New Books in Anthropology

This episode features a conversation with Murali Shanmugavelan and Sareeta Amrute about how caste structures IT workspaces and communication infrastructures. We began with their reflections on how they came to scholarship and advocacy on caste. The rest of our discussion covered a range of topics including, the ideology of tech as immaterial and disembodied, the role of tech within racial and caste supremacist projects, how and why large language models systematically favor dominant caste norms, the internal and external pressures required for tech companies to advance social equity, the necessity and limits of law in advancing protections against caste hate speech and other forms of identity-based violence and discrimination, and the need to balance visibility and secrecy as two dimensions of the anticaste struggle.

Guest bios:

Murali Shanmugavelan: Affiliate with the Data & Society Research Institute and Senior Fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies.

Sareeta Amrute: Associate Professor of Strategic Design at Parsons School of Design, Affiliate Faculty of Anthropology at the New School, and Principal Researcher at the Data & Society Research Institute.

References:

Karve: Dhondo Keshav Karve set up a home and school for widows in the city of Pune in Maharashtra in 1896. The institution, which is now called Maharshi Karve Stree Shikshan Samstha, runs 60 sites for women's education.

Periyar: E.V. Ramasamy Naicker, commonly known as Periyar, was a writer, social revolutionary, and politician who was one of the principal ideologues of the Self-Respect Movement.

Western Ghats: a mountain range that stretches along the western coast of the Indian peninsula.

Sriram Krishnan: tech executive and Senior White House Policy Advisor on Artificial Intelligence in the second Trump administration.

Bruno Latour: French philosopher known for his work in the field of Science and Technology Studies.

Maha Shivarathri: annual festival to celebrate the deity, Shiva.

Mimi Onuoha: Nigerian American visual artist and academic whose work examines the effect of data collection and technology on society.

Thenmozhi Soundararajan: founder of the Dalit feminist organization Equality Labs and author The Trauma of Caste: A Dalit Feminist Meditation on Survivorship, Healing, and Abolition.

The Hindu Code Bills aimed to codify and modernize Hindu personal laws, promoting gender equality in marriage, inheritance, and adoption.

Gail Omvedt: sociologist and anticaste activist whose work on Dalit epistemology and politics was path-defining.
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The Ryukyu Islands between Japan and Taiwan consist of around 160 islands and are home to about 1.5 million inhabitants. Across the islands' history, sea-lanes and trade patterns have connected them to the East China Sea region, giving them a unique vantage point on the region's changes and making them a useful lens through which to view and understand those transformations. In this book, Gregory Smits marshals his expertise to canvass the environmental, political, and social history of this fascinating area, emphasizing the diversity of influences from China, Japan, and Korea that have shaped it. Smits begins by tracing the islands' early history from the time of the oldest extant human remains, through massive inflows of settlers from Japan, until the emergence of a centralized state in the sixteenth century. He then traces the development of the Ryukyu Kingdom from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, examining its major cultural formations and the interplay of local and external influences driving its evolution. Finally, Smits ushers readers to the modern era, from the end of the Ryukyu Kingdom in 1879 through World War II, the era of American military control, and on to the present. He concludes with their present-day status as a tourist destination affected by ongoing geopolitical, economic, and environmental challenges. Synthesizing decades of research, this book is an indispensable, comprehensive guide to the islands' history for scholars and nonspecialists alike.

Gregory Smits is professor of history and Asian Studies at Penn State University. He is the author of several books, including, most recently, Early Ryukyuan History: A New Model.

Ran Zwigenberg is a professor at Pennsylvania State University.
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In Tension: Mental Distress and Embodied Inequality in the Western Himalayas (Duke UP, 2026), Dr. Nikita Kaur Simpson examines the effects of rapid development in the Himalayas on the minds and bodies of the Gaddi people who inhabit them through attention to the multifaceted state of distress they call “tension.” This “tension” takes many forms: Kamzori, or weakness, in the bodies of elderly women; “Future tension” accumulating in the minds of young girls; or Opara, or black magic, afflicting whole families.

