous production of nuclear emergency and climate disruption since 1945, Masco focuses on the psychosocial accommodations as well as the technological revolutions that have produced these linked planetary scale disasters.
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