"Growing Up Godless"

New from Princeton University Press: Growing Up Godless: Non-Religious Childhoods in Contemporary England by Anna Strhan and Rachael Shillitoe.

About the book, from the publisher:

How children’s non-belief and non-religion are formed in everyday life

The number of those identifying as “non-religious” has risen rapidly in Britain and many other parts of Europe and North America. Although non-religion and non-belief are especially prevalent among younger people, we know little about the experience of children who are growing up without religion. In Growing Up Godless, Anna Strhan and Rachael Shillitoe fill this scholarly gap, examining how, when, where, and with whom children in England learn to be non-religious and non-believing. Drawing on in-depth interviews and extensive ethnographic fieldwork with children, their parents, and teachers, Strhan and Shillitoe offer a pioneering account of what these children believe in and care about and how they navigate a social landscape of growing religious diversity.

Moving beyond the conventional understanding of non-religion as merely the absence of religion, Strhan and Shillitoe show how children’s non-religion and non-belief emerge in relation to a pervasive humanism—centering the agency, significance, and achievements of humans and values of equality and respect—interwoven in their homes, schools, media, and culture. Their findings offer important new insight into the rise and formation of non-religious identities and, more broadly, the ways that children’s beliefs and values are shaped in contemporary society.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The View from Everywhere"

New from Oxford University Press: The View from Everywhere: Realist Idealism without God by Helen Yetter-Chappell.

About the book, from the publisher:

Few contemporary philosophers take idealism seriously. The View from Everywhere aims to change this, developing a new quasi-Berkeleyan realist idealism, which does not depend upon God to do the metaphysical heavy lifting. This non-theistic idealism requires a fresh approach to the persistence and stability of the physical world. The resulting theory offers unique accounts of the nature of perception and the relationship between our minds and our bodies.

When we peel away all the attributes of God that aren't essential for ensuring the stability of the world, we're left with a simpler and more intelligible metaphysical picture. On the resulting view, reality is a vast unity of consciousness that binds together experiences as-of every object from every perspective: a "tapestry" woven out of experiential "threads."

Helen Yetter-Chappell seeks to fully flesh out this idealist metaphysics in a way that lets us make sense of the structure of reality and the deliverances of scientific inquiry, to consider the relationship between our minds and reality within an idealist framework, and to show that there are distinctive benefits to embracing idealism - benefits that should lead us to reassess our commitment to the materialist orthodoxy.

Visit Helen Yetter-Chappell's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Stuck at Home"

New from Stanford University Press: Stuck at Home: Pandemic Immobilities in the Nation of Emigration by Yasmin Y. Ortiga.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Philippines is among the most successful migrant-sending nations in the world, both lauded and critiqued for exporting its own citizens to a global labor market. Yasmin Y. Ortiga brings readers beyond this popular image to explore questions often overlooked: What happens when workers who were encouraged to emigrate are suddenly unable to leave? Stuck at Home examines how the Philippine state and its aspiring migrants negotiated the meaning of immobility amid the COVID-19 pandemic. In this pioneering book, Ortiga studies the narratives that emerged around two groups of Filipino workers: nurses banned from leaving the country and cruise workers who returned home after COVID-19 shut down the travel industry. Ortiga emphasizes the high stakes in telling the "right" story of immobility to a nation built around emigration—one that provides a compelling rationale for who deserves to move and who can be forced to stay. A gripping account of political interests, frustrated dreams, and an unprecedented crisis, Stuck at Home reveals how migration governance is not only about regulating people's movement, but also defining the meaning and implications of remaining in place.

Yasmin Y. Ortiga is Associate Professor of Sociology at Singapore Management University. She is the author of Emigration, Employability, and Higher Education in the Philippines (2018).

--Marshal Zeringue

"Irrational Together"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Irrational Together: The Social Forces That Invisibly Shape Our Economic Behavior by Adam S. Hayes.

About the book, from the publisher:

A must-read that reshapes how we think about the social underpinnings of our financial choices.

In Irrational Together, economic sociologist Adam S. Hayes takes readers on a fascinating journey to uncover the often-unseen social forces that shape our financial behavior. Drawing on original research and engaging real-world examples, Hayes challenges not only the notion that economic decisions are purely rational but also the prevailing behavioral economics view that irrational choices stem primarily from individual beliefs. Instead, he argues that our economic choices and actions are deeply embedded in our social and cultural contexts and that understanding these influences is crucial to fully grasp the complexities of financial decision-making.

From the impact of social class and cultural capital on risk-taking and the role of social networks and group identities in shaping consumer choices to the gendered dimensions of financial advice and literacy, this book weaves together insights from sociology, behavioral economics, and cultural studies to paint a nuanced picture of how we navigate the economic landscape as inherently social beings. Why, for example, would someone choose to continue paying 20% interest on a large credit card debt rather than taking out a low-interest mortgage on their home to pay off the card? As Hayes makes clear through rigorous analysis, cultural values—like those related to home ownership—hold as much or more sway over us than financial best practices.

Bridging the gap between behavioral economics and sociology, this groundbreaking work paves the way for a more holistic understanding of the social and cultural influences on economic behavior. Hayes also looks to the future and argues that to correct major disparities in our social understanding of wealth and money, we need to construct financial systems that consider a diversity of social backgrounds.

With its accessible language and thought-provoking insights, Irrational Together is an essential guide for anyone seeking to understand the intersection of money, society, and human behavior.

