PODCAST · society
The World Ethnography Project
by Gwyneth Talley
This is a collaborative multi-modal project that brings students of anthropology together to create a massive collection that includes a map of ethnographies from around the world, a podcast or video review link to each map pin, and a discussion and passage reading. This project is inspired by Ann Morgan’s TED talk of reading a book from every country in the world (TED Talk linked here). Together we can read ethnographies from around the world and share them a wider audience.
Episodes
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WEP Episode 94 Mohammed Nadeem Reviews The Jamaa and the Church: A Bantu Catholic Movement in Zaire
This book tells a story, an examination, a history, and social reflections on a seminal religious movement, which originated in Katanga, Zaire (Democratic Congo now) during the fanatically brutal period of Belgian occupation. In the backdrop of avid extraction of minerals like magnesium, gold,...
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WEP Episode 93 Esther Michael Reviews From Cuba with Love: Sex and Money in the Twenty-First Century
This book primarily focuses on Cuba’s society in the twenty-first century and how gender, sexuality, and ethics circle around it. Megan Daigle focuses on women’s sexuality and how men’s masculinity plays a huge factor in Cuba’s society. For instance, the emergence of jinetera is prostitution in...
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WEP Episode 92 Madi Harken Reviews Lydia's Open Door: Inside Mexico's Most Modern Brothel
Zona Galactica is a state-run brothel in Tuxtla Gutiérrez. This ethnography discusses the modernization of the sex industry and how the efforts of the government to modernize Chiapas are connected to its regulation of the sex industry. Patty Kelly examines how politics and economics impact sex...
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WEP Episode 91 Peyton Wilkoski Reviews Outlawed: Between Security and Rights in a Bolivian City
Peter Kirby explores the wide variety of implications "waste" has in Japan. At first meant to be only about the contradictions between Japan's pollution problem and their fixation on nature, Kirby finds deeper roots in things like "racist self imaginings and wartime practice... contemporary...
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WEP Episode 90 RJ Suey Reviews Ghetto at the Center of the World: Chunking Mansions, Hong Kong
This is an ethnography that discusses one of the most diverse buildings in the world, the Chungking Mansions of Hong Kong. Due to the unique history of Hong Kong, and the economic opportunities that reside there, people from all over the world flock to the city to try out their luck. The…
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WEP Episode 89 Marcus Fertig Reviews Dacha Idylls: Living Organically in Russia's Countryside
Dacha life in Russia is a major part of Russian society. It is something that not many many people know about either. This book does an excellent job of introducing its readers about Russian summer culture. The tradition of the summer cottage in Russia explains Russian society in ways one would...
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WEP Episode 88 Wren Shawhan Reviews Straight from the Heart: Gender, Intimacy, and the Cultural Production of Shojo Manga
Japan is an epicenter for media, and the origin for a lot of these cultural exports is manga. It inspires toys, anime, video games, movies, and more. Manga has an even bigger impact on Japanese culture than any comic book does in the United States. Shojo manga is the “girls manga”, and it has…
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WEP Episode 87 Izze Schwab Reviews The Spirit Ambulance: Choreographing the End of Life in Thailand
This ethnography is the accounts of medical and cultural anthropologist and physician Scott Stonington mainly in Nakhon Ping in Northern Thailand, but also in Bangkok and some surrounding areas in Southern Thailand. Stonington shares his research of the two phases of dying in the Thailand culture...
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WEP Episode 86 Charlie Look Reviews The Traveler - Gypsies
In the early 1970’s, anthropologist Judith Okely lived around and with several Gypsy families across Southern Britain in order to perform a case study. Before performing her study, however she attempted research on the history of Gypsies, which is a rather difficult task. Their history comes from...
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WEP Episode 85 Liam Joyce Reviews The Funeral Casino: Meditation, Massacre, and Exchange with the Dead in Thailand
The Funeral Casino is an ethnography that was written by Dr. Alan Klima during his time in Thailand after its military dictatorship had come to an end. In Thailand, the massacre of protestors spurred a coup that eventually instituted a new government, but three years later, most of the people had...
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WEP Episode 84 Nathan Fricke Reviews Where the World Ended: Re-Unification and Identity in the German Borderland
The ethnographic research by Daphne Berdahl takes place in the village of Kella, Germany, in the early 1990s. Kella is a small village located directly on the former border between East and West Germany. This area of the world at the time was going through many social, political, and economic...
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WEP Episode 83 Lily Bruner Reviews Life Without Lead: Contamination, Crisis and Hope in Uruguay
Life Without Lead discusses the crisis that started in La Teja, a neighborhood in Montevideo, Uruguay. Over many decades, a company that makes batteries caused lead to infect the water and grounds of many neighborhoods in Montevideo. After many children began to get sick, they were discovered to...
