Book reviews

All Items

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  Tatiana Smorodina

  Book review. Donovan V (2025) Life in Spite of Everything: Tales from the Ukrainian East

  This is a review of a recent monograph by Victoria Donovan entitled Life in Spite of Everything: Tales from the Ukrainian East (Daunt Publishing, 2025). The book focuses on the Ukrainian South, also known as the Donbas macroregion. The Donbas is among the most complex and under-researched areas of Ukraine, long relegated to the periphery of scholarly and public attention. Drawing on fieldwork and employing methods of urban and oral history, Donovan seeks to dismantle the colonial and Soviet-era clichés that have shaped perceptions of the region. Her work reimagines the Ukrainian South through a nuanced lens, foregrounding the local knowledge holders.

   

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  Jonas Tinius

  Book review. Schuchardt K and Spieker I (eds) (2024) Performanzen & Praktiken. Kollaborative Formate in Wissenschaft und Kunst

  This is a review of Performanzen & Praktiken. Kollaborative Formate in Wissenschaft und Kunst (‘Performances & Practices. Collaborative Formats in Science and Art’), edited by Katharina Schuchardt and Ira Spieker (Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2024). The volume situates itself within a German lineage of collaborative anthropology and empirical cultural research while contributing to wider debates on practice-based and multimodal work beyond the discipline. The book invites its readers to dwell in the awkward, generative spaces, where anthropology continues to reinvent itself through experimental practice. 

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  Amanda Tobin Ripley

  Book review. Shaked N (2022) Museums and Wealth: The Politics of Contemporary Art Collections

  This review focuses on Nizan Shaked’s Museums and Wealth: The Politics of Contemporary Art Collections (2022) and its dissection of the system of philanthrocapitalism in the financing of museum operations. The review asserts the importance of engaging with Shaked’s analysis as a means of recognizing the complicity of museum workers with these systems of wealth accumulation. Shaked demonstrates how existing systems of philanthropic giving uphold white supremacy and imperial hegemony by concentrating wealth and decision-making power in the hands of boards of trustees. To enact liberatory museum practices and ethics, therefore, museum workers and activists must also transform funding and governance. 

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  Isabel Bredenbröker

  Book review. Von Oswald M (2022) Working Through Colonial Collections: An Ethnography of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin

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  Aleksandr Veselov

  Book review. Luísa Santos (ed) (2023) Cultures of Silence: The Power of Untold Narratives