Outstanding Academic Titles 2023: Anthropology

Posted on June 13, 2024 in Outstanding Academic Titles

Enjoy these five selections from the Choice Reviews 2023 Outstanding Academic Titles list. This week we highlight, Outstanding Academic Titles from the past year pertaining to Anthropology. A hearty congratulations to the winning authors, editors and publishers!

1. Ritual: what it is, how it works, and why
Davis-Floyd, Robbie. by Robbie Davis-Floyd and Charles D. Laughlin Berghahn Books, 2022

Social scientists have long studied ritual to decipher the mysteries of the human condition. Following this tradition, Davis-Floyd (Rice Univ.) and Laughlin (emer., Carleton Univ., Canada) mobilize numerous case studies, ranging from Navajo initiation rites and Buddhist meditation to hospital obstetrics, to demonstrate the power of ritual to shape bodies, emotional states, everyday dispositions, and world views. The book engages classic ethnographic studies and academic theories and presents the authors’ personal experiences as ritual practitioners. Targeting nonspecialists unfamiliar with anthropological theory, it even provides a guide to effectively designing and orchestrating a ritual. Although eclectic and nuanced, the text often adopts functionalist and neuro-anthropological approaches to examine how ritual resolves hardships, fosters social solidarity, heightens consciousness, reduces stress, and confronts uncertainty. The authors also explore how authority figures have mobilized ritual for nefarious ends. Each chapter investigates one of eight characteristics that form part of a larger “anatomy of ritual,” which includes everything from the intensified symbolism and performativity of ritual to its reliance on framing technologies. In sum, the book provides a fascinating introduction to ritual while offering innovative heuristics (e.g., ritual drivers, entrainment, symbolic penetration) to interpret how ritual effectively works. View on Amazon

2. Story machines: how computers have become creative writers
Sharples, Mike. by Mike Sharples and Rafael Pérez y Pérez Routledge, 2022

Sharples (The Open University, UK) and Pérez y Pérez (Metropolitan Autonomous Univ., Mexico) are leaders in the field of computer-generated writing. Pérez y Pérez is the original creator of the highly popular writing program MEXICA (based on his 1999 dissertation). The field of AI-generated writing has exploded even more in the months since this book was published, thanks to the popularity of Chat-GPT. Here, the authors provide a history of machines that write, starting with the Eureka Machine of 1845.The most important development was Scott Turner’s invention of the MINSTREL program in the 1990s. Sharples and Pérez y Pérez pursue three routes to explain how machines can write stories and poems: the process requires a story generating program, a storyworld of believable characters and settings, and “a working model of a storyteller.” The ultimate challenge—not yet achieved—is for a program to create empathy. Unfortunately, the examples of creative writing in the book are not very interesting: much more work remains. One delightful chapter shows readers how they can create a primitive story generator with slips of paper and empty yoghurt pots. The style of the book is only as technical as necessary. This timely work has rich explanatory notes, a good bibliography, and a superb index. View on Amazon

3. Perpetrators: encountering humanity’s dark side
Robben, Antonius C. G. M. by Antonius C. G. M. Robben and Alexander Laban Hinton Stanford, 2023

In writing this book, Robben (emer., Utrecht University, the Netherlands) and Hinton (Rutgers Univ.; UNESCO Chair in Genocide Prevention) provide a comprehensive and original contribution to the scholarly research on perpetrators of mass violence. Relying on a wide range of case studies from Cambodia to Argentina and Germany, the authors discuss the varied roles and division of labor that emerge among perpetrators. They reject the stereotype that holds that there is a single kind of perpetrator and instead discuss how perpetrators can be better understood in terms of their various roles, such as architects, organizers, and facilitators. Robben and Hinton argue that perpetrators can also be understood in terms of their proximity to would-be victims. Like a layer cake, the distinctions that they draw among perpetrators result in different levels of responsibilities. The case studies that are covered here provide supporting evidence to illustrate the distinctive roles that perpetrators assume. This is a must-read book. View on Amazon

4. The archaeology of the homed and the unhomed
Sayers, Daniel O. University Press of Florida, 2023

This slim volume challenges archaeologists to expand their discussions of household archaeology by critically examining the notion of the home and how it can be defined archaeologically and by considering the archaeology of people without houses and how they define the home. Sayers (American Univ.) examines a number of examples in the historical archaeology of the US, including the archaeology of home among migrant workers in 19th-century Michigan, notions of home among hobo encampments during the Great Depression, and the homes that escaped former slaves created in the Great Dismal Swamp. All these examples require researchers to look for the signatures of homes in artifact assemblages, pushing them to go beyond traditional studies conducted by archaeologists, which equate a single household with living in a domestic structure. Sayers also presents the home as an often contested space where material signatures of resistance against societal norms and intrafamilial conflict (e.g., domestic violence) can be teased out from a careful consideration of artifact assemblages. This carefully considered study offers researchers a new lens through which to explore a fundamental unit of archaeological analysis—the household. View on Amazon.

5. Women teachers of rural Oaxaca: agency and empowerment Howell, Jayne. Lexington Books, 2023

In the wake of the Mexican Revolution (1910–17) a wave of school teachers were sent into rural, often Indigenous communities throughout Mexico to serve as the vanguard of progress, justice, and enlightenment. This fine volume by Howell (California State Univ., Long Beach) details the fascinating history of that educational movement as it played out in the state of Oaxaca, an impoverished, multiethnic, multilingual human landscape as challenging as any found in Mexico. The author’s story encompasses the changing ideological and organizational framework for teacher training and placement from the onset of the federal socialist initiative in the 1920s to the current politically and economically tumultuous period of Mexico’s transition to neoliberalism. Focusing on the life and career stories of 15 women, Howell highlights the great obstacles they faced to become teachers and provide education in diverse rural settings and explores the ideals that motivated them. In the process, she shares with readers these women’s evaluations of the satisfactions and disappointments they experienced in their own words. This book explores a very important, much neglected topic relevant for any student of rural Mexican society. View on Amazon.

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