Visit Adam S. Hayes's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Gardens of Hope"

New from NYU Press: Gardens of Hope: Cultivating Food and the Future in a Post-Disaster City by Yuki Kato.

About the book, from the publisher:

Social changes through urban gardening and farming

Gardens are often spaces of hope, expected to solve many problems in a city including food insecurity and climate resilience. In fact, there has been a historical trend of urban gardening gaining popularity during times of crisis. Gardens of Hope is the story of urban gardening in New Orleans in the decade after Hurricane Katrina. Yuki Kato highlights the impact urban gardens have on communities after disasters and the efforts of well-intended individuals envisioning alternative futures in the form of urban farming.

Drawing on repeated interviews with residents who began cultivation projects in New Orleans between 2005 and 2015, Kato explains how good intentions and grit were not enough to implement or sustain urban gardeners’ visions for the post-disaster city’s future. Coining the term “prefigurative urbanism,” Kato illustrates how individuals tried to realize alternative ways of living and working in the city through pragmatism and innovation. Gardens of Hope asks key questions about what inspires and enables individuals to pursue prefigurative urbanism and about the potential and limitations of this form of civic engagement to bring about short- and long-term changes in cities undergoing transformation, from gentrification, post-pandemic recovery, to climate change.

Visit Yuki Kato's faculty website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Fortress Farming"

New from Cornell University Press: Fortress Farming: Agrarian Transitions, Livelihoods, and Coffee Value Chains in Indonesia by Jeff Neilson.

About the book, from the publisher:

Fortress Farming identifies in Indonesia's rural coffee-growing regions an alternative livelihood strategy that is reshaping relationships with land and informing Indonesia's agrarian transition. Jeff Neilson presents "fortress farming" households as ones that are reluctant to embrace productivity-maximizing agriculture, even as they interact with commodity markets and powerful downstream companies. Rather, these households tenaciously maintain access to land as a last defense against insecurity in a precarious global economy, all the while actively tapping into off-farm income sources. Fortress farming confounds assumptions that the development process entails an inevitable transition away from the land and into city-based manufacturing.

Shifting away from production to take a fuller view of rural Indonesian coffee-growing communities, Fortress Farming explores how and why defensive farming strategies have emerged, and what these tendencies mean for our understanding of agrarian transition in late-industrializing countries in the early twenty-first century. Neilson posits that late-industrializing countries may never undergo a full agrarian transition: In the alternative livelihood practice of fortress farming, we see a way that local social institutions can resist, or at least modify, the productive forces of capitalist agriculture.

Jeff Neilson is Associate Professor of Economic Geography at the University of Sydney. He is the coauthor of Value Chain Struggles and the coeditor of Global Value Chains and Global Production Networks.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Seven Challenges for the Science of Animal Minds"

New from Oxford University Press: Seven Challenges for the Science of Animal Minds by Mike Dacey.

About the book, from the publisher:

The scientific study of animal minds is difficult. This book examines the most significant reasons this is so: seven challenges for the science to overcome. Researchers are aware of these challenges, but few take any of them head-on, and none address them collectively. Despite this focus on challenges, the book's attitude is optimistic rather than critical; these are challenges for the science, not challenges to the science. Researchers have made substantial progress as things are. But taking the challenges head-on can help build an even stronger, more vibrant science. The seven challenges are: 1) underdetermination of theory by data, 2) anthropomorphic bias, 3) the difficulty of modeling cognitive processes, 4) integrating across disciplines, 5) ecological validity, 6) small sample sizes, and 7) measuring consciousness. For each, the book suggests rethinking the challenge and reorienting our attempts to address it. These approaches are novel, general ways of thinking that will help researchers work through the challenges, and perhaps find solutions appropriate to their own research. Each of the main chapters takes on one challenge. Each also includes an empirical case study, from social reasoning in chimpanzees, to foraging in honeybees, to consciousness in octopuses. Along the way, a big-picture framework emerges for drawing conclusions about animal minds based on experimental evidence. In this framework, the role of any individual piece of the science is limited: any individual experiment, model, claim, or argument can only tell us so much. When we are appropriately modest about each piece, conclusions about animal minds must be arrived at by holistically considering all the evidence we can get. This is a work in the philosophy of science, but it is written to be accessible to any philosopher interested in empirical issues relating to the mind, researchers in any of the related sciences, including psychology, neuroscience, ethology, and evolutionary biology, as well as intermediate to advanced students.

Visit Mike Dacey's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The American Mirage"

New from Princeton University Press: The American Mirage: How Reality TV Upholds the Myth of Meritocracy by Eunji Kim.

About the book, from the publisher:

How the entertainment narrative of upward mobility distorts the harsh economic realities in America

In an age of growing wealth disparities, politicians on both sides of the aisle are sounding the alarm about the fading American Dream. Yet despite all evidence to the contrary, many still view the United States as the land of opportunity. The American Mirage addresses this puzzle by exposing the stark reality of today’s media landscape, revealing how popular entertainment media shapes politics and public opinion in an increasingly news-avoiding nation.

Drawing on an eclectic array of original data, Eunji Kim demonstrates how, amid a dazzling array of media choices, many Americans simply are not consuming the news. Instead, millions flock to entertainment programs that showcase real-life success stories, such as American Idol, Shark Tank, and MasterChef. Kim examines how shows like these leave viewers confoundingly optimistic about the prospects of upward mobility, promoting a false narrative of rugged individualism and meritocracy that contradicts what is being reported in the news.

