Translated by Nora Scott. London: Verso. 615pp. + index. US$49.95 / £30.00 (hardcover)
Maurice Godelier opens his magisterial tour of the “universe of kinship” with the observation that formal anthropological kinship theory has long been left for dead. What follows is a dazzling analysis that revisits ethnographic data on marriage, descent, siblinghood, …
A Heart for the Work: Journeys through an African Medical School
University of Chicago Press, 2010. 352 pp., US$27.50 (paperback).
In A Heart for the Work, Claire Wendland explores how biomedicine and its values are remade in an African context through an ethnographic study of the impact of medical training on students of Malawi’s College …
The book stalls at the American Anthropological Association meeting were flush with a new crop of books waiting (yearning) to be reviewed. If you have ideas, suggestions, or a desire to review a particular title, please let it be known. You can contact me by email ( eg1421 AT wayne DOT edu ) or at the address below:
Todd …
My colleague William Garriott of James Madison University’s Department of Justice Studies was recently interviewed by the website Left Eye on Books about his recently published monograph Policing Methamphetamine: Narcopolitics in Rural America (NYU Press: 2011). In the interview Garriott discusses the concept of narcopolitics, the particular role ethnography has to play in understanding an emergent phenomenon like methamphetamine, …
The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession along the Rio Grande
University of California Press, 2010. 264 pp., US$24.95 (paperback).
Angela Garcia’s magisterial, unsettling account of heroin addiction among a Hispanic community in Espanola Valley opens with a description of Nuevo Dias, a rural detoxification facility for drug users. Accepting the executive director’s challenge to “work” …
The Republic of Therapy: Triage and Sovereignty in West Africa’s Time of AIDS.
By Vinh-Kim Nguyen.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.
Pp. 256. ISBN 9780822348740. (Paperback, US $ 22.95)
Reviewed by Betsey Brada (Princeton University)
In The Republic of Therapy, Vinh-Kim Nguyen traces responses to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Francophone West Africa between 1994, when effective …
