New Books in Anthropology

Near and Desired Things: Shamanism in Late Imperial Local Siberian Museums (Cornell University Press, 2026) reveals nineteenth-century Siberian museums, built on Indigenous land and increasingly populated by political exiles, as active sites of ethnographic knowledge-making and centers of scientific research, regional identity, and colonial authority. Rather than collecting from distant colonies, these institutions concentrated on surrounding communities, their tools, beliefs, and everyday lives, to configure ideas about what counted as legitimate knowledge.

Dr. Marisa Karyl Franz traces how Siberian museums helped construct shamanism as an ethnographic category. Shamans, while familiar and embedded in local space, were recast as icons of cultural otherness or representatives of an imagined primitive past. Through the evolving languages of science, anthropology, and empire, the local was abstracted and exported, feeding global museum networks and shaping modern anthropology. Yet, the museums held onto the intimacy of place, preserving tensions between familiarity and spectacle, documentation and desire.

By placing Siberia at the center of a broader intellectual and political history, Near and Desired Things challenges assumptions about where modern knowledge is made and redefines provincial spaces as sites of innovation and as forces that reshape the terms of empire.

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

Infrastructural Urbanism in Contemporary China: Volunteering, Infrastructures and Civic Imaginations (Leiden University Press, 2026) examines
how Chinese citizens negotiate their everyday experiences with urban
spaces, improved city infrastructure, and an increasingly tight
surveillance regime through volunteering. This book asks how citizens
connect to city spaces where facilities for transit, culture, and
leisure have been substantially upgraded. Drawing on extensive research,
Ka-ming Wu investigates how citizens conduct volunteer activities that
not only promote party-state campaigns and engage with new urban spaces
and services, but also experiment with political, social, and cultural
rights, including advocating for the rights of people with disabilities
and promoting unofficial interpretations of national history.

The book argues that volunteering has become an urban practice
through which citizens navigate existing hierarchies of urban and rural
status, gender, age, and ability, while contesting top-down,
mega-event-driven urbanization. It situates Chinese everyday urbanism
within the context of China's hosting of multiple international events,
its expanding public and digital infrastructures, heightened party-state
control, and burgeoning digital activism. The book contributes to the
infrastructural turn in urban anthropology and the field of China
studies, offering a new understanding of urban rights and public access
in contemporary China.

NOTE: The book Ka-ming Wu mentioned in the interview is Stephen Graham’s Cities under Siege: The New Military Urbanism
(Verso, 2010).

Wu Ka-ming is Associate Professor in the Department of Cultural and
Religious Studies at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, with courtesy
appointments in the Department of Anthropology and the Centre for China
Studies. Trained as a cultural anthropologist, her work is
interdisciplinary, situated at the intersection of cultural studies,
anthropology, China studies, and environmental humanities. She is the
author of Reinventing Chinese Tradition: The Cultural Politics of Late Socialism
(UIP 2015) and the co-author of Living with Waste (CUP 2017).

Yadong Li is an anthropologist-in-training. He is a PhD candidate of
Socio-cultural Anthropology at Tulane University. 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

Are we driving our technology, or is it starting to drive us? In this thought-provoking conversation, Eli Karetny sits down with researcher and author Eduardo Albrecht to explore the invisible, rapidly encroaching frontier of AI governance and data surveillance.Moving far beyond traditional debates about data privacy, Albrecht warns of a near future where the state and corporate partners bypass human speech entirely, relying instead on "sentiment detection" to ascribe thoughts and make decisions that impact our physical lives. Together, they trace the historical trajectory of control—from early fingerprinting and eugenics to modern biometrics and neural implants—and challenge the modern illusion of state efficiency at the expense of human agency.Tune in for a deep dive into the two fundamental rights required to safeguard the future of democracy: absolute transparency over our data, and an evolving, radical defense of our collective freedom of thought.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

What role do microbes play in aquaponic farming and cultivated meat production, and how might such novel food technologies impact microbiomes? In this episode, Ishita Dey of Gastronomica hosts Lukáš Senft, Tereza Stöckelová, and Varvara Borisova in a conversation about their new article, “The Microbiopolitics of Novel Foods: The Pro- and Antibiotic Implications of Cultivated Meat and Aquaponic Farming.” In a discussion that connects food futures with environment, sustainability, health, and technology, the research team shares insights from their multisited ethnography of indoor vertical farms, bioreactors, and alternative food production in Czechia. They illuminate the emergence of new food technologies and the regulatory landscape, discuss the demand for protein and alternative protein sources, and reflect on the broader implications for microbial diversity and resilience-building in food systems.

“The Microbiopolitics of Novel Foods: The Pro- and Antibiotic Implications of Cultivated Meat and Aquaponic Farming” by Lukáš Senft, Tereza Stöckelová, and Varvara Borisova, appears in issue 26.1 of Gastronomica. Their article is one of eleven in a newly published special section on microbes in food and food systems. Learn more about the two-part special section and access the articles in the Spring 2026 and Summer 2026 issues of the journal.

Lukáš Senft has a PhD in sociology from Charles University and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences. His work on food systems has explored topics related to small-scale farming, mushroom foraging, precision agriculture, and the use of medicinal plants through multispecies ethnography and public scholarship.

Tereza Stöckelová is a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences and also an associate professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Charles University. An expert in social studies of science, her current research on food and health focuses on extended metabolism in relation to bodies, ecologies, and technologies.

Varvara Borisova recently completed her PhD in anthropology at Charles University and is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences where she is pursuing research on science and technology, obesity, metabolism, and alternative proteins.

Ishita Dey is an assistant professor of sociology at South Asian University and a member of Gastronomica’s Editorial Collective. Her new book, a multisited ethnography of sweet-making titled Sweet Excess: Crafting Mishti in Bengal, was published by Routledge in 2025.

Gastronomica: The Journal for Food Studies is published by the University of California Press. Quarterly issues are available in print and online.

Listeners can now find the Gastronomica podcast on the New Books Network. Subscribe to Gastronomica’s podcast feed to stay updated on the newest episodes.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

In the aftermath of the Soviet Union's collapse, Kazakhstan inherited the remnants of one of the world's most contaminated landscapes: the Semipalatinsk Test Site, known locally as the Polygon. Resigned to dispossession, residents have chosen to remain on the abandoned nuclear test site, despite the isolation and the radioactive environment, rather than face marginalization or the rigors of a neoliberal world. Atomic Collective: Radioactive Life in Kazakhstan (University of Toronto Press, 2025) examines this nuclear legacy through a decade-long ethnographic examination of the village of Koian, situated on the border of the test site. Facing residual radiation all around them and isolation, Koianers persist, reshaping their pastoral existence among the ruins and scientific debates surrounding genetic damage.

Drawing on first-hand accounts and archival research, this book explores the resilience and everyday survival strategies of a community left behind to fend for itself in the shadow of nuclear testing. It offers a unique perspective on life in a nuclear zone and poses fundamental questions about human resilience and the impact of historical events on a collective identity. Atomic Collective sheds light on a community overlooked in the larger Cold War histories of atomic testing.

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