By taking seriously what people casually watch every day, The American Mirage shows how rags-to-riches programs perpetuate the myth of the American Dream, glorifying the economic winners, fostering tolerance for income inequality, and dampening support for redistributive policies that could improve people’s lives.

Visit Eunji Kim's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Symphony Concert in Nazi Germany"

New from the University of Chicago Press: The Symphony Concert in Nazi Germany by Neil Gregor.

About the book, from the publisher:

A new history of how the musical worlds of German towns and cities were transformed during the Nazi era.

In the years after the Nazis came to power in January 1933 and through the war years all aspects of life in Germany changed. However, despite the social and political upheaval, gentile citizens were able to continue leisure activities such as attending concerts. In this book, historian Neil Gregor surveys the classical concert scene in Nazi Germany from the perspective of the audience, rather than institutions or performers. Gregor delves into the cultural lives of ordinary Germans under conditions of dictatorship. Did the ways in which Germans heard music in the period change? Did a Nazi way of listening emerge?

For audiences, Gregor shows, changes to the concert experience were small and often took place around the edges. This, combined with the preserved idea of the concert hall as a space of imagined civility and cultivation, led many concertgoers and music lovers to claim after the war that their field and their practice had been innocent—a place to retreat from the vicious violence and racism of the Nazi regime. Drawing on untapped archival sources, The Symphony Concert in Nazi Germany reveals that the true history was one of disruption but also of near effortless adaptation. Through countless small acts, the symphony concert was reframed within the languages of strident nationalism, racism, and militarism to ensure its place inside the cultural cosmos of National Socialist Germany.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Closed Seasons"

New from the University of North Carolina Press: Closed Seasons: The Transformation of Hunting in the Modern South by Julia Brock.

About the book, from the publisher:

In a unique and personal exploration of the game and fish laws in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi from the Progressive Era to the 1930s, Julia Brock offers an innovative history of hunting in the New South. The implementation of conservation laws made significant strides in protecting endangered wildlife species, but it also disrupted traditional hunting practices and livelihoods, particularly among African Americans and poor whites.

Closed Seasons highlights how hunting and fishing regulations were relatively rare in the nineteenth century, but the emerging conservation movement and the rise of a regional “sportsman” identity at the turn of the twentieth century eventually led to the adoption of state-level laws. Once passed, however, these laws, were plagued by obstacles, including insufficient funding and enforcement. Brock traces the dizzying array of factors—propaganda, racial tensions, organizational activism, and federal involvement—that led to effective game and fish laws in the South.

Visit Julia Brock's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Assembling Religion"

New from NYU Press: Assembling Religion: The Ford Motor Company and the Transformation of Religion in America by Kati Curts.

About the book, from the publisher:

How Henry Ford institutionalized a social gospel

Henry Ford did not just mass produce cars. As a member of the Episcopal Church, reader of New Thought texts, believer in the “gospel of reincarnation,” mass marketer of antisemitic material, and employer who institutionalized a social gospel, Henry Ford’s contributions to American models of business were informed by and produced for an America he understood to be broadly Christian. Though Ford’s efforts at the head of the Ford Motor Company have commonly been understood as secular, Ford himself was explicit that his work in engineering and auto production was prophetic and meant to remake the world.

This religious history of Henry Ford and the Ford Motor Company repositions them within critical studies of religion, examining how Ford transformed American religious practice in the twentieth century. Drawing directly on documents from Ford’s archive, it examines Ford’s mass production methods and bureaucratic reforms as examples of prosperity gospel traditions, illuminating the ways manufacturing and technology intersect with American religious practice. Bridging American religious and industrial history, Assembling Religion offers a new and surprising way to understand Ford’s impact on culture, commerce, and the technology of labor.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Making the Invisible Real"

New from Oxford University Press: Making the Invisible Real: Practices of Seeing in Tibetan Pilgrimage by Catherine Hartmann.

About the book, from the publisher:

How can a person learn to see a mountain as a divine mandala, especially when, to the ordinary eye, the mountain looks like a pile of rocks and snow? This is the challenge that the Tibetan pilgrimage tradition poses to pilgrims, who are told to overcome their ordinary perception to see the hidden reality of the holy mountain.

Drawing on multiple genres of Tibetan literature from the 13th to 20th centuries--including foundational narratives of holy places, polemical debates about the value of pilgrimage, written guides to holy sites, advice texts, and personal diaries--this book investigates how the pilgrimage tradition tries to transform pilgrims' perception so that they might experience the wondrous sacred landscape as real and materially present. Catherine Anne Hartmann argues that the pilgrimage tradition does not simply assume that pilgrims experience this sacred landscape as real, but instead leads pilgrims to adopt deliberate practices of seeing: ways of looking at and interacting with the world that shape their experience of the holy mountain.

Making the Invisible Real explores two ways of seeing: the pilgrim's ordinary perception of the world, and the fantastic vision believed to lie beyond this ordinary perception. As pilgrims move through the holy place, they move back and forth between these two ways of seeing, weaving the ordinary perceived world and extraordinary imagined world together into a single experience. Hartmann shows us how seemingly fantastical religious worldviews are not simply believed or taken for granted, but actively constructed and reconstructed for new generations of practitioners.

