How Do We Think About Population in the Anthropocene?
The “Great Acceleration” describes a set of interrelated human-driven transformations of the Anthropocene, including the eightfold population growth since 1800. Yet ideas about population sit uncomfortably in contemporary discussions about our current historical moment. How Do We Think About Population in the Anthropocene? brings together the world’s key thinkers in Anthropocene studies from a wide range of disciplines, including geology, geography, demography, history, political theory, and more, to think critically about the most important variable: population. How do we think about population in the Anthropocene, or should we even think in terms of population at all? The twelve short essays in this pamphlet offer responses that reimagine how we think about economy, environment, and extinction.
Presence and Social Obligation | An Essay on the Share
In precarious and tumultuous times, schemes of social support, including cash transfers, are increasingly indispensable. Yet the inadequacy of the nation-state frame of membership that such schemes depend on is becoming evermore evident, as non-citizens form a growing proportion of the populations that welfare states attempt to govern. In Presence and Social Obligation, James Ferguson argues that conceptual resources for solving this problem are closer to hand than we might think. Drawing on a rich anthropology of sharing, he argues that the obligation to share never depends only on membership, but also on presence: on being “here.” Presence and Social Obligation strives to demonstrate that such obligatory sharing based on presence can be observed in the way that marginalized urban populations access state services, however unequally, across the global South. Examples show that such sharing with non-nationals is not some sort of utopian proposal but part of the everyday life of the modern service-delivering state. Presence and Social Obligation is a critical yet refreshing approach to an ever-growing way of being together.
The Gift Paradigm | A Short Introduction to the Anti-Utilitarian Movement in the Social Sciences
In his classic essay “The Gift,” Marcel Mauss argued that gifts can never be truly free; rather, they bring about an expectation of reciprocal exchange. For over one hundred years, his ideas on economy, social relations, and exchange have inspired new modes of thought, none more so than what crystallized in the 1980s around an innovative group of French academics. In The Gift Paradigm, Alain Caillé provides the first in-depth, English-language introduction to La Revue du MAUSS—or, “Anti-Utilitarian Movement in the Social Sciences,” combining the work of anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers, and others. Today, the very idea of a “general social science” seems unthinkable, unless you count the pervasive sway of a utilitarian logic in orthodox economics, or the diffuse influence of neoliberalism. Here, Caillé offers a distinctly different reading of economy and society, inspired by Mauss—as vital now as ever.
Kinds of Value | An Experiment in Modal Anthropology
In this slim volume, anthropologist Paul Kockelman showcases, reworks, and extends some of the core resources anthropologists and like-minded scholars have developed for thinking about value. Rather than theorize value head on, he offers a careful interpretation of a Mayan text about an offering to a god that lamentably goes awry. Kockelman analyzes the text, its telling, and the conditions of possibility for its original publication. Starting with a relatively simple definition of value—that which stands at the intersection of what signs stand for and what agents strive for—he unfolds, explicates, and experiments with its variations. Contrary to widespread claims in and around the discipline, Kockelman argues that it is not so-called relations, but rather relations between relations, that are at the heart of the interpretive endeavor.
What the Foucault?
This is the long-awaited fifth edition of Marshall Sahlins’ classic series of bon mots, ruminations, and musings on the ancients, anthropology, and much else in between. It’s been twenty-five years since Sahlins first devised some after-dinner entertainment at a decennial meeting of the Association of Social Anthropologists in Great Britain, published soon thereafter by Prickly Paradigm’s first incarnation, Prickly Pear. What the Foucault? contains all the old chestnuts, but has been thoroughly updated, and is laced through with all the wit and wisdom we’ve come to expect.
“Man—with Variations” | Interviews with Franz Boas and Colleagues, 1937
“The most interesting human beings, so far as talk is concerned, are anthropologists, farmers, prostitutes, psychiatrists, and the occasional bartender.” So wrote Joseph Mitchell, the legendary New Yorker journalist and chronicler of the full spectrum of humanity in New York City from the 1930s to the ’60s, when his last columns were published. The critic Malcolm Cowley called Mitchell “the best reporter in the country,” while Stanley Edgar Hyman would later write that he was “a reporter only in the sense that Defoe is a reporter, a humorist only in the sense that Faulkner is a humorist.” But, before he found fame, Mitchell worked as a beat reporter with an unusually keen sense of style and uncommonly graceful prose at the now-defunct World-Telegram. There, he wrote a series of articles on the anthropologist Franz Boas, who influenced his trenchant observations of humanity.
