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.
The Know-Nothing Campaign Against Higher Learning
The second Trump administration has committed itself to upending the knowledge systems and deliberative institutions that have been essential to modern democracy, with the American university — site of scientific research and liberal education — a primary target. In The Know-Nothing Campaign Against Higher Learning, literary and film critic James Chandler spotlights an American tradition of such hostility to intellectual life, especially the nativist movement of the 1850s that persecuted Catholic immigrants from Ireland and Germany. Ironically, Steve Bannon, the self-proclaimed “Know-Nothing vulgarian” who long ago recruited candidate Trump to his anti-intellectual crusade, is himself the great-grandson of an Irish immigrant who would have faced Know-Nothing backlash in that era.
Such dark ironies define our moment, Chandler argues, and they call out not only for intellectual critique but also for satire. Yet in the midst of the MAGA campaign’s calamitous effects on American public discourse, even satire must confront the “kayfabe” practices imported by Trump from professional wrestling, which mix illusion and reality to turn political life into a “spectacle without thought.” Drawing widely on cultural critics from Jonathan Swift and Alexis de Tocqueville to Roland Barthes, Chandler’s pamphlet offers an elegant and bracing account of the MAGA campaign against higher learning and its transformative effects on criticism and democracy itself.
The Treadmill Affect | Marxism, Subjectivity, and the Present
A critical synthesis of the work of Lauren Berlant, Moishe Postone, and Michael Silverstein. The Treadmill Affect draws upon the work of three University of Chicago professors, each a former program director at the Center for Transcultural Studies. Through this intellectual synthesis, Benjamin Lee demonstrates the critical possibilities of uniting a revived linguistic turn with Marxist accounts of affect and subjectivity, adding new dimensions to the “treadmill” affective structure of cruel optimism.
Last Words | Large Language Models and the AI Apocalypse
A critical exegesis of large language models, like ChatGPT, and recent advances in artificial intelligence. This slim text lays out a critical genealogy of the highly contested relation between human values, machinic parameters, and corporate powers. It also provides a theory of the reasons for, and effects of, our current social and technological horizon.
Grievance: In Fragments
Grievance is an American mode of being that can be traced back to the Declaration of Independence, that is at the root of the Civil War and accounts in large measure for the failure of Reconstruction, that runs through the Civil Rights moment, and that showed itself again in the events of January 6, 2021. Grievance, in America, always concatenates to racism and evinces itself most violently in those moments when white supremacy, fallaciously, presents itself as being under attack. This book explores this elemental yet destructive thread of the American character.
Subaltern Studies 2.0
With Essays by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Marisol de la Cadena, Thom Van Dooren, and Suraj Yengde
State and Capital reign over the Age of Sorrow. We face inequality, pandemics, ethnocide, climate crisis, and mass extinction. Our desire for security and power governs us as State. Our desire for possessions governs us as Capital. Our desires imprison and rule us beings as Unbeing. Yet, from Nagaland to New Zealand, Bhutan to Bolivia, a second wave of anti-colonial revolutions has begun. Arising from assemblies of humans and other-than-humans, these revolutions replace possessive individualism with non-exploitative interdependence. Naga elders, Bhutanese herders and other indigenous communities, feminists, poets, seers, yaks, cranes, vultures, and fungi haunt this pamphlet. The original Subaltern Studies narrated how Indian peasant communities destroyed the British empire. Subaltern Studies 2.0 prophesies the multi-being demos and liberates Being from Unbeing. Re-kin, Re-nomad, Re-animate, Re-wild! The Animist Revolution has come.
Can a Liberal be a Chief? Can a Chief be a Liberal? | Some Thoughts on an Unfinished Business of Colonialism
Across Africa, it is not unusual for proponents of liberal democracy and modernization to make room for some aspects of indigenous culture, such as the use of a chief as a political figure. Yet for Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, no such accommodation should be made. Chiefs, he argues, in this thought-provoking and wide-ranging pamphlet, cannot be liberals—and liberals cannot be chiefs. If we fail to recognize this, we fail to acknowledge the metaphysical underpinnings of modern understandings of freedom and equality, as well as the ways in which African intellectuals can offer a distinctive take on the unfinished business of colonialism.
