Manpreet K. Janeja, 2010, Transactions in Taste. The Collaborative Lives of Everyday Bengali Food (London: Routledge). 185 pp. Reviewed by Krishnendu Ray, New York University The reader uninitiated or uninterested in Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory (ANT) will find this book difficult. Lately, as I have been digging deeper intoContinue Reading
Hot Topics, Public Culture, Museums Fiona Cameron & Lynda Kelly (Eds) (2010) Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing by Jeffrey Feldman, NYU In the past few decades, the field of Museum Studies has seen the emergence of a reflexive and often ethnographic interest in cultural and political controversies that oftenContinue Reading
The new journal Dialogues in Human Geography offers a comprehensive book review forum whereby several scholars examine the same volume and the author(s) or editor(s) is allowed a riposte to the comments. The format is similar to the well established article discussions which anthropologists have become accustomed to from CurrentContinue Reading
Daniel Miller, UCL Kate Fletcher is best known for her 2008 book Sustainable Fashion (Earthscan) one of the great advantages of this book is the way is crossed fields from natural science through social science to the arts. More specifically it used natural science to establish what is known aboutContinue Reading
Review of Tara Hamling & Catherine Richardson (eds). 2010. Everyday Objects: Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture and its Meanings. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing. 376 pages. ISBN: 978-0-7546-6637-0 (hard cover). by Roman I. Shiyan (Univ. of Alberta) This collection of twenty-three essays represents an important step toward the further affirmation ofContinue Reading
Haidy Geismar, NYU Conal McCarthy, 2011. Museums and Maori: Heritage Professionals, Indigenous Collections, Current Practice. Te Papa Press/Left Coast Press Museums and Maori follows on the heels of McCarthy’s previous book, Exhibiting Maori, which traced the history of indigenous museum collecting, collections and display in Aoteaora New Zealand. This secondContinue Reading
Daniel Miller, UCL I just wanted to point out a couple of books of interest to material culture studies that otherwise might be missed. The reason they might not appear on the radar is that the in one case they come from a more literary or humanities perspective and THEContinue Reading
Marcia A. Forbes (2010) Music, Media and Adolescent Sexuality in Jamaica. Arawak Publications: Kingston, Jamaica. Reviewed by Elsa A. Leo-Rhynie CD, PhD (Univ. of West Indies) The information explosion of the late 20th century coincided with a technology revolution and heralded a new century in which the world’s population isContinue Reading
Haidy Geismar, NYU This posting is the “official book launch” of my co-authored (with Dr. Anita Herle) book, Moving Images: John Layard, Fieldwork and Photography on Malakula since 1914, just out with Crawford House Publishing (in Australia and New Zealand) and Hawaii University Press (rest of world). To celebrate theContinue Reading
A Culture of Stone: Inka Perspectives on Rock, Carolyn Dean, 2010, Duke University Press Sandra Rozental, New York University Having written extensively on Andean colonial art, namely on the celebrations of Corpus Christi in colonial Cuzco (1999), art historian Carolyn Dean has now shifted her attention to the stony tracesContinue Reading
By David Thompson The University of Sydney, Australia How do cosmopolitanism and consumption fit in together? Perhaps not very well, if theorists such as Craig Calhoun and Ulf Hannerz are to be believed. They both see consumption as superficial, at best a peripheral concern to something that is supposed toContinue Reading