Pitt-Rivers’ writings have a supple and subtle quality of style and argument, the flow of a fine essay. He draws the reader, only seemingly easily for these papers are cleverly and tightly argued, into wide-ranging reflections on founding patterns and structures, codes, customs and practices that he suggests should frame our understanding of major …
The art of life and death is unlike anything I have ever read in its combination of theoretical ambition and methodological innovation. The book is the fruit of Irving’s close collaboration with a remarkable group of men and women diagnosed with AIDS at a time when there was little hope of surviving the disease. With the help …
This is that rare book that constitutes a genuine theoretical tour de force. At a time when anthropological theorizing is often meek or painted only in partial gestures, Pina-Cabral attempts to build a theory of human life and the world(s) in which it unfolds from the ground up, reasoning from some very basic observations …
Values of Happiness is a thoughtful, thought-provoking, and often very moving book. As we are taken through people’s reflections on happiness in a wide range of cultural contexts, we see the extent to which happiness is rarely—well—happy. The authors use the complexities and ambiguities of this state of being to explore the ways in which …
Julien Bonhomme has produced a fascinating study of an unsettling African rumor: “genital theft,” the widespread distribution of which he is able to trace across both time and space. His work provides a detailed ethnography of these “genital theft” cases, and sets them in perspective alongside a series of other rumors and other forms …
“A great book, an indispensable book: une promesse de bonheur (“a promise of happiness”) as Stendhal would have said, for any reader curious to explore the intricacies and depths of the language she or he speaks.” — Carlo Ginzburg, author of The Cheese and the Worms “Benveniste’s erudition impresses and enthralls: every entry in this …
Comparing Impossibilities is a vivid demonstration of what a creative anthropology makes possible, comparatively—in both space and time. A tour de force, it traces the life and work of one of the leading anthropologists of our time over the last half-century. In it Sally Falk Moore’s surgical gaze focuses on an impressive range of …
Hamayon’s decades-long research led her to the conclusion that a unique principle is underlying all human playing, which, however, appears in multiple expressions. For her, this principle is best defined by Gregory Bateson’s exploration that play constitutes an activity which is framed by meta-communication, in which the players, before they start playing, in one …
In Before and After Gender, Strathern writes that she “brings writing to bear on other writing in order to shift the viewpoint.” From the beginning, she has not so much shifted viewpoints as entirely retooled their optics, making viewpoints undo other viewpoints, and here she does it for gender and all its bumptious ethnographic …
If you deem that anthropology is neither a form of pompous navel-gazing, nor an exercise in making preposterous generalizations out of sketchy personal experiences, this book is for you. With impeccable scholarship, conceptual imagination, and wit, David Graeber and Marshall Sahlins think anew, within a broad comparative scope, an ancient and illustrious question: why and …
