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.

During the ongoing COVID-19 Pandemic, most publishers are providing e-book review copies; physical books can be requested but availability is limited.

This list of books received is updated periodically. Scroll down for previous monthly lists. NB: Titles marked with an asterisk are already assigned to a reviewer (updated 30 June 2021)

PoLAR: Books Received

Spring-Summer 2021

Adebanwi, Wale and Rogers Orock, eds. 2021. Elites and the Politics of Accountability in Africa. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Bjorkman, Lisa, ed. 2021. Bombay Brokers. Durham: Duke University Press.

Bolotta, Guiseppe, Philip Fountain, and R. Michael Feener, eds. 2020. Political Theologies and Development in Asia: Transcendence, Sacrifice, and Aspiration. Manchester: Manchester UP.

Brandel, Andrew and Marco Motta, eds. 2021. Living With Concepts: Anthropology in the Grip of Reality. New York: Fordham University Press.

Briggs, Charles L. 2021. Unlearning: Rethinking Poetics, Pandemics, and the Politics of Knowledge. Louisville, CO: Utah State University Press.

Carney, Megan A. 2021. Island of Hope: Migration and Solidarity in the Mediterranean. Oakland: University of California Press.

Chaplin, Chris. 2021. Salafism and the State: Islamic Activism and National Identity in Contemporary Indonesia. Copenhagen: NIAS Press.

Ferrarini, Lorenzo and Nicola Scaldaferri. 2020. Sonic Ethnography: Identity, Heritage, and Creative Research Practice in Basilicata, Southern Italy. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Gaudillière, Jean-Paul, Claire Beaudevin, Christoph Gradmann, Anne M. Lovell, and Laurent Pordié. 2020. Global Health and the New World Order: Historical and Anthropological Approaches to a Changing Regime of Governance. Manchester: University of Manchester Press.

Howlett, Zachary M. 2021. Meritocracy and its Discontents: Anxiety and the National College Entrance Exam in China. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Kalman, Ian. 2021. Framing Borders: Principle and Practicality in the Akwesasne Mohawk Territory. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Kuru, Ahmet T. 2019. Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment. A Global and Historical Comparison. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Luna, Zakiya. 2020. Reproductive Rights as Human Rights: Women of Color and the Fight for Reproductive Justice. New York: NYU Press.

Muir, Sarah. 2021. Routine Crisis: An Ethnography of Disillusion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

O’Neill, Kevin Lewis and Benjamin Fogarty-Valenzuela. 2020. Art of Captivity/Arte del Cautiverio. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Panella, Cristiana and Walter E. Little. 2021. Norms and Illegality: Intimate Ethnographies and Politics. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Sur, Malini. 2021. Jungle Passports: Fences, Mobility, and Citizenship at the Northeast India-Bangladesh Border. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Talesh, Shauhin, Elizabeth Mertz and Heinz Klug, eds. 2021. Research Handbook on Modern Legal Realism. Surrey, UK: Edward Elgar.

Thorpe, Amelia. 2020. Owning the Street: The Everyday Life of Property. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Truitt, Allison J. 2021. Pure Land in the Making: Vietnamese Buddhism in the US Gulf South. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

van Oorschot, Irene. 2021. The Law Multiple. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Vrǎbiescu, Ioana. 2020. Deporting Europeans: The Racialized Mobility of Romanians in France. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

January-February 2021

*Antoniello, Patricia. 2020. For the Public Good: Women, Health, and Equity in Rural India. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.

Bähre, Erik. 2020. Ironies of Solidarity: Insurance and Financialization of Kinship. London: Zed Books.

Bartlett, Nicholas. 2020. Recovering Histories: Life and Labor after Heroin in Reform-Era China. Oakland: University of California Press.

Bickford, Andrew. 2021. Chemical Heroes: Pharmacological Supersoldiers in the US Military. Durham: Duke University Press.

Bjork-James, Sophie. 2021. The Divine Institution: White Evangelicalism’s Politics of the Family. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Crane, Ken R. 2021. Iraqi Refugees in the United States: The Enduring Effects of the War on Terror. New York: NYU Press.

Dattatreyan, Ethiraj Gabriel. 2020. The Globally Familiar: Digital Hip Hop, Masculinity, and Urban Space in Delhi. Durham: Duke UP.

Elinoff, Eli and Tyson Vaughan, eds. 2020. Disastrous Times: Beyond Environmental Crisis in Urbanizing Asia. Philadelphia: University of Pennyslvania Press.

Harker, Christopher. 2021. Spacing Debt: Obligations, Violence, and Endurance in Ramallah, Palestine. Durham: Duke University Press.

Haynes, Nell, Eero Laine, Heather Levi, and Sharon Mazer, eds. 2020. Professional Wrestling: Politics and Populism. Calcutta: Seagull Books.

Karam, John Tofik. 2020. Manifold Destiny: Arabs at an American Crossroads of Exceptional Rule. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 2021. Wild Thought: A New Translation of La Pensée Sauvage. Jeffrey Mehlman and John Leavitt, trans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Pugliese, Joseph. 2020. Biopolitics of the More than Human: Forensic Ecologies of Violence. Durham: Duke University Press.

*Savci, Evren. 2021. Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics under Neoliberal Islam. Durham: Duke University Press.

Schulz, Philipp. 2020. Male Survivors of Wartime Sexual Violence: Perspectives from Northern Uganda. Oakland: Luminos/University of California Press.

Scott, Rachel M. 2021. Recasting Islamic Law: Religion and the Nation State in Egyptian Constitution Making. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

*Sullivan, Kathleen M. and James H. McDonald, eds. 2021. Public Lands in the Western US: Place and Politics in the Clash between Public and Private. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Vauchez, Antoine and Pierre France. 2020. The Neoliberal Republic: Corporate Lawyers, Statecraft, and the Making of Public-Private France. Meg Morley, trans., with a forward by Samuel Moyn. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

October-December 2020

Bondarenko, Dmitri M. 2020. African Americans & American Africans: Migration, History, Race and Identities. Canon Pyon: Sean Kingston.

