Duke University Press Log

Duke Authors at American Anthropological Association's Annual Meeting

Last week's American Anthropological Association annual meeting in Philadelphia was very exciting for Duke Press. Not only did we get to participate at the book exhibit and meet up with our authors, but we also had the book launch for S. Ann Dunham's Surviving against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia. There was a presidential session for the book, and we also had a reception that included Nancy I. Cooper, Alice G. Dewey, and Maya Soetoro-Ng.

 

A view of all the amazing books at our booth!

 

At the Dunham reception.

 

Dunham's daughter and President Obama's sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, signs copies of her mother's book.

 

Selling copies of Dunham's book.

 

One of our staffers, Helena Knox, at the Dunham reception.

 

Another one of our staffers, Emma Boyer, takes a glance at Dunham's Surviving against the Odds.

Sverker Finnstrom, Living with Bad Surroundings: War, History, and Everyday Moments in Northern Uganda (2008)

 

David A. B. Murray, editor of Homophobias: Lust and Loathing across Time and Space (2009)

Thanks to our Books Marketing Intern, Brittany Miller, for taking these pics!

 

Thomas F. Carter, The Quality of Home Runs: The Passion, Politics, and Language of Cuban Baseball (2008)

 

Enrique Mayer, Ugly Stories of the Peruvian Agrarian Reform (2009)

Thanks to our Exhibits Manager, Helena Knox, for these two photos!

Two Great Interviews

Listen to two great interviews with our authors. Maya Soetoro-Ng, daughter of S. Ann Dunham and sister of President Barack Obama, was interviewed this weekend by NPR's Guy Raz. She talks about her mother's book, Surviving against the Odds, about growing up in Indonesia and accompanying her mother on research trips, and about what their mother might have thought about her son becoming President. And on the BBC show Thinking Allowed, you can hear Karen Ho talk about her anthropological research in a very different locale: Wall Street. Ho took a job at Banker's Trust for a year and interviewed dozens of investment bankers for her book Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street.

Relationship with Military Debated at Anthro Meeting

The relationship between the military and social scientists is a recurring debate at the American Anthropology Association annual meeting now. Once again a commission has released a report on the Human Terrain System (HTS), a Pentagon program that embeds anthropologists or sociologists with military units abroad. The New York Times says, "The report cited insufficient training to prepare scholars for work in the field, concern about confidentiality and obtaining informed consent from the local population, and the possibility that collected research could be used to select military targets." Inside Higher Ed interviews David Price, one of the primary authors of the report as well as of two books from Duke: Threatening Anthropology and Anthropological Intelligence. Price does not believe that changes the Pentagon has suggested for the program will improve it: "To the extent to which it relies on misshapen forms of fieldwork, which is really the core of what it’s doing, it cannot be salvaged," he said. Price also discusses the HTS program in a Counterpunch article this week. He writes, "The notion of using anthropologists and other social scientists to gather information, probe and soothe the feelings of those living in these environments, increasingly monitored and controlled by machines, strikes me as an anthropological abomination. Given what we know anthropologically about the complexities of how culture works, it also seems doomed to failure."

Dunham Launch Today

Everyone at the Press is excited for the big launch of S. Ann Dunham's Surviving against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia today. Dunham, the mother of President Obama, submitted her dissertation on metal workers in Java in 1992 and died before she she could get it published. Now, fourteen years after her death, we are proud to be bringing her important work to the public. The book is being launched today at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association. At noon there will be a press conference about the book and Dunham's work. Editors Alice Dewey and Nancy Cooper, Duke Press Editorial Director Ken Wissoker, University of Hawaii's Geoffery White, and Dunham's daughter Maya Soetoro-Ng will attend. The press conference is followed by a special Presidential Session on Dunham and her work. And later in the evening, Duke Press and the AAA host a reception and book signing. Of course the book will be on sale at Duke's booth in the exhibit hall throughout the conference. To read more about the book, check out this great Chronicle of Higher Education piece which includes interviews with Soetoro-Ng and Wissoker (subscription required) or this Publishers Weekly article.

Maya Soetoro-Ng on Diane Rehm Today

Today in the second hour of her program, Diane Rehm interviews Maya Soetoro-Ng, daughter of S. Ann Dunham and sister of President Barack Obama. Dunham died in 1995, before she was able to revise her dissertation, so Soetoro-Ng worked with editors Nancy Cooper and Alice Dewey to bring the work to publication. Surviving against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia is based on Dunham’s research over a period of fourteen years among the rural metalworkers of Java, the island home to nearly half Indonesia’s population. Soetoro-Ng will reflect on her mother's life and legacy and her own upbringing in Indonesia as the daughter of an anthropologist.

