The six review essays in this collection emerge from a joint launch of five books and one dissertation/ book-in-progress and a panel at the recent annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies. In these meetings, each author provided a reading of another’s text, then revisited their own work in light of the resonances and dissonances that arose.
Addressing lab-based …
Lazy, Crazy, and Disgusting: Stigma and the Undoing of Global Health
Alexandra Brewis and Amber Wutich
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. 288 pages.
Background
Dr. Alexandra Brewis & Dr. Amber Wutich—anthropologists at Arizona State Universities School of Evolution and Social Change and The Center for Global Health—make a provocative argument: people at the receiving end of health interventions are stigmatized …
On Not Dying: Secular Immortality in the Age of Technoscience
Abou Farman
University of Minnesota Press, 2020. 360 pages.
Max More, a trained philosopher and the present Ambassador and President Emeritus of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, is of the opinion that most of us are caught in a “deathist”[1] trap. Aubrey de Grey, a noted gerontologist whose presence …
This book forum brings together eight anthropologists to discuss Li Zhang’s Anxious China: Inner Revolution and Politics of Psychotherapy (University of California Press 2020). Zhang examines the rise of psychotherapeutic practices in contemporary China, documenting how techniques for managing mental distress are intersecting with new forms of self-care and modes of governing in the context of tremendous politico-economic transformation. While …
This book forum brings together seven scholars to discuss Julie Livingston’s Self-Devouring Growth: A Planetary Parable as Told from Southern Africa (Duke 2019), a story of what grows alongside “growth” and the price of “a good life.” Botswana offers lessons that are peopled and elemental; lessons that tug between the local and the global. Livingston shows how water, food, transportation…
Two decades ago, Lawrence Cohen’s No Aging in India: Alzheimer’s, the Bad Family, and Other Modern Things challenged the ways in which we think about aging and senility, kinship and its undoing, medicine and the nation, language and the possibilities of ethnographic writing, and what it means to do the anthropology of South Asia. But its 300-odd pages contain much …