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About Adam Bobeck

Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented ʿAzâdâri: Ontology and Ritual Theory”.
Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented ʿAzâdâri: Ontology and Ritual Theory”.

NBN Episodes hosted by Adam:

Anthropology August 16, 2023

Fishers, Monks and Cadres

Navigating State, Religion and the South China Sea in Central Vietnam

Edyta Roszko

Hosted by Adam Bobeck
Listen:
This remarkable and timely ethnography explores how fishing communities living on the fringe of the South China Sea in central Vietnam interact with state and religious authorities as well as …
Anthropology July 18, 2023

Awkward Archives

Ethnographic Drafts for a Modular Curriculum

Margareta von Oswald and Jonas Tinius

Hosted by Adam Bobeck
Listen:
Awkward Archives: Ethnographic Drafts for a Modular Curriculum (Archive Books, 2022) proposes a manual for academic teaching and learning contexts. An ethnographic research approach is confronted with the demands of …
Critical Theory June 28, 2023

Sufi Deleuze

Secretions of Islamic Atheism

Michael Muhammad Knight

Hosted by Adam Bobeck
Listen:
“There is always an atheism to be extracted from a religion,” Deleuze and Guattari write in their final collaboration, What Is Philosophy? Their claim that Christianity “secretes” atheism “more than …
Archaeology June 10, 2023

Objects Untimely

Object-Oriented Philosophy and Archaeology

Graham Harman and Christopher Witmore

Hosted by Adam Bobeck
Listen:
Objects generate time; time does not generate or change objects. That is the central thesis of this book by the philosopher Graham Harman and the archaeologist Christopher Witmore, who defend …
Critical Theory April 18, 2023

The Graham Harman Reader

Including Collected Works and Previously Unpublished Essays

Graham Harman, Jon Cogburn, and Niki Young

Hosted by Adam Bobeck
'Overcoming the war of religion between analytics and continentals with a brand-new metaphysical insight, Graham Harman has restored to philosophy its greatness and value.' -Maurizio Ferraris, Italian continental philosopher and …
Anthropology March 5, 2023

Materializing Ritual Practices

Lisa M. Johnson and Rosemary A. Joyce

Hosted by Adam Bobeck
Materializing Ritual Practices (U Colorado Press, 2022) explores the deep history of ritual practice in Mexico and Central America and the ways interdisciplinary research can be coordinated to illuminate how …
Anthropology January 4, 2023

Django Generations

Hearing Ethnorace, Citizenship, and Jazz Manouche in France

Siv B. Lie

Hosted by Adam Bobeck
Django Generations: Hearing Ethnorace, Citizenship, and Jazz Manouche in France (U Chicago Press, 2021) shows how relationships between racial identities, jazz, and national belonging become entangled in France. Jazz manouche—a …
Anthropology December 17, 2022

Cultivating the Past, Living the Modern

The Politics of Time in the Sultanate of Oman

Amal Sachedina

Hosted by Adam Bobeck
Cultivating the Past, Living the Modern: The Politics of Time in the Sultanate of Oman (Cornell UP, 2021) explores how and why heritage has emerged as a prevalent force in …
Middle Eastern Studies December 3, 2022

Agents of the Hidden Imam

Forging Twelver Shi‘ism, 850-950 CE

Edmund Hayes

Hosted by Adam Bobeck
In 874 CE, the eleventh Imam died, and the Imami community splintered. The institutions of the Imamate were maintained by the dead Imam's agents, who asserted they were in contact …
Critical Theory November 29, 2022

Indexicalism

The Metaphysics of Paradox

Hilan Bensusan

Hosted by Adam Bobeck
In Indexicalism: The Metaphysics of Paradox (Edinburgh UP, 2021), Hilan Bensusan clarifies the logic and structure of an essentially situated and indexical metaphysics that is paradoxical and can also be regarded …
Critical Theory November 4, 2022

Architecture and Objects

Graham Harman

Hosted by Adam Bobeck
Object-oriented ontology has become increasingly popular among architectural theorists and practitioners in recent years. Architecture and Objects (U Minnesota Press, 2022), the first book on architecture by the founder of …
Anthropology October 11, 2022

Beyond the Veil

Reflexive Studies of Death and Dying

Aubrey Thamann and Kalliopi M. Christodoulaki

Hosted by Adam Bobeck
Looking at the cultural responses to death and dying, Aubrey Thamann and Kalliopi M. Christodoulaki's edited volume Beyond the Veil: Reflexive Studies of Death and Dying (Berghahn Books, 2021) explores the …
Anthropology October 4, 2022

