On the Shelves will feature contributors’ reviews of new (or, when relevant, not-so-new) books focused on HIV/AIDS and global health, as well as other volumes broadly relevant to Transcriptions’ purpose. We’re interested in reviews of books that run the gamut — across disciplines and fields, from the empirical to the theoretical, and whether academic or popular.
If you’ve read (or …
Disability and Mobile Citizenship in Postsocialist Ukraine
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.
318 pp., US $ 24.95 (paperback)
In this compelling and intimate ethnography, Sarah D. Phillips analyzes the lives and worlds of disabled persons in contemporary Ukraine, placing them within the context of Russian and Soviet histories of disability and activism. Focusing on the experiences …
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, …