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WEP Episode 82 Tyler Klems Reviews The Tango Machine: Musical Culture in the Age of Expediency
In this ethnography, the author Morgan James Luker explores the connection between the historically rich culture of Argentina and tango. Even though tango is not nearly as popular as it was back in the 1940’s and 1950’s, many Argentine people still value the preservation of tango. In fact many...
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WEP Episode 81 Hannah Jensen Reviews Behold the Black Caiman: A Chronicle of Ayoreo Life
In 2004, one of the last remaining groups of voluntarily isolated native americans stumbled out of their woodland home in northern Paraguay, fleeing the bulldozers destroying their land, and stepped directly into the public eye. They thus became suddenly and violently inundated with a world that...
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WEP Episode 80 Frances Rodriguez Caraballo Reviews Flammable: Environmental Suffering in an Argentine Shantytown
This book goes into detail about the daily lives of those who live in a shantytown called Flammable in Argentina. It mostly focuses on and goes into the environmental suffering they go through, since the area is very polluted. It discusses the health effects of being in such an area, why the area...
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WEP Episode 79 Josie Guernsey Reviews The Crosses of Auschwitz: Nationalism and Religion in Post-Communist Poland
Geneviève Zubrzycki is an assistant professor of Sociology that in 1989, spent over 36 months conducting fieldwork in Oświęcim, Poland where the remnants and museum of Auschwitz is located. The event labeled “The Crosses of Auschwitz” is what brought her to Poland in particular. In 1988, when a...
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WEP Episode 78 Ben Skoff Reviews Laura Odgen's Swamplife: People, Gators, and Mangroves Entangled in the Everglades
This book discusses the early practices of the everglades such as alligator hunting slowly became outlawed and the way of life in the everglades changed forever. She also discusses how over time the landscape was changed by rhizomes, and in turn, the inhabitants were affected by the changing land...
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WEP Episode 77 Jacob Skretta Reviews Military Power and Popular Protest: The U.S. Navy in Vieques, Puerto Rico
Katherine McCaffrey's research focuses on the interaction between the United states military, specifically the Navy, in an outlying island of Puerto Rico called Vieques. Vieques is a small island and home to only 10,000 or so residents. Since World War Two, the United States has used Vieques as a...
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WEP Episode 76 Sam Bennie Reviews Zora Neale Hurston's Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti And Jamaica
Zora Neale Hurston’s experience of daily life & voodoo/obeah rituals in Haiti And Jamaica. She learns about Jamaican burial rituals, visits the first freedmen settlement in the world, describes the Haitian people as extreme liars, writes about Haitian politics (specifically one president who...
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WEP Episode 75 Ryan Wilson Reviews Troubled Natures: Waste, Environment, Japan
Peter Kirby explores the wide variety of implications "waste" has in Japan. At first meant to be only about the contradictions between Japans pollution problem and their fixation on nature, Kirby finds deeper roots in things like "racist self imaginings and wartime practice... contemporary...
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WEP Episode 74 Hayley Ramirez Reviews Enduring Cancer: Life, Death, and Diagnosis in Delhi
This ethnography depicts how a cancer diagnosis impacts the social lives of the patients and their families by exacerbating decades of martial abuse and fragile family relationships. Drawing on the ethnographical fieldwork conducted in 2011, Dwaipayan Banerjee highlights the familial strain and...
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WEP Episode 73 Samantha Grove Reviews Back Stories: U.S. News Production and Palestinian Politics
Amahl A. Bishara explores the influence and relationship journalists have with Palestinian people around Israel and the West Bank. She explores a number of anthropological ideas of power, use of language and globalization. Studying a group of people who are considered “stateless” introduces a…
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WEP Episode 72 Hanna Reynolds Reviews Burning at Europe's Borders: An Ethnography on the African Migrant Experience in Morocco
Migrants from areas south of the Maghreb are caught in transition on their way to Europe. Through the externalization policies of Spain and the EU, migrants are beaten down the fences of Spanish enclaves - Ceuta and Melilla - bordering Morocco. Alexander-Nathani’s ethnography explains that this...
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WEP Episode 71 Kinli Miller Reviews Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica
This ethnography navigates the social structures of the Caribbean which are deeply rooted in colonialism, sexism, and classism demonstrated by the taboo practice of Voodoo. During Hursten’s time in Haiti and Jamaica in the 1930’s, she explores the secrecy and mystery shrouding African rituals and...
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WEP Episode 70 Jessica Schafer Reviews In the Metro
In the Metro presents an ethnography of the subway and public transportation, a place where you are alone, yet surrounded by other people. This creates an interesting social paradox which Auge analyzes throughout the book, through observation, philosophical analysis, and personal experience....
