Books Available for Review

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

This list of books received is updated monthly. Scroll down for previous monthly lists and our backlist of books still available for review from 2017 onward. NB: Titles marked with an asterisk are already assigned to a reviewer (updated 03/03/2020)

PoLAR: Books Received

March 2020

Armytage, Rosita. 2020. Big Capital in an Unequal World: The Micropolitics of Wealth in Pakistan. New York: Berghahn.

Brunnegger, Sandra, ed. 2019. Everyday Justice: Law, Ethnography, Injustice. Cambridge UP.

Diaz-Barriga, Miguel and Margaret E. Dorsey. 2020. Fencing in Democracy: Border Walls, Necropolitics, and the Security State. Durham: Duke UP.

Göpfert, Mirco. 2020. Policing the Frontier: An Ethnography of Two Worlds in Niger. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Haenn, Nora. 2020. Marriage After Migration: An Ethnography of Money, Romance, and Gender in Globalizing Mexico. New York: Oxford University Press.

Kline, Nolan. 2019. Pathogenic Policing: Immigration Enforcement and Health in the US South. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Koch, Gabriele. 2020. Healing Labor: Japanese Sex Work in the Gendered Economy. Stanford UP.

Lakkimsetti, Chaitanya. 2020. Legalizing Sex: Sexual Minorities, AIDS, and Citizenship in India. New York: NYU Press.

Lombard, Louisa. 2020. Hunting Game: Raiding Politics in the Central African Republic. Cambridge UP.

Vogel, Erica. 2020. Migrant Conversions: Transforming Connections between Peru and South Korea. Berkeley: University of California Press.

February 2020

Baruah, Sanjib. 2020. In the Name of the Nation: India and its Northeast. Stanford UP.

Berta, Peter. 2019. Materializing Difference: Consumer Culture, Politics, and Ethnicity Among Romanian Roma. Toronto: University of Toronto Press [Anthropological Horizons].

Ghertner, D. Asher, Hudson McFann, and Daniel M. Goldstein, eds. 2020. Futureproof: Security Aesthetics and the Management of Life. Durham: Duke UP.

Ralph, Laurence. 2020. The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Reed-Danahay, Deborah. 2020. Bourdieu and Social Space: Mobilities, Trajectories, Emplacements. New York: Berghahn.

Yamin, Alicia Ely. 2020. When Misfortune Becomes Injustice: Evolving Human Rights Struggles for Health and Social Equality. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

January 2020

Appel, Hannah. 2019. The Licit Life of Capitalism: US Oil in Ecuatorial Guinea. Durham: Duke UP.

Braverman, Irus and Elizabeth R. Johnson, eds. 2020. Blue Legalities: The Life and Laws of the Sea. Durham: Duke UP.

Buck, Holly Jean. 2019. After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration. New York: Verso.

Etzioni, Amitai. 2018. Law and Society in a Populist Age: Balancing Individual Rights and the Common Good. Bristol: Bristol University Press.

Firat, Bilge. 2019. Diplomacy and Lobbying during Turkey’s Europeanisation: The Private Life of Politics. Manchester: University of Manchester Press.

Fischer, Johan and Jérémy Jammes, eds. 2019. Muslim Piety as Economy: Markets, Meaning and Morality in Southeast Asia. New York: Routledge.

Garth, Hanna. 2020. Food in Cuba: The Pursuit of a Decent Meal. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Li, Darryl. 2020. The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

McCargo, Duncan. 2019. Fighting For Virtue: Justice and Politics in Thailand. Ithaca: Cornell UP.

Sigal, Pete, Zeb Tortorici, and Neil L. Whitehead, eds. 2019. Ethnopornography: Sexuality, Colonialism, and Archival Knoweldge. Durham: Duke UP.

Skinner, Daniel. 2019. Medical Necessity: Health Care Access and the Politics of Decision Making. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

*Stamatopoulou-Robbins, Sophia. 2020. Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Pakistan. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

December 2019

Açıksöz, Salih Can. 2019. Sacrificial Limbs: Masculinity, Disability, and Political Violence in Turkey. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Dick, Hilary Parsons. 2018. Words of Passage: National Longing and the Imagined Lives of Mexican Migrants. Austin: University of Texas Press.

*Dickinson, Maggie. 2020. Feeding the Crisis: Care and Abandonment in America’s Food Safety Net. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Dua, Jatin. 2019. Captured At Sea: Piracy and Protection in the Indian Ocean. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Goodale, Mark. 2019. A Revolution in Fragments: Traversing Scales of Justice, Ideology, and Practice in Bolivia. Durham: Duke UP.

