In recent years, anonymity has rocked the political and social landscape. There are countless examples: An anonymous whistleblower was at the heart of President Trump’s first impeachment, an anonymous group of hackers compromised more than 77 million Sony accounts, and best-selling author Elena Ferrante resolutely continued to hide her real name and identity. In his book Anonymous: The Performance of Hidden Identities (University of Chicago Press, 2023), Thomas DeGloma investigates contemporary and historical cases to build a sociological theory that accounts for the many faces of anonymity.
Thomas DeGloma is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.
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Thomas DeGloma, "Anonymous: The Performance of Hidden Identities" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Interviews with Anthropologists about their New Books
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Social Sciences

Science & Medicine

Science

Lahore's Hall Road is the largest electronics market in Pakistan. Once the center of film and media piracy in South Asia, it now specializes in smartphones and accessories. For Hall Road's traders, conflicts between the economic promises and the moral dangers of film loom large. To reconcile their secular trade with their responsibilities as devoted Muslims, they often look to adjudicate the good or bad moral "atmosphere" (mahaul) that can cling to film and media.
In Moral Atmospheres: Islam and Media in a Pakistani Marketplace (Columbia UP, 2024),Timothy P. A. Cooper examines the diverse and coexisting moral atmospheres that surround media in Pakistan, tracing public understandings of ethical life and showing how they influence economic behavior. Drawing on extensive ethnographic work among traders, consumers, collectors, archivists, cinephiles, and cinephobes, Moral Atmospheres explores varied views on what the relationship between film and faith should look, sound, and feel like for Pakistan's Muslim-majority public. Cooper considers the preservation and censorship of film in and outside of the state bureaucracy, contestations surrounding heritage and urban infrastructure, and the production and circulation of sound and video recordings among the country's religious minorities. He argues that a focus on atmosphere provides ways of seeing moral thresholds as mutable and affective, rather than as fixed ethical standpoints. At once a vivid ethnography of a market street and a generative theorization of atmosphere, this book offers fresh perspectives on moral experience and the relationship between religion and media.
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Timothy P. A. Cooper, "Moral Atmospheres: Islam and Media in a Pakistani Marketplace" (Columbia UP, 2024)

The low-wage service industry is one of the fastest-growing employment sectors in the US economy. Its workers disproportionately tend to be low-income and minority women. Service sector work entails rigid forms of temporal discipline manifested in work requirements for flexible, last-minute, and round-the-clock availability, as well as limited to no eligibility for sick and parental leaves, all of which impact workers’ ability to care for themselves and their dependents.
Pregnant at Work: Low-Wage Workers, Power, and Temporal Injustice (NYU Press, 2024) examines the experiences of pregnant service sector workers in New York City as they try to navigate the time conflicts between precarious low-wage service labor and safety net prenatal care. Through interviews and fieldwork in a prenatal clinic of a public hospital, Elise Andaya vividly describes workers’ struggles to maintain expected tempos of labor as their pregnancies progress as well as their efforts to schedule and attend prenatal care, where waiting is a constant factor—a reflection of the pervasive belief that poor people’s time is less valuable than that of other people.
Pregnant at Work is a compelling examination of the ways in which power and inequalities of race, class, gender, and immigration status are produced and reproduced in the US, including in individual pregnant bodies. The stories of the pregnant workers featured in this book underscore the urgency of movements towards temporal justice and a new politics of care in the twenty-first century.
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Elise Andaya, "Pregnant at Work: Low-Wage Workers, Power, and Temporal Injustice" (NYU Press, 2024)

