“Agnieszka Kedzierska Manzon’s event-centered ethnography shows how people recover a sense of purpose and agency in the face of violence, climate change, and radical uncertainty. Particularly compelling is Manzon’s empathetic and immersive fieldwork, and her insights into how the world of the wild (the more-than-human) affords Mande people oblique and imaginative strategies for coping with …
“What a thrill to have Trouillot’s critically important Peasants and Capital re-released! As a graduate student, this book was a beacon that guided me to think across and among scales within a global infrastructure not only for transnational political and economic life, but also for emergent forms of alterity and world-building. It demonstrated how …
“Imacoqwa’s Arrow offers a major contribution to philosophy, ethnolinguistics, psychoanalysis, comparative religion, and anthropology. A lifetime of ethnographic study of the Yagwoia reveals the generative mythopoetic structures underpinning a full range of human practices. Mimica’s previous analysis of indigenous mathematical systems is expanded to the procreative conjugations of language. Turning away from the formalization of …
“The ambition of the present work is formidable: to present and make intelligible to a non-specialist audience the immense contribution to the human imagination made by the cognitive techniques of the boreal shamanic journey. Starting from the principle that, for most of their existence, Homo sapiens felt no need to store the virtual worlds …
Extracts from Reviews of the French Edition “In the context of the ongoing sixth extinction, Vanessa Manceron’s book gives us a little hope, a breath of air. The anthropologist … introduces her readers to the world of [English] naturalists, true artisans of a citizen science. Above all she deciphers their ‘regime of attention to the …
“A brilliant ethnography of addiction: superbly written, flush with phenomenally erudite scholarship that is fun to read, and crystal clear. Burraway conveys the spectacular humanity and tormented sociability of people no one wants to be around—unless they are a saint or are drinking-and-drugging themselves to death. He sets them in the historical-structural contexts that ripped …
“Before his paradigm-shattering work on globalization, Arjun Appadurai wrote some scintillating essays on agriculture in India. Collected together for the first time, these essays represent a magnificent contribution to agrarian studies and rurality, and demonstrate the power of cultural analysis for understanding the everyday activities of food production and distribution.” — Akhil Gupta, author of …
“Money is not just, or even primarily, a means of facilitating exchange. Schurtz finds its origin – and paradigm – in the aesthetic radiance that certain ornaments exert on human minds, arousing ‘the envy of fellows and the admiration of women’; what he calls ‘inside-money’. By meeting the needs of commerce, this primary social power …
“Reading Who Killed Jules Crevaux?, we realize that, despite the hundreds of pages written about him, we still know very little about the murder of the expedition members. The few studies on the subject are based on often secondary, sometimes deliberately misleading, and always fragmentary French sources. Isabelle Combès, who lives in Bolivia near …
“Keck’s book is a breath of fresh air. He is willing to explore the depth of the issues raised by Lévy-Bruhl in the rise of sociology and anthropology after the Dreyfus Affair and the struggle against French anti-Semitism, and to go beyond terminological allergy towards the concepts of “primitive” and “mentality.” The argument that French …
