“This beautifully written book is a path-breaking investigation in the anthropology of the senses and the politics of communication. Peter Graif ’s fascinating account of Nepali deaf worlds weaves a uniquely subtle and powerful appreciation of how communication, culture, language, creativity, even thought and the senses are produced, deployed, and reconfigured by everyone, not only …
“Carlo Severi’s new book is a masterpiece for its rare combination of erudition, attention to ethnographic detail, and its vast conceptual imagination. It is a unique book from a unique author who invites us to join him on a intellectual journey along a path, following the threads that guide us to new discoveries every step …
A major contribution to anthropological theorizing, this impressive work quietly disposes of many conceptual assumptions abroad in anthropology, less through interrogating Western ideas (via other Western ideas) than through brilliant ethnographic exegesis. The author follows through the consequences of ‘feeding’ as a signature of Amazonian ownership. Observational and analytical sophistication aside, the result offers …
Women are everywhere, women are nowhere. Humans have to be made, bodies have to be remade. Rituals are the key to those acts of person-making. How I wish, reading this marvelous piece of ethnography, that we had anything of the same quality for the production of boys and girls in contemporary Europe. – Bruno …
Jacob Copeman is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. He is coauthor, with Dwaipayan Banerjee, of Hematologies: The Political Life of Blood in India (Cornell University Press, 2019). Giovanni da Col is Research Associate at SOAS, University of London and Founder and Editor of Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory as well …
Would not the wizards of L’Année Sociologique be surprised to discover that all of their favorite conceptual glosses like sacrifice, prestation, ritual, and symbol could all be covered by Mosko’s single broad-scale analogy? Welcome to the twenty-first century, Bronislaw Malinowski. — Roy Wagner, author of The invention of culture This erudite and timely volume radically inverts much of …
This book is a considerable achievement which presents, for the first time, the form of sovereignty that the Andean kingdoms exercised over the varied populations and resources distributed across the different ecological zones of the Andean mountain range. We also learn how the different states and empires built on and transformed traditional village and …
“The fire of the jaguar reminds us why structuralism took the world by storm in its day, and why it is still relevant for today’s anthropology. Turner’s analysis of the famous Kayapo myth of the origin of cooking fire is brilliant, not least because it takes seriously ‘the sophistication and power of indigenous thought.’” — …
“What time is it? Many. In this incandescent book, we learn that time is always composite, a relation among things, made of conflicting simultaneities, teleologies, and eternities. Working through the timely and untimely worlds of 1920s Soviet Russia and 1990s indigenous Siberia, Ssorin-Chaikov delivers a dazzling brief for how exchanges among market, gift, and state …
Carey’s book poses an important and provocative question: what happens to our descriptions of sociality when we move mistrust to the foreground and trust to the background? Can mistrust be the founding stone of a positive sociality rather than its failure? The author addresses this theoretical question through a witty and lively exploration of …
