Publications
Now showing items 21-39 of 39
Becoming Somebody Else
(2025)
A study of homelessness and addiction exploring the void of drug-induced blackout and its impact on identity and time. What does it mean to exist outside the normative temporality of life, of housed living, and, ultimately, ...
Imacoqwa’s Arrow
(2025)
A pathbreaking study of Yagwoia cosmological concepts. In Imacoqwa’s Arrow, Jadran Mimica draws on decades of field research to bring us a rich ethnographic account of myth and meaning in the lifeworlds of the Yagwoia of ...
Ethics or the Right Thing?
(2022)
A sympathetic examination of the failure of anti-corruption efforts in contemporary Indonesia. Combining ethnographic fieldwork in the city of Kupang with an acute historical sensibility, Sylvia Tidey shows how good ...
Pandemic Exposures
(2021)
For people and governments around the world, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic seemed to place the preservation of human life at odds with the pursuit of economic and social life. Yet this simple alternative belies the ...
Mistrust
(2017-11-01)
Trust occupies a unique place in contemporary discourse. Seen as both necessary and good, it is variously depicted as enhancing the social fabric, lowering crime rates, increasing happiness, and generating prosperity. It ...
Of Humans, Pigs, and Souls
(2020)
For the Yagwoia-Angan people of Papua New Guinea womba is a malignant power with the potential to afflict any soul with cravings for pig meat and human flesh. Drawing on long-term research among the Yagwoia, and in an ...
Property, Substance, and Effect
(2023)
This title draws on Strathern’s interest in the reification of social relations. If the world is shrinking in terms of resources and their access, it is expanding in terms of new candidates for proprietorship. How new ...
Unexpected Subjects
(2021)
Unexpected Subjects is an ethnography of the encounter between women’s words and the demands of the law in the context of adjudications on intimate partner violence. A study of institutional devices, it focuses on women’s ...
A Witch's Hand
(2024)
From 1971 to 1972, William E. Mitchell undertook fieldwork on suffering and healing among the Lujere of Papua New Guinea’s Upper Sepik River Basin. At a time when it was not yet common to make colonial agencies a subject ...
The Mythology in Our Language
(2017-12-01)
In 1931 Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote his famous Remarks on Frazer’s “Golden Bough.". At that time, anthropology and philosophy were in close contact—continental thinkers drew heavily on anthropology’s theoretical terms, like ...
How Is It Between Us?
(2023)
A new theory of relational ethics that tackles contemporary issues. In How Is It Between Us?, Jarrett Zigon puts anthropology and phenomenological hermeneutics in conversation to develop a new theory of relational ethics. ...
Fernando Ortiz
(2023)
Cross-regional scholarly dialogue inspired by the work of the pioneering Cuban scholar. Fernando Ortiz (1881–1969) coined the term “transculturation” in 1940. This was an early case of theory from the South: concepts ...
Science in the Forest, Science in the Past
(2020)
This collection brings together leading anthropologists, historians, philosophers, and artificial-intelligence researchers to discuss the sciences and mathematics used in various Eastern, Western, and Indigenous societies, ...
Why We Play
(2016-07-31)
Whether it’s childhood make-believe, the theater, sports, or even market speculation, play is one of humanity’s seemingly purest activities: a form of entertainment and leisure and a chance to explore the world and its ...
Fake
(2018)
Fakes, forgery, counterfeits, hoaxes, bullshit, frauds, knock offs—such terms speak, ostensibly, to the inverse of truth or the obverse of authenticity and sincerity. But what does the modern human obsession with fabrications ...
Values of Happiness
(2016-11-30)
How people conceive of happiness reveals much about who they are and the values they hold dear. Drawing on ethnographic insights from diverse field sites around the world, this book offers a unique window onto the ways in ...
The Ethics of Space
(2020)
Across the Western world, full membership of society is established through entitlements to space and formalized in the institutions of property and citizenship. Those without such entitlements are deemed less than fully ...
Nullius
(2022)
Nullius is an anthropological account of the troubled status of ownership in India and its consequences for our understanding of sovereignty and social relations. Though property rights and ownership are said to be a ...
The Imensity of Being Singular
(2023)
In this powerful new work, Simone Toji reconsiders ethnography as a form of appreciation of the contradictions inherent in the making of life itself. Recovering Bronislaw Malinowski’s idea of the “imponderabilia of actual ...