Book Shelf

Thinking with Ngangas: What Afro-Cuban Ritual Can Tell Us about Scientific Practice and Vice Versa

Stephan Palmié

Inspired by the exercises of Father Lafitau, an eighteenth-century Jesuit priest and protoethnographer who compared the lives of the Iroquois to those of the ancient Greeks, Stephan Palmié embarks on a series of unusual comparative investigations of Afro-Cuban ritual and Western science. 

Working the Difference

E. Summerson Carr

Science, Spirit, and the Spread of Motivational Interviewing

A history of motivational interviewing and what its rise reveals about how cultural forms emerge and spread.

Footprints from Fossils to Gallows

Russell H. Tuttle

Adventures in Paleoanthropology, Primatology, and Forensic Anthropology

Fernando Ortiz: Caribbean and Mediterranean Counterpoints

Edited by Stephan Palmié

Cuban scholar Fernando Ortiz (1881-1969) coined the term “transculturation” in 1940. This was an early case of theory from the South: concepts developed from an explicitly peripheral epistemological vantage point, and launched as a corrective to European and North American theoretical formulations. What Ortiz proposed was a contrapuntal vision of complexly entangled processes that we, today, would conceptualize as cultural emergence.

Sovereignty Unhinged

Deborah A. Thomas and Joseph Masco (eds)

An Illustrated Primer for the Study of Present Intensities, Disavowals, and Temporal Derangements

Onscreen/Offscreen

Constantine V. Nakassis

Based on over a decade of ethnographic fieldwork in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, Onscreen/Offscreen is an exploration of the politics and being of filmic images. The book examines contestations inside and outside the Tamil film industry over the question "what is an image?" Answers to this question may be found in the ontological politics that take place on film sets, in theatre halls, and in the social fabric of everyday life in South India, from populist electoral politics and the gendering of social space to caste uplift and domination.

Language in Culture

Michael Silverstein

Lectures on the Social Semiotics of Language

Fare stile - Culture giovanili e mass media nell’India del Sud

Constantine V. Nakassis

In Fare stile Constantine Nakassis prende in esame il mondo dei giovani e dei mass media nell’India del Sud, dove la vita quotidiana e i media trovano ancoraggio in un fenomeno che i giovani tamil chiamano stile.

After Servitude - Elusive Property and the Ethics of Kinship in Bolivia

Mareike Winchell

How are injurious pasts redeployed by the dispossessed? After Servitude explores how agrarian engineers, Indigenous farmers, Mestizo mining bosses, and rural workers navigate racial hierarchies rooted in histories of forced agrarian labor. In the rural Bolivian province of Ayopaya, where the liberatory promises of property remain elusive, Quechua people address such hierarchies by demanding aid from Mestizo elites and, when that fails, through acts of labor militancy.

The New Death: Mortality and Death Care in the Twenty-First Century

Shannon Dawdy

The New Death brings together scholars who are intrigued by today’s rapidly changing death practices and attitudes. New and different ways of treating the body and memorializing the dead are proliferating across global cities. Using ethnographic, historical, and media-based approaches, the contributors to this volume focus on new attitudes and practices around mortality and mourning—from the possibilities of digitally enhanced afterlives to industrialized “necro-waste,” the ethics of care, the meaning of secular rituals, and the political economy of death.