Visit Kate Hartmann's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Mirages of Reform"

New from Cornell University Press: Mirages of Reform: The Politics of Elite Protectionism in the Arab World by Steve L. Monroe.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Mirages of Reform, Steve L. Monroe argues that geopolitics and social connections between state and capital underpin the Arab world's uneven trade policies. Despite decades of international pressure, neoliberal trade policy reform in the Arab world has been varied, selective, and often ineffective. Neoliberal trade policies have not deepened international trade in many of the region's markets. This book explains why.

When the region's regimes have strong support from global powers and strong social connections to the industrial elite, they engage in extensive but deceptive trade policy reform. Behind an edifice of neoliberal trade policies, neopatrimonial forms of protectionism like tax evasion and noncompetitive procurement shield the socially connected from international competition and obstruct actual trade liberalization. Industrialists are less trustful of regime promises of neopatrimonial protectionism after reform when they have weak social connections to their regime and their regime has low support from global powers. They are more likely to defend existing protectionist policies under these conditions, resulting in less trade policy reform.

Drawing on interviews, firm- and industry-level data, and evidence from Jordan to Morocco, Mirages of Reform reveals how international and domestic factors interact to shape the Arab world's rugged trade policy terrain. Insightful and well researched, this book imparts important lessons and warnings about the repercussions of economic reform in the region.

Visit Steve L. Monroe's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Harvests of Liberation"

New from Stanford University Press: Harvests of Liberation: Cotton, Capitalism, and the End of Empire in Egypt by Ahmad Shokr.

About the book, from the publisher:

In the first half of the twentieth century, a major change occurred in Egyptian nationalist understandings of imperialism and economic sovereignty. Where once the volatilities of foreign markets and capital were seen as the main threat, over time large landowners and their imperial allies were targeted as the principal obstacles to the country's industrial progress. The perceived locus of imperial domination shifted from the realm of circulation to the realm of production. Harvests of Liberation situates this transformation in the midcentury dynamics of agrarian capitalism in Egypt. Ahmad Shokr tells a story of decolonization through the lens of cotton, Egypt's prized export. He follows a range of actors—colonial advisors, nationalist leaders, agrarian reformers, merchant-financiers, landowners, and rural workers—whose interactions moved the levers of the cotton trade from institutions that facilitated accumulation on an imperial scale to new sites of control within the nation-state. Amidst depression and war, the transformation of Egypt's cotton economy prompted nationalists to embrace policies of land reform and industrialization and adopt a new conception of history. Ultimately, Shokr argues, these efforts set the stage for the construction of a postcolonial republic under Gamal Abdel Nasser, where national liberation became equated with national development.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Freedom Enterprise"

New from the University of Pennsylvania Press: Freedom Enterprise: Black Entrepreneurship and Racial Capitalism in Detroit by Kendra D. Boyd.

About the book, from the publisher:

Traces the rise and fall of the historic Black business community in Detroit

The Great Migration saw more than six million African Americans leave the US South between 1910 and 1970. Though the experiences of migrant laborers are well-known, countless African Americans also left the South to pursue entrepreneurial opportunities and viewed business as key to Black liberation. Detroit’s status as a mecca for Black entrepreneurship illuminates this overlooked aspect of the Great Migration story. In Freedom Enterprise, Kendra D. Boyd uses “migrant entrepreneurship” as a lens through which to understand the entwined histories of Black-owned business, racial capitalism, and urban space.

Freedom Enterprise follows Black Southerners’ journeys to Detroit during the initial wave of migration in the 1910s and 1920s, through their efforts to build a prosperous Black business community in the 1930s and 1940s, to the destruction of that community through urban renewal projects and freeway construction in the 1950s and 1960s. Combining business and social history methods to analyze an eclectic archive, Boyd chronicles migrant entrepreneurs’ experiences, highlighting tales of racial and economic violence, Black women’s business organizing, illegal business, communist entrepreneurs, and cooperative economics.

Boyd uses the framework of racial capitalism to examine migrant entrepreneurs’ experiences in twentieth-century America. In the Jim Crow South, African Americans worried about white mobs taking away their property, wealth, and lives. Though they sought refuge in Detroit, migrant entrepreneurs subsequently faced the loss of their livelihoods and the businesses they had spent decades building to the bulldozers of state-sponsored urban redevelopment initiatives. Southern migrants’ “freedom enterprise”—their undertaking of attaining freedom through business—was curtailed by the reality of operating within the confines of US racial capitalism.

In tracing Black entrepreneurs across the Great Migration, Freedom Enterprise provides important insights into African Americans’ activism for racial and economic justice and continued racialized wealth disparities.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Karl Marx in America"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Karl Marx in America by Andrew Hartman.

About the book, from the publisher:

The vital and untold story of Karl Marx’s stamp on American life.

To read Karl Marx is to contemplate a world created by capitalism. People have long viewed the United States as the quintessential anti-Marxist nation, but Marx’s ideas have inspired a wide range of people to formulate a more precise sense of the stakes of the American project. Historians have highlighted the imprint made on the United States by Enlightenment thinkers such as Adam Smith, John Locke, and Thomas Paine, but Marx is rarely considered alongside these figures. Yet his ideas are the most relevant today because of capitalism’s centrality to American life.

