The Owners of Kinship investigates how kinship in Indigenous Amazonia is derived from the asymmetrical relation between an “ownerâ€_x009d_ and his or her dependents. Through a comprehensive ethnography of the Kanamari, Luiz Costa shows how this relationship is centered around the bond created between the feeder and the fed. Building on anthropological studies of the acquisition, distri…
In the essays and lectures here titled Neganthropocene, Stiegler opens an entirely new front moving beyond the dead-end “banality” of the Anthropocene. Stiegler stakes out a battleplan to proceed beyond, indeed shrugging off, the fulfillment of nihilism that the era of climate chaos ushers in.
In anthropology, as much as in the current popular imagination, kings remain figures of fascination and intrigue. As the cliché 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, histor…
This new collection of J. Hillis Miller’s essays centres on the question “why and to what end should we read, teach, and spend our time with literary and/or cultural studies?” At a time when electronic media seem to dominate the market completely, and jobs follow the money flows into electronic and technical fields, literary and cultural studies might appear as a decorative addenda but no…
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…
There is no doubt that we live in exciting times: Ours is the age of many ‘silent revolutions’ triggered by startups and research labs of big IT companies; revolutions that quietly and profoundly alter the world we live in. Another ten or five years, and self-tracking will be as normal and inevitable as having a Facebook account or a mobile phone. Our bodies, hooked to wearable devices sitt…
Death of the PostHuman undertakes a series of critical encounters with the legacy of what had come to be known as 'theory,' and its contemporary supposedly post-human aftermath. There can be no redemptive post-human future in which the myopia and anthropocentrism of the species finds an exit and manages to emerge with ecology and life. At the same time, what has come to be known as the human - …
Drawing on a number of paradigmatic works of art, the book explores the motif of ‘gypsy’ child-theft and its visualisations. The analytical focus is on the colour coding of bodies in texts and images and their racialised/anti-gypsy uses. Offering a comprehensive survey of the motif’s adaptations to different visual media, the author elaborates on its multiple layers of meaning and functio…
This book describes life in a small hunting community in Northwest Greenland. It is based on fieldwork carried out by the author from 1966 to 1968 and documents in detail the traditional material culture, ways of hunting and fishing, daily life and festive occasions of an Inuit society not yet influenced by European culture. The historical background of the settlement from the establishment in …