Traude Gavin’s Borneo Ikat Textiles, Style Variations, Ethnicity, and Ancestry is a beautiful book replete with magnificent color plates documenting the author’s fieldwork. Gavin’s research included tracking down examples of a now defunct textile tradition, the warp ikat weaving once practiced by Ibanic-speaking ethnic groups in West Kalimantan.

Cutting the Mass Line: Water, Politics, and Climate in Southwest China, Andrea E Pia (John Hopkins University Press, July 2024)
Cutting the Mass Line: Water, Politics, and Climate in Southwest China, Andrea E Pia (John Hopkins University Press, July 2024)

China is experiencing climate whiplash—extreme fluctuations between drought and flooding—that threatens the health and autonomy of millions of people. Set against mounting anxiety over the future of global water supplies, Cutting the Mass Line explores the enduring political, technical, and ethical project of making water available to human communities and ecosystems in a time of drought, infrastructural disrepair, and environmental breakdown.

The Unruly Dead: Spirits, Memory, and State Formation in Timor-Leste, Lia Kent (University of Wisconsin Press, August 2024)
The Unruly Dead: Spirits, Memory, and State Formation in Timor-Leste, Lia Kent (University of Wisconsin Press, August 2024)

“What might it mean to take the dead seriously as political actors?” asks Lia Kent. In Timor-Leste, a new nation-state that experienced centuries of European colonialism before a violent occupation by Indonesia from 1975 to 1999, the dead are active participants in social and political life who continue to operate within familial structures of obligation and commitment.