Episodes

  • Ieva Jusionyte on American Guns in Mexico: Exit Wounds (EF, JP)

    Ieva Jusionyte on American Guns in Mexico: Exit Wounds (EF, JP)
    Apr 3 2025
    John and Elizabeth had the chance to talk with Ieva Jusionyte, anthropologist, journalist, emergency medical technician. Her award-winning books include Exit Wounds, which uses anthropological and journalistic methods to follow guns purchased in the United States through organized crime scenes in Mexico, and their legal, social and personal repercussions. Ieva described researching the topic, balancing structural understandings of how guns become entangled with people on both sides of the border with an emphasis on individual stories. The three also talked about how language captures and fails to capture violence, the ways violence and the fear of violence organize space, and the importance of a humble, responsive, and empathetic approach to speaking with people touched by gun violence. Mentioned in this episode: Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power (1985) Allen Feldman, Formations of Violence (1991) Roberto Bolaño, 2666 (2004) Yuri Herrera, Signs Preceding the End of the World (2009) tr. by Lisa Dillman, see RTB episode 48 "Transform, not Transfer: Lisa Dillman on Translation Deborah Thomas, Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation, 2019 Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (1985) Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer (1998) and the "state of exception" Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973) and the "zone" Nathan Thrall, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama (2023) Recallable Books/Films Ieva suggested E.P Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: the Origin of the Black Act (1975) for its thoughtful framing of state violence and its incredible detail, and also Sven Lindqvist, A History of Bombing (2000), for the ways in which the book's structure enacts its argument. Elizabeth went with the documentary by Raul Paz Pastrana, Border South (2019), which also weaves together the stories of those affected, including the anthropologist Jason De León, in ways that account for the multidimensionality of human experience. John prasied the contested Northern Irish spaces of Anna Burns' novel Milkman (2018) Listen and Read Here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr
  • 146* Managerial Bishops Rule! Peter Brown on Wealth in Early Christianity (JP)

    146* Managerial Bishops Rule! Peter Brown on Wealth in Early Christianity (JP)
    Mar 20 2025
    Peter Brown's fascinating Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD (Princeton UP, 2014) chronicles the changing conceptions of wealth and treasure in late antiquity and the first centuries of Christianity. For our 2020 series in the rise of money (we also spoke to Thomas Piketty and Christine Desan) Brown related the emergence, in the 3rd and 4th century AD, of striking new ideas about charity and how to include the poor inside a religious community. Brown explains the importance of civic euergetism in the Greek and Roman worldview–i.e. benefaction and charity strictly confined to the good of the city. In early Christianity, this was replaced by compensatory almsgiving by the rich to benefit the lowly poor, or beggars. That notion of the rich being “less likely to enter heaven than a camel going through the eye of a needle”–that, says Brown, “was Jesus at its wildest.” Augustine even preached about almsgiving as “like a traveller’s check” that let the rich bank up credit in heaven. But most crucial of all to Brown’s argument about changed ideas of wealth is that Christianity initiated the world-transformational notion of corporate identity. Before Oxford, before the East India Company, before IBM, the “managerial Bishop” (Brown’s brilliant coinage) is not wealthy in his own right, but is an agent of “impersonal continuity.”.Brown thinks Foucault got this kind of “pastoralism” in Church leaders partially right. But Foucault–“an old fashioned Catholic in many ways” Brown remarks slyly–underestimated the desire of the Christian community to designate a “consumer-driven” church hierarchy in which they can invest. Pressed on the question of resonance to our own day, Brown (as a “good semi-Durkheimian of the Mary Douglas variety”) stresses that “these are almost incommensurable societies.” And he does note an ominous Roman parallel in present-day “personalization of power”–understanding the odious Putin by reading Seneca. Nonetheless, Brown makes clear his enduring admiration for Late Antiquity–compared to classical Greece and perhaps to our own day–because of its “remarkable tolerance for anomaly.” Brown has that too, more power to him! Mentioned in the Episode Peter Brown, Body and Society (1968) Peter Brown,. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (1968) Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints (1981) Peter Brown, The Ransom of the Soul (2015) Evelyne Patlagean, Pauvreté économique et pauvreté sociale à Byzance, 4e-7e siè (Economic Poverty and Social Poverty) Augustine, Confessions (c. 400 AD and many other works available here ) Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978 (on priests and the importance of the pastoral or shepherding metaphor) George Lakoff and Michael Johnson, Metaphors We Live By Seneca, Letters from a Stoic Listen and Read Here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    52 mins
  • 145 Violent Majorities 2.3: Long-Distance Ethnonationalism Roundup (LA, AS)