Man—with Variations republishes Mitchell’s writings on Boas, which weave together interviews with the great anthropologist and his students and colleagues to recount a formative period in American anthropology, as well as the journalist’s own compelling set of reflections on the human condition. Man—with Variations will be essential reading for anyone interested in the history of the discipline, and it will also be welcomed by the new generation of readers who are discovering Mitchell’s work.
The Culture of Ethics
What is ethics? Is it a system of transcendent moral imperatives or can it be produced by ordinary people in everyday life? Do the daily rules of interaction constitute a code of ethics? In The Culture of Ethics, renowned anthropologists Franco La Cecla and Piero Zanini address these questions in a series of thought-provoking reflections that draw their inspiration from diverse sources, ranging from fieldwork in Papua New Guinea to cinematic depictions of the Ten Commandments.
An engaging and accessible contribution to the emerging area of interest in “ordinary ethics,” The Culture of Ethics explores what anthropology has to offer on the question of how we ought to live.
The Ecology of Others
Since the end of the nineteenth century, the division between nature and culture has been fundamental to Western thought. In this groundbreaking work, renowned anthropologist Philippe Descola seeks to break down this divide, arguing for a departure from the anthropocentric model and its rigid dualistic conception of nature and culture as distinct phenomena. In its stead, Descola proposes a radical new worldview, in which beings and objects, human and nonhuman, are understood through the complex relationships that they possess with one another.
The Ecology of Others presents a compelling challenge to anthropologists, ecologists, and environmental studies scholars to rethink the way we conceive of humans, objects, and the environment. Thought-provoking and engagingly written, it will be required reading for all those interested in moving beyond the moving beyond the confines of this fascinating debate.
The Science of Passionate Interests | An Introduction to Gabriel Tarde’s Economic Anthropology
How can economics become genuinely quantitative? This is the question that French sociologist Gabriel Tarde tackled at the end of his career, and in this pamphlet, Bruno Latour and Vincent Antonin Lépinay offer a lively introduction to the work of the forgotten genius of nineteenth-century social thought. Tarde’s solution was in total contradiction to the dominant views of his time: to quantify the connections between people and goods, you need to grasp “passionate interests.” In Tarde’s view, capitalism is not a system of cold calculations—rather it is a constant amplification in the intensity and reach of passions. In a stunning anticipation of contemporary economic anthropology, Tarde’s work defines an alternative path beyond the two illusions responsible for so much modern misery: the adepts of the Invisible Hand and the devotees of the Visible Hand will learn how to escape the sterility of their fight and recognize the originality of a thinker for whom everything is intersubjective, hence quantifiable.
At a time when the regulation of financial markets is the subject of heated debate, Latour and Lépinay provide a valuable historical perspective on the fundamental nature of capitalism.
“Culture”and Culture | Traditional Knowledge and Intellectual Rights
Brazilian anthropologist Manuela Carneiro da Cunha examines here the complex meaning—and anthropological implications—of the word “culture” for indigenous peoples. Caneiro da Cunha explores the contradictions inherent in the interface between Western and traditional understandings of knowledge and intellectual property rights.
Distinguishing culture from “culture,” the latter being a reflexive awareness of one’s culture, Carneiro da Cunha then poses questions such as: What are the cognitive and pragmatic consequences when “culture” and culture coexist? She shows how the word “culture,” as used in the anthropological sense, is employed by indigenous people to distinguish the different interpretations and avoid contradictions. “Culture” and Culture offers a concise and innovative anthropological study of a crucial issue faced by indigenous peoples the world over.
The Western Illusion of Human Nature
Reflecting the decline in college courses on Western Civilization, Marshall Sahlins aims to accelerate the trend by reducing “Western Civ” to about two hours. He cites Nietzsche to the effect that deep issues are like cold baths; one should get into and out of them as quickly as possible. The deep issue here is the ancient Western specter of a presocial and antisocial human nature: a supposedly innate self-interest that is represented in our native folklore as the basis or nemesis of cultural order. Yet these Western notions of nature and culture ignore the one truly universal character of human sociality: namely, symbolically constructed kinship relations. Kinsmen are members of one another: they live each other’s lives and die each other’s deaths. But where the existence of the other is thus incorporated in the being of the self, neither interest, nor agency or even experience is an individual fact, let alone an egoistic disposition. “Sorry, beg your pardon,” Sahlins concludes, Western society has been built on a perverse and mistaken idea of human nature.
