Elizabeth Anne Davis, "Artifactual: Forensic and Documentary Knowing" (Duke UP, 2023)
New Books in AnthropologyShow Notes
In Artifactual: Forensic and Documentary Knowing (Duke University Press, 2023), Elizabeth Anne Davis explores how Cypriot researchers, scientists, activists, and artists process and reckon with civil and state violence that led to the enduring division of the island, using forensic and documentary materials to retell and recontextualize conflicts between and within the Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot communities. Davis follows forensic archaeologists and anthropologists who attempt to locate, identify, and return to relatives the remains of Cypriots killed in those conflicts. She turns to filmmakers who use archival photographs and footage to come to terms with political violence and its legacies. In both forensic science and documentary filmmaking, the dynamics of secrecy and revelation shape how material remains such as bones and archival images are given meaning. Throughout, Davis demonstrates how Cypriots navigate the tension between an ethics of knowledge, which valorizes truth as a prerequisite for recovery and reconciliation, and the politics of knowledge, which renders evidence as irremediably partial and perpetually falsifiable.
Elizabeth Anne Davis is Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University.
* This episode is part of a special collaboration between the New Books Network and the Society for the Anthropology of Europe, a section of the American Anthropological Association. Together, we’re highlighting exciting new work in Europeanist anthropology—featuring authors from across the field, including winners of the William A. Douglass Book Prize and contributors to the European Anthropology in Translation series published by Berghahn Books. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology
More from New Books in Anthropology
The claim to moderate or modernist Islam in Indonesia is particularly contentious today, as these labels participate in the global politics of identity for Muslims past and present. Who gets to claim to be representative of an Islam that is modernist, progressive, or tolerant? What constitutes a traditionalist Islamic orientation? And why and for whom do these distinctions matter? In her new book Theologies of Remembering: Modernity, Ambiguity, and Transcendence in Islamic Indonesia (U California Press, 2026), Dr. Verena Meyer raises these questions in an ethnographic study of two major Indonesian Muslim organizations based in Yogyakarta: the Muhammadiyya and the Nahdlatul Ulama.
Drora interviewed Dr. Eveyln Maria Dean-Olmsted about her book, Coming of Age as Syrian Jewish Mexicans: The Pragmatics of Diaspora (Brill, 2025), published by Brill in 2026. Dr. Dean-Olmsted is a linguistic anthropologist who lived with the Jewish community in Mexico City for a time to research this book. The community includes four distinct groups: Ashkenazi, Aleppans, Damascenes, and Ottoman Sephardim. She explained how these communities formed in the early 20th century following migration from the Ottoman Empire and later Syria and Lebanon, with each group maintaining separate institutions for social and religious purposes. Evelyn noted that while these communities were once strictly separated, there is now more mixing between them, though specific ethnic and geographic identifications remain important within the community.
At a time when artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and digital technologies increasingly shape our understanding of what it means to be human, Fuchs argues that we need to recover a richer conception of the human person. Rather than viewing ourselves as information-processing systems or collections of neural mechanisms, he develops a philosophical vision centred on embodiment, relationality, and lived experience. The result is a compelling defence of human agency, dignity, and freedom against contemporary forms of reductionism and transhumanism.
Dr Raluca Bianca Roman's book is an ethnography of the Finnish Kaale, Finland's national Roma community, and of the impact of Evangelical Christianity on their social and political lives. It is based on more than a decade of fieldwork and on archival research from the early twentieth century onwards. The book follows Kaale families as they handle the consequences of settlement, urbanisation and a turn towards the nuclear household, and as many convert to Pentecostalism. It moves from family homes and prayer groups in Helsinki to small towns in Eastern Finland, and on to Roma settlements in Western Romania where Kaale believers carry out missionary work. Kaale life emerges as a set of attachments and detachments, to kin and to the Finnish nation, to custom and to faith, and to other Roma at home and abroad.
Who has the “right” to learn Mandarin Chinese? In Multiracial Mandarin: Asian Americans and Impossible Language (U Minnesota Press, 2026), Dr. David Shuang Song examines how matters of race and privilege shape US Mandarin language education and who has access to it. Through a two-year ethnographic study of two Bay Area high schools where diasporic and heritage speakers learn Mandarin alongside Black and Latinx students, Song advances a sociological and educational–linguistic inquiry into how language interacts with our understanding of identity and equity.