In Karl Marx in America, historian Andrew Hartman argues that even though Karl Marx never visited America, the country has been infused, shaped, and transformed by him. Since the beginning of the Civil War, Marx has been a specter in the American machine. During the Gilded Age, socialists read Marx as an antidote to the unchecked power of corporations. In the Great Depression, communists turned to Marx in hopes of transcending the destructive capitalist economy. The young activists of the 1960s were inspired by Marx as they gathered to protest an overseas war. Marx’s influence today is evident, too, as Americans have become increasingly attuned to issues of inequality, labor, and power.

After decades of being pushed to the far-left corner of intellectual thought, Marx’s ideologies have crossed over into the mainstream and are more alive than ever. Working-class consciousness is on the rise, and, as Marx argued, the future of a capitalist society rests in the hands of the people who work at the point of production. A valuable resource for anyone interested in Marx’s influence on American political discourse, Karl Marx in America is a thought-provoking account of the past, present, and future of his philosophies in American society.

The Page 99 Test: A War for the Soul of America.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Challenging Knowledge"

New from Oxford University Press: Challenging Knowledge: How We (Sometimes) Don't Know What We Think We Know by Jody Azzouni.

About the book, from the publisher:

Starting-point epistemology (SPE) is a new position in epistemology that, coupled with agent-centered rationality-the idea that a rational agent is one who cleaves to their own picture of rationality-is the key to resolving philosophical scepticism. SPE acknowledges that metacogntively-sophisticated agents know that they know things, and know some things about the methods by which this happens. Agent-centered rationality implies that a metacognitively-sophisticated agent should only desert a knowledge claim because of a challenge they recognize to be fatal to that claim. Scepticism is metacognitive pathology. Except in those rare cases when an individual is cognitively damaged, sceptical arguments should fail.

In Challenging Knowledge Jody Azzouni studies the various ways the cognitively healthy can protect themselves from prematurely denying what they take themselves to know. A sceptical position results from an agent's failure to correctly monitor their own processes of knowledge gathering. These scenarios are characterized as cases that are "logically compatible" with the evidence had by that agent, but logical possibility is not coextensive with epistemic possibility. The former allows cases that no agent should regard as challenging their knowledge claims, and excludes cases that every agent should be concerned with. Giving in to logically-possible scenarios illustrates an agent's failure to stand their ground when inappropriately challenged; e.g., yielding their knowledge claims in cases where they know the scenarios being presented are too remote to take seriously. Azzouni shows how the arguments for Cartesian and Pyrrhonian scepticism turn on failures to appropriately evaluate one's knowledge-gathering methods.

Visit Jody Azzouni's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Underworld Work"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Underworld Work: Black Atlantic Religion Making in Jim Crow New Orleans by Ahmad Greene-Hayes.

About the book, from the publisher:

A rethinking of African American religious history that focuses on the development and evolution of Africana spiritual traditions in Jim Crow New Orleans.

When Zora Neale Hurston traveled to New Orleans, she encountered a religious underworld, a beautiful anarchy of spiritual life. In Underworld Work, Ahmad Greene-Hayes follows Hurston on a journey through the rich tapestry of Black religious expression from emancipation through Jim Crow. He looks within and beyond the church to recover the diverse leadership of migrants, healers, dissidents, and queer people who transformed their marginalized homes, bars, and street corners into sacred space.

Greene-Hayes shows how, while enclosed within an anti-black world, these outcasts embraced Africana esotericisms—ancestral veneration, faith healing, spiritualized sex work, and more—to conjure a connection to freer worlds past and yet to come. In recovering these spiritual innovations, Underworld Work celebrates the resilience and creativity of Africana religions.

Visit Ahmad Greene-Hayes's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Iroquoia"

New from Cornell University Press: Iroquoia: Haudenosaunee Life and Culture, 1630–1783 by Kelly Y. Hopkins.

About the book, from the publisher:

Iroquoia highlights the innovation of the Haudenosaunee peoples in retaining sovereignty over their homelands through seven generations of social and environmental change following European contact and the settler invasion. Kelly Y. Hopkins argues that Haudenosaunee men and women incorporated articles of European manufacture into their daily lives to fulfill conventional social and cultural needs. They used new trade items and alliances to enhance their lives and to pursue goals specific to their communities. In Iroquoia, Hopkins explores how engagement in the global market economy irreversibly transformed the local environment, severed Indigenous relationships and responsibilities to human and other-than human kin, and challenged longstanding social and economic relationships within Haudenosaunee communities. While settler expansion, violence, and imperial terraforming threatened Indigenous communities, food sovereignty, and water management, The People of the Longhouse produced distinctive new material cultures and new land use practices that incorporated features of the colonial settlement template into longstanding subsistence and settlement patterns. Haudenosaunee peoples employed these survivance strategies to control the scale and scope of European intrusion into their homelands.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Playing through Pain"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: Playing through Pain: The Violent Consequences of Capitalist Sport by Daniel Sailofsky.

About the book, from the publisher:

For many fans and casual observers, professional sports and violence are deeply connected. Violence on the field has real consequences for players, notably in the form of life-altering injuries from concussions. Off the field, in the last several decades, scores of athletes have committed violent acts, from domestic abuse and sexual assault to animal abuse and murder. Beyond athletes, sport also serves as a site of political and structural violence, from the displacement and hyperpolicing of everyday people for mega-events to the “sportswashing” of environmentally harmful industries.