    145 Violent Majorities 2.3: Long-Distance Ethnonationalism Roundup (LA, AS)
    Mar 6 2025
    John joins Lori Allen and Ajantha Subramanian for the roundup episode of the second series of Violent Majorities, focusing on long-distance ethnonationalism. Looking back at their conversations with Peter Beinart on Zionism and Subir Sinha on Hindutva, Lori begins by asking whether Peter underestimates the material entanglements keeping Jewish American support for Israel in place. Ajantha wonders if a space has been opened up by Zionism’s more naked dependence on coercion and brute force. When John expresses puzzlement about the fervent ethnonationalism of minorities within a pluralistic society Lori and Ajantha point out that a sense of minority vulnerability may heighten the allures of long-distance ethnonationalism. The three explore various questions. Does the successful rise of Hindu ethnonationalism in the UK stem from a perceived contrast between benign Hinduism and dangerous Islam? Does the need for popular ratification through electoral democracy limit the scope of long-distance ethnonationalism? Is there a limit to how effectively Zionists and Hindutvites in the US and UK can wield claims to wounded religious minority sentiment while benefiting from from the hollowing out of democratic institutions? And finally, the three ask if the ominously successful assimilation of Zionism into American right-wing politics may also start working for Hindutva. Mentioned in the episode: Isabella Hammad, Recognizing the Stranger Azad Essa, Hostile Homelands Recall This Book with Shaul Magid on Meir Kahane Ben Lorber on masculinist “Bronze-Age” Zionism Recallable Books: Lori singles out The Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries, (1979) by Rosemary Sayigh, anthropologist and oral historian. It explores the ways Palestinian nationalism and organized resistance to their dispossession and oppression took hold in the refugee camps of Lebanon. Ajantha’s choice is Ayad Akhtar’s Homeland Elegies, published in 2020, a readable, poignant, and edgy account of US empire, Islam, and race and the challenges of being an South Asian American Muslim. She also recalls the film Mississippi Masala from 1991, a compelling take on race and class dynamics in the US Indian diaspora. John proposes Paul Breines’ Tough Jews and Gita Mehta’s Karma Cola–to which Ajantha adds Hanif Kureshi’s Buddha of Suburbia. Listen and Read Here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    47 mins
  • 144 Violent Majorities 2.2: Subir Sinha on Hindutva as Long-Distance Ethnonationalism

    144 Violent Majorities 2.2: Subir Sinha on Hindutva as Long-Distance Ethnonationalism
    Feb 20 2025
    Lori Allen and Ajantha Subramanian continue their second series on Violent Majorities. Their previous episode featured Peter Beinart on Zionism as long-distance ethnonationalism; here they speak with Subir Sinha, who teaches at SOAS University of London, comments on Indian and European media, and is a member of a commission of inquiry exploring the 2022 unrest between Hindus and Muslims in Leicester, UK. The catalysts he identifies for the rise of Hindu nationalism (Hindutva) include the emergence of new middle classes after economic liberalization, the rise of Islamophobia after 9/11, the 2008 crisis in capitalism, and the spread of new communications technologies. The trio discuss the growth of Hindutva in the US and UK since the 1990s and its further consolidation. Social media has been key to Modi’s brand of authoritarian populism, with simultaneous messaging across national borders producing a globally dispersed audience for Hindutva. Particularly useful to transnational political mobilizations has been the manufacture of wounded Hindu sentiments: a claim to victimhood that draws on the legitimizing language of religious minority rights in the US and UK. They also note more hopeful signs: Dalit and other oppressed caste politics have begun to strengthen in the diaspora; the contradictions between lived Hinduism and Hindutva have become clearer; there are some demographic and structural barriers to Hindutva’s further growth in the UK and US. Subir’s Recallable Book is Kunal Purohit’s H-Pop:The Secretive World of Hindutva Pop Stars (Harper Collins India, 2023), which looks at the proliferation of Hindutva Pop, a genre of music that is made to go viral and whip up mob violence against religious minorities. Mentioned in this episode: Subir Sinha, “Fragile Hegemony: Modi, Social Media, and Competitive Electoral Populism in India.” International Journal of Communication 11(2017), 4158–4180. Subir Sinha, “‘Strong leaders’, authoritarian populism and Indian developmentalism: The Modi moment in historical context.” Geoforum, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.02.019 Subir Sinha, “Modi's People and Populism's Imagined Communities.” Seminar, 7 5 6 – A u g u s t 2022, pp.18-23. Edward T. G. Anderson, Hindu Nationalism in the Indian Diaspora: Transnational Politics and British Multiculturalism. London: Hurst & Co., 2023. Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), or National Volunteer Corps, is the parent organization of the Sangh Parivar, or Hindu nationalist family of organizations. It espouses principles of Hindu unity and aims to transform India into a Hindu supremacist nation-state. Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), or World Hindu Organization, is a branch of the Sangh Parivar. Its stated aims are to engage in social service work, construct Hindu temples, and defend Hindus. On the anti-caste discrimination bill in the UK parliament, see David Mosse, Outside Caste? The Enclosure of Caste and Claims to Castelessness in India and the United Kingdom The Ganesh Puja period is a 10-day festival that honors the Hindu god Ganesha, and usually takes place in late August or early September. Diane M. Nelson, A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso; Revised edition, 2016. Yohann Koshy, “What the unrest in Leicester revealed about Britain – and Modi’s India.” The Guardian, 8 February 2024. Richard Manuel, Cassette Culture in North India: Popular Music and Technology in North India. University of Chicago .Press; 2nd ed. Edition,1993. Listen and Read here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    57 mins
  • 143 Violent Majorities 2.1: Peter Beinart on Long-Distance Israeli Ethnonationalism (LA, AS)

