New Books in Anthropology

Life in Spite of Everything: Tales from the Ukrainian East (Daunt Books Publishing, 2025) is
a unique reflection on the much-mythologised Donetsk and Luhansk
regions of the Ukrainian east, the old and recent history of the region
as seen by an esteemed academic multi-disciplinary scholar Victoria
Donovan in her numerous travels to the region prior to the full-scale
invasion. Seen through a deeply empathetic lens of conversations with
local curators, historians, museum workers, and artists, the region is
shown in its complexity, with the uniqueness of its landscapes,
endangered biodiversity, entangled colonialisms of its past and a
threatened future.

Since start of Russia’s war against Ukraine in
2014, its eastern region—Donbas—has been synonymous with conflict. With
the escalation of that war in 2022, its, cities such as Bakhmut and
Lysychansk have become familiar to us through the images and reports of
brutal devastation. Victoria Donovan excavates a rich, multicultural
history of this area, and paints a radically different picture.

Travelling
from the dramatic, jagged peaks of Bilokuzmynivka to the marshland of
Mariupol, from a warehouse rave to an abandoned gypsum mine, the
physical world and its importance to this region’s identity is brought
to vivid life. But above all else, by speaking to those whose lives are
embedded there now—curators, artists, railway workers, young people who
have grown up amidst instability and destruction—Donovan amplifies local
voices and reveals the intensely personal lived reality of Putin’s war.

Victoria
Donovan is Professor of Ukrainian and East European Studies and
Director of the Centre for Global (Post)socialisms, Southeast, Central
and East European Studies at the University of St Andrews.

Viktoriia
Grivina is an independent anthropologist and writer, author of Kharkiv,
a War City (Ibidem, 2025), and Kharkiv is a Dream: Public Art and
Activism, 2013–2023 (Ibidem, 2025).
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

The
early twenty-first century ushered in a period of change in Bolivia.
The country welcomed its first Indigenous president, a new constitution,
and a profusion of laws that recognized individual music and dance
expressions as intangible cultural heritage. Using cultural heritage
lawmaking as a window through which to view the de-centered workings of the Indigenous-focused Plurinational Bolivian State, Heritage Fever: Law and Cultural Politics in a Decolonizing State
(Oxford University Press, 2025) by Dr. Michelle Bigenho and Dr. Henry
Stobart unpacks the myriad motivations for heritage making in this this
politically transformative moment. Heritage Fever reorients
UNESCO-driven heritage debates towards a different set of questions—a pivot the authors call “heritage otherwise.”

These
inquiries focus on how citizens use law to frame expressive culture and
engage their new state. Through grounded case studies, Bigenho and
Stobart reveal how competing claims over cultural expressions stimulate
aficionado research and produce an abundance of cultural activities.
Managing these productive conflicts often involves strategic uses of
scale within the country's new political autonomies, even as old-style
nationalisms lurk beneath a plurinational sheen. One case study highlights
imagined Indigenous autonomy as bolstered by decolonizing
historiography that predates the Plurinational State by several decades.

Privileging
the stories told by those who championed or who were bureaucratically
involved in the respective heritage-making campaigns, Heritage Fever's
research draws from the authors' combined fieldwork in Bolivia over the
last 30 years, recent multi-sited fieldwork conducted as a team, and
ethnographic interviews conducted with Bolivians involved in
heritage-making projects. Contributing to legal anthropology, critical
heritage studies, ethnomusicology, and anthropology of the state, Heritage Fever
looks beyond intellectual property frames, opens new perspectives on
archival thinking, reflects on decolonizing practices in expertise and
knowledge production, and uncovers the agency of mid-level citizens in a
decolonizing state.

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

Backyard gardens flush with cucumbers, tomatoes, and
peppers where bees buzz and chickens scratch. Beyond, a forest filled
with blackberries and jewelweed. Inspired by childhood memories of his
grandmother’s overflowing backyard garden, author Andrew Flachs has
embarked on a multi-continent, decades-long look at agriculture and its
value.

The dominant view of agriculture has focused only on what
we produce. It sees value in terms of capital gains or yield efficiency,
masking how our global food system produces tremendous amounts of food
commodities while failing to feed people, support rural communities, or
enhance ecological well-being. Feeding the World as if People Mattered: How Small Farms Produce Value Beyond Yields (University of Arizona Press, 2026) asks us to look more deeply and more humanely at what we perceive to be most valuable in our agricultural systems.

