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In anthropology, as much as in the current popular imagination, kings remain figures of fascination and intrigue. As the cliche goes, kings continue to die spectacular deaths only to remain subjects of vitality and long life. This collection of essays by a teacher and his student -- two of the world's most distinguished anthropologists-- explores what kingship actually is, historically and anthropologically. The divine, the stranger, the numinous, the bestial--the implications for understanding kings and their sacred office are not limited to questions of sovereignty, but issues ranging from temporality and alterity to piracy and utopia; indeed, the authors argue that kingship offers us a unique window into the understanding fundamental dilemmas concerning the very nature of power, meaning, and the human condition. Besides general theoretical reflections, several essays included in the volume focus on particular case studies-- the BaKongo, Aztec, Shilluk, 18th century pirate kings of Madagascar, and others--though each also contains comparative material drawn from many other cases besides. With a jointly written critical introduction, richly framed with the wit and sharp analysis characteristic of these two thinkers, this volume opens up new avenues for how an anthropological study of kingship might proceed in the twenty-first century.

"Trust occupies a unique place in contemporary discourse. Seen as both necessary and virtuous, it is variously depicted as enhancing the social fabric, lowering crime rates, increasing happiness, and generating prosperity. It allows for complex political systems, permits human communication, underpins financial instruments and economic institutions, and generally holds society together. Against these overwhelmingly laudable qualities, mistrust often goes unnoticed as a positive social phenomenon, treated as little more than a corrosive absence, a mere negative of trust itself. With this book, Matthew Carey proposes an ethnographic and conceptual exploration of mistrust that raises it up as legitimate stance in its own right.While mistrust can quickly ruin relationships and even dissolve extensive social ties, Carey shows that it might have other values. Drawing on fieldwork in Morocco's High Atlas Mountains as well as comparative material from regions stretching from Eastern Europe to Melanesia, he examines the impact of mistrust on practices of conversation and communication, friendship and society, and politics and cooperation. In doing so, he demonstrates that trust is not the only basis for organizing human society and cooperating with others. The result is a provocative but enlightening work that makes us rethink social issues such as suspicion, doubt, and uncertainty."--Back cover.

Examining social constructions and perceptions of nature. In Wild and Wonderful, social anthropologist Vanessa Manceron investigates an understudied but indispensable scientific practice: getting to know and recognize the living worlds around us. Her research takes her to England, where a longstanding naturalist tradition brings together professionals, academics, and amateurs to study the world around them. Observing the natural world here is regarded not as a simple hobby, but as a necessary activity. This is participatory science, an itinerant brand of scholarship that immerses itself in a specific and delimited territory, meticulously documenting the species living there and how they develop and expand their domain or regress and disappear. Manceron leads us through woods and fields, showing us another way of looking, of paying attention to minute differences, sounds, and variations of color. Her book is both a contribution to the anthropology of science and an opportunity to take a fresh look at our relationship with nature, affording us a glimpse of another way of living and living with.

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 pursue forms of life not just outside of time, but outside of self? Becoming Somebody Else takes up this question, offering a window into the fragmented and chaotic lives of London's urban homeless as they drink and drug themselves into blackout. A state-of-being where time, body, agency, and self collapse into a memoryless abyss, the blackout has consistently alluded to a deep anthropological investigation.

In this long-awaited sequel to The Invention of Culture, Roy Wagner tackles the logic and motives that underlie cultural invention. Could there be a single, logical factor that makes the invention of the distinction between self and other possible, much as specific human genes allow for language? Wagner explores what he calls "the reciprocity of perspectives" through a journey between Euro-American bodies of knowledge and his in-depth knowledge of Melanesian modes of thought. This logic grounds variants of the subject/object transformation, as Wagner works through examples such as the figure-ground reversal in Gestalt psychology, Lacan's theory of the mirror-stage formation of the Ego, and even the self-recursive structure of the aphorism and the joke. Juxtaposing Wittgenstein's and Leibniz's philosophy with Melanesian social logic, Wagner explores the cosmological dimensions of the ways in which different societies develop models of self and the subject/object distinction. The result is a philosophical tour de force by one of anthropology's greatest mavericks.

In engaging essays, celebrated anthropologist Marilyn Strathern reflects on the complexities of social life.Property, Substance, and Effect draws on Marilyn Strathern's longstanding interest in the reification of social relations. If the world is shrinking in terms of resources and access to them, it is expanding in terms of new candidates for proprietorship. How new relations are brought into being is among the many questions about property, ownership, and knowledge that these essays bring together.Twenty years have not diminished the interest in the book's opening challenge: if one were inventing a method of enquiry by which to configure the complexity of social life, one might wish to invent something like the anthropologist's ethnographic practice. A wide range of studies deliberately brings into conversation claims people make on one another through relations imagined in the form of body-substance along with the increasing visibility of conceptual or intellectual work as property. Whether one lives in Papua New Guinea or Great Britain, categories of knowledge are being dissolved and reformed at a tempo that calls for reflection-and for the kind of lateral reflection afforded through the "ethnographic effect."

