“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 …
“If anthropology has any conceit that it is hospitable to other modes of thought and their salience for ‘provincializing Europe,’ the texts we allow into the canon must be raked for their potential for the future they might have as much as for their past. My discussion is heavily oriented to the Indian texts that …
“A timely gift. An exercise in both retrospection and imagining worlds and relations otherwise, the book is full of mind-bending reflections on how we might think with a world marked, as ever, by scale-scrambling change. These essays offer something sorely needed right now: a brilliant model of how to embrace and think with incommensurability and …
“At a time when there is a desperate need for better understandings of the Muslim world, this essay by Clifford Geertz, brilliantly introduced by his fieldwork partner and colleague Lawrence Rosen, once again illustrates the importance of cultural anthropology in providing insights into different peoples and places. This is anthropology at its best.” — …
Émile Benveniste (1902–1976) was a French linguist and semiotician who taught at the Collège de France until 1969. He is the author of many works on language, including Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society, also published by HAU Books. With Claude Lévi-Strauss and Pierre Gourou, he cofounded the anthropological journal L’Homme. Jordan K. Skinner is …
“This is a remarkable book by the UK’s leading medical anthropologist. Gilbert Lewis was both a professional anthropologist and a trained medical doctor. He brought these skills and extraordinary personal insight when carrying out pioneering fieldwork in Papua New Guinea. In this his final book, he retains the clarity of his original lectures and extends …
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 …
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 …
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 …
