Beyond the Margins: The University of California Press Podcast

Julie Sze‘s new book opens by bringing readers into the wetlands of Dongtan, introducing us to an ambitious but unrealized project to create the “world’s first great eco-city.” Fantasy Islands: Chinese Dreams and Ecological Fears in an Age of Climate Crisis (University of California Press, 2015) considers Dongtan, the Chongming Island...

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Lisa Stevenson‘s new book opens with two throat-singing women and one listening king. Whether we hear them sitting down to a normal night’s dinner (as the women) or stalking the pages of a short story from Italo Calvino’s Under the Jaguar Sun (as the king), listening to these voices can potentially transform our notion of listening itself, as well as our understanding of what a “self” is and could be. Life Beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic (University of California Press, 2014) shows us this by exploring formulations and practices of life, death, and care in a history and ethnography of Canadian policies and attitudes toward the Inuit during two epidemics, a tuberculosis epidemic (1940s-early 1960s) and a suicide epidemic (1980s-present). In juxtaposing those two cases, the book considers different forms of “care,” bureaucratic and otherwise. In her archival and ethnographic research, Stevenson works as a collector of images, paying careful attention to the ways that they give meaning to life itself, even and especially amid conditions of uncertainty and confusion. The first three chapters of the book trace the practices of anonymous care that characterized the two epidemics in question, considering how the Canadian North has functioned as a massive laboratory for transforming Inuit into Canadian citizens. Whether the biopolitical project operated on tubercular or suicidal subjects, Inuit people were conceptualized as serialized bodies that needed to be brought back to health. Life Beside Itself shows that despite this, Inuit were never fully made into biopolitical subjects: instead, we come to know the friends and acquaintances that animate Stevenson’s work as they cultivate multiple forms of life and of care. This is a beautiful and thoughtful book that will reward a wide range of readers, whether they come to it with an interest in health care and its histories, in the Canadian North, in forms of life and death, or simply in a moving and generously narrated story.

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The idea of jihad is among the most keenly discussed yet one of the least understood concepts in Islam. In her brilliant new book Body of Victim, Body of Warrior: Refugee Families and the Making of Kashmiri Jihadists (University of California Press, 2013), Cabeiri Robinson, Associate Professor of International Studies and South Asian Studies at the University of Washington engages the question of what might an anthropology of jihad look like. By shifting the focus from theological and doctrinal discussions on the normative understandings and boundaries of jihad in Islam, Robinson instead asks the question of how people live with perennial violence in their midst? The focus of this book is on the Jihadists of the Kashmir region in the disputed borderlands between India and Pakistan, especially in relation to their experiences as refugees (muhajirs). By combining a riveting ethnography with meticulous historical analysis, Robinson documents the complex ways in which Kashmiri men and women navigate the interaction of violence, politics, and migration. Through a careful reading of Kashmiri Jihadist discourses on human rights, the family, and martyrdom, Robinson convincingly shows that the very categories of warrior, victim, and refugee are always fluid and subject to considerable tension and contestation. In our conversation, we talked about the relationship between the categories of Jihad and Hijra as imagined by Kashmiri Jihadists, the ethical and methodological dilemmas of an ethnographer of Jihad, the mobilization of the human rights discourse by Kashmiri militant groups to legitimate violence, and the intersections of family, sexuality, and martyrdom. All students and scholars of Islam, South Asia, and modern politics must read this fascinating book that was also recently awarded the Bernard Cohn book prize for best first book in South Asian Studies by the Association for Asian Studies.