Neo-Liberal Genetics | The Myths and Moral Tales of Evolutionary Psychology
Evolutionary psychology claims to be the authoritative science of “human nature.” Its chief architects, including Stephen Pinker and David Buss, have managed to reach well beyond the ivory tower to win large audiences and influence public discourse. But do the answers that evolutionary psychologists provide about language, sex, and social relations add up? Susan McKinnon thinks not.
Far from being an account of evolution and social relations that has historical and cross-cultural validity, evolutionary psychology is a stunning example of a “science” that twists evolutionary genetics into a myth of human origins. As McKinnon shows, that myth is shaped by neo-liberal economic values and relies on ethnocentric understandings of sex, gender, kinship, and social relations. She also explores the implications for public policy of the moral tales that are told by evolutionary psychologists in the guise of “scientific” inquiry. Drawing widely from the anthropological record, Neo-Liberal Genetics offers a sustained and accessible critique of the myths of human nature fabricated by evolutionary psychologists.
Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology
Everywhere anarchism is on the upswing as a political philosophy—everywhere, that is, except the academy. Anarchists repeatedly appeal to anthropologists for ideas about how society might be reorganized on a more egalitarian, less alienating basis. Anthropologists, terrified of being accused of romanticism, respond with silence . . . . But what if they didn’t?
This pamphlet ponders what that response would be, and explores the implications of linking anthropology to anarchism. Here, David Graeber invites readers to imagine this discipline that currently only exists in the realm of possibility: anarchist anthropology.
The Root of Roots | Or, How Afro-American Anthropology Got its Start
Anthropological iconoclasts Richard and Sally Price have spent the last two decades not only creating an unparalleled oeuvre of scholarship in several areas of anthropology but also unabashedly calling foul on any untenable or patronizing concepts of “us” and “them,” “primitive” and “modern,” that cross their path. For this pamphlet, they crack the yellowing diaries kept by Melville and Frances Herskovits on their famous 1920s expedition deep into the South American jungle, exposing—with their trademark combination of deadpan wit and theoretical rigor—the origins of the field that has come to be known as African diaspora studies.
On the Edges of Anthropology | Interviews
Since the publication of Person and Myth: Maurice Leenhardt in the Melanesian World, James Clifford has become one of anthropology’s most important interlocutors. A key figure in theory and criticism, he has written seminal essays on topics ranging from art and identity to museum studies and fieldwork. This collection of interviews captures Clifford in exchanges with his critics in Brazil, Hawaii, Japan, the United Kingdom, and Portugal, offering a set of provocative reflections on an intellectual career in transformation.
The Secret Sins of Economics
Deirdre McCloskey’s work in economics always calls into question its reputation as “the dismal science.” She writes with passion and an unusually wide scope, drawing on literature and intellectual history in exciting, if unorthodox, ways. In this pamphlet, McCloskey reveals what she sees as the secret sins of economics (there are two) that no one will discuss. In her view, these sins “cripple” economics as a “scientific enterprise.”
Waiting for Foucault, Still
First devised as after-dinner entertainment at a decennial meeting of the Association of Social Anthropologists in Great Britain, and first published by Prickly Pear Press in 1993, this expanded edition of Waiting for Foucault represents some of the brightest anthropological satire—mixed in with some of the most serious intellectual issues in the human sciences. Whether he’s summing up the state of the discipline (“Some things are better left un-Said”) or ruminating on the ancients, Sahlins delivers a strong mixture of wit and wisdom.
The Child in the City | A Case Study in Experimental Anthropology
“The only way I can be Indian now, the only way I can be Cherokee now, is nostalgically. I can tell the stories but anyone can tell any stories now, stories don’t have the weight that we need them to have, they’re not the proper baggage.”
Conversations with Anthropological Film-Makers: David MacDougall
“There’s a close parallel between the notion of the anthropologist as hero, discovering a foreign culture and bringing it back home, and the film-maker doing the same thing and bringing back evidence of it on film.”
Conversations with Anthropological Film-Makers: Melissa Llewelyn-Davies
“The wonderful thing about film, if you use the medium properly, is that the image is richer and overwhelms your simple message and commentary.”