The Violence of Recognition: Adivasi Indigeneity and Anti-Dalitness in India (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023) offers an unprecedented firsthand account of the operations of Hindu nationalists and their role in sparking the largest incident of anti-Christian violence in India’s history. Through vivid ethnographic storytelling, Pinky Hota explores the roots of eth ... Show More
Today
Sebastian Truskolaski, "Adorno and the Ban on Images" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
Adorno and the Ban on Images (Bloomsbury, 2022) upends some of the myths that have come to surround the work of the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno – not least amongst them, his supposed fatalism.
Sebastian Truskolaski argues that Adorno's writings allow us to address what is argua ... Show More
58m 5s
Today
Amy Hughes, "An Actor's Tale: Theater, Culture, and Everyday Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States" (U Michigan Press, 2025)
Harry Watkins was no one special. During a career that spanned four decades, this nineteenth-century actor yearned for fame but merely skirted the edges of it. He performed alongside the brightest stars, wrote scores of plays, and toured the United States and England, but he neve ... Show More
1h 4m
Yesterday
Heather Davis, "Plastic Matter" (Duke UP, 2022)
Plastic is ubiquitous. It is in the Arctic, in the depths of the Mariana Trench, and in the high mountaintops of the Pyrenees. It is in the air we breathe and the water we drink. Nanoplastics penetrate our cell walls. Plastic is not just any material—it is emblematic of life in t ... Show More
1h 1m
Dec 2023
Violent Majorities, Indian and Israeli Ethnonationalism. Episode 1
"The Slippery Slope to a Multiculturalism of Caste"
Professor Balmurli Natrajan has long studied questions of caste, nationalism and fascism in the Indian context: his many works include a 2011 book, The Culturalization of Caste in India. He joins anthropologists Lori Allen and A ... Show More
51m 35s
Jul 2024
Neena Mahadev, "Karma and Grace: Religious Difference in Millennial Sri Lanka" (Columbia UP, 2023)
Around the turn of the millennium, Pentecostal churches began to pepper majority-Buddhist Sri Lanka, setting off a sense of alarm among Buddhists who saw Christianity as a neocolonial threat to the nation. Rumors of foul play in the death of a Buddhist monk, as well as allegation ... Show More
1h 24m
Jun 2023
Violence Against Tribal Christians in Manipur, India
<p>In May 2023, violent clashes between two communities erupted in India’s Manipur state, leaving entire villages burned and displacing tens of thousands. The ongoing conflict is between the state’s majority Hindu Meitei community and the Christian Kuki population and has seen th ... Show More
15m 17s
Jul 2023
Roluah Puia, "Nationalism in the Vernacular: State, Tribes, and Politics of Peace in Northeast India" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
Roluah Puia's book Nationalism in the Vernacular: State, Tribes, and Politics of Peace in Northeast India (Cambridge UP, 2023) illuminates our understanding of the relationship between orality and nationalist politics. In doing so, it provides a new angle to the understanding of ... Show More
46m 7s
Sep 2023
Kerry P. C. San Chirico. "Between Hindu and Christian: Khrist Bhaktas, Catholics, and the Negotiation of Devotion in Banaras" (Oxford UP, 2022)
On the second Saturday of each month, on the outskirts of the ancient city of Varanasi, Shiva's own city, thousands of shudra and Dalit devotees worship Yesu (Jesus) at a Catholic ashram. In an open-air pavilion more than three thousand women and men alternately sit, stand, and s ... Show More
53m 40s
Apr 2023
K. N. Sunandan, "Caste, Knowledge, and Power: Ways of Knowing in Twentieth Century Malabar" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
Caste, Knowledge, and Power: Ways of Knowing in Twentieth-Century Malabar (Cambridge UP, 2023) investigates the transformations of caste practices in twentieth century India and the role of knowledge in this transformation and in the continuing of these oppressive practices. The ... Show More
53m 3s
Feb 2022
Renny Thomas, "Science and Religion in India: Beyond Disenchantment" (Routledge, 2021)
Science and Religion in India: Beyond Disenchantment (Routledge, 2021) provides an in-depth ethnographic study of science and religion in the context of South Asia, giving voice to Indian scientists and shedding valuable light on their engagement with religion. Drawing on biograp ... Show More
55m 23s
Feb 2022
Renny Thomas, "Science and Religion in India: Beyond Disenchantment" (Routledge, 2021)
Science and Religion in India: Beyond Disenchantment (Routledge, 2021) provides an in-depth ethnographic study of science and religion in the context of South Asia, giving voice to Indian scientists and shedding valuable light on their engagement with religion. Drawing on biograp ... Show More
55m 23s
Feb 2024
Hindu Nationalism’s New Temple
<p>On January 22nd, India’s far-right prime minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the Ram Mandir, a gargantuan new temple dedicated to the Hindu god Ram, in an event that marked the most consequential victory for the Hindu nationalist movement in its 100-year history. The temple has ... Show More
33m 3s