New Books in Anthropology

Communities of Sound: Religion, Displacement, and Caste in the Bay of Bengal (Wesleyan University Press, 2026) brings
together insights from religion, anthropology, sound, and migration
studies to explore the sonic traces of untouchability and forced
migration across the Bay of Bengal. Based on an immersive, multi-sited
ethnography with Matua devotees—a low-caste, Bengali-speaking Dalit
religious community fragmented by Partition, war, and postcolonial
displacement—the book explores how sound sustains identity across
fractured geographies. Using richly detailed descriptions, the book
follows traveling archives of song, story, and ritual performance
through West Bengal, Bangladesh, and the Andaman Islands. These sonic
practices—congregational singing, drumming, and itinerant
storytelling—forge belonging beyond nation-states, connecting the
Matua's fifty million members across borders and seas. In a world
dominated by visual culture, Communities of Sound centers
listening as a mode of knowledge and care, revealing how sound shapes
our sense of self and cosmos. More than scriptures or doctrine, it is
sound—entangled with authority and power—that binds this transregional
Dalit movement and animates its collective action. The book is
generously illustrated and references an online companion with video and
audio examples.

Author bio: Carola E. Lorea is
Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology University of Tübingen,
at the University of Tübingen, Germany, where she leads the ERC-funded
project MANTRAMS: Mantras in Religion, Media, and Society in Global
Southern Asia. She is the author of Folklore, Religion and the Songs of a Bengali Madman (2016), and editor with Rosalind Hackett of Religious Sounds Beyond the Global North: Senses, Media and Power (2024).
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Tunisia’s Andalusians: The Cultural Identity of a North African Minority (Edinburgh UP, 2025) tells the captivating story of those Andalusians, descendants of Muslims expelled from Spain in the seventeenth century, who sought refuge in Tunisia. Rather than simply replicating Iberian traditions, Andalusian culture in Tunisia stands as a vibrant and evolving phenomenon, shaped by complex dynamics of interaction and adaptation over four centuries. The book dismantles the romanticised view of Andalusian culture as a mere transplantation of al-Andalus, analysing distinctive cultural features that distinguish Andalusians as an ethnic group within Tunisia’s diverse social fabric. Drawing on historical records and contemporary ethnographic data, including personal accounts and family archives, the book sheds light on how Andalusians navigate their unique cultural position amidst a Tunisian national narrative often focused on Arabo-Muslim homogeneity. By examining the complexities of cultural preservation and assimilation, the book offers a nuanced perspective on Andalusian identity, revealing its dynamism and resilience in the face of changing social, political, and economic circumstances.
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In her recent publication, Hidden Heretics: Jewish Doubt in the Digital Age, scholar Ayala Fader tells the fascinating, often heart-wrenching stories of married ultra-Orthodox Jewish men and women in twenty-first-century New York who lead “double lives” in order to protect those they love. Drawing on five years of fieldwork with those living double lives and the rabbis, life coaches, and religious therapists who minister to, advise, and sometimes excommunicate them, Fader investigates religious doubt and social change in the digital age. In following those living double lives, who range from the religiously observant but open-minded on one end to atheists on the other, Fader delves into universal quandaries of faith and skepticism, the ways digital media can change us, and family frictions that arise when a person radically transforms who they are and what they believe.

Join YIVO for a discussion of this recent publication featuring Fader in conversation with Josh Lambert, professor and director of the Jewish Studies Program at Wellesley College.

Buy the book: here

This book talk originally took place on September 22, 2022.
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Alena Ledeneva is Professor of Politics and Society at the
University College London and a founder of the Global Informality
Project. Her research focuses on informal practices, and she has written
several Russia-focused books, including Russia’s Economy of Favours, How Russia Really Works and Can Russia Modernise. The Global Informality has also published 3 volumes of its Global Encyclopaedia of Informality. Alena is here today to talk about her new book Russian Pendulum: Paradoxes, Practices and Patterns (UCL Press, 2026), which has been shortlisted for the 2026 Pushkin House Book Prize.

Adam Quinn is a Glasgow-based researcher whose work focuses on
activism, social movements and state-society relations in the
Post-Soviet space. 

Alena’s new book: art, music, text in a new UCL Press book in open access:

Russian Pendulum: here

The accompanying music: Delphian Records classical album The System Made Me Do It composed by Benjamin Woodgates: here

And a brilliant review of the music: here

Plus, a nice mention in the BBC sounds for dark: here

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In this episode of the New Books Network, we explore Ethnographic Reflections on Marriage in Dhofar, Oman (Anthem Press, 2026),
with anthropologist Dr Marielle Risse. Drawing on nearly two decades of
ethnographic fieldwork, Dr Risse offers a nuanced examination of
marriage practices among Sunni Muslim communities in southern Oman,
challenging many of the assumptions that often underpin Western
discussions of gender, family, and personal autonomy.

Rather than portraying marriage as either oppressive or emancipatory,
Dr Risse presents it as a complex social institution shaped by kinship
networks, religious values, and community expectations. Risse’s work
encourages readers to reconsider familiar ideas about family, marriage,
household, intimacy, autonomy, and social life.

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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