Griffiths, Anne. 2019. Transformations on the Ground. Space and the Power of Land in Botswana. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Hodges, Adam. 2019. When Words Trump Politics: Resisting a Hostile Regime of Language. Stanford: Stanford Briefs.

*Kleinman, Julie. 2019. Adventure Capital: Migration and the Making of an African Hub in Paris. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Malmström, Maria Frederika. 2019. The Streets are Talking to Me: Affective Fragments in Sisi’s Egypt. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Mugler, Johanna. 2019. Measuring Justice: Quantitative Accountability and the National Prosecuting Authority in South Africa. New York: Cambridge UP.

Peters, Rebecca Warne. 2020. Implementing Inequality: The Invisible Labor of International Development. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

*Subramanian, Ajantha. 2019. The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

October 2019, part II

Applebaum, Rachel. 2019. Empire of Friends: Soviet Power and Socialist Internationalism in Cold War Czechoslovakia. Ithaca: Cornell UP.

Bajoghli, Narges. 2019. Iran Reframed: Anxieties of Power in the Islamic Republic. Stanford UP.

*Burney, Ian and Christopher Hamlin, eds. 2019. Global Forensic Cultures: Making Fact and Justice in the Modern Era. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.

Constable, Marianne, Leti Volpp, and Bryan Wagner, eds. 2019. Looking for Law in All the Wrong Places: Justice Beyond and Between. New York: Fordham UP.

Eltringham, Nigel. 2019. Genocide Never Sleeps: Living Law at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. New York: Cambridge University Press.

LeBrón, Marisol. 2019. Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Lopez, William D. 2019. Separated: Family and Community in the Aftermath of an Immigration Raid. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.

McMahon, Richard, ed. 2019. National Races:  Transnational Power Struggles in the Sciences and Politics of Human Diversity, 1840-1945. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Moore, Adam. 2019. Empire’s Labor: The Global Army that Supports US Wars. Ithaca: Cornell UP.

Park, Kyeyoung. 2019. L.A. Rising: Korean Relations with Blacks and Latinos after Civil Unrest. New York: Lexington Books.

Speed, Shannon. 2019. Incarcerated Stories: Indigenous Women Migrants and Violence in the Settler-Capitalist State. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Srinivas, Tulasi. 2018. The Cow in the Elevator: An Anthropology of Wonder. Durham: Duke University Press.

Waring, Alan, ed., 2019. The New Authoritarianism: Vol. 2: A Risk Analysis of the European Alt-Right Phenomenon. Stuttgart/New York: Ibidem-Verlag/Barbara Budrich Publishers.

Weiss, Hadas. 2019. We Have Never Been Middle-Class. New York: Verso.

Westermeyer, William H. 2019. Back to America: Identity, Political Culture, and the Tea Party Movement. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Wills, David. 2019. Killing Times: The Temporal Technology of the Death Penalty. New York: Fordham UP.

October 2019

Jegathesan, Mythri. 2019. Tea and Solidarity: Tamil Women and Work in Postwar Sri Lanka. Washington: University of Washington Press.

Livingston, Julie. 2019. Self-Devouring Growth: A Planetary Parable as told from Southern Africa. Durham: Duke UP.

*Martin, Jeffrey T. 2019. Sentiment, Reason, and Law: Policing in the Republic of Taiwan. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Nikolakis, William, Stephen Cornell and Harry W. Nelson, eds. 2019. Reclaiming Indigenous Governance: Reflections and Insights from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Ross, Robert. 2018. These Oppressions Won’t Cease: An Anthology of Political Thought of the Cape Khoesan, 1777-1879. Cincinnati: University of Cincinnati Press.

Tejani, Riaz. 2019. Law and Society Today. Berkeley: University of California Press.

September 2019

Cooper, Davina. 2019. Feeling Like a State: Desire, Denial, and the Recasting of Authority. Durham: Duke UP.

Guilbault, Jocelyne and Timothy Rommen, eds. 2019. Sounds of Vacation: Political Economies of Caribbean Tourism. Durham: Duke UP.

Kravel-Tovi, Michal. 2017. When the State Winks: The Performance of Jewish Conversion in Israel. New York: Columbia UP.

Nicholls, Walter J. 2019. The Immigrant Rights Movement: The Battle over National Citizenship. Stanford UP.

Nugent, David. 2019. The Encrypted State: Delusion and Displacement in the Peruvian Andes. Stanford UP.

*Parla, Ayse. 2019. Precarious Hope: Migration and the Limits of Belonging in Turkey. Stanford UP.

