Reviewer Meets Reviewed

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Reviewer Meets Reviewed: Momentous mobilities: anthropological musings on the meanings of travel

The Royal Anthropological Institute is pleased to present ‘Reviewer meets Reviewed’, a discussion between author Prof Noel Salazar (University of Leuven) and reviewer Dr Sanam Roohi (University of Gottingen), chaired by Prof Florentina Badalanova Geller (Royal Anthropological Institute).

Grounded in scholarly analysis and personal reflection, and drawing on a multi-sited and multi-method research design, Momentous Mobilities disentangles the meanings attached to temporary travels and stays abroad and offers empirical evidence as well as novel theoretical arguments to develop an anthropology of mobility. Both focusing specifically on how various societies and cultures imagine and value boundary-crossing mobilities "elsewhere" and drawing heavily on his own European lifeworld, the author examines momentous travels abroad in the context of education, work, and spiritual quests and the search for a better quality of life.

Revewer Meets Reviewed: Being and dwelling through tourism: an anthropological perspective

The Royal Anthropological Institute is pleased to present ‘Reviewer meets Reviewed’, a discussion between author Dr Catherine Palmer (University of Brighton) and reviewer Prof Noel Salazar (University of Leuven).

Much of the existing literature seeks to make sense of tourism based on singular approaches such as visuality, identity, mobility, performance and globalised consumption. What is missing, however, is an overarching framework within which these valuable approaches can be located. This book offers one such framework using the concept of dwelling taken from Heidegger and Ingold as the starting point from which to consider the interrelatedness of being, dwelling and tourism. The anthropological focus at the core of the book is infused with multidisciplinary perspectives that draw on a variety of subjects including philosophy, material cultural studies and cultural geography. The main themes include sensuous, material, architectural and earthly dwelling and each chapter features a discussion of the unifying theoretical framework for each theme, followed by an illustrative focus on specific aspects of tourism. This theoretically substantive book will be of interest to anyone involved with tourism research from a wide range of disciplines including anthropology, sociology, geography, cultural studies, leisure studies and tourist studies.

Reviewer Meets Reviewed: Where Are We Heading? The Evolution of Humans and Things

The Royal Anthropological Institute is pleased to present ‘Reviewer meets Reviewed’, a discussion between author Prof Ian Hodder (Stanford University) and Prof Julian Thomas (University of Manchester).

A theory of human evolution and history based on ever-increasing mutual dependency between humans and things. In this engaging exploration, archaeologist Ian Hodder departs from the two prevailing modes of thought about human evolution: the older idea of constant advancement toward a civilized ideal and the newer one of a directionless process of natural selection. Instead, he proposes a theory of human evolution and history based on “entanglement,” the ever-increasing mutual dependency between humans and things. Not only do humans become dependent on things, Hodder asserts, but things become dependent on humans, requiring an endless succession of new innovations. It is this mutual dependency that creates the dominant trend in both cultural and genetic evolution. He selects a small number of cases, ranging in significance from the invention of the wheel down to Christmas tree lights, to show how entanglement has created webs of human-thing dependency that encircle the world and limit our responses to global crises.

Reviewer Meets Reviewed: Magic’s Reason: an Anthropology of Analogy

The Royal Anthropological Institute is pleased to present ‘Reviewer meets Reviewed’, a discussion between author Professor Graham Jones (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and reviewer Dr Katherine Swancutt (Kings College London).

In Magic's Reason, Graham M. Jones tells the entwined stories of anthropology and entertainment magic. The two areas are not as separate as they may at first seem. As Jones shows, the endeavors not only matured around the same time, but they also shared stances towards modernity and rationality that fed into each other. As stage magic established for itself a circumscribed realm of suspension of disbelief, colonial ethnographers drew on the language of that realm in describing native ritual performers as charlatans, hoodwinking gullible people into believing their sleight of hand was divine. Using French magicians' engagements with North African ritual performers as a case study, Jones shows how their concept of magic became enshrined in anthropological practice. Ultimately, Jones argues, anthropologists should not dispense with the concept of magic, but, rather, they should think more sharply about it, acknowledging the residue of its colonial origins. Through this radical reassessment of classic anthropological ideas, Magic's Reason develops a new perspective on the promise and peril of cross-cultural comparisons.

The book is published by The University of Chicago Press. More info here.

Reviewer Meets Reviewed: Burgundy: The Global Story of Terroir

The Royal Anthropological Institute is pleased to present ‘Reviewer meets Reviewed’, a discussion between author Prof Marion Demossier (University of Southampton) and reviewer Prof Rachel E Black (Connecticut College), chaired by Prof Deborah Reed-Danahay (University of Buffalo).

