New Books in Anthropology

Museums often served nationalist and imperialist interests in the past, but the primary force in the 21st century is the market. Museum franchising—exemplified by the Louvre Abu Dhabi—is one of the most visible cases of the increasing entanglement of art and museums with capital interests. Such projects are often touted as global enterprises diversifying the art world. Frequently, critics of these controversial projects question these claims and market influence.

The intersection of these two forces—increasing capitalization and moving toward inclusivity—creates a fundamental tension, and that is the subject of Beth Derderian's Art Capital: Museum Politics and the Making of the Louvre Abu Dhabi (Stanford UP, 2026). Focusing on the decade between the Louvre Abu Dhabi's announcement and its eventual opening, the book analyzes how major shifts away from the 19th- and 20th-century paradigm of culture-state representation play out in museums' and artists' everyday practices. Derderian traces the emergence of a new logic, wherein the ways that artists represent the state shift, as does the notion of what constitutes 'good art.' In addition, these intersecting forces spur preemptive erasures that neutralize and depoliticize difference for museum publics.

Drawing on ethnographic research with artists, curators, museum staff, gallerists, art teachers, and other arts professionals, this book analyzes the UAE art world as a microcosm of these massive, epistemic changes.

Beth Derderian is Assistant Professor of Modern Middle East Studies and Anthropology at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University.
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The consequences of U.S. border policies through the experiences of Honduran migrants. Hondurans have been at the heart of some of the most visible migration phenomena in the last few years, as well as the direct target of anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy. In Leave If You Can: Migration and Violence in Bordered Worlds (U California Press, 2026) Amelia Frank-Vitale offers a detailed portrait of the Honduran exodus and what it reveals about the broader consequences of changing US border enforcement policies. She highlights the stories of those who are often presented as unsympathetic: deported young men implicitly associated with the very violence they are trying to flee. In the process, she challenges underlying assumptions frequently held by policy makers and humanitarian agencies. Connecting overlapping regimes of mobility control, from the invisible gangland borders within San Pedro Sula to the growing expansiveness of the U.S. border's reach, this book shows how deportation does not deter migration but, in fact, keeps people moving, and how U.S. policies fuel the migration "crisis" they claim to address. Drawing from her own experiences accompanying migrant caravans over many years, Frank-Vitale also explores how caravans emerge as both protest movement and migration tactic in response to this expanding border regime.
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Between the Buddha and the New Tsar: Urban Religion and Minority Politics at the Asian Borderlands of Russia (Cornell UP, 2026) by Dr. Kristina Jonutytė is an ethnography of contemporary urban Buddhism in Buryatia, a republic within the Russian Federation. Kristina Jonutytė shows how—in this ethnically and religiously diverse borderland region—Buryat Buddhists are caught between an oppressive, militant Russian regime and the tenacity of local religious and cultural forms. As Dr. Jonutytė narrates, historically Buryat Buddhism has been tightly linked with the Russian state ever since the imperial period, a relationship with mutual interest and benefits. Yet everyday Buddhist practices point to a more complex picture, shedding light on precarity, minoritization, struggles for cultural sovereignty, and infrapolitical religious forms. Between the Buddha and the New Tsar reveals the important ways in which the urban setting is not just a backdrop to Buddhism, but that religion and the city are intertwined and mutually impactful.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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In an era dominated by visual information, what can the sounds of a pandemic reveal about crisis and care? How might attuning to sonic atmospheres uncover new dimensions to states of emergency and their implications for collective life? In Sonic Socialism: Crisis and Care in Pandemic Hanoi (U California Press, 2025), Christina Schwenkel examines the use of sound in COVID-19 response efforts in urban Vietnam. Based on “soundwork” conducted in Hanoi in 2020 during the pandemic’s first year, she shows how acoustic technologies played a pivotal yet overlooked role in state efforts to achieve record-low infection rates worldwide. Across lived experiences of quarantine, lockdown, and spatial distancing, Schwenkel explores sound-based interventions to curb virus transmission, and the public’s response to these auditory measures. From instant messaging alerts to public health videos and neighborhood loudspeakers, sonic governance sought to transform urban sounds and listening practices to mobilize action, drawing people into networks of care and control. As anthropology stands at a crossroads, Sonic Socialism makes the compelling case for the value of sensory autoethnography in reimagining a more careful and caring ethnographic practice in a post-pandemic world.

Christina Schwenkel is Professor of Anthropology and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Riverside. She currently serves on the Editorial Committee of University of California Press and is Vice Chair of the AAS Publications Editorial Board. Her research examines the material legacies of infrastructural warfare in urban Vietnam and the Cold War circulations of people, objects, design technologies, and architectural practices among socialist-allied countries in its wake. She is the author of The American War in Contemporary Vietnam: Transnational Remembrance and Representation (Indiana UP, 2009) and the award-winning Building Socialism: The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam (Duke UP, 2020), which together explore the material practices through which people remember and rebuild in the aftermath of empire. Her most recent book, a sensory autoethnography entitled Sonic Socialism: Crisis and Care in Pandemic Hanoi (UC Press, 2025), extends her work on urban disaster and decay to encompass media infrastructures and the anthropology of sound. Sonic Socialism is available in open-access format via Luminos. She can be reached via her personal website: https://christinaschwenkel.com.

Camellia (Linh) Pham is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at Harvard University. Her research focuses on modern Vietnamese literature, socialist realism, and literary translation across French, Vietnamese, Chinese, and English. She can be reached at [email protected].
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The Ryukyu Islands between Japan and Taiwan consist of around 160 islands and are home to about 1.5 million inhabitants. Across the islands' history, sea-lanes and trade patterns have connected them to the East China Sea region, giving them a unique vantage point on the region's changes and making them a useful lens through which to view and understand those transformations. In this book, Gregory Smits marshals his expertise to canvass the environmental, political, and social history of this fascinating area, emphasizing the diversity of influences from China, Japan, and Korea that have shaped it. Smits begins by tracing the islands' early history from the time of the oldest extant human remains, through massive inflows of settlers from Japan, until the emergence of a centralized state in the sixteenth century. He then traces the development of the Ryukyu Kingdom from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, examining its major cultural formations and the interplay of local and external influences driving its evolution. Finally, Smits ushers readers to the modern era, from the end of the Ryukyu Kingdom in 1879 through World War II, the era of American military control, and on to the present. He concludes with their present-day status as a tourist destination affected by ongoing geopolitical, economic, and environmental challenges. Synthesizing decades of research, this book is an indispensable, comprehensive guide to the islands' history for scholars and nonspecialists alike.

Gregory Smits is professor of history and Asian Studies at Penn State University. He is the author of several books, including, most recently, Early Ryukyuan History: A New Model.

Ran Zwigenberg is a professor at Pennsylvania State University.
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