Christa Kuljian, "Our Science, Ourselves: How Gender, Race, and Social Movements Shaped the Study of Science" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)

The ethnic Chinese have had a long and problematic history in Indonesia, commonly stereotyped as a market-dominant minority with dubious political loyalty toward Indonesia. For over three decades under Suharto’s New Order regime, a cultural assimilation policy banned Chinese languages, cultural expression, schools, media, and organizations. This policy was only abolished in 1998 following the riots and anti-Chinese attacks that preceded the fall of the New Order. In the post-Suharto era, Chinese Indonesians were finally free to assert their Chineseness again. But how does an ethnic group recover from the trauma of assimilation and regain a lost cultural identity? Memories of Unbelonging: Ethnic Chinese Identity Politics in Post-Suharto Indonesia (U Hawaii Press, 2023) is an ethnographic study of how collective memories of state-sponsored ethnic discrimination have shaped Chinese identity politics in Indonesia. Combining case studies, in-depth primary data, and incisive analysis of Indonesia’s contemporary political landscape, anthropologist Charlotte Setijadi argues that trauma narratives are at the core of modern Chinese identity politics. Examining spaces and domains such as residential enclaves, educational institutions, the creative arts, and politics, this book paints a vivid picture of how different generations of Chinese Indonesians make sense of their historical trauma, ethnic identity, and belonging in a post-assimilation environment. Far from being passive victims of history, the ethnic Chinese are actively challenging old stereotypes and boundaries of acceptable Chineseness in the country. This emphasis on group and individual agency marks a strong departure from structural analyses of Chinese Indonesians that mostly highlight their disempowerment as an oppressed minority. Furthermore, placing the analysis within the broader context of China’s rise in the twenty-first century demonstrates how the combination of persisting local anti-Chinese sentiments and renewed pride over China’s growing global dominance have prompted many Chinese Indonesians to re-evaluate their sense of ethnic and national belonging. By focusing on the nexus between collective memory, local identity politics, and the rise of China as an external factor, Memories of Unbelonging offers new perspectives of understanding about Chinese Indonesians, post-Suharto Indonesian society, and the relationship between China and ethnic Chinese communities in Southeast Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

15 Maalis 202450min

State of the Arts: An Ethnography of German Theatre and Migration (Cambridge UP, 2023) is a bold and wide-ranging account of the unique German public theatre system through the prism of a migrant artistic institution in the western post-industrial Ruhr region. State of the Arts analyses how artistic traditions have responded to social change, racism, and cosmopolitan anxieties and recounts how critical contemporary cultural production positions itself in relation to the tumultuous history of German state patronage, difficult heritage, and self-cultivation through the arts. Jonas Tinius' fieldwork with professional actors, directors, cultural policy makers, and activists unravels how they constitute theatre as a site for extra-ordinary ethical conduct and how they grapple with the pervasive German cultural tradition of Bildung, or self-cultivation through the arts. Tinius shows how anthropological methods provide a way to understand the entanglement of cultural policy, institution-building, and subject-formation. An ambitious and interdisciplinary study, the work demonstrates the crucial role of artistic intellectuals in society. Adam Bobeck received his PhD in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His dissertation was entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Ontology and Ritual Theory”. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

15 Maalis 202453min

Philosophical concepts are influential in the theories and methods to study the world religions. Even though the disciplines of anthropology and religious studies now encompass communities and cultures across the world, the theories and methods used to study world religions and cultures continue to be rooted in Western philosophies. In Indic philosophical systems, such as Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism, one of the common views on reality is that the world both within one self and outside is a flow with nothing permanent, both the observer and the observed undergoing constant transformation. Pankaj Jain and Jeffery D. Long's book Indian and Western Philosophical Concepts in Religion (Rowman and Littlefield, 2023) is based on such innovative ideas coming from different Indic philosophies and how they can enrich the theory and methods in religious studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

