Beyond the Margins: The University of California Press Podcast

Merchants of Virtue: Hindus, Muslims, and Untouchables in Eighteenth-Century South Asia (U California Press, 2023) explores the question of what it meant to be Hindu in precolonial South Asia. Divya Cherian presents a fine-grained study of everyday life and local politics in the kingdom of Marwar in eighteenth-century western India to uncover how merchants enforced their caste ideals of vegetarianism and bodily austerity as universal markers of Hindu identity. Using legal strategies and alliances with elites, these merchants successfully remade the category of "Hindu," setting it in contrast to "Untouchable" in a process that reconfigured Hinduism in caste terms. In a history pertinent to understanding India today, Cherian establishes the centrality of caste to the early-modern Hindu self and to its imagination of inadmissible others.

This book is available open access here. 

Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com.

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This agricultural history explores the transformation of the Santa Clara Valley over the past one hundred years from America's largest fruit-producing region into the technology capital of the world. In the latter half of the twentieth century, the region's focus shifted from fruits--such as apricots and prunes--to computers. Both personal and public rhetoric reveals how a sense of place emerges and changes in an evolving agricultural community like the Santa Clara Valley. 

In Valley of Heart's Delight: Environment and Sense of Place in the Santa Clara Valley (U California Press, 2022), Anne Marie Todd explores the concepts of place and placelessness, arguing that place is more than a physical location and that exploring a community's sense of place can help us to map how individuals experience their natural surroundings and their sense of responsibility towards the local environment. Todd extends the concept of sense of place to describe Silicon Valley as a non-place, where weakened or disrupted attachment to place threatens the environment and community. The story of the Santa Clara Valley is an American story of the development of agricultural lands and the transformation of rural regions.

Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.

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What if Hawai'i wasn't the 50th state? In Pacific Confluence: Fighting Over the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Hawai'i (U California Press, 2022), UCSD assistant professor Christen Sasaki argues that the years 1893-1898 marked a pivotal and understudied moment in Hawai'ian history. After the coup led by white oligarchs which overthrew Queen Liliuokalani and the Hawai'ian monarchy, the island chain became the center of international focus and competition, particularly between the empires of Japan and the United States, both of which vied for hegemony and control over Hawai'i's bountiful plantations. Questions about whiteness and race, labor, and immigration are at the center of this history, which recasts the story of Hawai'ian annexation as not an inevitable march of American expansion, but instead as a moment of contingency, which shows just how many possible branches any given historical moment can have.

Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.

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The Paraguayan Chaco is a settler frontier where cattle ranching and agrarian extractivism drive some of the world's fastest deforestation and most extreme land tenure inequality. Disrupting the Patrón: Indigenous Land Rights and the Fight for Environmental Justice in Paraguay's Chaco (U California Press, 2023) shows that environmental racism cannot be reduced to effects of neoliberalism but stems from long-standing social-spatial relations of power rooted in settler colonialism. Historically dispossessed of land and exploited for their labor, Enxet and Sanapaná Indigenous peoples nevertheless refuse to abide settler land control. Based on long-term collaborative research and storytelling, Joel E. Correia shows that Enxet and Sanapaná dialectics of disruption enact environmental justice by transcending the constraints of settler law through the ability to maintain and imagine collective lifeways amidst radical social-ecological change.

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Freddy Foks's Participant Observers: Anthropology, Colonial Development, and the Reinvention of Society in Britain (U California Press, 2023) is a novel new history of the role of social anthropology in British society from the 1920s to the 1970s. Foks follows the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski and his students from the seminar room and field and out into the broader world, describing how their brand of 'social anthropology' interacted with British debates debates about colonialism, marriage and the family, and urban life. Participant Observers is especially interesting because it gives attention to Margaret Read, Elizabeth Bott, Kenneth Little, Polly Hill, and other figures whose important work has not received the attention it deserves. A clearly and at times elegantly written work, this closely researched book's ambitious scope makes it notable, and its orientation to British history gives it an unusual angle that will appeal to historians of anthropology.

In this episode of the podcast, Freddy speaks with host Alex Golub about his book, the characters and events of twentieth century social anthropology, and the challenges of creating a narrative that spans several decades and an entire country.