Sunday Times Returns to Java to Profile S. Ann Dunham

 The Sunday Times (London) sent reporter Christine Finn to Kajar, Java in Indonesia to revisit the site of S. Ann Dunham's research there. As you have read before on this blog, Dunham, who died in 1995, was President Barack Obama's mother. An anthropologist, she did her fieldwork on Javanese metal workers in the village of Kajar. Finn writes, "Dunham is still remembered in the central Javan hamlet of Kajar as a generous benefactor whose gifts of money, food and schoolbooks helped numerous villagers. Yet none of them had realised that the woman who paid several visits to research rural crafts in the 1980s had a son who was to become America’s 44th president." Duke will publish Dunham's dissertation, Surviving against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia next month.

Karadzic Trial Begins in The Hague

The trial of Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader who stands accused of genocide, began yesterday in The Hague. But the accused refused to appear, claiming he needed more time to prepare his defense. Karadzic's recalcitrance will remind many of the trial of Slobodan Milosevic. Milosevic made a mockery of the proceedings and died before a verdict could be issued. Next fall we will publish the definitive account of the Milosevic trial, Judith Armatta's Twilight of Impunity: The War Crimes Trial of Slobodan Milosevic. Armatta, a lawyer, sat inches away from Milosevic throughout the entire trial as she served as an observer for the Coalition for International Justice, a human rights organization. Her book presents both a day-to-day account of the trial and analysis of its significance as well as personal accounts of victims of the Balkan wars. Armatta argues that the trial set an important precedence and that studying and understanding it is crucial to future efforts to bring war criminals (like Karadzic) to justice. After the jump, read an excerpt from this important forthcoming book.

Karen Ho in The Guardian

The Guardian's "Brain Food" column features anthropologist Karen Ho this week. Aditya Chakrabortty writes, "Anthropologists used to study the alien: pygmies in rainforests with blowdarts and more piercings than a knife-thrower's assistant. Nowadays, however, few societies are more foreign than that found on Wall Street. After all, what could be more outlandish than the tribes of Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and the famously fierce Goldman Sachs – with their obscure tongue (CDOs, CLOs and the rest), their worship of gold and those grisly ritual cullings of staff?" Ho's book Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street is an in-depth investigation into the everyday experiences and ideologies of Wall Street investment bankers which shows how financial markets, and particularly booms and busts, are constructed.

Seminole Gaming in the News

After months of trying to agree on a gambling compact, it appears that Florida's Seminole tribe and its state government are at an impasse, reports the Miami Herald. At issue is the desire of some lawmakers to expand gambling throughout the state and the refusal of the Seminoles to give Florida $150 million a year in shared gaming revenue if the expansion goes through. But the even larger issue looming behind the dispute is that of sovereignty. The Seminoles claim that Federal law makes them a sovereign nation, not subject to the state of Florida's fines and rules. The Florida House of Representatives has asked the Federal government to step in and halt gaming on the Seminole reservations. These large issue of sovereignty are discussed in detail in Jessica Cattelino's High Stakes: Florida Seminole Gaming and Sovereignty. She argues that the Seminoles have used their vast gaming profits to shore up both their cultural traditions and their sovereignty, and that while states and the Federal government have both been happy to let tribes claim sovereignty when they were poor, the addition of huge gambling profits raises the stakes for everyone. When asked about the current impasse, Cattelino said she is "particularly intrigued by the potential for the tribe to negotiate gaming terms with the federal government and thereby cut out the state."

Gender Not Always Clear Cut

The Washington Post has a thoughtful article today about how in athletics and other areas, it's not always easy to assign a gender to a person. The recent plight of runner Caster Semenya brought to the forefront the issue of competitors who have always identified as women, but who test genetically as male. Reporter David A. Farenthold writes that, with one in 100 people having a medical condition that might make gender assignment difficult, these issues extend far beyond athletic competition. Many people with these medical conditions identify as intersex. Katrina Karkazis's Fixing Sex: Intersex, Medical Authority, and Lived Experience is the first book to examine contemporary controversies over the medical management of intersexuality in the United States from the multiple perspectives of those most intimately involved (parents and doctors as well as intersex people themselves). It has been widely praised for its thoroughness and sensitivity. Check it out if you'd like to know more about this complex issue.