Drawing on more than twenty years of fieldwork, this book explores the professional, social, and cultural world of Burgundy wines, the role of terroir, and its transnational deployment in China, Japan, South Korea, and New Zealand. It demystifies the terroir ideology by providing a unique long-term ethnographic analysis of what lies behind the concept. While the Burgundian model of terroir has gone global by acquiring UNESCO world heritage status, its very legitimacy is now being challenged amongst the vineyards where it first took root.

Reviewer Meets Reviewed: Hegemonies of Language and Their Discontents: The Southwest North American region since 1540

The Royal Anthropological Institute is pleased to present ‘Reviewer meets Reviewed’, a discussion between author Professor Carlos Velez-Ibanez (Arizona State University) and reviewer Professor Anthony Grant (Edge Hill University), chaired by Dr Martin Edwardes (King's College London).

Spanish and English have fought a centuries-long battle for dominance in the Southwest North American Region, commonly known as the U.S.-Mexico transborder region. Covering the time period of 1540 to the present, Hegemonies of Language and Their Discontents provides a deep and broad understanding of the contradictory methods of establishing language supremacy in the region and the manner in which those affected have responded and acted, often in dissatisfaction and at times with inventive adaptations. Well-regarded author Carlos G. Velez-Ibanez details the linguistic and cultural processes used by penetrating imperial and national states. He argues that these impositions were not linear but hydra-headed, complex and contradictory, sometimes accommodating and at other times forcefully imposed. Such impositions created discontent resulting in physical and linguistic revolts, translanguage versions, and multi-layered capacities of use and misuse of imposed languages-even the invention of community-created trilingual dictionaries. Velez-Ibanez gives particular attention to the region, including both sides of the border, explaining the consequences of the fragile splitting of the area through geopolitical border formation. He illustrates the many ways those discontents have manifested in linguistic, cultural, educational, political, and legal forms. From revolt to revitalization, from silent objection to expressive defiance, people in the Southwest North American Region have developed arcs of discontent from the Spanish colonial period to the present. These narratives are supported by multiple sources, including original Spanish colonial documents and new and original ethnographic studies of performance rituals like the matachines of New Mexico. This unique work discusses the most recent neurobiological studies of bilingualism and their implications for cognitive development and language as it spans multiple disciplines. Finally, it provides the most important models for dual language development and their integration to the Funds of Knowledge concept as creative contemporary discontents with monolingual approaches.

Reviewer Meets Reviewed: Vital diplomacy

In Brazil, where forest meets savanna, new towns, agribusiness and hydroelectricity plants form a patchwork with the indigenous territories. Here, agricultural work, fishing, songs, feasts and exchanges occupy the Enawenê-nawê for eight months of each year, during a season called Yankwa. Vital Diplomacy focuses on this major ceremonial cycle to shed new light on classic Amazonian themes such as kinship, gender, manioc cultivation and cuisine, relations with non-humans and foreigners, and the interplay of myth and practice, exploring how ritual contains and diverts the threat of violence by reconciling antagonistic spirits, coordinating social and gender divides, and channelling foreign relations and resource

Reviewer Meets Reviewed: Marital Breakdown Among British Asians

The British Museum’s Anthropology Library and Research Centre, in conjunction with the Royal Anthropological Institute, is pleased to present ‘Reviewer meets Reviewed’,
a discussion between author Dr Kaveri Qureshi and reviewer Wiebe Ruijtenberg.

Against long-standing characterizations of British Asians as ‘flying the flag’ for traditional life, this book identifies an increase in marital breakdown and argues to reorient debates about conservatism and authoritarianism in British Asian families. Qureshi draws on a rich ethnographic study of marital breakdown among working class Pakistani Muslims in order to unpick the grounds of marital conflict, the manoeuvres couples undertake in staying together, their interactions with divorce laws and their moral reasonings about post-divorce family life. Marital Breakdown among British Asians argues against individualization approaches, demonstrating the embeddedness of couples in extended family relations, whilst at the same time showing that Pakistani marriages and divorces do not deviate in all respects from wider marital separation trajectories in Britain. The book provides new insights into how marital breakdown is changing the contours of British Asian families.

Reviewer Meets Reviewed: My Life as a Spy

As Katherine Verdery observes, "There's nothing like reading your secret police file to make you wonder who you really are." In 1973 Verdery began her doctoral fieldwork in the Transylvanian region of Romania, ruled at the time by communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. She returned several times over the next twenty-five years, during which time the secret police—the Securitate—compiled a massive surveillance file on her. Reading through its 2,781 pages, she learned that she was "actually" a spy, a CIA agent, a Hungarian agitator, and a friend of dissidents: in short, an enemy of Romania. In My Life as a Spy she analyzes her file alongside her original field notes and conversations with Securitate officers. Verdery also talks with some of the informers who were close friends, learning the complex circumstances that led them to report on her, and considers how fieldwork and spying can be easily confused. Part memoir, part detective story, part anthropological analysis, My Life as a Spy offers a personal account of how government surveillance worked during the Cold War and how Verdery experienced living under it.