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 Jewish Question Again
Anti-Semitism is on the rise. How is this still possible? Once again, we are witness to a surge in right-wing authoritarianism, ethnonationalism, and white supremacism, and the racist, xenophobic, and misogynist violence they spread. Like historic newsreels brought back to life, renewed waves of refugees are turned away at borders, placed in cages, or washed up lifeless on the shore. Such striking similarities between present and past suggest that we are not done with the issues raised by the historical Jewish Question: that is, what is the place of “the Jew”—the minority, the relic, the rootless stranger, the racialized other, the exiled, the displaced, the immigrant, the diasporic? In The Jewish Question Again, leading scholars grapple with our inability to keep these struggles in the past and why we continue to repeat these atrocities. This book explores the haunting recurrence of the Jewish Question today and begs why we find ourselves here yet again.
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.
Making Kin Not Population | Reconceiving Generations
As the planet’s human numbers grow and environmental concerns proliferate, natural scientists, economists, and policy-makers are increasingly turning to new and old questions about families and kinship as matters of concern. From government programs designed to fight declining birth rates in Europe and East Asia, to controversial policies seeking to curb population growth in countries where birth rates remain high, to increasing income inequality transnationally, issues of reproduction introduce new and complicated moral and political quandaries.
Making Kin Not Population ends the silence on these issues with essays from leading anti-racist, ecologically-concerned, feminist scholars. Though not always in accord, these contributors provide bold analyses of complex issues of intimacy and kinship, from reproductive justice to environmental justice, and from human and nonhuman genocides to new practices for making families and kin. This timely work offers vital proposals for forging innovative personal and public connections in the contemporary world.
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.
Complicities | The People’s Republic of China in Global Capitalism
As the People’s Republic of China has grown in economic power, so too have concerns about what its sustained growth and expanding global influence might mean for the established global order. Explorations of this changing dynamic in daily reporting as well as most recent scholarship ignore the part played by forces emanating from the global capitalist system in the PRC’s failures as well as its successes.
China scholar Arif Dirlik reflects in Complicities on a wide range of concerns, from the Tiananmen Square tragedy to the spread of Confucius Institutes across more than four hundred campuses worldwide, including nearly one hundred in the United States. Eschewing popular stereotypes and simple explanations, Dirlik’s discussion stresses foreign complicity in encouraging the PRC’s imperial ambitions and disdain for human rights. Eager for economic gain, the United States, Europe, and other Western countries have been complicit in supporting the PRC’s authoritarian capitalism. Such support has been a key factor in nourishing the PRC’s hegemonic aspirations. Infatuation with the PRC’s incorporation in global capitalism has been important to Communist Party leaders’ ability to suppress all memory and mention of Tiananmen, and their continuing abuse of human rights. More recently, the PRC’s focus has migrated to “soft power” as a means of expanding global influence, with organizations like the Confucius Institutes exploiting foreign educational institutions to promote the political aims of the state.
Making Trouble | Surrealism and the Human Sciences
Surrealism was not merely an artistic movement to its adherents but an “instrument of knowledge,” an attempt to transform the way we see the world by unleashing the unconscious as a radical, new means of constructing reality. Born out of the crisis of civilization brought about by World War I, it presented a sustained challenge to scientific rationalism as a privileged mode of knowing. In certain ways, surrealism’s critique of white, Western civilization anticipated many later attempts at producing alternate non-Eurocentric epistemologies.
With Making Trouble, sociologist and cultural historian Derek Sayer explores what it might mean to take surrealism’s critique of civilization seriously. Drawing on a remarkable range of sources, Sayer first establishes surrealism as an important intellectual antecedent to the study of the human sciences today. He then makes a compelling and well-written argument for rethinking surrealism as a contemporary methodological resource for all those who still look to the human sciences not only as a way to interpret the world, but also to change it.
