This article is part of the following series: Book forum
This book forum brings together seven scholars and artists to discuss Todd Meyers’s All That Was Not Her (Duke 2022). A profoundly introspective and original book, All That Was Not Her traces a relationship between an anthropologist and his interlocutor that equally verges on friendship and antagonism. Eschewing well-trodden anthropological approaches which focus on identity or suffering, Meyers delves into …
This article is part of the following series: Book forum
Dána-Ain Davis’s Reproductive Injustice: Racism, Pregnancy, and Premature Birth (NYU Press, 2019) is a vividly written ethnography highlighting how medical racism shapes birth outcomes for Black women in America. Under the sign of maternal health risk and prematurity, Davis argues, the American medical system forces Black women to participate in a limited array of interventions informed by theories of wellness …
This article is part of the following series: Book forum
The six review essays in this collection emerge from a joint launch of five books and one dissertation/ book-in-progress and a panel at the recent annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies. In these meetings, each author provided a reading of another’s text, then revisited their own work in light of the resonances and dissonances that arose.
Addressing lab-based …
This article is part of the following series: Book forum
This book forum brings together eight anthropologists to discuss Li Zhang’s Anxious China: Inner Revolution and Politics of Psychotherapy (University of California Press 2020). Zhang examines the rise of psychotherapeutic practices in contemporary China, documenting how techniques for managing mental distress are intersecting with new forms of self-care and modes of governing in the context of tremendous politico-economic transformation. While …
This article is part of the following series: Book forum
This book forum brings together seven scholars to discuss Julie Livingston’s Self-Devouring Growth: A Planetary Parable as Told from Southern Africa (Duke 2019), a story of what grows alongside “growth” and the price of “a good life.” Botswana offers lessons that are peopled and elemental; lessons that tug between the local and the global. Livingston shows how water, food, transportation…
This article is part of the following series: Book forum
Michelle Murphy’s The Economization of Life (Duke University Press, 2017) received the Ludwik Fleck Prize from the the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) at the 2019 conference in New Orleans. Murphy’s book, recognized for its novelty, scholarly excellence, and contribution to science and technology studies, was also the subject of a panel of feminist thinkers who offered commentary …