The University of Arizona Press

November 18, 2025

The University of Arizona Press’ podcast features an interview with K.G. Hutchins author of A Song for the Horses: Musical Heritage for More-than-Human Futures in Mongolia. Hutchins is a cultural anthropologist interested in the intersection of music and the environment. His research focuses on the roles that nonhuman animals, spirits, and other beings can play in cultural heritage, particularly in Mongolia and southern Appalachia.

Asked about how the context of his Mongolia research, Hutchins answered, “I’m a cultural anthropologist with a music background . . . so I asked musicians, ‘what’s important to know about Mongolian music, especially about the morin khuur, or horse fiddle?’ It permeates the soundscape of north Asian music, but we don’t know much about it. My advisors said that if you want to know about the horse fiddle, you need to know about the horses and the role they play in the way that you learn the instrument, and the way that you learn to be a listener of the instrument.”

Listen to the full podcast here.

About the book:

As permafrost in Siberia continues to melt and the steppe in the Gobi turns to desert, people in Mongolia are faced with overlapping climate crises. Some nomadic herders describe climate change as the end of a world. They are quick to add that the world has ended before for Indigenous people in North Asia, as waves of colonialism have left the steppe with a complicated web of apocalypses. A Song for the Horses by K. G. Hutchins examines cases in which people respond to the pressures of climate change by drawing on cultural heritage to foster social resiliency. 

Hutchins’s ethnographic research, spanning more than a decade, provides a vivid and intimate portrayal of Mongolian life. Musicians use the morin khuur, or ‘horse fiddle,’ to engage with the subjectivities and agencies of nonhuman animals and other beings. This work is a significant contribution to the posthuman turn in social sciences, engaging with theories from prominent scholars such as Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing. 

November 10, 2025

The University of Arizona Press’ podcast features an interview with Joe Watkins author of Indigenizing Japan: Ainu Past, Present, and Future. Watkins, a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, is an affiliated faculty member in the School of Anthropology at the University of Arizona. He was president of the Society for American Archaeology from 2019–2021. His study interests concern the ethical practice of anthropology and anthropology’s relationships with descendant communities and populations on a global scale.

Asked about how he became interested in the Ainu people, Watkins answered, “A colleague at Hokkaido University in Japan asked if I would come to Japan to talk about the issues American Indians faced in terms of membership status, issues of repatriation and other issues of archaeology. . . . The four-day trip to Sapporo where I talked about these issues was the beginning of seventeen years of work with Hokkaido University on archaeological excavations that involved Ainu history, and of working with Ainu individuals to further discuss how archaeological work can impact Ainu communities.”

Listen to the full podcast here.

About the book:

Relaying the deep history of the islands of Japan, Watkins tells the archaeological story from the earliest arrivals some 40,000 years ago to 16,000 years ago when local cultures began utilizing pottery and stone tools. About 2,300 years ago, another group of people immigrated from the Korean peninsula into the Japanese archipelago, bringing wet rice agriculture with them. They intermarried with the people who were there, forming the basis of the contemporary Japanese majority culture. As the Japanese state developed on the central Islands of Honshu, Ryukyu, and Shikoku, the people of Hokkaido continued developing along a different trajectory with minimal interaction with the mainland until colonization in the mid-nineteenth century, when the people known as the Ainu came under Japanese governmental policy.

November 6, 2025

The University of Arizona Press’ podcast features an interview with Rick A. López, author of Rooted in Place: Botany, Indigeneity, and Art in the Construction of Mexican Nature, 1570–1914. Rick López is Anson D. Morse 1871 Professor of Latin American History and Environmental Studies at Amherst College. He has published articles and essays on the history of nation formation, race, aesthetics, and the environment in Mexico, as well on the history of the Latinx population in the United States.

Asked about why he started writing the book in the podcast, López answered, “As a historian, I began as a modernist, and I accidentally went back to study colonial era Mexico. And it all started because I wanted to read a book when I got interested in environmental studies. And I wanted to know about the connection between nature and nation in Latin American countries.” He says there were many books about the connection between American exceptionalism and wilderness as well as books about the connection to nature for European countries, but not about other places. “I was surprised to find there weren’t any such studies [connecting nature and nation] of Latin America . . . so before I knew it, I was writing this book!”

Listen to the full podcast here.

About the book:

Since the first moment of conquest, colonizers and the colonized alike in Mexico confronted questions about what it meant to be from this place, what natural resources it offered, and who had the right to control those resources and on what basis.

Focusing on the ways people, environment, and policies have been affected by political boundaries, historian Rick A. López explores the historical connections between political identities and the natural world. López analyzes how scientific intellectuals laid claim to nature within Mexico, first on behalf of the Spanish Empire and then in the name of the republic, during three transformative moments: the Hernández expedition of the late sixteenth century; the Royal Botanical Expedition of the late eighteenth century; and the heyday of scientific societies such as the Sociedad Mexicana de Historia Natural of the late nineteenth century.

October 31, 2025

The University of Arizona Press’ first podcast of the Fall 2025 season features an interview with Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez and Anita Huízar-Hernández, editors of meXicana Roots and Routes: Listening to People, Places, and Pasts. The book is the inaugural title in the the Arizona Crossroads Series.

Asked about the origin story for the book in the podcast, Fonseca-Chavez answered, “[We saw] the opportunity to bring Arizona to the center of the conversation and more importantly to speak about marginalized communities that have not been written about all that much within the larger trajectory of Arizona . . . then Anita said, ‘what do you think about a book?’ So we quickly shifted started thinking about a book, to really center Arizona in the conversation and bring in other scholars who were thinking about Arizona alongside other southwestern states.”

Listen to the full podcast here.

About the book:

In this collection, established and emerging scholars draw upon their rootedness in the U.S. Southwest and U.S.-Mexico borderlands. The meXicana contributors use personal and scholarly inquiry to discuss what it means to cultivate spaces of belonging, navigate language policies, and explore and excavate silences in various spaces, among other important themes. From the recruitment of Latinas for the U.S. Benito Juárez Squadron in World War II, to the early twentieth-century development of bilingual education in Arizona, to new and insightful analyses of Bracero Program participants and their families, the book details little-known oral histories and archival material to present a rich account of lives along the border with emphasis on women and the working class.