This
book draws on fifteen years of anthropological research, taking readers
to fields in South India, Eastern Europe, and North America, where
people are already feeding the future amid global change. From these
fields, Flachs shows us how a radical rethinking of the value of small
farms and farmers is already happening. Bringing together conversations
in agriculture, economics, anthropology, and the environmental
humanities, Flachs deftly shows how small farms reproduce social and
ecological relationships that are the only sustainable path forward.

For
anyone who is curious about the food on their plate and the people who
helped to get it there, Feeding the World as if People Mattered will
offer a new way to find value in the food we grow and the people who
grow it.

Dr. Andrew Flachs researches food and
agriculture systems, exploring genetically modified crops, heirloom
seeds, and our own microbiomes. Born and raised in rural Pennsylvania,
he graduated from Oberlin College with dual Bachelor of Music and
Bachelor of Arts degrees in 2010. He earned his PhD from Washington
University in St. Louis in April 2016 and was a 2016-2017 Volkswagen
Exchange Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Heidelberg University
Karl Jaspers Centre for Advanced Transcultural Studies. He is currently
an associate professor of anthropology at Purdue University. His work
among farmers in North America, the Balkans, and South India
investigates ecological knowledge and technological change in
agricultural systems spanning Cleveland urban gardens and Indian GM
cotton fields. His research has been supported by public and private
institutions including the Department of Education, the National
Geographic Society, the American Institute of Indian Studies, and the
Social Science Research Council, while his writing on agricultural
development has been featured in numerous peer-reviewed publications as
well as public venues including Sapiens, Salon, and the National
Geographic magazine. His work has been recognized by eight
international awards, including most recently as a finalist for the
Society for Economic Anthropology Kate Browne Creativity in Research
Award and the International Convention of Asia Scholars’ Book Prize.

Sandra
Elizabeth is a graduate student enrolled at the Department of Sociology
in Shiv Nadar University, Delhi- NCR. She looks at rice farmers’ and
their way of life in Kuttanad, Kerala—which is dubbed as the state’s
rice granary. She can be reached out on X.  
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

The rise of “heritage” foods—that is, the reinvention of traditional
foods—has enjoyed a high profile thanks to the oft-praised efforts of
chefs such as Sean Brock and René Redzepi. But Lily Kelting observes the
popularity of heritage foods as something more: a global movement in
response to climate catastrophe and the rise of right-wing, populist
movements that center a return to the past as part of their ideology.
Weaving ethnography, discourse analysis, critical theory, and sensory,
embodied critique, Kelting tracks and critiques the boom of traditional
food revival movements in the American South, Denmark, and India.
Ultimately, Kelting argues that the heritage culinary professionals wish
to revive is equal parts nostalgia and invention: They engage, subvert,
and ignore food histories in their creation of new food movements. As
Kelting documents our contemporary moment, she shows how the
conversations surrounding these new food movements leave out people
already keeping their traditions alive. Against Heritage: The Reinvention of Traditional Foods (University of North Carolina Press, 2026),
then, serves as a reparative revaluation of the work of the cooks
largely excluded from the contemporary media conversation about heritage
revival.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

This episode featured a conversation with Rahul Sonpimple, founder of the All-India Independent Scheduled Castes Association. Our conversation began with Rahul’s conception of Indian history and the place of anti-caste struggle within it. We delved further into Rahul’s own understanding of “anti-caste” as deeply rooted in Ambedkar’s own argument about the necessity of force in emancipatory social transformation. Rahul was especially forthright about the political cost of elevating meekness as a moral condition, a choice that he associates with the rise of a Dalit middle class focused primarily on securing its own representational authority. This took us to a discussion of the need for an independent and consolidated Dalit politics rooted in the lives of the Dalit poor with sufficient leverage to negotiate terms with the state. The last part of the episode focused on Rahul’s critique of both Ambedkarites and Indian Marxists for their disregard of caste as a material question. He spoke at particular length about the failure of Indian Marxists to advance a materalist critique of caste and how their analytical separation of caste and class has played into the hands of the Hindu Right. We ended the episode with Rahul laying out his own definition of Ambedkarism as a material and spiritual politics that recognizes the Dalit poor as a revolutionary class with the potential to rebuild society.

Read the transcript here

Guest

Rahul Sonpimple is author and founder of the All-India Independent Scheduled Castes Association.

References

B.R. Ambedkar, The Buddha and his Dhamma, 1957.