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In Miracles of Book and Body: Buddhist Textual Culture and Medieval Japan (University of California Press, 2011), Charlotte Eubanks examines the relationship between Mahāyāna Buddhist sÅ«tras and the human body, using Japanese tale literature (setsuwa) as a lens through which to understand this particular aspect of Buddhist textual culture and the way in which text and body are not as separate as we usually assume. Two of the questions she wants to answer are “What do sÅ«tras want?” and “What do sÅ«tras get?” She examines Buddhist scriptures of continental origin to answer the former, while she turns to Japanese tale literature (setsuwa) to answer the latter. Two ideas central to the book are that bodies can become texts, and that texts can become bodies. Concerning the first, through reciting, reproducing, and in some sense embodying a sutra, an individual can in effect turn his or her body into the text itself (a result that the sÅ«tras themselves encourage through various admonishments, a move that can be seen as their own quest for survival). As for the second–the idea that texts can become bodies–Eubanks shows that in the Japanese context sÅ«tras literary materialize, becoming independent actors in their own right. While it was largely through setsuwa and other such filters that medieval Japanese understood Buddhist scripture, the ease with which sÅ«tras and bodies moved back and forth along what Eubanks terms “the text-flesh continuum” was dependent upon Mahāyāna sÅ«tras’ concealment of their authorship. Indeed, certain sÅ«tras went so far as to suggest that their origins are to be found prior to the Buddha himself, the figure who in traditional Buddhism would have been considered the author of these texts. This move allowed Mahāyāna sÅ«tras to claim agency for themselves, and thus for Japanese setsuwa to later depict sÅ«tras as willful, motivated actors rather than mere containers for the teachings of the Buddha. Besides using setsuwa as a source for understanding the Japanese reception of Buddhist sÅ«tras, Eubanks examines the prefaces and colophons of setsuwa collections in order to understand how the compilers or authors of these tales intended this didactic literature to interact with human bodies (e.g., as food or medicine), showing that in the ideal relationship between setsuwa and reader/listener, the latter not only received ideas and ethical norms but also came to embody (both literally and figuratively) those very ideas and norms. Beside being rewarded with a stimulating reinterpretation of the way in which sÅ«tras and setsuwa make their messages heard and felt, the reader will be treated to a plethora of fascinating accounts from nine medieval setsuwa collections. In addition, Eubanks addresses gender at various points throughout the work, showing how Japanese and non-Japanese scholars alike have treated this genre as an erotic object, and the way in which setsuwa were conceived by their own authors and compilers as elderly female matchmakers (to give but two examples). And in the final chapter Eubanks discusses the relationship between material form and the practice of reading, seeking to understand the development of the revolving sÅ«tra library and the persistence of the scroll in East Asian Buddhism long after the codex has come into use. This book will be of particular interest to those researching medieval Japanese Buddhism, Mahāyāna sÅ«tras as a genre, setsuwa, Buddhist textual culture, gender symbolism in Japanese Buddhism, medieval traditions of preaching and proselytization, and the body in religious thought and practice.

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Islamic theology is generally understood or approached in terms of its systematic or speculative forms. In Islamic Theological Themes: A Primary Source Reader (University of California Press, 2014), John Renard, Professor of Theological Studies at Saint Louis University, has produced a collection of primary sources that thinks through theological deliberation far beyond the narrow strictures of kalam. This inclusive model is both chronologically expansive and geographically diverse. Renard offers relevant passages from the Qur’an and hadith, the tafsir tradition, narrative histories, manuals of moral direction, texts from spiritual guidance, creedal statements, and political theology. All of these sources are artfully introduced leading the reader through the diversity of the Islamic tradition. In our conversation we discussed human responsibility, the nature of God, the evaluation of non-Muslim beliefs, what merits community membership, the spiritual journey, functions of poems, stories, and letters, Iblis, mercy and justice, political succession, governance, and questions of leadership, and the social consequences of theological thinking.

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Cancer pervades American bodies–and also habits of mind. Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us (University of California Press, 2013) is a sharp, adventurous book by the established legal anthropologist, S. Lochlann Jain. The book simultaneously complicates and clarifies the multiple ways in which cancer and patient-hood gets appropriated, embodied and reproduced through seemingly quotidian activities–from opening an insurance bill to enjoying yoga class. Jain shows, in other words, exactly how and in what way cancer becomes you and me. The book draws together interviews, observations, and Jain’s first-hand experience as a cancer patient, as well as a range of cultural remains, from literature to law to life tables. In doing so, Jain holds a mirror to corporate stakeholders, to everyday Americans, and to herself in order to show, paradoxically, how modern Americans reinvest in cancer in the very practices designed to promote health. The book is a critique of the ways of life and “ways of knowing” that drive twenty-first century America–and an uncomfortable, necessary look at ourselves. Just when you think scholars have protested too much about the hidden costs of better health, Jain shows that Americans have not protested nearly enough.

