Books

Anthropology and its Literary Companions (University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming)

This book offers a near history of anthropology in America by revisiting the work of a handful of anthropologists in light of the literature that accompanied them throughout their lives. If anthropologists have long been interested in the relationship between their work and that of literature, we have rarely systematically thought about how personal histories of reading shape our thinking (including our thinking about anthropological knowledge itself). The aim, however, is neither a general theory nor a representative history. Instead, each essay here looks at specific anthropologists and traces when and why they turned to literature, in sudden resonances, chance encounters, and serendipitous wordings, and examines how these turns and returns compelled crucial shifts in vision. It explores how a cherished character, or a scene, or even a phrase, helps us take a thought forward, to pose new questions, or to move a conceptual blockage. And more emphatically, it shows how literary tastes, friendly recommendations, and personal collections all potentially contribute to the different pictures we have of anthropology

In the decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Berlin has re-emerged as a global city in large part thanks to its reputation as a literary city – a place where artists from around the world gather and can make a life. Moving Words foregrounds the many contexts in which life in the city of Berlin is made literary – from old neighbourhood bookshops to new reading circles, NGOs working to secure asylum for writers living in exile to specialized workshops for young migrant poets. Highlighting the differences, tensions, and contradictions of these scenes, this book reveals how literature can be both a site of domination and a resource for resisting and transforming those conditions. By attending to the everyday lives of writers, readers, booksellers, and translators, it offers a crucial new vantage point on the politics of difference in contemporary Europe, at a moment marked by historical violence, resurgent nationalism, and the fraught politics of migration.

Publisher’s website

Matter of Detail inspires new ways of thinking about detail by bringing anthropology, philosophy, art history, and aesthetics into direct conversation. We challenge a long-standing assumption that the history of detail begins with European modernity and follows a teleological course from an object of scorn to a sign of the good. In its place, they offer a history of attention to detail that draws on classical and vernacular histories and traditions found in grammar, ritual, and poetics around the world. Emphasizing detail as a method and moving between its usage as a noun (detail) and a verb (detailing) enables them to tell stories about the reassembly of detail across accidents, contingencies, and unintended consequences. From this vantage, the book argues that details are not always small and insignificant. Rather, there is a dynamic relationship between the minute and the grand, detail and surface, which makes the proliferation of details threatening to the idea of an authoritative and integrated imagination of the whole. This expanded context generates ways of conceiving detail as a conceptual and moral mode of self-formation and being toward others, both human and non-human.

Publisher’s website

This volume examines an often taken for granted concept—that of the concept itself. How do we picture what concepts are, what they do, how they arise in the course of everyday life? Challenging conventional approaches that treat concepts as mere tools at our disposal for analysis, or as straightforwardly equivalent to signs to be deciphered, the anthropologists and philosophers in this volume turn instead to the ways concepts are already intrinsically embedded in our forms of life and how they constitute the very substrate of our existence as humans who lead lives in language. Attending to our ordinary lives with concepts requires not an ascent from the rough ground of reality into the skies of theory, but rather acceptance of the fact that thinking is congenital to living with and through concepts. The volume offers a critical and timely intervention into both contemporary philosophy and anthropological theory by unsettling the distinction between thought and reality that continues to be too often assumed and showing how the supposed need to grasp reality may be replaced by an acknowledgement that we are in its grip.

Publisher’s website