Book reviews

This is the book cover of Constance Debré's Name, published by Semiotext(e) / Native Agents. The image shows a person's head from behind, with an extremely short haircut.

Jesse van Amelsvoort, Joja Bos

Debré, C. (2025). Name (H. James, trans.). Profile Books. ISBN: 9781800819870

In this dialogic book review, Jesse van Amelsvoort and Joja Bos discuss how the novel Nom (2022, translated into English as Name) by the French former lawyer and author Constance Debré deals with naming and unnaming. In this book, the third part of a trilogy, Debré's autofictional narrator interrogates the historical weight of her name. Yet as she tries to renounce the familial, she seems to stumble into something all too familiar: known scripts, tired plots, and sexual clichés.

Andrei Zavadski

Rinne, C. (2025) Footnotes: Ein Supplementarium. Schweifhefte, Heft 18.

This is a review of Cia Rinne's (2025) Footnotes: Ein Supplementarium (Schweifhefte, Heft 18).

The cover of the book ‘Life in Spite of Everything: Tales from the Ukrainian East’ features an industrial landscape at dusk.

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.

You see the cover of the book 'Performanzen & Praktiken. Kollaborative Formate in Wissenschaft und Kunst.' In the image, a man is standing still, while his shadow is dancing in the spotlight.

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.

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.

Isabel Bredenbröker

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

Aleksandr Veselov