New Books in Anthropology

“What might it mean to take the dead seriously as political actors?” asks Lia Kent in this exciting new contribution to critical human rights scholarship The Unruly Dead: Spirits, Memory, and State Formation in Timor-Leste (U Wisconsin Press, 2024). In Timor-Leste, a new nation-state that experienced centuries of European colonialism before a violent occupation by Indonesia from 1975 to 1999, the dead are active participants in social and political life who continue to operate within familial structures of obligation and commitment. On individual, local, and national levels, Timor-Leste is invested in various forms of memory work, including memorialization, exhumation, reburial, and commemoration of the occupation’s victims. Such practices enliven the dead, allowing them to forge new relationships with the living and unsettling the state-building logics that seek to contain and control them.

With generous, careful ethnography and incisive analysis, Kent challenges comfortable, linear narratives of transitional justice and argues that this memory work is reshaping the East Timorese social and political order—a process in which the dead are active, and sometimes disruptive, participants. Community ties and even the landscape itself are imbued with their presence and demands, and the horrific scale of mass death in recent times—up to a third of the population perished during the Indonesian occupation—means Timor-Leste’s dead have real, significant power in the country’s efforts to remember, recover, and reestablish itself.
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In Ambitious and Anxious: How Chinese College Students Succeed and Struggle in American Higher Education (Columbia UP, 2020), sociologist Yingyi Ma offers a multifaceted analysis of a new wave of international Chinese students—mostly self-funded—who have transformed American higher education over the past decade. This privileged yet diverse group of young people, emerging from a rapidly changing China, must navigate the complications and confusions of their formative years while bridging the world’s two most powerful countries. How do these students come to study in the United States? What does that experience mean to them? And what does American higher education need to know—and do—in order to continue attracting these students and supporting them adequately?

Drawing on research conducted in both Chinese high schools and American colleges and universities, Ma’s book offers illuminating insights into the experiences that define this new wave of students: above all, a duality of ambition and anxiety rooted in the transformative social changes of contemporary China. These students and their families are ambitious in seeking to navigate two very different educational systems and societies. Yet, at the same time, the complexity and pressure of these systems generate profound anxiety—from the challenges of applying to colleges, to studying and socializing on campus, to deciding what comes next after graduation. Ambitious and Anxious also offers valuable policy implications for American colleges and universities, touching on recruitment, student life, faculty support, and career services.

About the Author

Yingyi Ma is Professor of Sociology at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, where she also serves as Director of the Asian/Asian American Studies Program. She is a Fellow of the Public Intellectuals Program of the National Committee on United States–China Relations.
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My conversation with Nico Slate began with him reflecting on his own path into the study of historical connections between South Asia and the United States. We then moved to a wide-ranging discussion covering the importance of the transnational scale for an understanding of antiracist and anticaste politics, the repurposing of ‘race’ and ‘caste’ through creative acts of transnational translation, the interplay between the race-colony and race-caste analogies in solidaristic politics across the late 19th and 20th centuries, and the conjunctural factors that have shaped the rise and fall of race-caste scholarship.

Guest bio:

Nico Slate, Professor of History. Carnegie Mellon University.

References:

Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay: Indian social reformer, nationalist, feminist, and socialist who promoted handicrafts, handlooms, and theatre.

W.E.B. Du Bois: American sociologist, historian, and Pan-Africanist who authored some of the most consequential works on the global color line and racial capitalism.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi: Indian lawyer, anti-colonial nationalist, and political thinker who employed nonviolent resistance to lead the successful campaign for India's independence from British rule.

Daniel Immerwahr, “Caste or Colony? Indianizing Race in the United States” (2007)

Oliver Cox: Trinidadian sociologist of race relations.

B.R. Ambedkar: Indian jurist and anticaste thinker who chaired the committee that drafted the Indian Constitution and served as the independent India’s first Minister of Law.

Lala Lajpat Rai: Indian revolutionary, politician, and author.

Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020)

W.E.B. Du Bois, Dark Princess (1928).

Katherine Mayo, Mother India (1927).
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I had a substantive conversation with Dr. Stephen Onyango Ouma, author of Africa Unbound: Decolonial Pathways to Sovereignty and Liberation (Brill, 2026). He explained that, despite achieving political independence, African countries still experience significant colonial and neo-colonial influences in their economies, education systems, cultures, and political structures.

The book argues that genuine liberation must include economic independence, epistemic freedom, cultural reclamation, and Pan-African unity. Dr Ouma highlights the importance of revitalising indigenous knowledge systems, strengthening regional cooperation, and addressing dependencies that limit Africa's ability to determine its own path.

We discussed topics ranging from the lasting mental effects of colonialism to the potential of the AfCFTA, the rise of youth activism, and the key role African women play in liberation movements. It was a thoughtful look at what decolonisation should mean today.

For those interested in African philosophy, global politics, or contemporary decolonial thought, this book and the accompanying interview offer valuable insights.

Amisah Bakuri (PhD) is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her work explores the intersections of religion, sexuality, gender, and migration, especially within African diasporic communities in the Netherlands.
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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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