Reviewer Meets Reviewed: Being Bedouin Around Petra: Life at a World Heritage Site in the Twenty-First Century

Petra, Jordan became a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1985, and the semi-nomadic Bedouin inhabiting the area were resettled as a consequence. The Bedouin themselves paradoxically became UNESCO Masterpieces of Oral and Intangible Heritage in 2005 for the way in which their oral traditions and everyday lives relate to the landscape they no longer live in. Being Bedouin Around Petra asks: How could this happen? And what does it mean to be Bedouin when tourism, heritage protection, national discourse, an Islamic Revival and even New Age spiritualism lay competing claims to the past in the present?

Reviewer Meets Reviewed: The Empire's New Clothes

The Empire's New Clothes: the Myth of the Commonwealth

In the wake of Brexit, the Commonwealth has been identified as an important body for future British trade and diplomacy, but few know what it actually does. How is it organised and what has held it together for so long? How important is the Queen’s role as Head of the Commonwealth? Most importantly, why has it had such a troubled recent past, and is it realistic to imagine that its fortunes might be reversed? In The Empire’s New Clothes, Murphy strips away the gilded self-image of the Commonwealth to reveal an irrelevant institution afflicted by imperial amnesia. He offers a personal perspective on this complex and poorly understood institution, and asks if it can ever escape from the shadow of the British Empire to become an organisation based on shared values, rather than a shared history.

Reviewer Meets Reviewed: Being Young, Male and Muslim in Luton

What is it like to be a young Muslim man in post-7/7 Britain, and what impact do wider political factors have on the multifaceted identities of young Muslim men? Drawn from the author's ethnographic research of British-born Muslim men in the English town of Luton, Being Young, Male and Muslim in Luton explores the everyday lives of the young men and, in particular, how their identity as Muslims has shaped the way they interact with each other, the local community and the wider world. Through a study of religious values, the pressures of masculinity, the complexities of family and social life, and attitudes towards work and leisure, Ashraf Hoque argues that young Muslims in Luton are subverting what it means to be 'British' through consciously prioritising and re-articulating self-confessed 'Muslim identities' in novel and dynamic ways that suit their experiences as a post-colonial diaspora. Employing extensive participant observation and rich interview content, Hoque paints a detailed picture of young Muslims living in a town consistently associated in the popular media with terrorist activity and as a hotbed for radicalisation. He challenges widely held assumptions about cultural segregation, gender relations and personal liberty in Muslim communities, and gives voice to an emerging generation of Muslims who view Britain as their home and are very much invested in the long-term future of the country and their permanent place within it.

19 November 2019 Reviewer Meets Reviewed

Work, Sleep, Repeat: The Abstract Labour of German Management Consultants

The British Museum’s Anthropology Library and Research Centre, in conjunction with the Royal Anthropological Institute, is pleased to present ‘Reviewer meets Reviewed’, a discussion between Dr Felix Stein, author of Work, Sleep, Repeat: The Abstract Labour of German Management Consultants, and Dr James Carrier, who reviewed the book for the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

This book on the work regime of German management consultants provides a first-hand account of the boardroom culture of Europe's strongest economy. Analysing how knowledge and power operate in this sector, Felix Stein explores a number of paradoxes. For example, while it is the job of management consultants to analyse the activities of other employees, they actually spend most of their time in luxurious seclusion away from them. In addition, despite having a strong sense of the importance of their work, consultants often find it difficult to explain to outsiders what it is they do. The book addresses these and other paradoxes by arguing that consultants are engaged in abstract labour and by offering new ways to think about white collar work and elites in the 21st century.

This lecture is available here.

17 October 2019 Reviewer Meets Reviewed

Made in Egypt: Gendered Identity and Aspiration on the Globalised Shop Floor

The British Museum’s Anthropology Library and Research Centre, in conjunction with the Royal Anthropological Institute, is pleased to present ‘Reviewer meets Reviewed’, a discussion between Dr Leila Zaki Chakravarti, author of Made in Egypt: Gendered Identity and Aspiration on the Globalised Shop Floor, and Dr Chihab El Khachab, who reviewed the book for the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

This ground-breaking ethnography of an export-orientated garment assembly factory in Egypt examines the dynamic relationships between its managers – emergent Mubarak-bizniz (business) elites who are caught in an intensely competitive globalized supply chain – and the local daily-life realities of their young, educated, and mixed-gender labour force. Constructions of power and resistance, as well as individual aspirations and identities, are explored through articulations of class, gender and religion in both management discourses and shop floor practices. The study also moves beyond the confines of the factory, examining the interplay with the wider world around it.