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Joseph D. Hankins‘s marvelous new ethnography of the contemporary Buraku people looks at the labor involved in “identifying, dismantling, and reproducing” the Buraku situation in Japan and beyond. Taking readers on a journey from Lubbock, Texas to Tokyo, India, and back again, Working Skin: Making Leather, Making a Multicultural Japan (University...

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Dengue fever is on the rise globally. Since it is transmitted by mosquitoes which reside and reproduce in human environments, eradication efforts involve households and the people who keep them clean as well as moral and persuasive campaigns of surveillance and invigilation. In his new book Mosquito Trails: Ecology, Health and the Politics of Entanglement (University of California Press, 2014), Alex Nading follows the trails of garbage collectors and recyclers, local health care workers, and the mosquitoes themselves in this fascinating ethnography of Nicaragua’s Ciudad Sandino’s efforts to deal with dengue fever. He argues that these efforts are better understood as a series of entanglements and attachments that bring human and more than human actors together in intimate relationships. Nading’s book offers readers new ways to think about the relationships among the state and local actors as mediated through a series of objects: houses, viruses, immune systems, insects, and allocation budgets. This is a story about stories, and how they matter to health and urban environments.

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Liberal Protestants are often dismissed as reflecting nothing more than a therapeutic culture or viewed as a measuring rod for the decline of Christian orthodoxy. Rarely have they been the subjects of anthropological inquiry. Pamela Klassen, Professor of Religion at the University of Toronto, wants to change that. Her recent book, Spirits of Protestantism: Medicine, Healing, and Liberal Christianity (University of California Press, 2011), charts a transition in liberal Protestant self-understanding over the course of the twentieth century whereby “supernatural liberalism,” as Klassen calls it, enabled imaginative shifts between Christianity, science, and secularism. In the process, she explores how Protestants went from seeing themselves as Christians who combined medicine and evangelism to effect ‘conversions to modernity’ among others, including Native Americans and colonized people, to understanding themselves as complicit in an oftentimes racist imperialism. At the same time, they have recombined forms of healing in new ways, drawing on practices such as yoga and reiki in order to continue the search for a universalized type of wholeness – both spiritual and physical. Focusing on Canadian Protestants in the Anglican and United churches, Spirits of Protestantism combines rich historical examples and four years of ethnographic study to show how liberal Protestants have exerted a major influence in public life and even on anthropology itself.

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Academics don’t pay enough attention to class. And when we do, too often we only magnify the tendency for working class subjects to be defined according to middle class norms; and according to those norms, they, not surprisingly, fail in one way or another, justifying their position beneath the middle class. There are many unfortunate consequences of this dynamic. Among them, we seldom see what’s really happening in, say, the performance of a country song.

Nadine Hubbs, Professor of Music Theory and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan, is an exception to this rule. In Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music (University of California Press, 2014), she discusses subjects that range from a Foo Fighters tour-promotion video, the role of taste in class distinction, and the blinders that members of the middle class seem to wear when they notice working-class culture. Then she removes the blinders and takes a look at some country, noticing an artistic richness and political agenda that academics and critics seldom see. Along the way, she investigates a few of the prominent assumptions about country–its bigotry and political conservatism, for example. She discusses research that undermines these assumptions, noting the work they do to maintain class distinctions and privilege. And finally she makes the case for paying more attention to class, working-class culture, suggesting the potential for real political collaboration between the working and the middle classes.

Here are some of the videos mentioned in the interview:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsrqw0oElHQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6e5hRLbCaCs

http://www.gretchenwilson.com/media/videos/41683/56793

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