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WEP Episode 69 Will Synowiecki Reviews A Year in the Life of a Shinto Shrine
A Year in the Life of a Shinto Shrine is an ethnography in which John K. Nelson experiences the practices and happenings in a Japanese Shinto Shrine. The Shrine Nelson does his studies at is the Suwa Shrine in Nagasaki, Japan. He observes Shinto practices by priests, as well as worshippers of the...
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WEP Episode 68 Miranda Ritchie Reviews Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death
Since the invention of the ventilator and the adaptation of defining death, "Western" countries have had to determine when and how to define death and organ transplants. The first heart transplant occurred in South Africa in 1967 sparking the beginning of the exploration of the organ transplant...
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WEP Episode 67 Abby Queen Reviews A Society without Fathers or Husbands: The Na of China
The Na people, also called the Moso, live in Yunnan Province in southern China. Family is very important to the Na, but their families are different from the way we know family in the west. Brothers and sisters live together their whole lives, and the uncles take on the “father figure” in the...
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WEP Episode 66 Skyler Meyer Reviews Meeting the "Other:" Living in the Present, Gender and Sustainability in Bhutan
In “Meeting the Other,” Crins introduces her unique journey into the small country of Bhutan. After a brief background and introduction to the country, she gives several details before diving into her observations and experiences. The author explains her 17 years of experience in Bhutan…
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WEP Episode 65 Heather Martin Reviews The Maintenance of Life: Preventing Social Death through Euthanasia Talk and End-of-Life Care—Lessons from The Netherlands, Second Edition
This ethnography takes place in The Netherlands where euthanasia and physician assisted suicide is legal and a fairly common practice. The main points of this ethnography were: to identify the purpose and importance of huisartsen (general practitioners) in the end of life of Dutch people, to show...
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WEP Episode 64 Valeria Facio-Lom Reviews Other-Worldly: Making Chinese Medicine through Transnational Frames
This ethnography focuses on the “worlding” of Chinese traditional medicine from Shanghai to the San Francisco Bay Area over a 10-year period between 1995-2005. Mei Zhan argues that what has become known as “Chinese Traditional Medicine” has shifted and changed as a result of the various…
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WEP Episode 63 Ana Facio-Lom Reviews The Biopolitics of Beauty: Cosmetic Citizenship and Affective Capital in Brazil
Alavo Jarrín explores a variety of topics in his ethnographic research, The Biopolitics of Beauty: Cosmetic Citizenship and Affective Capital in Brazil. The ethnography can be summarized by one quote. “Não tem feio, só tem pobre” or in other words There are no ugly people, only poor people.…
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WEP Episode 62 Dellante Clark-Brown Reviews City of Darkness: Life In Kowloon Walled City
Ian Lambot and his co-illustrator Greg Girad travel to Hong Kong’s “Walled City of Kowloon”. They conduct many interviews with people who have lived within the city or were a part of the seedy dealings taking place within it. They live in Hong Kong doing research for four years talking to locals,...
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WEP Episode 61 Ashley Ciccarelli Reviews Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail
The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail is an ethnography that uses photography, forensic anthropology, archeology, and linguistics to educate the public about illegal immigration from Mexico to the United States. The book mostly focuses on the journey of illegal…
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WEP Episode 60 Sam Biaggi Reviews Learning Capoeira: Lessons in Cunning from an Afro-Brazilian Art
In Brazil, African slaves developed capoeira, an acrobatic and deceptive martial art designed to disguise itself as a dance to allow slaves to practice without suspicion. Throughout the centuries, capoeira has evolved and grown into an essential part of Afro-Brazilian culture. From its use by...
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WEP Episode 59 Lucy Parizek Reviews My Father’s Wars: Migration, Memory, and the Violence of a Century
My Father’s Wars: Migration, Memory, and the Violence of a Century is an “intimate ethnography” involving an anthropologist’s vivid account of her father’s journey across continents, countries, cultures, generations, and wars. Waterstone creates a “moving portrait” of her father as a charming,...
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WEP Episode 58 Erin O'Connor Reviews Unity of Heart: Culture and Change in a Polynesian Atoll Society
Anne Chambers and her husband, Keith Chambers, recount the experiences they had when encountering the small island community of Nanumea over 25 years. Their first visit lasted for two years from 1973-75 as part of a British colonial project to learn about island communities. The second in 1983…
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WEP Episode 57 Trinity Mozingo Reviews The Professor in the Cage: Why Men Fight and Why We Like to Watch
In his late-thirties, Jonathan Gottschall unhappy about his current job as an adjunct community college professor who decides to join a mixed martial arts (MMA) gym. Throughout the book, we follow as Gottschall trains to fight in a cage match. As he is training, he also goes into detail about the...