Canova, Paola. 2020. Frontier Intimacies: Ayoreo Women and the Sexual Economy in the Paraguayan Chaco. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Garth, Hanna and Ashanté M. Reese, eds. 2020. Black Food Matters: Racial Justice in the Wake of Food Justice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

*González, Roberto J. 2020. Connected: How a Mexican Village Built its Own Cell Phone Network. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Knox, Hannah. 2020. Thinking like a Climate: Governing a City in Times of Environmental Change. Durham: Duke University Press.

Kyed, Helene Maria. 2020. Everyday Justice in Myanmar: Challenges and Experiences in the Political Transition. Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Press.

Layton, Robert, ed. The Anthropology of Displaced Communities. Canon Pyon: Sean Kingston.

Lokaneeta, Jinee. 2020. Truth Machines: Policing, Violence, and Scientific Interrogations in India. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Magaña, Maurice Rafael. 2020. Cartographies of Youth Resistance: Hip-Hop, Punk, and Urban Autonomy in Mexico. Berkeley: University of California Press.

*Masco, Joe. 2020. The Future of Fallout, and Other Episodes in Radioactive World-Making. Durham: Duke University Press.

Molé Liston, Noelle. 2020. The Truth Society: Science, Disinformation, and Politics in Berlusconi’s Italy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Schwenkel, Christina. 2020. Building Socialism: The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam. Durham: Duke University Press.

Tamarkin, Noah. 2020. Genetic Afterlives: Black Jewish Indigeneity in South Africa. Durham: Duke University Press.

Varma, Saiba. 2020. The Occupied Clinic: Militarism and Care in Kashmir. Durham: Duke University Press.

Zaretsky, Natasha. 2020. Acts of Repair: Justice, Truth, and the Politics of Memory in Argentina. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

August-September 2020

Alexy, Allison. 2020. Intimate Disconnections: Divorce and the Romance of Independence in Contemporary Japan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

*Bannerjee, Dwaipayan. 2020. Enduring Cancer: Life, Death, and Diagnosis in Delhi. Durham: Duke University Press.

*Bens, Jonas. 2020. The Indigenous Paradox: Rights, Sovereignty, and Culture in the Americas. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Billé, Franck. 2020. Voluminous States: Sovereignty, Materiality, and the Territorial Imagination. Durham: Duke University Press.

Greenhouse, Carol J. and Christina L. Davis, eds., 2020. Landscapes of Law: Practicing Sovereignty in Transnational Terrain. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Harkness, Geoff. 2020. Changing Qatar: Culture, Citizenship and Rapid Modernization. New York: NYU Press.

Hodžić, Saida. 2017. The Twilight of Cutting: African Activism and Life after NGOs. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Malatino, Hil. 2020. Trans Care. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Nadkarni, Maya. 2020. Remains of Socialism: Memory and the Futures of the Past in Postsocialist Hungary. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Patton-Imani, Sandra. 2020. Queering Family Trees: Race, Reproductive Justice, and Lesbian Motherhood. New York: NYU Press.

Pike Sarah M., Jone Salomonsen and Paul-Francois Tremlett, eds. 2020. Ritual and Democracy: Protests, Publics, and Performances. Sheffield, UK: Equinox Publishing.

Rodriguez, Juan Luis. 2020. Language and Revolutionary Magic in the Orinoco Delta. New York: Bloomsbury.

Ventsel, Aimar. 2020. Punks and Skins United: Identity, Class, and the Economics of an Eastern German Subculture. New York: Berghahn.

Watson, Matthew C. 2020. Afterlives of Affect: Science, Religion, and an Edgewalker’s Spirit. Durham: Duke University Press.

Zavella, Patricia. 2020. The Movement for Reproductive Justice: Empowering Women of Color through Social Activism. New York: NYU Press.

April – June 2020

Besky, Sarah. 2020. Tasting Qualities: The Past and Future of Tea. Oakland: University of California Press.

Chriss, James J. 2020. Law and Society: A Sociological Approach. Thousand Oaks: Sage.

Grama, Emanuela. 2020. Socialist Heritage: The Politics of Past and Place in Romania. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Kuru, Ahmet T. 2020. Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment: A Global and Historical Comparison. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Peletz, Michael. 2020. Sharia Transformations: Cultural Politics and the Rebranding of an Islamic Judiciary. Oakland: University of California Press.

Redding, Jeffrey A. 2020. A Secular Need: Islamic Law and State Governance in Contemporary India. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Scott-Smith, Tom. 2020. On An Empty Stomach: Two Hundred Years of Hunger Relief. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Strathern, Marilyn. 2020. Relations: An Anthropological Account. Durham: Duke University Press.

Thompson, Gardner. 2020. Legacy of Empire: Britain, Zionism, and the Creation of Israel. London: Saqi Books.

Wiegratz, Jörg, Giuliano Martiniello, and Elisa Greco, eds. 2020. Uganda: The Dynamics of Neoliberal Transformation. London: Zed Books, 2020.

Wydra, Harald, and Bjørn Thomassen. 2020. Handbook of Political Anthropology. Cheltanham: Edward Elgar.

Yang, Mayfair. 2020. Re-enchanting Modernity: Ritual, Economy, and Society in Wenzhou, China. Durham: Duke University Press.

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.

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

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.

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.

*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.

December 2019

Açıksöz, Salih Can. 2019. Sacrificial Limbs: Masculinity, Disability, and Political Violence in Turkey. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

August 2019

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

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.