This lecture is available here.

16 May 2019 Reviewer Meets Reviewed

Josefu’s Thousand Hills

The British Museum’s Anthropology Library and Research Centre, in conjunction with the Royal Anthropological Institute, is pleased to present ‘Reviewer meets Reviewed’, a discussion between Dr Tamara Dragadze, author of Josefu’s Thousand Hills, and Dr Olivier Nyirubugara, who reviewed the book for the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

Josefu Mutesa, British born of Ugandan parents, slowly recalls his experiences in Rwanda, 'land of a thousand hills' where he went as a UN official to record and report on the violent events that had just taken place. The magnitude of political treachery and human betrayal causes him to break down and he is removed to Canada where he attempts to recover with the help of friends, part owns a bookshop there and leads a quiet life. Now, six years later, He decides to drive across Canada and face his demons. Crossing the prairies accompanied by ghosts that demand their stories be heard, he takes us on a parallel journey between time and place that is both sensitive and harrowing. One that we shall not forget.

This lecture is available here.

21 February 2019 Reviewer Meets Reviewed

Anthropological Practice: Fieldwork and the Ethnographic Method

The British Museum’s Anthropology Library and Research Centre, in conjunction with the Royal Anthropological Institute, is pleased to present ‘Reviewer meets Reviewed’, a discussion between Prof Judith Okely, author of Anthropological Practice: Fieldwork and the Ethnographic Method , and Dr Anselma Gallinat, who reviewed the book for the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

Anthropologists are increasingly pressurised to formulate field methods for teaching. Unlike many hypothesis-driven ethnographic texts, this book is designed with the specific needs of the anthropology student and field researcher in mind, with particular emphasis on the core anthropological method: long term participant observation. Anthropological Practice explores fieldwork experiences unique to anthropology, and provides the context by which to explain and develop practice-based and open-ended methodology. It draws on dialogues with over twenty established and younger anthropologists, whose fieldwork spans the late 1960s to the present day, taking place in locations as diverse as Europe, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Africa, Iran, Afghanistan, North and South America.

This lecture is available here.

17 May 2018 Reviewer Meets Reviewed

A Jewish Guide in the Holy Land: How Christian Pilgrims Made Me Israeli

The British Museum’s Anthropology Library and Research Centre, in conjunction with the Royal Anthropological Institute, is pleased to present ‘Reviewer meets Reviewed’, a discussion between Prof Jackie Feldman, author of A Jewish Guide in the Holy Land: How Christian Pilgrims Made Me Israeli, and Prof Tom Selwyn, who reviewed the book for the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

For many Evangelical Christians, a trip to the Holy Land is an integral part of practising their faith. Arriving in groups, most of these pilgrims are guided by Jewish Israeli tour guides. For more than thirty years, Jackie Feldman—born into an Orthodox Jewish family in New York, now an Israeli citizen, scholar, and licensed guide—has been leading tours, interpreting Biblical landscapes, and fielding questions about religion and current politics. In this book, he draws on pilgrimage and tourism studies, his own experiences, and interviews with other guides, Palestinian drivers and travel agents, and Christian pastors to examine the complex interactions through which guides and tourists "co-produce" the Bible Land. He uncovers the implicit politics of travel brochures and religious souvenirs. Feldman asks what it means when Jewish-Israeli guides get caught up in their own performances or participate in Christian rituals, and reflects on how his interactions with Christian tourists have changed his understanding of himself and his views of religion.

This lecture is available here.

19 April 2018 Reviewer Meets Reviewed

In Defense of Anthropology: An Investigation of the Critique of Anthropology

The British Museum’s Anthropology Library and Research Centre, in conjunction with the Royal Anthropological Institute, is pleased to present ‘Reviewer meets Reviewed’, a discussion between Prof Herbert Lewis, author of In Defense of Anthropology: An Investigation of the Critique of Anthropology, and Dr James Carrier, who reviewed the book for the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

This book argues that the history and character of modern anthropology has been egregiously distorted to the detriment of this intellectual pursuit and academic discipline. The "critique of anthropology" is a product of the momentous and tormented events of the 1960s when students and some of their elders cried, "Trust no one over thirty!" The Marxist, postmodern, and postcolonial waves that followed took aim at anthropology and the result has been a serious loss of confidence; both the reputation and the practice of anthropology has suffered greatly. The time has come to move past this damaging discourse. Lewis chronicles these developments, and subjects the "critique" to a long overdue interrogation based on wide-ranging knowledge of the field and its history, as well as the application of common sense.

This lecture is available here.