Alex Golub is associate professor of anthropology, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.

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How did British society become financialised? In Are We Rich Yet? The Rise of Mass Investment Culture in Contemporary Britain (U California Press, 2022), Dr Amy Edwards, a senior lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Bristol, analyses the cultural, social, and economic history of the 1980s to understand how British society became a nation of investors. The book ranges from well-known examples, such as Yuppies and privatisation of national utilities, through to everyday examples of share shops and investment clubs. Linking the analysis to broader trends in British and in financial history, alongside issues of class and gender, the book is essential reading across the humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in why money is so important to contemporary life.

Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield.

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There is a vast body of imaginal literature in Bengali that introduces fictional Sufi saints into the complex mythological world of Hindu gods and goddesses. Dating to the sixteenth century, the stories--pīr katha--are still widely read and performed today. The events that play out rival the fabulations of the Arabian Nights, which has led them to be dismissed as simplistic folktales, yet the work of these stories is profound: they provide fascinating insight into how Islam habituated itself into the cultural life of the Bangla-speaking world. In Witness to Marvels: Sufism and Literary Imagination (U California Press, 2019), Tony K. Stewart unearths the dazzling tales of Sufi saints to signal a bold new perspective on the subtle ways Islam assumed its distinctive form in Bengal.

This book is available open access here. 

Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com.

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The aging of America will reshape how we live and will transform nearly every aspect of contemporary society. Renowned life course sociologist Deborah Carr provides a lively, nuanced, and timely portrait of aging in the United States. The US population is older than ever before, raising new challenges for families, caregivers, health care systems, and social programs like Social Security and Medicare.

Organized in seven chapters, Aging in America (U California Press, 2023) covers these topics:

Drawing on state-of-the-art data, current events, and pop culture, this portrait of an aging population challenges outdated myths and vividly shows how future cohorts of older adults will differ from the generations before them.

Rachel Pagones is an acupuncturist, educator, and author based in Cambridge, England.

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The Avatar Faculty: Ecstatic Transformations in Religion and Video Games (University of California Press, 2023) creatively examines the parallels between spiritual and digital activities to explore the roles that symbolic second selves—avatars—can play in our lives. The use of avatars can allow for what anthropologists call ecstasy, from the Greek ekstasis, meaning "standing outside oneself." The archaic techniques of promoting spiritual ecstasy, which remain central to religious healing traditions around the world, now also have contemporary analogues in virtual worlds found on the internet. In this innovative book, Jeffrey G. Snodgrass argues that avatars allow for the ecstatic projection of consciousness into alternate realities, potentially providing both the spiritually possessed and gamers access to superior secondary identities with elevated social standing. Even if only temporary, self-transformations of these kinds can help reduce psychosocial stress and positively improve health and well-being.

Jeffrey G. Snodgrass is Professor of Anthropology at Colorado State University.

Armanc Yildiz is a doctoral candidate in Social Anthropology with a secondary field in Studies in Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University. He is also the founder of Academics Write, where he supports scholars in their writing projects as a writing coach and developmental editor.

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Katherine S. Newman and Elisabeth S Jacobs' book Moving the Needle: What Tight Labor Markets Do for the Poor (U California Press, 2023) is a timely investigation reveals how sustained tight labor markets improve the job prospects and life chances of America’s most vulnerable households.

Most research on poverty focuses on the damage caused by persistent unemployment. But what happens when jobs are plentiful, and workers are hard to come by? Moving the Needle examines how very low unemployment boosts wages at the bottom, improves benefits, lengthens job ladders, and pulls the unemployed into a booming job market.

Drawing on over seventy years of quantitative data, as well as interviews with employers, jobseekers, and longtime residents of poor neighborhoods, Katherine S. Newman and Elisabeth S. Jacobs investigate the most durable positive consequences of tight labor markets. They also consider the downside of overheated economies that can ignite surging rents and spur outmigration. Moving the Needle is an urgent and original call to implement policies that will maintain the current momentum and prepare for potential slowdowns that may lie ahead.

John Emrich has worked for decades years in corporate finance, business valuation and fund management. He has a podcast about the investment space called Kick the Dogma.

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