Carlo Severi’s The chimera principle is a forceful study for anyone who wants to move beyond conventional concepts of “text” and “image.”… In this brilliant translation of what is certain to become an instant classic in visual anthropology, we come to understand how sound and image become alive in acts of communication. —Thomas Cummins, …
Between Anthropology and History “Any superlative diminishes Valerio Valeri and his scholarship, which is characterized by rich, subtle, and complex ethnographic and historical information, underscored by formidable theoretical vigor based on extensive fieldwork. His work is comparative, including ethnographic and historical material from ancient Hawaii, Huaulu of Seram, Yap, eastern Indonesia, and Malaysia, but also …
“Quietly famous among Polynesianists, Prytz-Johansen’s classic has a strange timeliness for ethnographers today, many of its old-school values standing well in front of our cutting edge. His discussion of kinship as “living together,” his comments on the cultural ordering of historical temporality, his inquiry into moral ethnopsychology, and his idea of the expansiveness of what …
Learning to see in Melanesia is as much a question of unlearning to see as a Westerner as of grasping what Melanesians choose to display (or, just as importantly, to conceal or banalize) and why. Strathern demonstrates that the political economy of the gaze in Melanesia focuses on the temporal and spatial dynamics of relationships …
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s seminal lectures on cosmological perspectivism provide a careful and highly innovative introduction to many themes that have become central to the ontological turn in anthropology, including multinaturalism against multiculturalism, transformation/exchange versus creation/production, and performativity replacing representation. They offer invaluable insight into an anthropology operating in a space where we have been …