    143 Violent Majorities 2.1: Peter Beinart on Long-Distance Israeli Ethnonationalism (LA, AS)
    Feb 6 2025
    Political anthropologists Ajantha Subramanian and Lori Allen are back to continue RTB's Violent Majorities series with a set of three episodes on long-distance ethno-nationalism. Today, they speak with Peter Beinart (an editor at Jewish Currents and Professor of Journalism and Political Science at the City University of New York) about his just-released book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning (Knopf, 2025). It aims to mobilize Jewish religious ethics and teachings to reach a Jewish-American audience shaped by Zionism. Beinart seeks to debunk myths that prevent many from realizing that the moral abominations committed against Palestinians are part of the Israeli settler-colonial-nation-state project. Peter is haunted by the fact that some of the most ardent opposition to apartheid in his parents’ country of South Africa came from secular Jewish people, and is troubled by the nationalistic tendency of religiously observant Jews there in the apartheid era. The three also discuss questions of solidarity against and among authoritarians, Israel’s threat to international law, the dangers of minority alliances with majoritarian politics, campus politics, and the importance of seeing Gaza and Palestine as connected to us all. Peter’s Recallable Book is Accepting the Yoke of Heaven: Commentary on the Weekly Torah Portion, by Orthodox scientist, philosopher, and Judaica scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903-1994), who emphasized the idolatry of investing the state with anything more than a supportive role in Jewish life. Mentioned in the Episode: 119 Violent Majorities, Indian and Israeli Ethnonationalism. Episode 2: Natasha Roth-Rowland with Ajantha and Lori Aparna Gopalan, "The Hindu Nationalists Using the Pro-Israel Playbook," Jewish Currents. Isabella Hammad, Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative. Martin Luther King, Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message. The Beinart Notebook podcast Listen and Read Here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    57 mins
  • 142* Greg Childs on Seditious Conspiracy (EF, JP)

    142* Greg Childs on Seditious Conspiracy (EF, JP)
    Jan 23 2025
    What a difference four years makes. Back in February 2021, still struggling to understand what had just happened at the Capitol, John and Elizabeth spoke with Brandeis historian Greg Childs. He is an expert in Latin American political movements and public space; his Seditious Spaces: Race, Freedom, and the 1798 Conspiracy in Bahia, Brazil is imminently forthcoming from Cambridge UP. Greg's historical and hemispheric perspective helped bring out the differences between calling an event “sedition,” “seditious conspiracy” and “insurrection,” the new “Lost Cause” that many of those attacking the Capitol seem to hold on to and the particularities of Whiteness in the United States, as compared to elsewhere in the Americas. Greg even proposes a new word for what happened January 6th, 2021: counterinsurgency. Mentioned in this episode: Legitimation Crisis (1974), Jurgen Habermas On Revolution (1963), Hannah Arendt The Machiavellian Moment (1975), J. G. A. Pocock Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (2004), Stephanie Camp Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758-1834 (1998), Charles Tilly The Possessive Investment of Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (orig. 1998) 20th anniversary edition, George Lipsitz Listen and Read. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    35 mins
  • 141 The Hyphen Unites: Avi Shlaim on Arab-Jewish Life