Indonesia is the world's second largest cigarette market: two out of three men smoke, and clove-laced tobacco cigarettes called kretek make up 95 percent of the market. To account for the staggering success of this lethal industry, Kretek Capitalism: Making, Marketing, and Consuming Clove Cigarettes in Indonesia (University of California Press, 2024) moves beyond a focus on the addictive hold of nicotine to examine how kretek manufacturers have adopted global tobacco technologies and enlisted Indonesians to labor on their behalf in fields and factories, at retail outlets and social gatherings, and online. The book charts how Sampoerna, a Philip Morris International subsidiary, uses contracts, competitions, and gender, class, and age hierarchies to extract overtime, shift, seasonal, gig, and unpaid labor from workers, influencers, artists, students, retailers, and consumers. Critically engaging nationalist claims about the commodity's cultural heritage and the jobs it supports, Marina Welker shows how global capitalism has transformed both kretek and the labor required to make and promote it. 
Marina Welker is Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University and author of Enacting the Corporation: An American Mining Firm in Post-Authoritarian Indonesia. 
Reighan Gillam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).
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Marina Welker, "Kretek Capitalism: Making, Marketing, and Consuming Clove Cigarettes in Indonesia" (U California Press, 2024)

In 1974 the government of Jordan established a new ministry to oversee a nationwide scheme to buy and distribute subsidized flour and regulate bakeries. The scheme sets terms for the politics that are the subject of a new book: States of Subsistence: The Politics of Bread in Contemporary Jordan (Stanford University Press, 2022). Rest assured, this is no dull account of state welfare that posits and tests for a two-dimensional relationship between the delivery of a staple food and public acquiescence to authoritarian rule. Far from it! To explain these politics, José Ciro Martínez goes to work baking, and taking the reader through kitchens, byways and marketplaces. Via descriptions of bakers and regulators, and interviews with consumers and policymakers, he offers a sophisticated account of how the state meets the stomach in Jordan, and how both citizens and bureaucracy are changed through this intra-action.
States of Subsistence was the winner of the 2023 Roger Owen Book Award, sponsored by the Middle East Studies Association, and singled out for an honourable mention by the 2023 Charles Taylor Book Award committee of the American Political Science Association’s Interpretive Methodologies and Methods Group.
If you like this episode of New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science then you might also be interested in Mona El Ghobashy on Bread and Freedom: Egypt’s Revolutionary Situation, or Gerard McCarthy on Outsourcing the Polity: Non-state Welfare, Inequality and Resistance in Myanmar.
José’s book recommendations are:

Teo Ballvé, The Frontier Effect: State Formation and Violence in Colombia


Lauren Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People


Hisham Matar, My Friends



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José Ciro Martínez, "States of Subsistence: The Politics of Bread in Contemporary Jordan" (Stanford UP, 2022)

America's elite law firms, investment banks, and management consulting firms are known for grueling hours, low odds of promotion, and personnel practices that push out any employees who don't advance. While most people who begin their careers in these institutions leave within several years, work there is especially difficult for Black professionals, who exit more quickly and receive far fewer promotions than their White counterparts, hitting a "Black ceiling."
Sociologist and law professor Kevin Woodson knows firsthand what life at a top law firm feels like as a Black man. Examining the experiences of more than one hundred Black professionals at prestigious firms, Woodson discovers that their biggest obstacle in the workplace isn't explicit bias but racial discomfort, or the unease Black employees feel in workplaces that are steeped in Whiteness. He identifies two types of racial discomfort: social alienation, the isolation stemming from the cultural exclusion Black professionals experience in White spaces, and stigma anxiety, the trepidation they feel over the risk of discriminatory treatment. While racial discomfort is caused by America's segregated social structures, it can exist even in the absence of racial discrimination, which highlights the inadequacy of the unconscious bias training now prevalent in corporate workplaces. Firms must do more than prevent discrimination, Woodson explains, outlining the steps that firms and Black professionals can take to ease racial discomfort.
Offering a new perspective on a pressing social issue, The Black Ceiling: How Race Still Matters in the Elite Workplace (U Chicago Press, 2023) is a vital resource for leaders at preeminent firms, Black professionals and students, managers within mostly White organizations, and anyone committed to cultivating diverse workplaces.
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Thomas DeGloma, "Anonymous: The Performance of Hidden Identities" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

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