In this interview Gerard Russell talks about his vivid and timely new book Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys Into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East (Basic Books, 2014). Russell’s experience as a British diplomat in a rapidly changing region gives the book remarkable breadth, providing a valuable insight into the lives of minority communities from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border to Egypt: Mandaeans, Yazidis, Zoroastrians, Druze, Samaritans, Copts and Kalasha. Russell’s account pays particular attention to the circulation of stories, symbols and practices between these groups and reveals a history or extraordinary diversity and interdependence. His journey through this symbolic ecosystem, struggling to survive in its lands of origin, leads him eventually to diaspora communities in America and Europe. Is this the final domain of these forgotten kingdoms?

Gerard Russell’s account of these colorful pasts, precarious presents and unknown futures will be of interest to scholars of religion, culture, the Middle East, and a wider non-specialist readership.

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Ronald P. Formisano has written Plutocracy in America: How Increasing Inequality Destroys the Middle Class and Exploits the Poor (Johns Hopkins UP, 2015). Formisano is the William T. Bryan Chair of American History and professor emeritus of history at the University of Kentucky.

Are those in the United States living in a plutocracy? Formisano offers a full-throated “definitely, yes.” His wide-ranging book explores the nature of inequality, the role political institutions play in perpetuating inequality, and several ways to change the status quo. Plutocracy in America is a provocative read about the status of the country today.

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AirBnB has dramatically altered the landscape for the hotel, tourism, and real estate sectors. Uber and Lyft have done the same to transportation. But, how come we haven’t seen the same in American higher education? Ryan Craig, Managing Director of University Ventures, engages that question in his new book, entitled College Disrupted: The Great Unbundling of Higher Education (Palgrave McMillan, 2015). The author is critical of the current higher educational system in the US, which he says focuses too much on the “four Rs”: Rankings, Research, Real Estate, and Rah! (college sports) rather than on teaching and learning. For this reason, students graduate (or don’t) without the skills needed to actually get a job. In the book, Craig suggests that universities should unbundle the various services they offer and allow students to choose things that they need or want. He compares this unbundling to the current trend in cable providers, as many people are leaving behind the mammoth packages with 300 channels and instead pairing down their wants to more specific options, especially via the web. We haven’t really seen this in higher education, yet, but this book shows that the current system could be moving in that direction.

Ryan Craig joins New Books in Education for the interview to discuss the book. You can find him on Twitter at @ryancraiguv. For questions or comments on the podcast, you can also find the host on Twitter at @PoliticsAndEd.

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In How the Bible Became Holy (Yale University Press, 2014), Michael L. Satlow, a professor of religious studies and Judaic studies at Brown University, explores how an ancient collection of obscure writing became, over the course of centuries, “holy.” We take for granted that texts have power, but that idea was not always so obvious to people.

Satlow traces the story of how the Bible became the foundational, authoritative text of Judaism and Christianity.

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Mexican American religious healing – often called curanderismo – is a vital component of life in the US-Mexican borderlands. In his book Border Medicine: A Transcultural History of Mexican American Curanderismo (New York University Press, 2014) – Brett Hendrickson tracks healers going back to the nineteenth century and even before. He argues that these healing practices were never only Mexican American nor were they a sign of an inability to develop modern bio-medicine. They have in fact been shaped in a transcultural context where ideas about metaphysical healing and the efficacy of gifted individuals circulated among Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and Anglo-American settlers. Each population has contributed to the development and growing popularity of folk curanderismo.

Brett Hendrickson is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania.

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Dana Simmons‘s marvelous and thoughtful new book takes on a question that many of us likely take for granted: “What is a need; what is a want, a desire, a luxury?” Vital Minimum: Need, Science, and Politics in Modern France (University of Chicago Press, 2015) offers an answer that emerges from and is embedded in the particular historical context of nineteenth century France, but has consequences that range well beyond modern French history. Early in this fascinating study, Simmons articulates an argument that threads through the book: “a science of human needs undergirded the modern wage economy and the welfare state.” That science was collaboratively built by a diverse community of agronomists, chemists, doctors, anthropologists, economists, sociologists, amateur data gatherers, trade unions, and others who collectively attempted to define and then measure human needs for the sake of better social organization. How to do this was not at all self-evident, and fierce debates were waged that challenged participants to rethink the most basic elements of a notion of society: What were the “needs” that must be fulfilled in order to keep persons productive? Were those needs physical and/or psychological? What were the characteristics of a model “person,” anyway? The chapters of the book narrate the traces that these debates left on the bodies of workers, the pages of history, and the basic notions (like “minimum wage,” like “citizen”) that make up modern conceptions of civil society. Highly recommended!

