"The Work of Disaster"

New from the University of Chicago Press: The Work of Disaster: Crisis and Care Along a Himalayan Fault Line by Aidan Seale-Feldman.

About the book, from the publisher:

A compelling portrait of post-disaster imaginaries of repair in Nepal.

In a world marked by escalating disasters, the forms that care takes are increasingly fraught. In this powerful book, anthropologist Aidan Seale-Feldman focuses on Nepal, where in 2015 a 7.8-magnitude earthquake and equally powerful aftershock struck the country’s central region. The disaster claimed more than nine thousand lives and inspired a surge of humanitarian concern for the mental health of Nepali people. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, The Work of Disaster examines the possibilities generated by disaster, as well as the vexed relationship between crisis and care.

Moving between NGO offices, mountain trails, therapeutic interventions, and affected villages, Seale-Feldman tells the story of an emergent “mental health crisis” and the forms of care that followed in the disaster’s wake. She also analyzes the changes emergency services bring about in the places they seek to assist, the challenges of psychiatric support provided by international organizations, and the place of mental health counseling in a modern biopolitical reality. The Work of Disaster reveals the simultaneous violence and gentleness of humanitarian encounters, engaging along the way with broader debates about world making and the ethics of care.

Visit Aidan Seale-Feldman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Digital Initiation Rites"

New from Cornell University Press: Digital Initiation Rites: Joining Anonymous in Britain by Vita Peacock.

About the book, from the publisher:

Digital Initiation Rites is an ethnography of Anonymous in Britain between 2014 and 2017, in the context of government austerity. Drawing on testimonies of dozens of participants, for whom digital technologies enabled and articulated a political transformation from being "asleep" to being "awake," Vita Peacock narrates the process through which these technologies have become implicated in profound subjective changes. The book joins a wider return of the comparative method in anthropology by placing these accounts in direct conversation with studies of traditional initiation rites―ritual sequences of symbolic death and rebirth―that charge the initiand with knowledge about a society to produce a moral responsibility for it. Through this juxtaposition, Peacock conceptualizes the historically novel form of digital initiation rites, in which digital communication and information technologies play a substantive role in these sequences. Digital Initiation Rites presents another angle to contemporary debates around "conspiracy theorizing" and shows how the consumption of digital media connects to the deep history of humankind.

Vita Peacock is Principal Investigator of the ERC project Surveillance and Moral Community: Anthropologies of Monitoring in Germany and Britain, at King's College London. Her research focuses on hierarchy, surveillance, anonymity, and privacy. She is cofounder of the Anthropology of Surveillance Network (ANSUR).

--Marshal Zeringue

"Founding Fanatics"

New from Oxford University Press: Founding Fanatics: Extremism and the Formation of American Democracy by Noah Eber-Schmid.

About the book, from the publisher:

Since the American Revolution, scholars and citizens have often assumed that dispassionate rationality, reciprocity, and nonviolent tolerance are necessary conditions for the sustained development of democracy. Accordingly, they reject oppositional parties that spurn consensus and terms of mutual respect--and often use force to accomplish their political goals--denouncing extremists as irrational and antidemocratic.

Founding Fanatics questions this understanding, examining how moments of tension, violence, and extremism in the United States have sometimes served the pursuit of political equality. Noah Eber-Schmid focuses his analysis on the American Founding era, presenting case studies of the early memorialization of the Boston Massacre, popular debates over Shays' Rebellion, the thought and practices of the Democratic Societies, and the use of the French Revolution in political discourse. From this historical account of popular politics in the Founding era, Eber-Schmid draws new insights for theoretical approaches to contemporary American democracy, challenging assumptions that extremism is always a negative or antidemocratic force. By recognizing the role that democratic extremism has played in the development of American popular democracy, political theorists and citizens will better understand how such movements may contribute to the struggle to deepen and expand political equality and participation that continues today.

Visit Noah Eber-Schmid's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Reclaiming Clio"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: Reclaiming Clio: Making American Women's History, 1900-2000 by Jennifer Banning Tomás.

About the book, from the publisher:

Women’s history traveled a long and fascinating path before it became a respected and recognized academic field in twentieth-century America. This book explores the field’s development as a multiracial and multigenerational effort, going beyond the careers of individual women historians to focus on how the discipline itself took shape. Focusing on the foundational period between 1900 and 1968, Jennifer Banning Tomás shines a light on the work performed by archivists and professional historians that gave women’s history its own identity and legitimacy.

The women in Reclaiming Clio laid the groundwork for the field’s remarkable expansion during the final wave of twentieth-century feminism after 1970, when a genuine movement for women’s history emerged. Their contributions made the later success of women’s history possible. Tomás reveals the dedication and vision that turned women’s history into the thriving, influential field it is today.

Visit Jennifer Banning Tomás's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Money and the Making of the American Revolution"

New from Princeton University Press: Money and the Making of the American Revolution by Andrew David Edwards.

About the book, from the publisher:

American money and American democracy have always been in tension, pitting political equality against economic inequality. In Money and the Making of the American Revolution, Andrew David Edwards shows how this struggle emerged in America’s founding era. Everyone knows that the founders waged a revolt against taxation without representation. Edwards shows that the dispute over taxes was really a dispute over money: what it was, who could make it, and how to keep it from being used at the expense of the colonists in North America. The colonial rebels refocused their resistance on democratic, local control—defending the power they had used to make money for themselves.

