Kathryn Kozaitis published Indebted: An Ethnography of Despair and Resilience in Greece's Second City with Oxford University Press in 2021. Against the backdrop of the Great Recession (2007-2009) and its impact on the Greek state economy, Indebted examines Greek citizens lived experience of the fiscal, social, and moral crisis that threatened and mobilized them in the aftermath of the Eurozone crash. Ethnographic analysis of crisis among Thessaloniki middle-class residents at the height of structural austerity (2011-15) reveals patterned allocations of their personal time and cultural resources to revitalize their city, their economy, and their society through critical reckonings, alternative economies, grassroots organizing, and transnational solidarities. This ethnography propounds a theory of societal crisis as a temporal, transitional, and regenerative timespace and process marked by people's collective hope, resilience, and agency that propels systemic socio-cultural transformations.
Louis Ruprecht published Quatremere de Quincy's Moral Consideration of the Place and Purpose of Works of Art, Translation, and Commentary (Rowman and Littlefield, 2021). Antoine Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy(1755-1849) was arguably the most important Neoclassical art historian in the generation after Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768). It is difficult to appreciate his importance now, due in part to the lack of translations of his 21 published books: three were rendered into English in the 19th century, and one in the 21st. The Moral Considerations has long been considered the most shattering polemic against public museums ever written. But Ruprecht shows that Quatremère’s polemic was aimed, not against museums per se, but rather against the imperialist and secularist curatorial purposes of Parisian museums in the age of the French Revolution. His Neoclassical commitments maintained the centrality of religion, and incarnation, to any proper understanding of the place and purpose of the fine arts, including their place in modern museums.
Bethany Turner-Livermore published a book (with colleague Haagen D. Klaus) in 2020 titled Diet, Nutrition, and Foodways on the North Coast of Peru: Bioarchaeological Perspectives on Adaptive Transitions with Springer. The book synthesizes the results of a 10-year study into the diet, subsistence, and nutrition and corresponding insights into adaptation, suffering, and resilience among indigenous Lambayeque communities from early agricultural through European colonial periods. The Spanish invasion and colonization of Andean South America left millions dead, landscapes transformed, and traditional ways of life annihilated. However, the nature and magnitude of these changes were far from uniform. Turner-Livermore and Klaus argued that Lambayeque communities maintained their traditional foodways generations into the Colonial period, and discuss the implications of this resistance in the face of Spanish oppression by drawing on a wealth of theoretical perspectives. This book is an invited contribution to the Springer edited series Bioarcheology and Social Theory.
Jennifer Patico's latest ethnography, The Trouble with Snack Time: Children's Food and the Politics of Parenting, is based on extensive fieldwork in Atlanta and was published by NYU Press in 2020. Charlotte Faircloth (University College London) calls it "a beautifully written account of the double bind faced by many contemporary parents: how to be 'engaged' and 'concerned' about their children's eating, without being overly 'neurotic' or anxious'. Thick with detailed ethnographic observation, the book illuminates the politics of parenting from the ground up, forcing the reader to reflect on why children's eating has become both individualized and moralized in recent years, as well as pushing us to consider other, more collaborative possibilities.