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Minghui Hu‘s new book takes Dai Zhen as a case study to look at broader transformations in classical scholarship, technical methodologies, politics, and their relationships in the Qing period. This story of Dai Zhen begins before his birth and ends after his death, extending from a moment in which the Jesuits were denounced as “seditious foreigners” in 1664, to around 1800, when Dai’s classical vision was used by the Qing state as a kind of political-scientific legitimation of their rule. Dai Zhen’s methodology became the groundwork for a new political philosophy, and China’s Transition to Modernity: The New Classical Vision of Dai Zhen (University of Washington Press, 2015) takes that methodology and Dai’s technical accomplishments seriously. Hu’s book embeds a history of Dai’s work and legacy within a broader treatment of the work of European scholars and their legacy in shaping eighteenth and nineteenth century discourse, and it offers a fascinating window into an important aspect of the history of Qing science, scholarship, and politics.

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Researching the communal killings that occurred in North Maluku, Indonesia during 1999 and 2000, Christopher Duncan was struck by how participants “experienced the violence as a religious conflict and continue to remember it that way”, yet outsiders–among them academics, journalists, and NGO workers–have tended to dismiss or downplay its religious features. Agreeing that we need to move beyond essentialist explanations, Duncan nevertheless insists that the challenge for scholars “is to explain the role of religion in the violence without essentializing it”.

In Violence and Vengeance: Religious Conflict and Its Aftermath in Eastern Indonesia (Cornell University Press, 2013) he takes up the challenge. Drawing on over a decade of research in North Maluku, and informed by time spent in the region prior to the conflict, Duncan speaks with impressive authority about the before, during and after of the bloodshed. Utilizing work by scholars of political violence and the management of memory like Stanley Tambiah and Steve Stern, he shows how participants themselves produced and reproduced master narratives of holy warfare. In the process, he critiques scholarship that overstates elite agendas and machinations, remaining too focused on the causes of violence and losing sight of how, in the words of Gerry Van Klinken, “a runaway war can become decoupled from its initial conditions”.

Violence and Vengeance makes a powerful case for why study of vernacular understandings of conflict matter. The book also is exemplary in demonstrating how such study can and should be done.

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Bhavani Raman‘s new book Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India (University of Chicago Press, 2012) explores the world of colonial clerks in the Madras Presidency. Arguing that paper played an important role in colonial rule, Raman analyses cutcherry scribes and the allegations of corruption that surrounded them, accountant-scribes and their amazing memory skills, the changes in the education system wrought by the colonial encounter, issues of forgery and finally the use of petitions that helped form a particular type of colonial subject. The book details this fascinating topic with extreme subtlety and care and pushes the reader to ask many questions about corruption and the importance of paper not only in colonial but also in contemporary India.

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What is color? On the one hand it seems obvious that it is a property of objects – roses are red, violets are blue, and so on. On the other hand, even the red of a single petal of a rose differs in different lighting conditions or when seen from different angles, and the basic physical elements that make up the rose don’t have colors. So is color instead a property of a mental state, or a relation between a perceiving mind and an object? In Outside Color: Perceptual Science and the Puzzle of Color in Philosophy (MIT Press, 2015), M. Chirimuuta defends an ontology of color that aims to capture the ontology implicit in contemporary perceptual science. Chirimuuta, an assistant professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Pittsburgh, argues for color adverbialism, in which color is a property of an action-guiding interaction between an organism with the appropriate visual system and the environment. On her view, color vision is not for perceiving colors; it provides chromatic information that helps us perceive things.

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