August 2019

*Ambrust, Walter. 2019. Martyrs and Tricksters: An Ethnography of the Egyptian Revolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

*Bou Akar, Hiba. 2019. For the War Yet to Come: Planning Beirut’s Frontiers. Stanford UP.

Chowdhury, Nusrat Sabina. 2019. Paradoxes of the Popular: Crowd Politics in Bangladesh. Stanford UP.

Fukushima, Annie Isabel. 2019. Migrant Crossings: Witnessing Human Trafficking in the US. Stanford UP.

Gascón, Luis Daniel and Aaron Roussell. The Limits of Community Policing: Civilian Power and Police Accountability in Black and Brown Los Angeles. New York: NYU Press.

Leadbeater, Marie. 2018. See No Evil: New Zealand’s Betrayal of the people of West Papua. Cincinnati: University of Cincinnati Press.

Samet, Robert. 2019. Deadline: Populism and the Press in Venezuela. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

*Zani, Leah. 2019. Bomb Children: Life in the Former Battlefields of Laos. Durham: Duke UP.

The following two books are published separately, but form a joint project or “duo-graph”; both books may be reviewed together or individual reviewers may request one for review.

Boyer, Dominic. 2019. Energopolitics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene. Durham: Duke UP.

Howe, Cymene. 2019. Ecologics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene. Durham: Duke UP.

June 2019

Besteman, Catherine and Hugh Gusterson, eds. Life By Algorithms: How Roboprocesses are Remaking our World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Deverell, Rita Shelton. 2019. American Refugees: Turning to Canada for Freedom. Regina: University of Regina Press.

Harvey, Penny, Christian Krohn-Hansen, and Knut G. Nustad, eds. Anthropos and the Material. Durham: Duke University Press.

Hass, Bridget M. and Amy Shuman, eds. 2019. Technologies of Suspicion and the Ethics of Obligation in Political Asylum. Athens: Ohio University Press.

May 2019

Anderson, Mark. 2019. From Boas to Black Power: Racism, Liberalism, and American Anthropology. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Finkelstein, Maura. 2019. The Archive of Loss: Lively Ruination in Mill Land Mumbai. Durham: Duke University Press.

April 2019

*Caldwell, Beth. 2019. Deported Americans: Life After Deportation to Mexico. Durham: Duke UP.

Coe, Cati. 2019. The New American Servitude: Political Belonging Among African Immigrant Home Care Workers. New York: NYU Press.

Copeland, Nicholas. 2019. The Democracy Development Machine: Neoliberalism, Radical Pessimism, and Authoritarian Populism in Mayan Guatemala. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2019.

Gibson, Christopher L. Movement-Driven Development: The Politics of Health and Democracy in Brazil. Stanford: Stanford UP.

James, Erica Caple. 2019. Governing Gifts: Faith, Charity, and the Security State. Albuquerque: SAR Press/University of New Mexico Press.

Miller, Ethan. 2019. Reimagining Livelihoods: Live Beyond Economy, Society, and Environment. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Shore, Cris and David V. Williams, eds. 2019. The Shapeshifting Crown: Locating the State in Postcolonial New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the UK. New York: Cambridge University Press.

March 2019  

Arnason, Johann P. and Chris Hann, eds. 2019. Anthropology and Civilizational Analysis: Eurasian Explorations. Albany: SUNY Press.

Destrooper, Tine and Sally Engle Merry, eds. 2018. Human Rights Transformation in Practice. UPenn.

Grisaffi, Thomas. 2019. Coca Yes, Cocaine No: How Bolivia’s Coca Growers Reshaped Democracy. Duke UP.

Mezzdra, Sandro and Brett Nielson. 2019. The Politics of Operations: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP.

Padios, Jan M. 2018. A Nation on the Line: Call Centers as Postcolonial Predicaments in the Philippines. 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 – Backlist from 2017 – present

  • Adelman, Madelaine. 2017. Battering States: The Politics of Domestic Violence in Israel. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP.
  • Alexander, Catherine and Andrew Sanchez, eds. 2018. 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.
  • 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.
  • *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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Jusionyte, Ieva. 2019. Threshold: Emergency Responders at the US-Mexico Border. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • McBrien, Julie. 2017. From Belonging to Belief: Modern Secularisms and the Construction of Religion in Kyrgyzstan. University of Pittsburgh Press.
  • 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
  • Powell, Dana E. 2018. Landscapes of Power: The Politics of Energy in the Navajo Nation. Durham: Duke UP.
  • Rafael, Vincente. 2016. Motherless Tongues: 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.
  • Renfrew, Daniel. 2018. Life Without Lead: Contamination, Crisis, and Hope in Uruguay. Berkeley: U California Press.
  • 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: NGOs 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.
  • 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.