“In this excellent ethnography, Sylvia Tidey interrogates the widely prevalent assumption in global discourse about the state and development that corruption is always inimical to the “good,” thereby challenging dominant conceptions of good governance. Based on long-term research in Indonesia, she argues—and convincingly demonstrates—that corruption can, in practice, be deeply intertwined with care. More …
Book Review The Ethics of Space: Homelessness and Squatting in Urban England, by Steph Grohmann. Chicago: HAU Books/University of Chicago Press, 2020. Interview and Review by Jane Sabherwal Author Steph Grohmann writes from personal experience and we meet her looking like an extra from Les Misérables, pushing a trolley containing all her worldly possessions, …
“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 …
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 …
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 …
“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 …
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 …