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WEP Episode 56 Jack Sokolik Reviews The Strange Child: Education and the Psychology of Patriotism in Recessionary Japan
The Strange Child: Education and the Psychology of Patriotism in Recessionary Japan, details the changing landscape of the Japanese youth and education system in an ever changing modern Japan. This evolution, one of rapid modernization and industrialization, has made Japan one of the most...
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WEP Episode 55 Clair Jantz Reviews Empowering Women in Russia: Activism, AID, and NGOs
In Empowering Women in Russia, Julie Hemment explores the different phases of women’s groups had to go through after the fall of the Soviet Union. She explains how Russian women’s groups, such as Zhenskii Svet, were influenced by the United States and Western European organizations' ideals to...
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WEP Episode 54 Cassandra Corral Reviews The Death Rituals of Rural Greece
The Death Rituals of Rural Greece written by Loring M. Danforth in 1982.
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WEP Episode 53 Michael Day Reviews Joyriding in Riyadh
Joyriding in Riyadh perfectly encapsulates the youth subculture in Saudi Arabia. The author, Pascal Menoret identifies key youth ideologies through a web of informants that he connected with over years of work. Traveling throughout Saudi Arabia, Pascal discovers many complex relationships between...
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WEP Episode 52 Maggie Riekman – It's All Greek to Me!
Maggie Reickman Reviews Making Modern Mothers: Ethics and Family Planning in Urban Greece Through thick description, statistical research, interviews, her own narrative, and inclusivity of Greek voices and language, Paxson explores motherhood and femininity in contemporary Athens, Greece. Athens…
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WEP Episode 50 Evan Melchior Reviews The World of Lucha Libre: Secrets, Revelations, and Mexican National Identity
This book covers the sport of Lucha Libre wrestling in the country of Mexico, form the time of its inception until the modern age. Author Heather Levi studies all aspects of the sport: the wrestlers themselves, officials/referees, spectators and fans, and media members. She examines themes of...
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WEP Episode 51 Austin Ash Reviews Life beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic
Life beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic by Lisa Stevenson
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WEP Episode 49 Emma Hanson Reviews Improving Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic
Livingston describes the cancer ward in terms of politics, need, power, biomedical science, death, and hope that shape contemporary experience in southern Africa. She talks of her time in the death and desolation of the overworked, understaffed, and in need of aid hospital. As she writes she…
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WEP Episode 48 Zach Markussen Imagined Olympians: Body Culture and Colonial Representation in Rwanda
This book by John Bale dives into the body culture of Rwanda, and how it was used during the colonization of Rwanda during the 1900's to set the ethnic groups against each other, to elevate one above the others, and how it was reflected in and changed by Europe. The specific body culture being...
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WEP Episode 47 Robert Stenzel Reviews My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft
World of Warcraft, a massively-multiplayer-online role-playing game set in the Warcraft universe, has been a major player in the gaming industry since its inception. It has captivated millions of dedicated players from all over the world and all walks of life with its expansive game world and...
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WEP Episode 46 Matthew Stennes Reviews Merchants in the City of Art: Work, Identity, and Change in a Florentine Neighborhood
This book focuses on the world of street markets in Florence, Italy, specifically in the neighborhood of San Lorenzo. It focuses on certain vendors that have been working in the street vending business for many years. The book attempts “to explore how cultural identities are formed in periods of...
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WEP Episode 45 Blake Mann Reviews Death Without Weeping
Death Without Weeping is an ethnography written by Nancy Scheper-Hughes about the high infant mortality rates in Northeastern Brazil and the social, psychological, political, and cultural factors behind it. The author begins by giving a background of the region such as the major industry (sugar),...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
This is a collaborative multi-modal project that brings students of anthropology together to create a massive collection that includes a map of ethnographies from around the world, a podcast or video review link to each map pin, and a discussion and passage reading. This project is inspired by Ann Morgan’s TED talk of reading a book from every country in the world (TED Talk linked here). Together we can read ethnographies from around the world and share them a wider audience.
HOSTED BY
Gwyneth Talley
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does The World Ethnography Project have?
The World Ethnography Project currently has 94 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is The World Ethnography Project about?
This is a collaborative multi-modal project that brings students of anthropology together to create a massive collection that includes a map of ethnographies from around the world, a podcast or video review link to each map pin, and a discussion and passage reading. This project is inspired by Ann...
How often does The World Ethnography Project release new episodes?
The World Ethnography Project has 94 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to The World Ethnography Project?
You can listen to The World Ethnography Project on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts The World Ethnography Project?
The World Ethnography Project is created and hosted by Gwyneth Talley.
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