New Books in Anthropology

This episode features a conversation with Ravikant Kisana, Dean of the School of Liberal Education and Languages at Galgotias University in India, about his book Meet the Savarnas: Indian Millennials Whose Mediocrity Broke Everything. We discussed the term “savarna” and how his personal experiences as a student and professor in liberal institutions led him to write the book, the performativity and insularity of upper castes, the importance of endogamy to caste social reproduction, and how to understand the recent shift from claims to castelessness to overt assertions of caste pride.

Guest

Ravikant Kisana, Dean, School of Liberal Education and Languages, Galgotias University, India

References:

B.R. Ambedkar, “Castes in India”

Babasaheb: an honorific for B.R. Ambedkar meaning “respected father.”

IIMs: Indian Institutes of Management

Mayawati: first Dalit woman chief minister of India who served in the state of Uttar Pradesh as the leader of the Bahujan Samaj Party.

BSP: Bahujan Samaj Party founded in 1984 and focused on representing the interests of Dalits, Other Backward Classes (OBCs) and religious minorities.

OBC parties: see above

Veds/Vedas: ancient Sanskrit scriptures

Kayasth: scribal and administrative caste originating in Maharashtra, Bengal, and Odisha.

Marwari: mercantile caste originating in the Marwar region of Rajasthan.

Baniya: mercantile caste originating in the states of Rajasthan and Gujarat. Baniya and Marwari are overlapping categories.

Jat: agricultural caste originating in the regions of Sindh and Punjab.

Noida: a city in the National Capital Region that falls within the state of Uttar Pradesh

Congress: Indian National Congress, one of India’s main national political parties founded in 1885.

MGNREGA: The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act of 2005 is an Indian labor law guaranteeing at least 100 days of paid, unskilled manual work per financial year to rural households.

Read the transcript here
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China is a multicultural country home to fifty-five ethnic minority groups, yet due to linguistic and cultural barriers many of these groups remain understudied or unknown in the West. The Qiang, one of modern China’s officially recognized ethnic minorities, is also China’s longest-standing ethnoracial identity marker that has existed since the earliest recorded history of China. Creative Belonging: The Qiang and Multiethnic Imagination in Modern China (U Michigan Press, 2026) by Dr. Yanshuo Zhang investigates the formation and evolution of the Qiang as a people, a concept, and a cultural history in China. It further examines how the contemporary Qiang ethnic group interacts strategically with mainstream Chinese society, challenging the historically entrenched hierarchies between the sociocultural “centers” of China and its ethnic “peripheries.”

This book is based on years of ethnographic and textual-archival research in the Himalayan regions of southwest China, where the contemporary Qiang group resides. Drawing on a diverse range of official and local political discourses and previously unstudied literary, historiographical, and cinematic works, Dr. Zhang illuminates how the Qiang have carved out spaces of “creative belonging” within the parameters of multiculturalism in contemporary China. Rooted in ethnographic and textual-archival research, the book presents original materials produced by Qiang indigenous writers, scholars, artists, grassroots village cultural activists, and entrepreneurs at both the local and the global levels. Creative Belonging invites readers to rethink ethnicity and national belonging in China by centering minority groups’ efforts to expand the meanings and implications of “Chinese culture.”

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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Options for Success: A PhD's Guide to Navigating Career Transitions and Thriving in Your Next Professional Chapter (Oxford UP, 2025) is a transformative, step-by-step guide designed for early to mid-career academics exploring career paths beyond faculty roles and into careers in industry. This book speaks directly to PhDs asking "What's next?" as they consider their career options beyond the faculty. Blending narrative, practical workbook exercises and real-life examples, Options for Success empowers readers to reimagine their career expectations, navigate the complexities of career transition, and align their professional paths with their personal values and goals.At the heart of this guide is the Options for Success framework, a seven-step process that takes readers through the phases of career change-from Detox, making mental and emotional space for new opportunities, to Onboarding, integrating into new roles with insight into workplace dynamics. With tools like the Ecosystems and Economies framework and Professional Profile Pillars, readers can inventory their skills, evaluate their core strengths, and identify careers that align with their values. The Translational Power of Action Verbs exercise encourages academics to shift from a "knowing lens" to a "doing lens," while the Power Story Method helps them translate their achievements into impactful stories that resonate with potential employers.The book also addresses the "messy middle" of job searching, equipping readers with strategies to maintain momentum and resilience through self-care practices and targeted skills building. Unlike traditional career guides, Options for Success is rich with templates, scripts, and sample materials, from hybrid CV-résumés to informational interview guides and bios, offering readers the practical support they need to articulate their unique value effectively.Career transition stories from PhDs across disciplines illustrate the real-world application of these principles across a range of fields and roles, showing diverse pathways into impactful, fulfilling careers. Written in a coach's voice-approachable, empathetic, and filled with generative questions-Options for Success feels like having a personalized career coach, guiding readers to explore, evaluate, and act with confidence. Options for Success is an essential companion for any PhD ready to transition beyond the faculty and into new professional possibilities.

