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About Alex Golub

Alex Golub is associate professor of anthropology, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa

Alex's website

NBN Episodes hosted by Alex:

Anthropology April 14, 2023

Participant Observers

Anthropology, Colonial Development, and the Reinvention of Society in Britain

Freddy Foks

Hosted by Alex Golub
Freddy Foks's Participant Observers: Anthropology, Colonial Development, and the Reinvention of Society in Britain (U California Press, 2023) is a novel new history of the role of social anthropology in British …
Anthropology March 19, 2023

Harvard's Quixotic Pursuit of a New Science

The Rise and Fall of the Department of Social Relations

Patrick L. Schmidt

Hosted by Alex Golub
Harvard's Department of Social Relations made history in the 1950s and 1960s as the most ambitious program in social science in the United States. Dedicated to a synthesis of sociology …
Anthropology September 27, 2022

Franz Boas

The Emergence of the Anthropologist

Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt

Hosted by Alex Golub
Franz Boas is remembered today as one of the most important figures in the history of anthropology. In the United States, he is widely created with creating the modern field …
Anthropology June 15, 2022

Coconut Colonialism

Workers and the Globalization of Samoa

Holger Droessler

Hosted by Alex Golub
In Coconut Colonialism: Workers and the Globalization of Samoa (Harvard UP, 2022), Holger Droessler provides a novel history of the impact of globalization on Sāmoa and vice versa. Using a …
Anthropology March 29, 2022

In the Shadow of the Palms

More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua

Sophie Chao

Hosted by Alex Golub
This episode we speak with Sophie Chao, author of In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua (Duke University Press, 2022). Her new book examines the lives of Marind …
Anthropology August 20, 2021

Everything Ancient Was Once New

Indigenous Persistence from Hawaiʻi to Kahiki

Emalani Case

Hosted by Alex Golub
In Everything Ancient Was Once New: Indigenous Persistence from Hawai‘i to Kahiki (U Hawaii Press, 2021), Emalani Case draws on her own life experiences to explore the politics and ethics of being Native Hawaiian …
Anthropology July 28, 2021

Boasians at War

Anthropology, Race, and World War II

Anthony Q. Hazard

Hosted by Alex Golub
The realities of race that continue to plague the United States have direct ties to anthropology. Anthropologists often imagine their discipline as inherently anti-racist and historically connected to social …
Anthropology July 19, 2021

Voyagers

The Settlement of the Pacific

Nicholas Thomas

Hosted by Alex Golub
In Voyagers: The Settlement of the Pacific (Apollo, 2020), the distinguished anthropologist Nicholas Thomas tells the story of the peopling of the Pacific. In clear, accessible language Thomas shows us that …
Anthropology April 6, 2021

Anthropology and Radical Humanism

Native and African American Narratives and the Myth of Race

Jack Glazier

Hosted by Alex Golub
Paul Radin was one of the founding generation of American cultural anthropologists: A student of Franz Boas,  and famed ethnographer of the Winnebago. Yet little is known about Radin's life. A leftist who was …
Anthropology February 3, 2021

Revealing the Invisible Mine

Social Complexities of an Undeveloped Mining Project

Emilia E. Skrzypek

Hosted by Alex Golub
Located amid tropical rainforest in the heart of Papua New Guinea, the Frieda River area is home to one of the biggest undeveloped gold and copper deposits in the Pacific …
Anthropology November 24, 2020

Tanna Times

Islanders in the World

Lamont Lindstrom

Hosted by Alex Golub
For four decades, Lamont "Monty" Lindstrom has conducted research on the island of Tanna in the Pacific nation of Vanuatu. Considered by outsiders to be incredibly exotic, Tanna attracts tourists …
Anthropology September 30, 2020

La Batea

Elizabeth Ferry and Stephen Ferry

Hosted by Alex Golub
La Batea is an unconventional book. A collaboration between anthropologist Elizabeth Ferry and her photographer brother Stephen, it combines text and images to paint a picture of the lives of …
Anthropology August 13, 2020

Possessing Polynesians

The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai‘i and Oceania

Maile Arvin

Hosted by Alex Golub
From their earliest encounters with Indigenous Pacific Islanders, white Europeans and Americans saw Polynesians as almost racially white, and speculated that they were of Mediterranean or Aryan descent. In Possessing …
Anthropology June 23, 2020

God is Samoan

Dialogues Between Culture and Theology in the Pacific

Matt Tomlinson

Hosted by Alex Golub
Christian theologians in the Pacific Islands see culture as the grounds on which one understands God. In God is Samoan: Dialogues Between Culture and Theology in the Pacific (University of …
Anthropology May 13, 2020

Uncommon Anthropologist

Gladys Reichard and Western Native American Culture

Nancy Mattina

Hosted by Alex Golub
Protégé of Elsie Clews Parsons and Franz Boas, founder and head of Barnard College's anthropology department, and a trailblazer in Native American linguistics and anthropology, Gladys Reichard (1893–1955) is one …
Anthropology March 2, 2020

Talking Like Children

Language and the Production of Age in the Marshall Islands

Elise Berman

Hosted by Alex Golub
Since World War II, the fate of the Marshal Islands has been tied to the United States. The Marshalls were a site of military testing, host a US military base …
Anthropology November 13, 2019

At The Bridge

James Teit and an Anthropology of Belonging

Wendy Wickwire

Hosted by Alex Golub
The history of anthropology remembers James Teit as a field assistant and man-on-the spot for Franz Boas. But in At The Bridge: James Teit and an Anthropology of Belonging (University …
Anthropology October 7, 2019

A Death in the Rainforest

How a Language and a Way of Life Came to an End in Papua New Guinea

Don Kulick

Hosted by Alex Golub
Called "perhaps the finest and most profound account of ethnographic fieldwork and discovery that has ever entered the anthropological literature" by the Wall Street Journal, A Death in the Rainforest …
Anthropology September 4, 2019

Gods of the Upper Air

How A Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century

Charles King

Hosted by Alex Golub
American anthropologists consider Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead to be foundational figures, but outside the academy few people know the details of their ideas. In this new volume …
Anthropology July 25, 2019

Sea People

The Puzzle of Polynesia

Christina Thompson

Hosted by Alex Golub
It's rare for a book of non-fiction to catch the interest of the reading public in the United States, much less a book on the history of science in the …
Anthropology July 12, 2019

The Lost Black Scholar

Resurrecting Allison Davis in American Social Thought

David Varel

Hosted by Alex Golub
Allison Davis (1902-1983) was a pioneering anthropologist who did ground-breaking fieldwork in the Jim Crow south, challenged the racial bias of IQ tests, and became the first African American to …