Games

Agency As Art

C. Thi Nguyen

Hosted by Adam Bobeck
Games are a unique art form. Games work in the medium of agency. Game designers tell us who to be and what to care about during the game. Game designers …
Anthropology September 23, 2022

Trouillot Remixed

The Michel-Rolph Trouillot Reader

Yarimar Bonilla, Greg Beckett, and Mayanthi L. Fernando

Hosted by Adam Bobeck
Throughout his career, the internationally renowned Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot unsettled key concepts in anthropology, history, postcolonial studies, Black studies, Caribbean studies, and beyond. From his early critique of the …
Critical Theory September 15, 2022

Object Oriented Dialectics

Hegel, Heidegger, Harman

Charles William Johns

Hosted by Adam Bobeck
In Object Oriented Dialectics: Hegel, Heidegger, Harman (Mimesis, 2022), Johns, in the style of Derrida, looks over the absence or spectre of the signifier ‘dialectic’ in both Martin Heidegger and …
Anthropology August 26, 2022

Palestine Is Throwing a Party and the Whole World Is Invited

Capital and State Building in the West Bank

Kareem Rabie

Hosted by Adam Bobeck
In 2008, Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad invited international investors to the first-ever Palestine Investment Conference, which was designed to jump-start the process of integrating Palestine into the global economy …
Anthropology August 3, 2022

Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity

Tema Milstein and José Castro-Sotomayor

Hosted by Adam Bobeck
The Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity (Routledge, 2020) brings the ecological turn to sociocultural understandings of self. Tema Milstein and José Castro-Sotomayor introduce a broad, insightful assembly of original theory and research …
Music August 1, 2022

Sight Readings

Photographers and American Jazz, 1900-1960

Alan John Ainsworth

Hosted by Adam Bobeck
Alan John Ainsworth's book Sight Readings: Photographers and American Jazz, 1900-1960 (Intellect, 2022) explores the work of a wide range of American photographers attracted to jazz during the period 1900–60. It …
Anthropology July 4, 2022

Commodities of Care

The Business of HIV Testing in China

Elsa L. Fan

Hosted by Adam Bobeck
Commodities of Care: The Business of HIV Testing in China (U Minnesota Press, 2021) examines the unanticipated effects of global health interventions, ideas, and practices as they unfold in communities …
Music June 8, 2022

Jazz in Socialist Hà Nội

Improvisations Between Worlds

Stan BH Tan-Tangbau, Lưu Quang Minh, and Quyền Thiện Đắc

Hosted by Adam Bobeck
Jazz in Socialist Hà Nội: Improvisations between Worlds (Routledge, 2022) examines the germination and growth of jazz under communist rule—perceived as the "music of the enemy" and "ideologically decadent"—in the Vietnamese capital …
Music June 8, 2022

The Jazz Masters

Setting the Record Straight

Peter C. Zimmerman

Hosted by Adam Bobeck
The Jazz Masters: Setting the Record Straight (UP of Mississippi, 2021) is a celebration of jazz and the men and women who created and transformed it. In the twenty-one conversations …
Environmental Studies May 31, 2022

Plastic Matter

Heather Davis

Hosted by Adam Bobeck
Plastic is ubiquitous. It is in the Arctic, in the depths of the Mariana Trench, and in the high mountaintops of the Pyrenees. It is in the air we breathe …
Anthropology May 9, 2022

Collaborative Damage

An Experimental Ethnography of Chinese Globalization

Mikkel Bunkenborg, Morten Nielsen, and Morten Axel Pedersen

Hosted by Adam Bobeck
Collaborative Damage: An Experimental Ethnography of Chinese Globalization (Cornell UP, 2022) is an experimental ethnography of Chinese globalization that compares data from two frontlines of China's global intervention—sub-Saharan Africa and …
Islamic Studies April 18, 2022

The Words of the Imams

Al-Shaykh Al-Saduq and the Development of Twelver Shi'i Hadith Literature

George Warner

Hosted by Adam Bobeck
Ibn Babawayh – also known as al-Shaykh al-Saduq – was a prominent Twelver Shi'i scholar of hadith. Writing within the first century after the vanishing of the twelfth imam, al-Saduq …