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Published Books
Peter's first book Boundless Worlds, an edited collection, furnishes a perspective on human-scale movement over the uneven sociocultural terrain that anthropologists chart and navigate in their varied fieldwork. 'Space' as a conceptual regime, with its origins in Ancient Greece, creates distortions in how humans perceive their surroundings and, indeed, how scholars analyze sociocultural realms. The book chooses movement as its vehicle in attempting to get beyond the biases of 'space-thinking' and in turn addresses the ethnographic ramifications of this shift, bringing together nine scholars working in vastly different field settings - insular, nomadic, urban, corporate, military, and so on - to refine and present this anthropological approach to movement.
Available for purchase on AMAZON
Peter's second book, Troubled Natures, is a wide-ranging cultural analysis of waste and pollution in contemporary Japan, encompassing ideas of purity, attitudes toward hygiene, notions of health and illness, problems with dumping and vermin, processes of social exclusion, and reproductive threats. Throughout, waste and environmental health problems in Tokyo collide against diverse cultural elements linked to nature(s) - uneasy relations between animals and humans; 'native' conceptions of the foreign and the polluted; reproductive challenges in the face of a plunging fertility rate; and changing attitudes toward illness and health. In highlighting the practical ambivalence of Japanese environmental consciousness and the relatively recent post-Bubble appeal of frugality, sustainability, and recycling initiatives there, the book confronts pressing policy questions to which anthropology is well suited.
Available for purchase on AMAZON
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