Through her long-term ethnographic fieldwork, Dr. Simpson follows the ways in which Gaddi people tie this distress to broader structural changes, such as land dispossession and caste, class, tribal and gender inequality, which are growing alongside modernity and prosperity. In doing so, she shows how “tension” acts as an everyday diagnostic of the problems of cultural, economic and environmental change as they shape intimate life. At once a lived historical account, a cartography of care relations, and a multi-sensory exploration of the intimate experiences of atmosphere and body, Tension puts forth a novel theory of distress, that inequality is often determined by who is made to feel, hold, and absorb distress.

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.
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In Precarious Accumulation: Fast Fashion Bosses in Transnational Guangzhou (Duke UP, 2026), the cultural anthropologist Nellie Chu tells the story of the migrant entrepreneurs at the heart of Guangzhou’s fast fashion industry—one of the world’s most dynamic hubs of transnational commodity production. Chu shows how rural Chinese migrants, West African traders, and South Korean jobbers navigate the high-speed, low-margin world of just-in-time garment production that fuels the constant accumulation of wealth via global supply chains. Drawing on fieldwork in Guangzhou’s urban villages and household workshops, Chu outlines how these entrepreneurs’ dreams of economic freedom clash with the reality of precarity and the exclusions of emigre status. Migrant bosses operate within a highly competitive, informal economy where they are both agents and target of exploitation, as they must evade rent collectors, endure racialized policing, and mitigate extortion from security officers and competitors. Chu crucially demonstrates how their efforts generate novel forms of migratory labor, commodity production, and cross-cultural exchange in postsocialist China.

Nellie Chu (email here) is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke Kunshan University. Her research focuses on transnational and domestic migrant entrepreneurs across the global supply chains of fast fashion in southern China. She has papers published in leading academic journals, including positions: east asia critique, Modern Asian Studies, Culture, Theory, and Critique, and Journal of Modern Craft. Her work can also be found in Made in China Journal, Youth Circulations, and Noema Magazine.

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.
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Most employers in the United States routinely conduct criminal background checks on job applicants, weeding out those with criminal convictions—and thus denying opportunities to those who need them most. In The Criminal Record Complex: Risk, Race, and the Struggle for Work in America (Princeton UP, 2025), Melissa Burch sheds light on one of the most significant forces of social and economic marginalization of our time—discrimination on the basis of criminal records. Chronicling the daily interactions of hiring managers, workforce development professionals, and job-seekers with felony convictions in Southern California, Dr. Burch shows that this discrimination is not simply a matter of employer bias. Hiring is shaped by a set of institutions, organizations, and industries that promote the erroneous idea that people with criminal records are dangerous to employ. This “criminal record complex,” as Dr. Burch names it, encourages exclusion and undermines employers’ common-sense ways of assessing candidates. In vivid and intimate detail, Dr. Burch reveals both the futility and devastating human consequences of discriminatory policies.Dr. Burch places today’s routine practice of background screening within racialized notions of risk originating in early capitalist development, tracing how, over decades, criminal background checks became a convenient catch-all, leveraged by entities with a direct interest in growing the practice. Despite this reach, however, Dr. Burch discovers that small business owners tend to put less value on background checks, trusting their own judgment. Approaching the issue from both personal and policy perspectives, The Criminal Record Complex upends what we thought we knew about the causes of criminal record discrimination. It suggests that our best hope for creating safe workplaces lies not in the false promise of background screening, but in building the kinds of economies and communities that support true safety.

Our guest is: Dr. Melissa Burch, who is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan and Director of the Afterlives of Conviction Project.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is a writing coach and editor for academics. She is the producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast.

Playlist for listeners:

Ghost in the Criminal Justice Machine

Carceral Apartheid

Freemans Challenge

Hands Up Don't Shoot

The Names of all the Flowers

The Journal of Higher Education in Prison

Black Boy Out of Time

Secrets of the Killing State

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!
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