New Books in Anthropology

Where Saints Show Respect: Mafia, Modernity, and Rituals of Power is an anthropological exploration of how authority is produced not only through violence or secrecy but also through public ritual. Drawing on more than thirty years of ethnographic research in Sicily, Professor Berardino Palumbo turns our attention to saints’ festivals, processions, fireworks, ritual gestures and moments when power becomes visible, tangible, and socially negotiated.

At the centre of the book is the now well-known practice of saints “showing respect”: statues pausing or bowing during processions in front of particular homes or streets. Palumbo treats these not as traditional leftovers, but as modern political acts through which hierarchy, recognition, and moral worth are publicly visible. Power, he argues, is learned not only through fear or coercion, but through piety, celebration, play, and spectacle.

The English edition is translated and edited by Cornelia Mayer Herzfeld. The book opens with a foreword by Michael Herzfeld, who situates it within broader debates on modernity, Europe, and anthropological critique. It closes with an afterword by Jane and Peter Schneider, placing Palumbo’s work in dialogue with the long tradition of anthropological research on Sicily and the mafia, while highlighting what is novel in his approach.

Rather than treating the mafia as a hidden or external force, Where Saints Show Respect shows how it is woven into everyday social relations, religious life, and shared moral worlds. In doing so, the book challenges readers to rethink modernity, not as the disappearance of ritual, but as its reconfiguration.

This is an invitation to look more closely at how power operates wherever it appears festive, familiar, or “traditional” and to ask what makes us see some rituals as political and others not.

Amisah Bakuri (PhD) is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her work explores the intersections of religion, sexuality, gender, and migration, especially within African diasporic communities in the Netherlands.
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The term "commod bod" is used with humor and affection. It also offers a critical way to describe bodies shaped by long-term reliance on U.S. federal commodity food programs.

In Commod Bods: Embodied Heritage, Foodways, and Indigeneity (University of Arizona Press, 2026), Kasey Jernigan shares her ongoing collaborative research with Choctaw women and describes the ways that shifting patterns of participation in food and nutrition assistance programs (commodity foods) have shaped foodways; how these foodways are linked to bodies and health, particularly "obesity" and related conditions; and how foodways and bodies are intertwined with settler colonialism and experiences of structural violence, identity making, and heritage in the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.

Organized thematically, the book moves from a critical history of obesity and health in Indian Country to narratives of Choctaw women navigating food, memory, and belonging. Chapters such as "Food and Fellowship" and "Heritage, Embodied" center personal stories that show how food is not only sustenance but also a site of connection, resistance, and meaning making.

Food is critical to cultural survival and affirmation. For Choctaw people, the intentional demise of traditional foodways and dependence on federal food programs are specific experiences that inform part of what it means to be Choctaw today.

Kasey Jernigan is an assistant professor of American studies and anthropology at the University of Virginia, where she also co-directs the Black and Indigenous Feminist Futures Institute. She is a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.

Caleb Zakarin is the CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.
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“What might it mean to take the dead seriously as political actors?” asks Lia Kent in this exciting new contribution to critical human rights scholarship The Unruly Dead: Spirits, Memory, and State Formation in Timor-Leste (U Wisconsin Press, 2024). In Timor-Leste, a new nation-state that experienced centuries of European colonialism before a violent occupation by Indonesia from 1975 to 1999, the dead are active participants in social and political life who continue to operate within familial structures of obligation and commitment. On individual, local, and national levels, Timor-Leste is invested in various forms of memory work, including memorialization, exhumation, reburial, and commemoration of the occupation’s victims. Such practices enliven the dead, allowing them to forge new relationships with the living and unsettling the state-building logics that seek to contain and control them.

With generous, careful ethnography and incisive analysis, Kent challenges comfortable, linear narratives of transitional justice and argues that this memory work is reshaping the East Timorese social and political order—a process in which the dead are active, and sometimes disruptive, participants. Community ties and even the landscape itself are imbued with their presence and demands, and the horrific scale of mass death in recent times—up to a third of the population perished during the Indonesian occupation—means Timor-Leste’s dead have real, significant power in the country’s efforts to remember, recover, and reestablish itself.
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In Ambitious and Anxious: How Chinese College Students Succeed and Struggle in American Higher Education (Columbia UP, 2020), sociologist Yingyi Ma offers a multifaceted analysis of a new wave of international Chinese students—mostly self-funded—who have transformed American higher education over the past decade. This privileged yet diverse group of young people, emerging from a rapidly changing China, must navigate the complications and confusions of their formative years while bridging the world’s two most powerful countries. How do these students come to study in the United States? What does that experience mean to them? And what does American higher education need to know—and do—in order to continue attracting these students and supporting them adequately?

Drawing on research conducted in both Chinese high schools and American colleges and universities, Ma’s book offers illuminating insights into the experiences that define this new wave of students: above all, a duality of ambition and anxiety rooted in the transformative social changes of contemporary China. These students and their families are ambitious in seeking to navigate two very different educational systems and societies. Yet, at the same time, the complexity and pressure of these systems generate profound anxiety—from the challenges of applying to colleges, to studying and socializing on campus, to deciding what comes next after graduation. Ambitious and Anxious also offers valuable policy implications for American colleges and universities, touching on recruitment, student life, faculty support, and career services.

About the Author

Yingyi Ma is Professor of Sociology at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, where she also serves as Director of the Asian/Asian American Studies Program. She is a Fellow of the Public Intellectuals Program of the National Committee on United States–China Relations.
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My conversation with Nico Slate began with him reflecting on his own path into the study of historical connections between South Asia and the United States. We then moved to a wide-ranging discussion covering the importance of the transnational scale for an understanding of antiracist and anticaste politics, the repurposing of ‘race’ and ‘caste’ through creative acts of transnational translation, the interplay between the race-colony and race-caste analogies in solidaristic politics across the late 19th and 20th centuries, and the conjunctural factors that have shaped the rise and fall of race-caste scholarship.

Guest bio:

Nico Slate, Professor of History. Carnegie Mellon University.

References:

Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay: Indian social reformer, nationalist, feminist, and socialist who promoted handicrafts, handlooms, and theatre.

W.E.B. Du Bois: American sociologist, historian, and Pan-Africanist who authored some of the most consequential works on the global color line and racial capitalism.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi: Indian lawyer, anti-colonial nationalist, and political thinker who employed nonviolent resistance to lead the successful campaign for India's independence from British rule.

Daniel Immerwahr, “Caste or Colony? Indianizing Race in the United States” (2007)

Oliver Cox: Trinidadian sociologist of race relations.

B.R. Ambedkar: Indian jurist and anticaste thinker who chaired the committee that drafted the Indian Constitution and served as the independent India’s first Minister of Law.

Lala Lajpat Rai: Indian revolutionary, politician, and author.

Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020)

W.E.B. Du Bois, Dark Princess (1928).

Katherine Mayo, Mother India (1927).
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