Looking for a new book? Check out these books by Department of Anthropology faculty.
Medicines That Feed Us: Plants, Healing, and Sovereignty in a Toxic World
Published in February 2026; available at Duke University Press
By Professor Stacey Langwick
Medicines That Feed Us examines the relationship between toxicity and remedy in the face of the intertwined health and environmental crises that are shaping life in the twenty-first century. Through ethnographic work with organizations that use plant-based healing and sustainable farming practices in Tanzania, Stacey A. Langwick asks what it means to heal in a toxic world. Expanding on the Kiswahili phrase dawa lishe, or medicines that feed us, Langwick describes the potency of plant medicines in therapeutic projects that address bodies and environments together. These efforts challenge biomedicine’s intense focus on the internal dynamics of biological bodies and its externalization of the modern agricultural, industrial, and land management practices that impact it. Dawa lishe is not a call to return to the traditional, but an invitation to join contemporary experiments in how we know, use, and govern therapeutic plants. Medicines That Feed Us offers alternative ways of living and dying, growing and decaying, composing and decomposing which acknowledge the interdependence of bodily and ecological health.
Modernity and Malevolence in the Psychiatric Clinic: Anxious Selves in Urban and Rural South India
Published in October 2025; available at University of Hawaii Press
By Professor Andrew Willford
Modernity and Malevolence in the Psychiatric Clinic is a richly detailed ethnographic study of clinical care at NIMHANS, India’s leading mental health institution, offering rich observations of patient-physician interactions alongside interviews with psychiatrists and neurologists. It explores how patterns of psychosocial causation, shaped by modernity’s pressures, frame key questions in psychiatric practice.
With hundreds of patients visiting NIMHANS’ outpatient department daily, time constraints affect both doctors and patients. The stigma surrounding mental illness leads families to seek quick pharmaceutical solutions, avoiding psychotherapy for fear of exposing their condition to wider social circles—an issue that limits treatment options.
Urban modernity has introduced new sociocultural changes, creating tensions that shape vulnerable identities. Evolving religious disciplines have hardened social boundaries, frustrating aspirations and manifesting as somatic illness or spiritual affliction. This phenomenon drives the resurfaced diagnosis of “hysteria,” a term with both descriptive and analytical weight, in opposition to neuro-genetic determinism.
The book further explores the growing rigidity in thinking about good versus evil and self versus other. It argues that contemporary political and religious narratives sharpen social divisions, reinforcing rigid identity attachments and exacerbating clinical symptoms. Ultimately, it suggests that the “madness” observed in these cases stems from the impossible demands for singular, fixed identities in modern life, suppressing more fluid subjectivities and the histories that shape them.
The Kidney and the Cane: Planetary Health and Plantation Labor in Nicaragua
Published in May 2025; available at Duke University Press
By Professor Alex Nading
The recent unprecedented growth of Nicaragua’s sugarcane industry has brought promises of more jobs, better health care, and cleaner energy. But these promises have been overshadowed by an epidemic of chronic kidney disease of nontraditional causes (CKDnt). Unknown before the late 1990s, this disease has sickened and killed thousands of sugarcane plantation workers. Scientific studies link the disease to rises in mean average annual temperatures, chronic water scarcity, and the overuse of toxic agrochemicals. CKDnt is now understood as a consequence of global climate change. In The Kidney and the Cane, Alex M. Nading situates this epidemic within a deeper history of sugarcane plantation violence, arguing that CKDnt is not a result of climate change: it is climate change. Outlining a place-based approach to planetary health, Nading follows activists, scientists, and residents in the sugarcane zone wrestling with the consequences of plantation life. Along the way, he raises critical questions about the capacity of corporations and states to care for people and ecosystems; the ability of citizens and experts to regulate toxic substances; and the future of work on a warming planet.
More titles are available at our complete list of faculty books.