“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 Science of Myths and Vice Versa
We often assume that science and myth stand in opposition—with science providing empirically supported truths that replace the false ideas found in traditional mythologies. But the rhetoric of contemporary popular science and related genres tells a different story about what contemporary readers really want from science.
In The Science of Myths and Vice Versa, Gregory Schrempp offers four provocative vignettes that bring copious amounts of research on both traditional and modern mythologies to bear on the topic of science in contemporary popular culture. Schrempp shows how writers such as Malcolm Gladwell and Michael Pollan successfully fuse science and myth to offer compelling narratives about how we can improve our understanding of ourselves and our world. The most effective science writers, he finds, are those who make use of the themes and motifs of folklore to increase the appeal of their work.
Schrempp’s understanding of science and myth as operating not in opposition but in reciprocal relation offers an essential corrective to contemporary mischaracterizations.
Community of Scholars, Community of Teachers
Academics routinely engage with colleagues in the research community as a critical part of their work. But, although many researchers are also dedicated teachers, teaching tends to be seen as a private matter between a teacher and his or her students. But why shouldn’t faculty members feel a similar impulse to be aware of what their colleagues are doing in the area of teaching? What do we miss when the conversation, especially at major research universities, is focused almost exclusively on research?
In this revised and expanded collection of essays, Judith Shapiro, former president of Barnard College, issues an impassioned clarion call for a renewed focus on the role of community in teaching. When faculty members feel that they are not only a community of scholars, but also a community of teachers, teaching becomes more engaging for both students and teachers. Encouraging high-quality conversation about the pedagogical approaches that have proven most effective also puts the contributions of virtual, online communication into proper perspective and brings into clearer focus the advantages of a liberal arts education. With an argument that is controversial and sure to spark discussion and debate, Community of Scholars, Community of Teachers shows how higher education can become even more of a true community.
Data, Now Bigger and Better!
Data is too big to be left to the data analysts. Data: Now Bigger and Better! brings together researchers whose work is deeply informed by the conceptual frameworks of anthropology—frameworks that are comparative as well as field-based. From kinship to gifts, everything old becomes rich with new insight when the anthropological archive washes over “big data.” Bringing together anthropology’s classic debates and contemporary interventions, the book counters the future-oriented speculation so characteristic of discussions regarding big data. Drawing on the long-standing experience in industry contexts, the contributors also provide analytical provocations that can help reframe some of the most important shifts in technology and society in the first half of the twenty-first century.
Confucius Institutes | Academic Malware
In recent years, Confucius Institutes have sprung up on more than four hundred and fifty campuses worldwide, including nearly one hundred across the United States. At first glance, this seems like a benefit for everyone concerned. The colleges and universities receive considerable contributions from the Confucius Institutes’ head office in Beijing, including funds to cover the cost of set-up, the provision of Chinese-language instructors, and a cache of other resources. For their part, the Confucius Institutes are able to further their mission of spreading knowledge of Chinese language and culture.
But Marshall Sahlins argues that this seemingly innocuous arrangement conceals the more dubious mission of promoting the political influence of the Chinese government, as guided by the propaganda apparatus of the party-state. Drawing on reports in the media and conversations with those involved, Sahlins shows that the Confucius Institutes are a threat to the principles of academic freedom and integrity at the foundation of our system of higher education. Incidents of academic malpractice are disturbingly common, Sahlins shows. They range from virtually unnoticeable acts of self-censorship to the discouragement of visits from the Dalai Lama and publicly notorious cases like the scandal caused by the director-general of the Confucius Institutes at a recent meeting of the European Association for Chinese Studies when she had certain pages ripped out of the conference program and abstracts.
As prominent universities are persuaded by the promise of additional funding to allow Confucius Institutes on campus, they also legitimate them and thereby encourage the participation of other schools less able to resist Beijing’s inducements. But if these great institutions are to uphold the academic principles upon which they are founded, Sahlins convincingly argues that they must reverse this course, terminate their relations to the Confucius Institutes, and resume their obligation of living up to the idea of the university.