In 1931 Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote his famous Remarks on Frazer's "Golden Bough," published posthumously in 1967. At that time, anthropology and philosophy were in close contact - thinkers drew heavily on anthropology's theoretical terms, in order to help them explore the limits of human belief and imagination. This is a translation of his work.

Presents a erudite set of comparative essays on core topics in the history of anthropological theory. This book offers discussions of anthropological thought about ritual, fetishism, cosmogonic myth, belief, caste, kingship, mourning, play, feasting, ceremony, and cultural relativism. It is suitable for students and researchers in anthropology.

Written in the early 1970s, amidst widespread debate over the origins and causes of women's subordination, Marilyn Strathern's exploration of the stubborn paradox of sex and gender was intended as a popular book for a general audience. Had it been published, as planned, in 1974, Strathern's analysis of gender as a powerful cultural code, and sex as a defining mythology, would have offered an unprecedented set of insights into the symbolic leakage later defined by Judith Butler as 'gender trouble'. But after her publisher unexpectedly folded, this extraordinary manuscript went into storage - where it remained for more than four decades. The publication of this missing feminist classic enhances both our understanding of the work of one world's most influential anthropologists, and the enduring legacies of late twentieth century feminist thought. Strathern's direct engagements with many of the most influential feminist authors of the early 1970s, including Shulamith Firestone, Simone de Beauvoir, Ann Oakley and Kate Millett, are as vivid and insightful as are her critical readings of sociobology, romantic literature and structuralist anthropology. Building with characteristic precision toward a bold and sweeping conclusion in which she argues we underestimate the materializing grammars of sex and gender at our peril, Marilyn Strathern's Before and After Gender remains uncomfortably contemporary in its challenge to the intransigent mythologies of sex.

The Art of Life and Death explores how the world appears to people who have an acute perspective on it: those who are close to death. Based on extensive ethnographic research, Andrew Irving brings to life the lived experiences, imaginative lifeworlds, and existential concerns of persons confronting their own mortality and non-being. Encompassing twenty years of working alongside persons living with HIV/AIDS in New York, Irving documents the radical but often unspoken and unvoiced transformations in perception, knowledge, and understanding that people experience in the face of death. By bringing an "experience-near" ethnographic focus to the streams of inner dialogue, imagination, and aesthetic expression that are central to the experience of illness and everyday life, this monograph offers a theoretical, ethnographic, and methodological contribution to the anthropology of time, finitude, and the human condition. With relevance well-beyond the disciplinary boundaries of anthropology, this book ultimately highlights the challenge of capturing the inner experience of human suffering and hope that affect us all--of the trauma of the threat of death and the surprise of continued life.

9780990505099.

Presents a fresh theoretical ground for the study of ritual, iconographic technologies, and oral traditions among nonliterate peoples. The author unfolds fresh approaches to research in the anthropology of ritual and memory, ultimately building a new theory of imagination and an original anthropology of thought.

Features a synthesis of ethnographic theory and psychoanalytic revelation. This volume tries to bring a fresh generation of scholars into conversation with the work of a truly innovative thinker. It is suitable for practitioners of psychoanalysis as well as to anthropologists.

Presents a collection of essays and lectures of the author. This volume features new English translations of a number of previously unpublished works.

Features edited Lewis Henry Morgan lectures delivered by the author at the University of Rochester in 1986. This title includes a fresh introduction by her.

Includes a fresh foreword by anthropologist Marilyn Strathern. This volume discusses the ongoing response to the book and the debates it has engendered.

Marcel Mauss famous "Essay on the Gift" has now returned to its original context. For the first time, this masterpiece essential reading for every student of anthorpology can be read in an updated and annotated English translation alongside the profound works that framed its first publication in the 1923 24 issue of the journal "L Annee Sociologique." Included here are Mauss memorial account of the work of colleagues lost during World War I, and Mauss scholarly reviews of influential works by his contemporaries (Boas, Frazer, Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, and others). Now read in the context of its co-publications, the "Essay on the Gift "reveals a complementary whole, a genre of generosity both personal and political: Mauss honor and respect for his fallen colleagues; his aspiration for modern (post-war) society s recuperation of the gift as a mode of repair; and his careful, yet critical, reading of the work of his contemporaries. It was Mauss hope that from this publication, Another seed will fall and germinate. Indeed, there is probably no other work in the history of anthropology that has germinated so great an intellectual flowering. This new translation by anthropologist Jane Guyer, with a critical foreword by anthropologists Jonathan Parry and Maurice Bloch, is certain to become the standard English reference for Marcel Mauss greatest essay setting the scence for a whole new generation of readers to study the gift alongside the erudition, political commitment, and generous collegial exchange that first nourished it into life and growth."