Caste: A Global Story
By Suraj Milind Yengde (Hurst)
Recommended by HÉLÈNE B. DUCROS
In Caste: A Global Story, Suraj Milind Yengde focuses on the history of caste-based social divisions and territorial discriminations across the world, highlighting how the practice of caste has varied across regions and time periods. In tracing the global trajectory of “Dalitality” from the vantage point of his own personal and familial story as “untouchable,” the author reviews a rich interdisciplinary and empirical literature, both Western and Eastern, that has interpreted and theorized caste from early tribal segregation and the emergence of “broken men” (Dalits) ghettos to modern India’s labor class relegated to humiliating tasks. Importantly, the author debunks the common impression that the caste system is regionally insulated by showing how caste plays out in the contemporary, cosmopolitan Indian diaspora. Examining caste as a “regulatory social mechanism,” he engages different historical and theoretical understandings of caste, also demonstrating that until the nineteenth century the history of caste was mostly told by non-Dalits and aimed at particular non-Dalit audiences. By encouraging reflexivity in the historiography of caste and bringing to the fore the history of modern Dalit writing, Yengde advocates for a scholarship on caste produced by Dalits themselves, through their outward subjectivity, shared generational experiences of “casteism,” and specific relationality with other groups.
The book is at the same time a historiography of caste, a history of the Dalit cause—including the political solidarity between some Black and Dalit movements—and a personal story of caste-mediated lived encounters, which the situatedness of the author makes remarkably forceful. From within his internal positioning, Yengde offers a reading of the different forms caste may have taken in places such as the UK, continental Europe, the Middle East, North America, or the Caribbean, to argue for the arising of “Dalit universality,” driven by migration and underlying a dynamic post-colonial Indian diaspora. Discrediting the notion that Dalits are merely passive subjects constitutive of a monolithic group, the author instead points to their agency and non-conformity to expected roles and practices. The volume will naturally be of acute interest to Indologists, but its reach is much wider, as it has relevance for the study of other diasporic prejudiced, oppressed groups. With a foreword by Amartya Sen and an outstanding appendix listing Dalit organizations by country, complete with contact information, the book represents a model of hybrid methodology in which the researcher as much as the scholarship is validated.
Künstliche Intelligenz und der neue Faschismus
By Rainer Mühlhoff (Reclam)
Recommended by NICHOLAS OSTRUM
Now in its eleventh printing just since 2025, Künstliche Intelligenz under der neue Faschismus (Artificial Intelligence and the New Fascism) has already made a sizeable impression at least in the German-speaking world. It is timely, as the title indicates. It is provocative, and its arguments are disturbing, though also compelling. Part of its appeal, however, also lies in its accessibility. Rainer Mühlhoff is a philosopher and mathematician but writes in a style that is both informed and technical while also readable to those with limited understanding of how AI technologies work and with only passing exposure to the philosophical debates about their development, deployment, and relationship to politics.
We are all living in a time when authoritarian policies—often aligned with xenophobic, racialist, anti-feminist, homophobic, and other illiberal causes—have gained acceptance among a significant portion of Europeans and Americans. This claim is neither new nor shocking. Mühlhoff’s intervention comes in his analysis of the ways in which AI, touted by its promoters as the hitherto elusive key to freeing humanity from the drudgery of physical and, now, intellectual labor, is enabling the revitalization of the fascist project. He defines fascism loosely as a movement with three characteristics: antidemocratic effects, an embrace of violence, and the instrumentalization of technology as a tool of oppressive power. Presumably, this ideological matrix could materialize on the left as well as the right, and in the various Querdenker spaces in between. Apart from the Peter Thiels and Elon Musks, who have increasingly embraced a techno-feudalist mantel of a distinctive xenophobic and decisively illiberal hue, Mühlhoff explains that much of the threat is less overt and therefore more insidious. It comes from the very socio-technical phenomenon that is AI, a technology that is reflexively built on and contributes to probabilistic algorithms that “collect, secure, and exercise power and control” for the tech-elite and allies (35). The goals and effects are often concealed in a “utilitarian ethics” that espouses objectivity when in reality it is based on stereotypes deployed to categorize, in the process reducing people to taxonomies of traits and numbers and rendering them governable in a fashion that earlier colonial, imperialist, and fascist (whether Nazi or, for Mühlhoff, Stalinist) leaders could not even fathom.
Amidst all this doomsaying, Mühlhoff does offer some glimmers of hope. The task now is to identify and understand the problem, discuss its issues in public fora, steer the popular and academic discourse, and force states to proactively engage and regulate. After all, he concludes, the Rechtsstaat (state of law) is predicated on restraining power imbalances that endanger the welfare of the population. Right now, one of the greatest threats to society as a membership of people equal before the law is the fascistic potential posed by the unrestrained deployment and development of AI.
Indigenous Christianity: Missionaries, Modernity, and Marginality in the Siberian Tundra
By Tatiana Vagramenko (Central European University Press)
Recommended by OKSANA ERMOLAEVA
Why would nomadic reindeer herders on the edge of the Russian Arctic embrace one of the strictest forms of Protestant Christianity? In her book, Indigenous Christianity: Missionaries, Modernity, and Marginality in the Siberian Tundra, Tatiana Vagramenko draws on more than a decade of fieldwork among the Nenets of the Yamal Peninsula and the Polar Urals to explore how religious conversion in the Northern margins of Russia reshapes ethnic identity, sense of belonging, and relationships with the state. The book’s central contribution is to understand the deep reasons for which the fundamentalist Baptist Brethren appeals to Russian Indigenous minorities. Offering a broad overview of the history of missionary activity in the region during the Tsarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet periods, Vagramenko focuses on colonial rule, Soviet modernization and repression, and the militarization of the Arctic and large-scale industrial extraction in the Putin era. She examines how the Nenets have resisted registering with the state and rejected secular culture and how they have survived and adapted to external pressures for generations. Vagramenko demonstrates how a religious movement born out of underground resistance to Soviet anti-religious persecution acquired new meanings in the post-Soviet Arctic. For some Nenets converts, opposing the Russian state through religion has been a way to assert their ethnic distinctiveness, while missionaries came to regard the tundra’s Indigenous inhabitants as authentic bearers of Christian values, supposedly uncorrupted by modernity. But the book also explains that as welcome as it was by the population as an alternative to the state’s secular pressures, this strict Protestantism resulted in the breaking of ancestral practices and destruction of sacred sites, which exposed converts to accusations of betrayal toward their heritage, as they were deemed to have become “not Nenets enough.” Thus, restrictive legislation, repression, and Soviet-style anti-sectarian rhetoric came to place the Nenets converts at odds not only with the state but with their own communities.
This open access book reveals the emergence of a distinctly Nenets Christianity that subverts conventional distinctions between tradition and modernity, resistance and accommodation, and Indigenous agency and missionary influence. Grounded in sustained ethnographic research, Indigenous Christianity offers a valuable contribution to the anthropology of Christianity and to wider debates about Indigenous politics, colonial legacies, and religious life under authoritarianism. The work’s broader significance lies not only in its highlighting of the role of Christianity in a complex interplay of Russian colonialism, ethnic identity, and state control in the Russian North but also in its reviving of discussions on modernity and neotraditionalism, on the nature of Indigenous resistance to authoritarian state power, and on the nature of Russian state colonization. It provides a fresh perspective on the Russian Arctic, where state power, industrial expansion, and struggles over cultural belonging continue to shape Indigenous lives.