Daniel Sailofsky examines the endemic violence in professional sports and argues that—while related to masculinity, misogyny, and individual factors like alcohol consumption and gambling—it is most intimately tied to capitalism and to capitalist modes of consumption and profit. Sailofsky explains how capitalism creates the conditions for violence to thrive and uncovers how sports leaders—coaches, league officials, and team owners—obfuscate these relationships to avoid accountability.

From minor league baseball exploitation to spectator hooliganism, Sailofsky shows the connections between the business of sports and violence, but also, more importantly, he imagines new forms of sport that are not places of harm.

Visit Daniel Sailofsky's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Overthrow of Robert Mugabe"

New from Oxford University Press: The Overthrow of Robert Mugabe: Gender, Coups, and Diplomats by Blessing-Miles Tendi.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Overthrow of Robert Mugabe: Gender, Coups, and Diplomats argues the 2017 coup that ousted long time Zimbabwean president Robert Gabriel Mugabe, and the generality of coups, cannot be accurately and rigorously understood without examining the crucial role of gender and women's politics in military seizures of power.

Tendi's findings show that the politics of gender and women pervade military coup causes, dynamics, justifications, and international responses to coups. Contrary to influential representations of Zimbabwe's 2017 coup and other recent coups as markedly different from past coups, Tendi draws on deep gendered histories of military coups in Africa to argue that in reality there are significant continuities in coup characteristics across time. This highly original account of the 2017 Zimbabwean coup identifies the motives, dynamics, and trigger of the coup and demonstrates the centrality of gender and women's politics in these factors and processes. Additionally, despite the existence of an international anti-coup norm and democracy promotion in Africa by Western states, Zimbabwean coup makers were largely not publicly condemned or penalised by Western and African diplomats, for staging the coup.

Visit Blessing-Miles Tendi's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Sex Is a Spectrum"

New from Princeton University Press: Sex Is a Spectrum: The Biological Limits of the Binary by Agustín Fuentes.

About the book, from the publisher:

Why human biology is far more expansive than the simple categories of female and male

Being human entails an astonishingly complex interplay of biology and culture, and while there are important differences between women and men, there is a lot more variation and overlap than we may realize. Sex Is a Spectrum offers a bold new paradigm for understanding the biology of sex, drawing on the latest science to explain why the binary view of the sexes is fundamentally flawed—and why having XX or XY chromosomes isn’t as conclusive as some would have us believe.

In this lively and provocative book, leading biological anthropologist Agustín Fuentes begins by tracing the origin and evolution of sex, describing the many ways in the animal kingdom of being female, male, or both. Turning to humans, he presents compelling evidence from the fossil and archaeological record that attests to the diversity of our ancestors’ sexual bonds, gender roles, and family and community structures, and shows how the same holds true in the lived experiences of people today. Fuentes tackles hot-button debates around sports and medicine, explaining why we can acknowledge that females and males are not the same while also embracing a biocultural reality where none of us fits neatly into only one of two categories.

Bringing clarity and reason to a contentious issue, Sex Is a Spectrum shares a scientist’s perspective on why a binary view of sex and gender is not only misguided but harmful, and why there are multitudes of ways of being human.

The Page 99 Test: Race, Monogamy, and Other Lies They Told You.

The Page 99 Test: Why We Believe.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Nietzsche's Earthbound Wisdom"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Nietzsche's Earthbound Wisdom: The Philosopher, the Poet, and the Sage by Keith Ansell-Pearson.

About the book, from the publisher:

An incisive exploration of Nietzsche as a bold, visionary poet-philosopher.

Today, Nietzsche is justly celebrated for his rich, philosophical naturalism, but Keith Ansell-Pearson warns that we must not overlook the visionary dimension of his thinking and his focus on the need to cultivate a new care of the self and care of life. In Nietzsche’s Earthbound Wisdom, Ansell-Pearson recovers Nietzsche’s love for a philosophy that guides us through our passions, one that opens us more fully to the possibilities of life and the joy of knowledge.

Ansell-Pearson offers close readings of Nietzsche’s texts in conversation with philosophical and literary figures including Augustine, Baudelaire, Carlyle, Dostoevsky, Emerson, Flaubert, Stendhal, and more. Throughout, Ansell-Pearson examines Nietzsche’s sophisticated critique of literary naturalism and his alternative conception of the poet as a seer who has a deep longing for a new earth.

Visit Keith Ansell-Pearson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Black Religion in the Madhouse"

New from NYU Press: Black Religion in the Madhouse: Race and Psychiatry in Slavery's Wake by Judith Weisenfeld.

About the book, from the publisher:

How white psychiatrists pathologized African American religions

In the decades after the end of slavery, African Americans were committed to southern state mental hospitals at higher rates as white psychiatrists listed “religious excitement” among the most frequent causes of insanity for Black patients. At the same time, American popular culture and political discourse framed African American modes of spiritual power as fetishism and superstition, cast embodied worship as excessive or fanatical, and labeled new religious movements “cults,” unworthy of respect.

As Judith Weisenfeld argues in Black Religion in the Madhouse, psychiatrists’ notions of race and religion became inextricably intertwined in the decades after the end of slavery and into the twentieth century, and had profound impacts on the diagnosis, care, and treatment of Black patients. This book charts how racialized medical understandings of mental normalcy pathologized a range of Black religious beliefs, spiritual sensibilities, practices, and social organizations and framed them as manifestations of innate racial traits. Importantly, these characterizations were marshaled to help to limit the possibilities for Black self-determination, with white psychiatrists’ theories about African American religion and mental health being used to promote claims of Black people’s unfitness for freedom.