Edwards’s narrative spans four continents, linking the problems of money and revolt in early America to the transatlantic slave trade, the disastrous mismanagement of the East India Company in India, and violence against Native Americans. His analysis emerges from the story itself, through the lives of individuals ranging from John Blackwell, Oliver Cromwell's one-time war treasurer, to Thomas Paine, the impassioned pamphleteer of the American Revolution. Edwards argues that as the republican vision of an agrarian, independent monetary system faded, the leaders of the Revolution tied the nation to capitalism and imperialism at its founding. The colonists may have won the battle for representation, but the money that underpinned European empire had established a stronghold in the new republic. Money and the Making of the American Revolution offers both an ambitious new interpretation of the Revolution and a fascinating story about the power of economic ideas.

--Marshal Zeringue

"America's Middle East"

New from Oxford University Press: America's Middle East: The Ruination of a Region by Marc Lynch.

About the book, from the publisher:

After Hamas' shocking 2023 attack on Israel, the United States stood firmly behind Israel's near-genocidal war on Gaza, despite widespread moral outrage and significant damage to Washington's global agenda. But Gaza is only the latest paradox in thirty-five years of Middle East policy. How did this pattern develop, why can't policymakers learn from repeated Middle Eastern calamities, and what does Gaza's destruction mean for America's place in the world?

Marc Lynch charts the United States' disastrously failed approach to the post-Cold War Middle East, where aspirations for US leadership and a calm region have only produced war, instability and humanitarian catastrophe. Lynch exposes the failure of each president's efforts to transform the Middle East in America's image, or pivot away from the region; Washington's refusal to take seriously the views of Middle Easterners; and its fantasy of forging a regional order 'without' the Palestinian issue.

Moving between American politics and Middle Eastern realities, this incisive account explains why US policy has not changed despite its horrifying human costs, from Iraq, Lebanon and Syria to Iran, Yemen and Libya.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Ryukyu Islands"

New from the University of Chicago Press: The Ryukyu Islands: A New History from the Stone Age to the Present by Gregory Smits.

About the book, from the publisher:

The first comprehensive history of the Ryukyu Islands region in English.

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.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Enduring Hostility"

New from Stanford University Press: Enduring Hostility: The Making of America's Iran Policy by Dalia Dassa Kaye.

About the book, from the publisher:

A timely and rigorous analysis of a half-century of American policymakers' shifting perceptions of Iran, and how they have driven US-Iran relations. US–Iran hostility has endured for longer than the Cold War. Momentous geopolitical shifts, changing leaderships, and evolving domestic priorities have not fundamentally altered this antagonistic relationship. Standard explanations pin the blame for this enduring hostility on Iran and its leaders' revolutionary ideology and policies at odds with the United States and the West. While Iran bears significant blame for a deeply adversarial relationship—the country often engages in dangerous and repressive activities—this book demonstrates that "it's them, not us" accounts cannot alone explain America's posture toward this complicated but critically important country. Drawing on original interviews with former government officials, oral histories, memoirs, congressional hearings, archival material, and the author's own participation in dozens of Iran-related track two meetings, Dalia Dassa Kaye deftly explores how America's Iran policy is made, the people who make it, and the underlying ideas and perceptions that inform it. Dassa Kaye looks back at US policy toward Iran over the past four decades to help us look ahead, offering wider lessons for understanding American foreign policymaking and providing critical insights at a pivotal time of heightened military tensions in and around the Middle East.

Visit Dalia Dassa Kaye's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Precarious Balance"

New from the University of North Carolina Press: A Precarious Balance: Firearms, Race, and Community in North Carolina, 1715–1865 by Antwain K. Hunter.

About the book, from the publisher:

Spanning the 1720s through the end of the Civil War, this book explores how free and enslaved Black North Carolinians accessed, possessed, and used firearms—both legal and otherwise—and how the state and white people responded. North Carolinians, whether free or enslaved, Black or white, had different stakes on the issue, all of which impacted the reality of Black people’s gun use.

Antwain K. Hunter reveals that armed Black people used firearms for a wide range of purposes: They hunted to feed their families and communities, guarded property, protected crops, and defended maroon communities from outsiders. Further, they resisted the institution of slavery and used guns both against white people and within their own community. Competing views of Black people’s firearm use created social, political, and legal points of contention for different demographics within North Carolina and left the general assembly and white civilians struggling to harness Black people’s armed labor for white people’s benefit. A Precarious Balance challenges readers to rethink how they understand race and firearms in the American past.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Imperative of Genius"

New from Oxford University Press: The Imperative of Genius by Kenneth Walden.

About the book, from the publisher:

Human beings produce many things, and the most remarkable of these we call works of genius. The symphonies of Beethoven, the of paintings of Cézanne, and the novels of Virginia Woolf are distinguished by their originality and their power. They are novel but not mere novelties. They are original in a way that seems profoundly meaningful, in a way capable of transforming the world. This ideal of genius appears most at home in art and science, but The Imperative of Genius suggests that its reach is much greater.

The problems that Beethoven, Cézanne, and Woolf face as artists--the problems whose solving makes them geniuses--are versions of a problem faced by every human being: the problem of acting in a way that is at once truly our own and intelligible to others. These demands naturally pull us in opposite directions--toward vain eccentricity and bland conformity. Genius is a capacity for synthesizing these demands, and this makes it a practical ideal. We see this ideal in lives marked by the same exemplary originality that we associate with great works of art: in the lives of Jesus, Diogenes the Cynic, Alain Locke, Jane Addams, Simone Weil, and many others.

This fact has consequences not only for our individual lives, but for how we live together. We owe each other a form of respect that extends to our shared capacity for genius. The fullest realization of that respect can be found in activities where creativity becomes collaborative. To create and sustain such activities is a moral task.

Visit Kenneth Walden's website.

--Marshal Zeringue