14 Maalis 202440min

Robert Kim Henderson, a recently-minted psychology PhD from Cambridge and prominent essayist, had a troubled childhood. A victim of child abuse, he was shuffled through the foster care system, then finally settled in a family in a working-class California town, only to become a child of divorce. At 17, he enlisted in the U.S. Airforce, and went on to earn his BA from Yale and become a Gates Scholar at Cambridge.  His debut book, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class (Gallery Books, 2024), delves into his unstable childhood and the ways in which elite Americans misunderstand the nature and challenges of class differences. In this conversation, Rob digs into his book and its implications, discussing the nature and history of American poverty, the prominence of "luxury beliefs," a term he coined to describe counter-productive beliefs on sex and politics meant to showcase affluence, and why his message has been so poorly received in elite circles, including a discussion of why and how it was excluded from the New York Times best-seller list. Along the way, he delves into pop culture, gives reading recommendations, and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

14 Maalis 20241h 5min

Authoritarianism is not something that happens only within the borders of authoritarian regimes. In this episode, Marlies Glasius talks with host Licia Cianetti about her work on “authoritarian practices”, how the sabotage of accountability can take place also within democracies, how it can be transnational, how the actors involved are not always the ones you are thinking about, and what this all means for the future of democracy. Marlies Glasius is Professor of International Relations at the University of Amsterdam. She is the author of Authoritarian Practices in a Global Age (Oxford UP, 2023). Licia Cianetti is Lecturer in Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham and Deputy Founding Director of CEDAR. The People, Power, Politics podcast brings you the latest insights into the factors that are shaping and re-shaping our political world. It is brought to you by the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR) based at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. Join us to better understand the factors that promote and undermine democratic government around the world and follow us on Twitter at @CEDAR_Bham! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

13 Maalis 202428min

Two decades ago, a group of Indonesian agricultural workers began occupying the agribusiness plantation near their homes. In the years since, members of this remarkable movement have reclaimed collective control of their land and cultivated diverse agricultural forests on it, repairing the damage done over nearly a century of abuse. Countering Dispossession, Reclaiming Land: A Social Movement Ethnography (U California Press, 2024) is their story. David E. Gilbert offers an account of the ways these workers-turned-activists mobilized to move beyond industrial agriculture's exploitation of workers and the environment, illustrating how emancipatory and ecologically attuned ways of living with land are possible. At a time when capitalism has remade landscapes and reordered society, the Casiavera reclaiming movement stands as an inspiring example of what struggles for social and environmental justice can achieve. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

12 Maalis 202432min

How can artists survive today? In Cultural Work and Creative Subjectivity: Recentralising the Artist Critique and Social Networks in the Cultural Industries (Routledge, 2023), Dr Xin Gu, Director of the Master of Cultural and Creative Industries at Monash University and an expert appointed by UNESCO 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of Diversity of Cultural Expression, examines contemporary labour conditions for cultural workers. Drawing on detailed historical and global case studies, as well as up to date analysis of changing working practices, the book offers a new theorisation of the role of culture in society. The book is the basis for a major reassessment of how art and culture function in our global context, and will be essential reading across the humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in cultural industries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

11 Maalis 202449min

All over the world, people disappear from their families, communities and the state’s bureaucratic gaze, as victims of oppressive regimes or while migrating along clandestine routes. An Anthropology of Disappearance: Politics, Intimacies and Alternative Ways of Knowing (Berghahn Books, 2023) brings together scholars who engage ethnographically with such disappearances in various cultural, social and political contexts. This volume takes an anthropological perspective on questions about human life and death, absence and presence, rituals and mourning, liminality and structures, citizenship and personhood as well as agency and power. The chapters explore the political dimension of disappearances and address methodological, epistemological and ethical challenges of researching disappearances and the disappeared. The combination of disappearance through political violence, crime, voluntary disappearance and migration makes this book a unique combination. Laura Huttunen is Professor of Social Anthropology at the Tampere University, Finland. In 2013-14 she ran a project that focused on the question of missing and disappeared persons in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In 2018-2022 she led a research project with a focus on disappearances in migratory contexts. Gerhild Perl is Assistant Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Trier, Germany. Her work has been published in journals such as the Journal of Social and Cultural Anthropology and the Journal of Intercultural Studies. Her doctoral dissertation on death during migration across the Spanish-Moroccan Sea was awarded the Maria Ioannis Baganha Award and the Dissertation Prize of the German Anthropological Association. Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of state, the anthropology of time, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. 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/sociology

10 Maalis 20241h 7min