Drawing on extensive archival research, Black Religion in the Madhouse is the first book to expose how racist views of Black religion in slavery’s wake shaped the rise of psychiatry as an established and powerful profession.

Visit Judith Weisenfeld's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Religion in the Lands That Became America"

New from Yale University Press: Religion in the Lands That Became America: A New History by Thomas A. Tweed.

About the book, from the publisher:

A sweeping retelling of American religious history, showing how religion has enhanced and hindered human flourishing from the Ice Age to the Information Age

Until now, the standard narrative of American religious history has begun with English settlers in Jamestown or Plymouth and remained predominantly Protestant and Atlantic. Driven by his strong sense of the historical and moral shortcomings of the usual story, Thomas A. Tweed offers a very different narrative in this ambitious new history. He begins the story much earlier—11,000 years ago—at a rock shelter in present-day Texas and follows Indigenous Peoples, African Americans, transnational migrants, and people of many faiths as they transform the landscape and confront the big lifeway transitions, from foraging to farming and from factories to fiber optics.

Setting aside the familiar narrative themes, he highlights sustainability, showing how religion both promoted and inhibited individual, communal, and environmental flourishing during three sustainability crises: the medieval Cornfield Crisis, which destabilized Indigenous ceremonial centers; the Colonial Crisis, which began with the displacement of Indigenous Peoples and the enslavement of Africans; and the Industrial Crisis, which brought social inequity and environmental degradation. The unresolved Colonial and Industrial Crises continue to haunt the nation, Tweed suggests, but he recovers historical sources of hope as he retells the rich story of America’s religious past.

The Page 99 Test: America's Church.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Andrew Jackson: Old Hickory in Christian America"

New from Oxford University Press: Andrew Jackson: Old Hickory in Christian America by Jonathan M. Atkins.

About the book, from the publisher:

Few today think of Andrew Jackson, the American military hero and president, as a religious man. Nevertheless, Jackson considered himself a Christian throughout his life. Raised a "rigid presbeterian," Jackson's mother wanted her son to grow up to become a clergyman, and despite suffering tragedies and losing his family in the American Revolution, Jackson never rejected the fundamental Christian teachings of his youth. Although he gained notoriety as a rakish young man, religion's influence on him ebbed and flowed as he established himself as part of the South's planter elite.

With his devout wife, Rachel, he attended church and knew his Bible and religious subjects well, and while his determination to preserve his reputation involved him in numerous personal conflicts--including a duel that led to his killing a rival--he blended the principles of the antebellum South's honor-based culture with his belief in a traditional, orthodox version of Christianity. Likewise, he easily reconciled his religion with his ownership of slaves and his advocacy of Native American removal, and while he equated his enemies with the forces of evil, he always attributed his military and political accomplishments to the blessings of Providence. As he aged, Jackson became more devout, but he never experienced a dramatic conversion--contradicting the expectations of the leading revivalists of his era's Second Great Awakening--and he consistently promoted religious liberty and separation of church and state as core republican principles. Ultimately, Jackson's faith reflected a version of Christianity widespread in his era, and his frequent appeals for divine guidance and for God's blessing on his nation further encouraged the development of an American civil religion.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Girl Power?"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Girl Power? A History of Girl-Focused Development from Nairobi by Sarah Bellows-Blakely.

About the book, from the publisher:

An examination of how, when, and why austerity capitalism and strands of feminism became intertwined, and why girl-focused programs have been at the heart of international policymaking.

Girl-focused education programs have long been at the heart of international policymaking—when girls’ access to education is ensured, the reasoning goes, they are more likely to turn into productive adults who can drive economic growth. These ideas combine strands of feminism and capitalism that have a specific and understudied origin. In this book, historian Sarah Bellows-Blakely shows how a doctored study of girls’ education in East and Southern Africa led to the creation of international norms in the United Nations that would go on to guide policymaking on women’s rights and economic growth, promoting neoliberal feminist policy at the expense of other forms of gender-based justice.

Focusing on the growth of free-market feminism and girl-focused economic development planning through the relationship between UNICEF and the Nairobi-based NGO FEMNET, Bellows-Blakely reveals how their joint efforts set the blueprints for linked movements of economic development and women’s rights that are still ongoing. Through a narrative of the UNICEF-FEMNET lobbying campaign, Bellows-Blakely shows how multiple, contested girl-focused visions of economic programming and gender justice became selectively erased in favor of an approach to global policy centered on the free-market construction and strategic deployment of the African “girl child.”

--Marshal Zeringue

"Decolonizing Medicine"

New from Stanford University Press: Decolonizing Medicine: Indigenous Politics and the Practice of Care in Bolivia by Gabriela Elisa Morales.

