In Nicholas Bartlett’s meditative and poignant ethnography about former heroin users in Gejiu, China, Recovering Histories: Life and Labor after Heroin in Post-Reform China (University of California Press 2020), he writes of arriving too late to the scene of the epidemic. Heroin use was widespread in this tin mining region in the 1980s, had peaked in the 1990s, and was …
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 …
I dream of a black cat. She jumps over a barbed wire fence, and across it. She leaps from one side of the fence to the other. Her coat glistens in the moonlight. Except for the gentle sound of her purring, the village where I stand is silent.
The silence was unnerving. Even remote villages were rarely silent along the …
Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies, and Braided Sciences
University of Chicago Press, 2016. 376 pages.
In a sequel to his 2009 Nationalizing the Body, Projit Bihari Mukharji returns to late-colonial South Asia to investigate the modernization of Ayurvedic science and medicine in Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies, and Braided Sciences. This time, Mukharji plunges …
This article is part of the following series: Book forum
Andrew Brandel has organized an extraordinary and diverse set of commentaries on Nayanika Mookherjee’s The Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories, and the Bangladesh War of 1971 (Duke University Press, 2015). Each intervention is a path that moves outward from Mookherjee’s remarkable study, finding ways through the brambles of memory and history. We hope you enjoy. — Todd Meyers, …
One late October morning in 2015, my phone rang and I got a “missed call” (a call where the caller hangs up before the receiver can answer as a way of establishing a pre-agreed decision, in my case being that I needed to call back) from Moyna’s daughter. The Spectral Wound had just been published. I rang back right away …