Fatimah Williams, Ph.D., is an executive coach, speaker, and founder of Professional Pathways. A cultural anthropologist with over 15 years of consulting experience, she has advised organizations like the National Institutes of Health, the Urban League, and more than 30 colleges and universities on leadership development, organizational strategy, and career growth. Her thought leadership appears in both academic and popular outlets, including The Chronicle of Higher Education and Essence. A former career services leader at the University of Pennsylvania, she also has served on the board of the University of Virginia Alumni Association and the advisory council of the Zimmerli Art Museum. She is the author of three books, Be Bold, Professional Pathways Planner, and her newest book, Options for Success, published by Oxford University Press, which guides PhDs through career transitions and the messy middle of reinvention.

Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).
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Rapa Nui, known to Western cultures as Easter Island for centuries, has long been a source of mystery. While the massive stone statues that populate the island’s landscape have loomed in the popular Western imagination since Europeans first set foot there in 1722, in recent years, the island has gained infamy as a cautionary tale of eco-destruction. The island’s history as it’s been written tells of Polynesians who carelessly farmed, plundered their natural resources, and battled each other, dooming their delicate ecosystem and becoming a warning to us all about the frailty of our natural world.

But what if that history is wrong?

In The Island at the Edge of the World: The Forgotten History of Easter Island (Bloomsbury, 2025), archeological writer and scholar Mike Pitts offers a direct challenge to the orthodoxy of Rapa Nui, bringing to light new research and documents that tell a dramatic and surprising story about what really led to the island’s downfall. Relying on the latest archaeological findings, he paints a vastly different portrait of what life was like on the island before the first Europeans arrived, investigating why a Polynesian people who succeeded for centuries throughout the South Pacific supposedly failed to thrive in Rapa Nui. Pitts also unearths the vital story of one of the first anthropologists to study Rapa Nui, an Oxford-trained iconoclast named Katherine Routledge, who was instrumental in collecting firsthand accounts from the Polynesians living on Rapa Nui in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But though Routledge’s impressive scholarship captured the oral traditions of what life had been like pre-1722, her work was widely dismissed because of her gender, her reliance on indigenous perspectives, and her conclusions which contradicted her historical peers.

A stunning work of revisionism, this book raises critical questions about who gets to write history and the stakes of ignoring that history’s true authors. Provocative and illuminating, The Island at the Edge of the World will change the way people think about Easter Island, its colonial legacy, and where the blame for its devastation truly lies.

Mike Pitts is a writer and broadcaster, archaeologist and former museum curator. His books include A Fairweather Eden: Excavations at Boxgrove, Hengeworld, Digging for Richard III, Digging up Britain, and How to Build Stonehenge. He has also written for almost all of the important British newspapers - the Guardian, Observer, Times, Sunday Times, Telegraph, New Scientist, BBC History Magazine, Spectator and other papers and magazines - and conduct original research and publish in peer-reviewed journals. He also edited British Archaeology magazine for 20 years and is a Fellow of the London Society of Antiquaries.

Sidney Michelini is a post-doctoral researcher working on Ecology, Climate, and Violence at the Peace Research Institute of Frankfurt (PRIF).
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Worker Centered: Allyship & Action in the Contemporary Labor Movement (Oxford UP, 2024) is a close-to-the-ground, ethnographic narrative of a workplace organizing campaign at a company whose workforce was primarily low wage and immigrant. The book details the overall strategy of the campaign and its ultimate failure to win its core demands. The organization used an innovative strategic model and insisted on the importance of worker leadership. And yet allies and staff participated in a campaign that, although continually framed as such, was decidedly not led by workers. Ultimately, Worker Centered challenges conventional notions of political representation, inviting reflection on the complexities of organizing the marginalized and speaking on their behalf.

Our guest Biko Koenig is an Assistant Professor in the Government and Public Policy programs at Franklin & Marshall college in Lancaster, PA. He is also co-founder of Research Action, a worker-owned research and organizing firm that performs research and analysis for unions, solidarity economy organizations, community groups and social justice campaigns. Trained as an ethnographer and qualitative specialist at the New School for Social Research, Koenig's research investigates questions of political behavior and mobilization that centers the experiences of everyday actors as they seek to challenge status-quo power relationships.

My co-host today is Joe Zerilli, and MA student in the Communication program at Oakland University.
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