Anthropology Book Forum

Mathews, Andrew S. 2022. Trees Are Shape Shifters: How Cultivation, Climate Change, and Disaster Create Landscapes. Yale Agrarian Studies Series. New Haven: Yale University Press, 320 pp., ISBN 978-0-300-26037-3

2025-01-27T01:01:19-08:00

In the Monte Pisano, a mountain range in Tuscany, Italy, people have been living in human-altered landscapes for millennia. Here, histories of peasant cultivation of chestnut and the slow ongoing disasters of plant disease, state abandonment, and capitalism have left marks on the landscape. In Trees are Shape Shifters, Mathews walks the reader through the villages, hillsides, and forests of the Monte Pisano, teaching us how to read these long-term processes from the graft scars of individual trees and the shapes of ancient terraces. As diverse temporalities and overlapping histories are sown together, these past forms leave an echo that affects climate policy in Italy today.

Shaylih Muehlmann, 2024, Call the Mothers: Searching for Mexico’s Disappeared in the War on Drugs, Oakland, California: University of California Press, 264 pp., ISBN 9780520314573

2025-01-02T14:08:04-08:00

This compelling multi-sited ethnography begins with author’s account of meeting Leticia in Mexico City, whose young daughter, Ivonne, had been missing for two years. After undertaking a two-year long search with minimal assistance from state authorities, Leticia finally found her daughter buried in a communal grave. By recounting this encounter, the author captures the heart-wrenching paradox of a mother's sense of relief at finding her child dead - a devastating end to the limbo of not knowing. In five chapters, this book traces how the process of searching for disappeared family members transformed the lives of Leticia and other Mexican mothers who conducted marches, built support networks, acquired investigative skills, searched through morgues and deserts, and exposed the corruption and complicity of state officials in human rights abuses in Mexico. The core contribution of this work is a critical examination of maternal activism that unpacks its interaction with dominant gender norms, state indifference, and organized crime.

Punching Back: Gender, Religion, and Belonging in Women-Only Kickboxing (2022)

2024-12-03T11:21:10-08:00

Review of:

JASMIJN RANA, 2022, Punching Back: Gender, Religion, and Belonging in Women-Only Kickboxing, New York: Berghahn Books, 180 pp., ISBN 9781800736900

Defending Rumba in Havana: The Sacred and Black Corporeal Undercommons (2025)

2025-01-26T10:33:11-08:00

Review of:

BERRY, MAYA J. 2025. Defending Rumba in Havana: The Sacred and Black Corporeal Undercommons. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 311 pg., ISBN 9781478031338

The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality and Humanity in Modern India (2022)

2025-01-02T11:39:42-08:00

Shailaja Paik’s The Vulgarity of Caste delves into the lives of Dalit women engaged in Tamasha, a theatrical art form prevalent in Maharashtra, western India. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, Paik examines how these women’s lives are shaped by the shifting dynamics of casteist and patriarchal systems, as well as the sociocultural frameworks of value and hierarchy within broader Maharashtrian and Indian society. The monograph is structured into three sections and eight chapters, offering a historical and analytical perspective on the interplay between Tamasha and the women who perform it. Paik focuses particularly on the notions of vulgarity, stigma, and discrimination, revealing how these are employed by dominant communities in placing the Dalit women who performs Tamasha at the most alienated position. Simultaneously, Paik highlights the agency of these women, exploring the dialectics of oppression and resistance. She portrays Tamasha not only as a site of discrimination but also as a powerful form of resistance, emphasizing its role in challenging societal norms and asserting agency.