James H. McDonald

James H. McDonald received his PhD from Arizona State University and is Provost and Professor of Arts & Sciences at the University of Montevallo, Alabama’s public liberal arts university. He is an applied cultural anthropologist with over 30 years of research experience analyzing rural development, political culture, and security dynamics in Mexico and Guatemala.

In Mexico he has explored how NAFTA, and related policy changes, effected domestic food production, the politics of rural development, and the livelihood of family farmers. This work culminated with an exploration of the effects of an aggressively evolving narcoeconomy on rural culture and society.

Most recently he collaborated on a research project in the Western Highlands of Guatemala studying the political and legal dynamics of indigenous communities under conditions of a faltering state governance system, endemic insecurity, and ethnic exclusion. That work has resulted in the book The Crisis in Governance in Maya Guatemala: Indigenous Responses to a Failing State (University of Oklahoma Press, 2013).

Mr. McDonald has published over 30 articles, as well as numerous book reviews, review essays, and commentaries. Additionally, he authored The Applied Anthropology Reader (Allyn & Bacon, 2002). He also served as senior editor of the American Anthropological Association journal, Culture & Agriculture, from 1998–2007.

Book Reviews by James H. McDonald

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“The warning here is clear. Overdevelopment of fragile, arid lands in places like the Intermountain and Desert Southwest is doomed to disaster.” 

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“Ayşegül Savaş wades into the thorny challenge of deciphering the other.”

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“Muir’s ideas on race and religion . . . were far from remarkable and very much congruous with contemporaneous ideological hegemony. What stands out . . .

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“It's one thing to have a great idea (liberal education) and altogether another for these ambitious start-ups to survive and thrive. Remarkably, they do so.”

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“This is a compelling, well-crafted exploration of a world turned culturally upside down by what might well be characterized as a civil war in which the abnormal becomes normal, and people

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“Roth poses the provocative question, ‘when exactly are students supposed to think for themselves . . .?’ Of course, that’s an open question.”

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"For [international students] are, indeed, commodities in a larger academic capitalist system that has grown to depend on them for its survival." 

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“The book, in sum, is a polemic rather than a serious attempt to sort out the science that informs policy and practice that would be a pathway to a better human future as the planet and all

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“Brooks’ deep analysis of narrative and storytelling also demonstrates that the tools of the humanities often have far-reaching utility well beyond their supposed boundaries.”

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“Lytle Hernández makes the provocative argument that it was a lesser-known figure, radical transformationalist Ricardo Flores Magó

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“If America was forged and reforged in the South, then it can be healed and reinvented there as well (and perhaps it must be so).”

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“This sweeping and novel synthesis exploring the arc of the human condition— its highly diverse forms of political organizing, and the future that lays in store for us—may well prove to be

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“In light of recent political upheavals around the globe, it is clear that democracy is an ongoing and open project that is subject to challenge and direct assault.”

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“Cobb is stridently warning us of imminent ecological peril and the need to systemic transformation of our systems of production and consumption.”

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“Today’s nation-states are increasingly driven by nationalist-cultural concerns that result in exclusionary logics.

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“That we have new levels of symbolic saturation via social media should give us a long moment of pause as we consider the intended and unintended effects of the powerful technologies that m

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“for [Shokheid] the path is to listen deeply to the advocates—Israeli and Palestinian alike—and work trenchantly toward the radical center.

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“The book captures, in broad outline, the precarity of the migrant world—leaving behind a very meager existence to venture into the foggy haze of endemic risk, threat, and violence.”

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“Foxfire served as a radical revalorization of a denigrated southern mountain culture, often slapped with the pejorative label of ‘hillbilly.’”

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“Environment reminds us that our patterns of production and consumption are often desperately destructive.

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“It’s a ‘strange world.’ It’s one where politicians and corporations find it too expensive to save the planet.”

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Secondhand tells an important story about consumerism gone wild, the complex industry that has grown around its detritus, and how we can push back on an entrenched culture of disp

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“We need anthropology now more than ever. As Ruth Benedict once noted prophetically, ‘The purpose of anthropology is to make the world safe for human difference.’”

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“Werb deftly captures the grim void of life among the disposable human detritus of a state governance apparatus more interested in its own power and enrichment than the lives and livelihood

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“Higher education in America is being rapidly reshaped under conditions of unprecedented volatility.* The very notion of the university as a public good is under wholesale siege.

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“Stability is out, revolution is in, so are the Islamists, identity politics are a jumble, women and their bodies remain repressed, violence or its threat is endemic, corruption is all arou

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In Pioneer Park in Dallas, past the statue of romantic cowboys and iconic longhorns, in a far corner of the park—a stone’s throw from the Kay Bailey Hutchison Conference Center—stands a monument.

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Anthropologist/folklorist/journalist Zora Neale Hurston used her polyvalent talent to produce the only recorded Trans-Atlantic slave narrative based on extensive interviews with Kossula, or Cudjo L

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“Trillions of dollars move through the world’s markets illegally, and millions of people work in extra-state activities.

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Guatemala, a small post-colonial state that is not so post.

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Ariel Dorfman’s Homeland Security Ate My Speech is a deeply thoughtful, poetic, and critical analysis of the fractured political landscape in America.

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Wallace Shawn is, by his own admission, a lucky man. Through no particular talent or effort on his part, he wound up on the privileged side of the class divide.

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Environmental historian Miles Powell has provided a new and provocative angle to the history of the American conservation/preservation movement through the lens of its racial logics.

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Written/Unwritten is a collection of essays by American academic faculty of color who have written poignant essays about the challenges, barriers, pain, and resilience required of being a

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Happy Anyway is a collection of short essays by current and past denizens of Flint, Michigan—the hometown of General Motors.

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Cartels are businesses that exist on the wildly entrepreneurial illegal side of capitalism.

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The Shock of the Anthropocene is a detailed, data-driven, and well-argued critique of conventional thought [about the ecosystem] . . .”

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“A classic liberal education has few defenders.”
—Fareed Zakaria

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While Evans and Reid explore such concepts as sustainable and participatory development in reference to the poor south, the book’s curatorial perspective is decidedly West

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Greening in the Red Zone provides critical research and application that provides a tremendous starting point for catalyzing a discussion about how to heal, integ

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Times of Security is an edited collection of essays that seeks to refine and redefine the study and understanding of security (general human wellbeing) in a complex geopolitical world that

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“. . . the story of an incredibly stoic, resilient people . . .”