    141 The Hyphen Unites: Avi Shlaim on Arab-Jewish Life
    Jan 3 2025
    Avi Shlaim, is a celebrated "New Historian” whose earlier work established him as an influential historian of Middle Eastern politics and especially of Israel's relations with the Arab world. Most recently he has turned to his own Iraqi/Israeli/British past in Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew–which he refers to as an "impersonal autobiography." He speaks today to John and his Brandeis colleague Yuval Evri, the Marash and Ocuin Chair in Ottoman, Mizrahi and Sephardic Jewish Studies. Yuval’s 2020 The Return to Al-Andalus: Disputes Over Sephardic Culture and Identity Between Arabic and Hebrew explores how fluidity in such categories as the "Arab-Jew" becomes a source of resistance to exclusive claims of ownership of land, texts, traditions, or languages. The three quickly agree that the crucial category for understanding Avi's latest work is that of the Arab Jew: "I am a problem for Zionists, an ontological impossibility....[as] a living breathing standing Arab Jew. A problem for them but not for me." Coexistence for him is not remote, but something that the Iraqi Jewish community experienced and touched on a daily basis. In describing the factors that sped migration from Iraq to Israel in its early years, Shlaim lays bare some evidence for Mossad involvement in three for the Baghdad bombs that hastened the flight from Baghdad. That bombing forms part of the “Cruel Zionism” that Avi sees having gravely damaged the possibilities of Middle Eastern religious coexistence. He also discusses the 1954 Lavon affair, and more generally reflects on the way that Zionism ("an Ashkenazi thing") conscripted Arab Jews into its political formation (This is a topic also discussed extensively in RTB"s conversation with Natasha Roth-Richardson and Lori Allen, in Violent Majorities). True, there is a much-discussed 1941 Baghdadi pogrom, The Farhud. It stands alone in the area and by Shlaim's account was largely a product of British colonialism in Iraq, with its divisive elevation of Christians and Jews over Muslims. Yuval asks Avi to discuss the power (or permission) to narrate stories told from below. Avi's tales of his own mother's resourcefulness and his father’s struggles betoken the range of poignant response to what for so many Arab Jews was not aliyah (ascent) but a yerida, a descent into marginality, unemployment, and cultural exclusion. To Avi, a single state of Israel/Palestine seems the best hope to ward off the worst that may come from the accelerated ethnic cleansing of both Gaza and the West Bank, which may lead to a second Nakba. Avi Shlaim's earlier books include: Collusion across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine (1988) The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (1988). Mentioned in the podcast The New Historians of Israel/Palestine. Joel Beinin, The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry (1998) Alliance Israelite Universelle Salo Baron anatomizes the "lachrymose version of Jewish history"; e.g. in his 1928 "“Ghetto and Emancipation: Shall We Revise the Traditional View?” Noam Chomsky called settler colonialism the most extreme and vicious form of imperialism. Recallable Books Avi credits the influential work of Ella Shohat on the idea of the Arab Jew and "cruel Zionism." One pathbreaking article was her 1988 "Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims." but he recommends On the Arab Jew. In her work the hyphen unites rather than divides Arab and Jew. Yehoudah Shinhav, The Arab Jews (2006). Sami Michael - Victoria Shimon Ballas, Outcast (1991) Samir Naqqash, Tenants and Cobwebs Iraqi Jewish Writers: Banipal 72 Michael Kazin, A Walker in the City (1951) and the rest of his New York trilogy. Listen and Read here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 10 mins
  • 140* Other Minds with Peter Godfrey-Smith (EF, JP)

    140* Other Minds with Peter Godfrey-Smith (EF, JP)
    Dec 19 2024
    Peter Godfrey-Smith knows his cephalopods. Once of CUNY and now a professor of history and philosophy of science at University of Sydney, his truly capacious career includes books such as Theory and Reality (2003; 2nd edition in 2020), Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection (2009) and most recently Metazoa. RtB--including two Brandeis undergraduates as guest hosts, Izzy Dupré and Miriam Fisch--spoke with him back in October 2021 about his astonishing book on the fundamental alterity of octopus intelligence and experience of the world, Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea and the Deep Origins of Consciousness. Another equally descriptive title for that book, and for the discussion we share with you here (after Thomas Nagel's "What is it like to be a Bat?") might be What is it Like to be an Octopus? As always, below you will find helpful links for the works referenced in the episode, and a transcript for those who prefer or require a print version of the conversation. Please visit us at Recallthisbook.org (or even subscribe there) if you are interested in helpful bonus items like related short original articles, reading lists, visual supplements and past episodes grouped into categories for easy browsing. Mentioned in the Episode: Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Ruin "Open the pod bay doors, Hal": a chilling line from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) District Nine (2009, dir. Neill Bloomkamp) in which giant intelligent shrimp from outer space play the role of octopus-like alien intelligence, and prompt a complex but unmistakably racist reaction on their arrival in South Africa. Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) Erik Linklater, Pirates in the Deep Green Sea (1949) Listen and Read Here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    50 mins