About the book, from the publisher:

Decolonizing Medicine examines Bolivian state-led efforts to decolonize health services during the administration of Evo Morales, Bolivia's first Indigenous president. Governing from 2006 to 2019, the Morales administration undertook sweeping reforms, vowing to reverse intertwined colonial and capitalist systems of oppression and restore Indigenous good living. Predating more recent calls from global health practitioners to "decolonize global health," Bolivian state projects included a range of initiatives, such as integrating Indigenous traditional medical practitioners into clinical care and encouraging cultural sensitivity among healthcare providers. And yet, despite layered institutional investments, many Indigenous patients continued to describe their local hospital as a place "donde no hay atención" ("where there is no care"). Through fine-grained ethnography of health policymaking and implementation, Gabriela Elisa Morales tracks how Bolivian biomedical and public health institutions fell short of the far-reaching transformations proposed by decolonial activists and theorists. At the same time, she foregrounds how Indigenous patients and healers challenged the terms of caregiving and demanded that state and medical institutions fulfill their obligations to Indigenous flourishing. In tracing these dynamics, Morales articulates the multiplicity of ways that care practice becomes a locus of political foreclosure as well as radical transformation, with crucial insights for broader projects of decolonization and Indigenous rights.

--Marshal Zeringue

"How Rabbis Became Experts"

New from Princeton University Press: How Rabbis Became Experts: Social Circles and Donor Networks in Jewish Late Antiquity by Krista N. Dalton.

About the book, from the publisher:

How rabbinic expertise was socially constructed, performed, and defended in Roman Palestine

At the turn of the common era, the Jewish communities of Roman Palestine saw the organization of a small group of literate Jewish men who devoted their lives to the interpretation and teaching of their sacred ancestral texts. In this groundbreaking study, Krista Dalton shows that these early rabbis were not an insular specialist group but embedded in a landscape of Jewish piety. Drawing on the writings of rabbis in Roman Palestine from the second through fifth centuries CE, Dalton illuminates the significance of social relationships in the production of rabbinic expertise. She traces the social interactions—everyday instances of mutual exchange, from dinner parties to tithes and patronages—that fostered the perception of rabbis as experts.

Dalton shows how the knowledge derived from the rabbis’ technical skills was validated and recognized by others. Rabbis socialized and noshed with neighbors and offered advice and legal favors to friends. In exchange for their expert judgments, they received invitations, donations, appointments, and recognition. She argues that their status as Torah experts did not arise by virtue of being scholars but from their ability to persuade others that their mobilization of Jewish cultural resources was beneficial. Dalton describes the relational processes that made rabbinic expertise possible as well as the accompanying tensions; social interactions shaped the rabbis’ domain of knowledge while also imposing expectations of reciprocity that had to be managed. Dalton’s authoritative analysis demonstrates that a focus on friendship and exchange provides a fuller understanding of how rabbis claimed and defended their distinct expertise.

Visit Krista Dalton's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Unholy Sensations"

New from Oxford University Press: Unholy Sensations: A Story of Sex, Scandal, and California's First Cult Scare by Joshua Paddison.

About the book, from the publisher:

The true story of the first California cult scandal

In 1891, a suffragist and social reformer named Alzire Chevaillier launched a moral crusade to destroy Fountaingrove, a utopian spiritualist community in northern California. Chevaillier accused the colony's leader, the poet and prophet Thomas Lake Harris, of perverting the teachings of the Bible to promote a “new sexology” that was “worse than Mormonism.” She insisted that Harris used magical powers of hypnosis to take sexual and financial advantage of his followers, turning them into a “spiritual harem” that practiced “free love” and other gross immoralities. Media reports emphasized the presence of Japanese immigrant men at Fountaingrove, raising racialized specters of miscegenation and moral contamination. The international scandal, full of the sorts of salacious details prized by newspaper editors at the dawn of the era of yellow journalism, would last more than a decade, establishing Harris as the prototype for a new type of public menace-the “California cult leader.”

Unholy Sensations takes a close-up look at the Fountaingrove scandal to examine religion, gender, sexuality, and race in the Gilded Age from a fresh perspective. By chronicling the life stories of the people swept up in the scandal, Unholy Sensations reveals connections and tensions between a wide variety of nineteenth-century religious and social groups, including suffragists and spiritualists, Christian Scientists and Theosophists, journalists and politicians, and Protestant ministers and urban reformers. Together, these disparate groups helped spark California's first cult scare, demonizing Harris as the first-but far from the last-dangerous California cult leader. By showing that the term “cult” has always been a marker of race, sexuality, and religion, Unholy Sensations reveals the limits of American freedom and the centrality of religion to the policing of whiteness, family, and nation.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Politics of Skin Tone"

New from the University of Chicago Press: The Politics of Skin Tone: African American Experiences, Identity, and Attitudes by Nicole D. Yadon.

About the book, from the publisher:

A nuanced examination of the salience of skin tone within African American politics.

Research shows that skin tone is associated with significant differences in life experiences. On average, African Americans with darker skin earn lower wages, suffer worse health outcomes, and endure more negative criminal justice experiences than lighter-skinned African Americans. Nicole D. Yadon conceptualizes skin tone as one facet of the multidimensional construct of race that powerfully influences racialized experiences which, in turn, can influence political identities and attitudes.

Drawing on evidence from one hundred in-depth interviews, multiple surveys, and a survey experiment, The Politics of Skin Tone investigates the political associations of skin tone. Yadon finds that skin tone correlates with political attitudes, particularly on issues where color-based disparities are especially pronounced such as criminal justice. Moreover, a sizable number of African Americans adopt a skin tone-based identity. In an era of shifting racial boundaries and growing color-based discrimination, The Politics of Skin Tone examines the implications for both scholars and policymakers.

--Marshal Zeringue