B.R. Ambedkar, Small Holdings in India and their Remedies, 1918.

B.R. Ambedkar, Buddha or Karl Marx, 1956.

B.R. Ambedkar, “Mr. Russell and the Reconstruction of Society,” 1916.

Rahul Sonpimple, “Against Hindu Rashtra: Ambedkar’s Buddhist Rashtra as Nation,” The Ambedkarian Chronicle, May 4, 2026.

Rahul Sonpimple, “Remembering Babasaheb Ambedkar: The Unfinished Task of Burying Manu,” The Ambedkarian Chronicle, April 14, 2026.

Rahul Sonpimple, “Kanshi Ram Sahab: Beyond Bureaucratic Dalit Passivity,” The Ambedkarian Chronicle, March 15, 2026.

Rahul Sonpimple, “Spontaneity in Ambedkar: Beyond the Passivity of Popular Dalit Discourse,” The Ambedkarian Chronicle, April 16, 2025.

Rahul Sonpimple, “The End of Independent Ambedkarite Dalit Politics?” Round Table India, July 12, 2024.

Rahul Sonpimple, “Dalit conversions: An act of rebellion against caste supremacy,” Al Jazeera, 14 June 2018.

Himsa and ahimsa are foundational ethical concepts in Buddhism. Himsa refers to injury, harm, or violence and ahimsa to non-harming, non-violence, or compassion. Ambedkar critiqued extreme, blanket doctrines of ahimsa as unworkable and often hypocritical.

Chokhamela was a saint-poet from Maharashtra, India who belonged to the Mahar caste and was a devotee of Vitthala.

Bhakt: devotee

Vitthala: Hindu deity worshipped mainly in the states of Maharashtra and Karnataka as an avatar of Vishnu.

Kabir and Ravidas: medieval poet-saints who were part of the Bhakti movement (7th-17th century), which emphasized devotion to a personal god, rather than rituals and scriptural knowledge, as the path to spiritual liberation.

Samata Sainik Dal: a social organization founded by B. R. Ambedkar in 1927 with the objective of safeguarding the rights of all oppressed sections of Indian society.

Bhima Koregaon: a village in Maharashtra that was the site of an 1818 battle between the army of Peshwa Baji Rao II and an East India Company force comprised mainly of Mahars, a Dalit caste. This battle has attained legendary status for Dalits who view it as a victory of Mahars over the Brahminical Peshwas.

Baniya: refers to mercantile castes primarily from the states of Rajasthan and Gujarat.

Kanshi Ram: Indian social reformer and politician who founded the All India Backwards and Minorities Communities Employees' Federation (BAMCEF) in 1971 and the Bahujan Samaj Party in 1984.

Jogendra Nath Mandal: Bengali politician and Dalit leader who held the law portfolio in the 1946-47 Interim Government of India and served as the Minister of Law and Labor in Pakistan from 1947-50.

Rajah: M.C. Rajah was a Tamil politician and Dalit leader who served on the Madras Legislative Council in the 1920s and founded the All India Depressed Classes Association in 1925.

Kamble: B.C. Kamble was a Marathi politician and Dalit leader who led the Republican Party of India for decades.

BAMCEF: All India Backwards and Minorities Communities Employees' Federation

UGC Bill: officially the University Grants Commission (Promotion of Equity in Higher Education Institutions) Regulations, 2026, is a set of regulations aimed at ending discrimination against marginalized communities in higher education. Following widespread protests and a public interest litigation (PIL), the Supreme Court of India stayed the regulations in January 2026.

Bhagwa kapda: saffron clothing

Scheduled Caste Federation: a political organization founded in 1942 by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar dedicated to advocating for the rights and political self-representation of the Dalit community.

Republican Party of India: a political party established by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar in 1956.

PESA: Panchayats Extension to Scheduled Areas (PESA) Act, 1996 is a landmark legislation enacted by the Government of India to ensure self-governance for tribal communities living in Fifth Schedule Areas.

Manusmriti: a text that served as a foundational legal and societal framework in ancient India.

EWS: refers to the Economically Weaker Section, a government classification referring to those within the unreserved (general) category eligible for a 10% quota in government jobs and educational admissions.

Karan Johar: an Indian filmmaker, producer and television personality.

Dharavi: a residential area in Mumbai (Bombay) considered one of the world’s largest slums.

Adani: Gautam Adani is an Indian billionaire and chairperson of the multinational conglomerate, the Adani Group.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology