Books Available for Review

This list is updated monthly, and each month’s list is sorted into general categories. Scroll down for previous monthly lists and our backlist of books still available for review from 2017 onward.

We invite queries about writing single book reviews or multi-book review essays. Contact Leo Coleman at polar.reviews@gmail.com for more information. PoLAR expects potential reviewers to have received their PhD in Anthropology or a related field, or to have a significant record of relevant publications.

PoLAR: Books Received

March 2019

Religion/Secularism    

  • Lemons, Katherine. 2019. Divorcing Traditions: Islamic Marriage Law and the Making of Indian Secularism. Cornell UP.
  • Mittermaier, Amrita. 2019. Giving to God: Islamic Charity in Revolutionary Times. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  • McBrien, Julie. 2017. From Belonging to Belief: Modern Secularisms and the Construction of Religion in Kyrgyzstan. University of Pittsburgh Press.
  • Subramanian, Banu. 2019. Holy Science: The Biopolitics of Hindu Nationalism. U Washington Press.

Human Rights, NGOs // European Politics

  • Destrooper, Tine and Sally Engle Merry, eds. 2018. Human Rights Transformation in Practice. UPenn.
  • Szombati, Kristof. 2018. The Revolt of the Provinces: Anti-Gypsyism and Right-Wing Politics in Hungary. Berghahn.
  • Vetta, Theodora. 2019. Democracy Struggles: NGOs and the Politics of Aid in Serbia. Berghahn.

Popular Movements/Activism

  • Grisaffi, Thomas. 2019. Coca Yes, Cocaine No: How Bolivia’s Coca Growers Reshaped Democracy. Duke UP.
  • Zia, Ather. 2019. Resisting Disappearance: Military Occupation and Women’s Activism in Kashmir. U Washington Press.

Migration

  • Vogt, Wendy A. 2018. Lives in Transit: Violence and Intimacy on the Migrant Journey. University of California Press.
  • Bloch, Alexia. 2017. Sex, Love, and Migration: Postsocialism, Modernity, and Intimacy from Istanbul to the Arctic. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Infrastructure / Technology / Energy

  • Kikon, Dolly. 2019. Living with Oil and Coal: Resources, Politics, and Militarization in Northeast India. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
  • Padios, Jan M. 2018. A Nation on the Line: Call Centers as Postcolonial Predicaments in the Philippines. Durham: Duke UP.

Political Anthropology Theory

  • Arnason, Johann P. and Chris Hann, eds. 2019. Anthropology and Civilizational Analysis: Eurasian Explorations. Albany: SUNY Press.
  • Mezzdra, Sandro and Brett Nielson. 2019. The Politics of Operations: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP.
  • Turner, Bertram and Guther Schlee, eds., 2017. On Retaliation: Towards an Interdisciplinary Understanding of a Basic Human Condition. New York: Berghahn.

Books Available as of February 2019 – Backlist from 2017 – present

  • Adelman, Madelaine. 2017. Battering States: The Politics of Domestic Violence in Israel. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP.
  • Aistara, Guntra A. 2018. Organic Sovereignties: Struggles Over Farming in an Age of Free Trade. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
  • Alexander, Catherine and Andrew Sanchez, eds. Indeterminacy: Waste, Value, and the Imagination. New York: Berghahn.
  • Alves, Jaime Amparo. 2018. The Anti-Black City: Police Terror and Black Urban Life in Brazil. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
  • Babul, Elif. 2017. Bureaucratic Intimacies: Translating Human Rights in Turkey. Stanford UP.
  • Berda, Yael. 2018. Living Emergency: Israel’s Permit Regime in the Occupied West Bank. Stanford UP.
  • Biehl, Joao & Peter Locke. 2017. Unfinished: The Anthropology of Becoming. Duke UP.
  • Briggs, Charles, and Clara Mantini-Briggs. 2016. Tell me Why My Children Died: Rabies, Indigenous Knowledge, and Communicative Justice. Durham: Duke UP.
  • Caglar, Ayse and Nina Glick Schiller, eds. 2018. Migrants and City-Making: Dispossession, Displacement, & Urban Regeneration. Durham: Duke UP.
  • Carrier, James G., ed. 2018. Economy, Crime, and Wrong in a Neoliberal Era. New York: Berghahn.
  • Castor, N. Fadeke. 2017. Spiritual Citizenship: Transnational Pathways from Black Power to Ifa in Trinidad. Durham: Duke UP.
  • Cepek, Michael. 2018. Life in Oil: Cofan Survival in the Petroleum Fields of Amazonia, photographs by Bear Guerra. Austin: University of Texas Press.
  • Chance, Kerry Ryan. 2018. Living Politics in South Africa’s Urban Shacklands. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  • Chavez, Alex E. 2017. Sounds of Crossing: Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeno. Durham: Duke UP.
  • Chong, Kimberly. 2018. Best Practice: Management Consulting and the Ethics of Financialization in China. Duke UP.
  • Chua, Lynette J. 2018. The Politics of Love in Myanmar: LGBT Mobilization and Human Rights as a Way of Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
  • Codding, Brian F. and Karn L. Kramer, eds. 2016. Why Forage: Hunters and Gatherers in the Twenty-First Century. Santa Fe, NM: SAR Press.
  • Cox, John 2018. Fast Money Schemes: Hope and Deception in Papua New Guinea. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
  • Dominguez, Virginia and Jasmin Habib, eds. America Observed: On An International Anthropology of the United States. New York: Berghahn.
  • Doxiadis, Evdixios and Aimee Placas, eds.. 2018. Living Under Austerity: Greek Society in Crisis. New York: Berghahn.
  • Dubal, Sam. 2018. Against Humanity: Lesson’s from the Lord’s Resistance Army. Berkeley: U California Press.
  • Dzenovska, Dace. 2018. School of Europeanness: Tolerance and Other Lessons in Political Liberalism in Latvia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
  • Galemba, Rebecca Berke. 2017. Contraband Corridor: Making a Living at the Mexico-Guatemala Border. Stanford UP.
  • Gowland, Geoffrey. 2017. Reinventing Craft in China: The Contemporary Politics of Yixing Zisha Ceramics. Canon Pyon: Sean Kingston Publishing.
  • Gutman, Yifat. 2017. Memory Activism: Reimagining the Past for the Future in Israel-Palestine. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP.
  • Halliburton, Murphy. 2017. India and the Patent Wars: Pharmaceuticals in the New Intellectual Property Regime. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
  • Heller, Monica and Bonnie McElhinny, eds. 2017. Language, Capitalism, and Colonialism: Toward a Critical History. Toronto: U Toronto Press.
  • Hinton, Alexander Laban. 2016. Man or Monster? The Trial of a Khmer Rouge Torturer. Duke UP.
  • Hinton, Alexander Laban. 2018. The Justice Façade. Trials of Transition in Cambodia. Oxford UP.
  • Holbrock, Mary J. 2016. Mayan Literacy Reinvention in Guatemala. University of New Mexico Press.
  • Hoover, Elizabeth. 2017. The River Is In Us: Fighting Toxics in a Mohawk Community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
  • Jimenez, Luis F. 2018. Migrants and Political Change in Latin America. U Florida Press.
  • Junge, Benjamin. 2018. Cynical Citizenship: Gender, Regionalism, and Political Subjectivity in Puerto Alegre, Brazil. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
  • Jusionyte, Ieva. 2019. Threshold: Emergency Responders at the US-Mexico Border. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  • Kahn, Jeffrey S. 2018. Islands of Sovereignty: Hatian Migration and the Borders of Empire. Chicago.
  • Karimi, Sirvan. 2017. Beyond the Welfare State: Postwar Social Settlement and Public Pension Policy in Canada and Australia. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
