New Books in Anthropology

While humanitarian organizations and media outlets often reduce Syrian refugees to statistics or brief anecdotes, the real story of displacement unfolds in the intimate spaces of family life. Through the interwoven narratives of five middle-aged sisters from Damascus, Lines of Flight, Assemblages of Home reveals how Syrian women navigate war, exile, and the profound transformation of their families and identities. Drawing on extensive interviews conducted between 2015 and 2017, this book follows an extended Sunni Muslim family as they flee their homes in Damascus’s Eastern Ghouta suburbs and scatter across Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Egypt, and eventually Europe. As these women move through an increasingly hostile landscape of border controls, refugee camps, and human trafficking networks, they must reinvent themselves—from stable middle-class mothers to resourceful survivors, from guardians of tradition to architects of change. Their journeys challenge conventional assumptions about refugee experiences, revealing how displacement reconfigures family networks, religious practices, and gender roles. Leila Hudson’s intimate portrait of Syrian displacement offers vital insights for researchers and practitioners working in humanitarian assistance, refugee resettlement, and forced migration. It provides essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how ordinary families navigate extraordinary circumstances, and how women in particular bear both the burdens and opportunities of displacement. Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at [email protected]. Blusky and IG: @robbyref Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Borrowing from the traditional alphabet book genre for children, An Alphabet for Dreamers: How to See the World with Eyes Closed (MIT Press, 2025) by Dr. Sharon Sliwinski provides adult readers with a new grammar for dreams, or what neuroscientist Sidarta Ribeiro calls “oracles of the night.” In this book, Dr. Sliwinski restores dreaming to its proper place as an important worldmaking activity, one that offers a gateway to another way of seeing. Each of the short chapters engages a dream from the historical record—from both the recent and distant past—to show how these experiences can help make sense of profound social conflicts and transform our shared reality.Thinking alongside the dreams of powerful exemplars—from Harriet Tubman to contemporary Indigenous activist Abigail Echo-Hawk—readers come to understand how dream life is a crucial resource for generating new worlds and new ways of being. The book brings together urgent concerns from the domains of critical theory, visual culture, and mental health to show how dreaming serves as a vital source of knowledge and a critical mode of thinking.As with traditional alphabet books, illustrations provide an integral voice. Each chapter of the book is accompanied by an original watercolor painting by Melinda Josie that visually underscores the way dreams serve as a unique medium for processing our lived experience. Together, the images and text form a delicate dialogue, drawing attention to the details of the central scenes, extending the book’s special mode of thinking in painted form.By working alongside dreamers from the past and present, An Alphabet for Dreamers begins a new and much-needed conversation about the social and political importance of dream life. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

A digital world in relentless movement—from artificial intelligence to ubiquitous computing—has been captured and reinvented as a monoculture by Silicon Valley "big tech" and venture capital firms. Yet very little is discussed in the public sphere about existing alternatives. Based on long-term field research across San Francisco, Tokyo, and Shenzhen, Common Circuits: Hacking Alternative Technological Futures (Stanford UP, 2025) explores a transnational network of hacker spaces that stand as potent, but often invisible, alternatives to the dominant technology industry. In what ways have hackers challenged corporate projects of digital development? How do hacker collectives prefigure more just technological futures through community projects? Luis Felipe R. Murillo responds to these urgent questions with an analysis of the hard challenges of collaborative, autonomous community-making through technical objects conceived by hackers as convivial, shared technologies. Through rich explorations of hacker space histories and biographical sketches of hackers who participate in them, Murillo describes the social and technical conditions that allowed for the creation of community projects such as anonymity and privacy networks to counter mass surveillance; community-made monitoring devices to measure radioactive contamination; and small-scale open hardware fabrication for the purposes of technological autonomy. Murillo shows how hacker collectives point us toward brighter technological futures—a renewal of the "digital commons"—where computing projects are constantly being repurposed for the common good. Mentioned in this episode: "Political Software: Mapping Digital Worlds from Below" Project Website here Luis Felipe R. Murillo is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Faculty Fellow at the Notre Dame Technology Ethics Center at the University of Notre Dame. His work is dedicated to the study of computing from an anthropological perspective. Liliana Gil is Assistant Professor of Comparative Studies (STS) at The Ohio State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

In Hedged Out: Inequality and Insecurity on Wall Street (U California Press, 2022) Megan Tobias Neely, a former hedge fund worker takes an ethnographic approach to hedge funds. Manager? A greedy fraudster, a visionary entrepreneur, a wolf of Wall Street? She gives readers an insider perspective on the phenomenon. Facing an unpredictable and risky stock market, hedge fund workers work long hours and build tight-knit networks with people who look and behave like them. Neely shows how the system of elite power and privilege sustains and builds over time as the beneficiaries concentrate their resources. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Politics of Tranquility: The Material and Mundane Lives of Buddhist Nuns in Post-Mao Tibet (Cornell University Press, 2025) concerns the Tibetan Buddhist revival in China, illustrating the lives of Tibetan Buddhist nuns and exploring the political effects that arise from their nonpolitical daily engagements in the remote, mega-sized Tibetan Buddhist encampment of Yachen Gar. Yasmin Cho's book challenges two assumptions about Tibetan Buddhist communities in China. First, against the assumption that a Buddhist monastic community is best understood in terms of its esoteric qualities, Cho focuses on the material and mundane daily practices that are indispensable to the existence and persistence of such a community and shows how deeply gendered these practices are. Second, against the assumption that Tibetan politics toward the Chinese state is best understood as rebellious, incendiary, and centered upon Tibetan victimhood, the nuns demonstrate how it can be otherwise. Tibetan politics can be unassuming, calm, and self-contained and yet still have substantial political effects. As Politics of Tranquility shows, the nuns in Yachen Gar have called forth an alternative way of living and expressing themselves as Tibetans and as female monastics despite a repressive context. ------------------ Jing Li teaches Chinese language, literature, and cinema. Her research focuses on rural China, independent filmmaking, and digital media cultures. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology