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 mana, taboo, and potlatch, in order to help them explore the limits of human belief and imagination. Now the book receives its first translation by an anthropolog…
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 allows for complex political systems, permits human communication, underpins financial instruments and economic institutions, and holds society itself together. There is scant …
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 perspectivesâ€_x009d_ through a journey …
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 and frauds tell us about ourselves? And what can anthropology tell us about this obsession? This timely book is the product of the first Annual Debate of Anthropological…
With forced marriage, as with so many human rights issues, the sensationalized hides the mundane, and oversimplified popular discourses miss the range of experiences. In sub-Saharan Africa, the relationship between coercion and consent in marriage is a complex one that has changed over time and place, rendering impossible any single interpretation or explanation. The legal experts, anthropol…
This book celebrates and mourns the increasing relevance of the 2008 volume of 'Profiling the European Citizen. Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives' (edited by Mireille Hildebrandt & Serge Gutwirth). Both volumes contain in-depth investigations by lawyers, philosophers and computer scientists into the legal, philosophical and computational background of the emerging algorithmic order. In BEING PROF…
How do deaf people in different societies perceive and conceive the world around them? Drawing on four years of anthropological fieldwork in Nepali deaf communities, Being and Hearing shows how questions of cultural difference are profoundly shaped by local habits of perception. Beginning with the premise that philosophy and cultural intuition are separated only by genre and pedigree, Peter Gra…
The book gives an intriguing insight into how young people in Estonia, twenty years after the establishment of democracy, perceive their own role as citizens. It does so in a theoretical framework that stresses the embeddedness of the civic experiences in a media-dominated environment, thus closely linking civic and media experiences. Based on the analysis of both qualitative interview data and…
This volume illuminates human lifeways in the northern Maya lowlands prior to the rise of Chichén Itzá. This period and area have been poorly understood on their own terms, obscured by scholarly focus on the central lowland Maya kingdoms. "Before Kukulkán" is anchored in three decades of interdisciplinary research at the Classic Maya capital of Yaxuná, located at a contentious crossroads of…
Written in the early 1970s amidst widespread debate over the causes of gender inequality, Marilyn Strathern's Before and After Gender was intended as a widely accessible analysis of gender as a powerful cultural code and sex as a defining mythology. But when the series for which it was written unexpectedly folded, the manuscript went into storage, where it remained for more than four decades. T…