  • Khosravi, Shahram. 2017. Precarious Lives: Waiting and Hope in Iran. U Penn Press.
  • Kockelman, Paul. 2016. The Chicken and the Quetzal. Durham: Duke UP.
  • Lombard, Louisa. 2016. State of Rebellion: Violence and Intervention in the Central African Republic. London: Zed.
  • Majumder, Sarasij. 2019. People’s Car: Industrial India and the Riddles of Populism. New York: Fordham University Press.
  • Martins, Rosana and Massimo Canevacci, eds. 2018. Lusophone Hip-Hop: “Who We Are” and “Where We Are”: Identity, Urban Culture, and Belonging. Canon Pyon: Sean Kingston Publishing.
  • McGranahan, Carole and John Collins, eds. Ethnographies of US Empire. Duke UP.
  • McKay, Ramah. 2018. Medicine in the Meantime: The Work of Care in Mozambique. Duke UP.
  • Mendoza, Marcos. 2018. The Patagonian Sublime: The Green Economy and Post-Neoliberal Politics. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP.
  • Mikus, Marek. 2018. Frontiers of Civil Society: Government and Hegemony in Serbia. New York: Berghahn.
  • Millar, Kathleen M. 2018. Reclaiming the Discarded: Life and Labor on Rio’s Garbage Dump. Durham: Duke UP.
  • Neale, Timothy. 2017. Wild Articulations: Environmentalism and Indigeneity in Northern Australia. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
  • Nyiri, Pal. 2017. Reporting for China: How Chinese Correspondents Work with the World. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
  • Pappe, Ilan. 2017. Ten Myths about Israel. New York: Verso
  • Phillips, Kristin D. An Ethnography of Hunger: Politics, Subsistence, and the Unpredictable Grace of the Sun. Bloomington: Indiana UP.
  • Powell, Dana E. 2018. Landscapes of Power: The Politics of Energy in the Navajo Nation. Durham: Duke UP.
  • Rafael, Vincente. 2016. Motherless Toungues: The Insurgency of Language Among Wars of Translation. Durham: Duke UP.
  • Ranasinghe, Prashan. 2017. Helter-Shelter: Security, Legality, and an Ethic of Care in an Emergency Shelter. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
  • Rees, Tobias. 2018. After Ethnos. Durham: Duke University Press.
  • Renfrew, Daniel. 2018. Life Without Lead: Contamination, Crisis, and Hope in Uruguay. Berkeley: U California Press.
  • Rosenbaum, Susanna. 2017. Domestic Economies: Women, Work, and the American Dream in Los Angeles. Durham: Duke University Press.
  • Schubert, John. 2017. Working the System: A Political Ethnography of the New Angola. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
  • Schuller, Mark. 2016. Humanitarian Aftershocks in Haiti. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP.
  • Shulist, Sarah. 2018. Transforming Indigeneity: Urbanization and Language Revitalization in the Brazilian Amazon. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
  • Solomon, Harris. 2017. Metabolic Living: Food, Fat, and the Absorption of Illness in India. Duke UP.
  • Sumich, Jason. 2018. The Middle Class in Mozambique: The State and the Politics of Transformation in Southern Africa. Cambridge UP.
  • Swanson, Heather Anne, Marianne Elisabeth Lien, and Gro B. Ween, eds. 2018. Domestication Gone Wild: Politics and Practices of Multi-Species Relations. Durham: Duke UP.
  • Sze, Julie, ed. 2018. Sustainability: Approaches to Environmental Justice and Social Power. New York: NYU Press.
  • Tomlinson, Matt and Julian Millie, eds. 2017. The Monologic Imagination: Oxford UP.
  • Tousignant, Noemi. 2018. Edges of Exposure: Toxicology and the Problem of Capacity in Postcolonial Senegal. Durham: Duke UP.
  • Tsing, Anna, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt, eds. Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
  • Vetta, Theodora. 2018. Democracy Struggles: NGO’s and the Politics of Aid in Serbia. New York: Berghahn.
  • West, Paige. 2016. Disposession and the Environment: Rhetoric and Inequality in Papua New Guinea. New York: Columbia University Press.
  • Wiley, Sara Ann. 2018. Fractivism: Corporate Bodies and Chemical Bonds. Durham: Duke UP.
  • Wilson, Alice. 2016. Sovereignty in Exile: A Saharan Liberation Movement Governs. U Penn.
  • Wright, Fiona. 2018. The Israeli Radical Left: An Ethics of Complicity. U Penn.
  • Wu, Yi. 2016. Negotiating Rural Land Ownership in Southwest China: State, Village, Family. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
  • Wynn, Lisa and Angela Foster. 2016. Abortion Pills, Test Tube Babies, and Sex Toys: Emerging Sexual and Reproductive Technologies in the Middle East and North Africa. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP.
  • Yeh, Rian. 2018. Passing: Two Publics in a Mexican Border City. Chicago.
  • Zacka, Bernardo. 2017. When the State Meets the Street: Public Service and Moral Agency. Cambridge: Harvard UP.