The Companion Species Manifesto | Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness
The Companion Species Manifesto is about the implosion of nature and culture in the joint lives of dogs and people, who are bonded in “significant otherness.” In all their historical complexity, Donna Haraway tells us, dogs matter. They are not just surrogates for theory, she says; they are not here just to think with. Neither are they just an alibi for other themes; dogs are fleshly material-semiotic presences in the body of technoscience. They are here to live with. Partners in the crime of human evolution, they are in the garden from the get-go, wily as Coyote. This pamphlet is Haraway’s answer to her own Cyborg Manifesto, where the slogan for living on the edge of global war has to be not just “cyborgs for earthly survival” but also, in a more doggish idiom, “shut up and train
Revolt of the Masscult
We live in an age of “popular culture”—another term, to some, for an organic mess of marketing strategies aimed at giving us the illusion of choice. From Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club to presidential politics, however, distinctions of taste are more accurately understood to be “blunt instruments of antidemocratic elitism.” So argues Chris Lehmann, in a discussion that ranges over the work of Edward Shils, Clement Greenberg, and Jonathan Franzen with equal ease. The resulting pamphlet is an impassioned plea for the rebirth of culture with content.
Talking Politics | The Substance of Style from Abe to “W”
If politics as practiced is talk, then how does a political figure—especially an American President—talk politics? If someone can be all style and no substance, is there any actual political substance to style? Talking Politics looks at the alpha and omega of presidential image, its highs—Lincoln at Gettysburg—and lows—“W” at any microphone—demystifying the spun mists of political “message” on which an institution like the American presidency has always depended.
New Consensus for Old | Cultural Studies from Left to Right
Thomas Frank has been sending wake-up calls to just about everyone within reach over the past decade, in venues from The Village Voice to Harper’s. His takes on labor politics, advertising, the virtues of the Midwest, and how un-cool you really are have won him a wide audience, and in this piece, Frank gives us a reading of cultural studies—viewed by some as an important new perspective in the academy, but by others as an unwieldy theoretical fad.
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.”
Against Bosses, Against Oligarchies | A Conversation with Richard Rorty
Nystrom and Puckett’s pamphlet gives us the most comprehensive picture available of Richard Rorty’s political views. This is Rorty being avuncular, cranky, and straightforward: his arguments on patriotism, the political left, and philosophy—as usual, unusual—are worth pondering. This pamphlet will appeal to all those interested in Rorty’s distinct brand of pragmatism and leftist politics in the United States.
War of the Worlds | What About Peace?
Bruno Latour is best known for his work in the cultural study of science. In this pamphlet he turns his attention to another worthy pursuit: the project of peace. As one might expect, Latour gives us a radically different picture of this project than Kant or the philosophes, asserting that the West has been in a constant state of war both with other cultures and its own—although unwittingly so. Read through the lens of his trademark take on “the modern,” his arguments are original, thoughtful, and, as usual, provocative.
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.”
On Becoming Authentic: An Interview with Jimmie Durham
“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.”
Miracle in Natal: Revolution by Ballot-Box
“It was a moment that was filled with wonder and grace, a time of dreams and wishes and miracles. After so much brutality…the spirit of the election emerged as something that transformed us all.”
The Relation
“…readers generate their own responses by everything brought to the reading — you don’t (ordinarily) read a book by writing it over again.”
Anthropology, the Intellectuals, and the Gulf War
“Intellectuals can no longer go straight to the public but must bow to the demands of the media if they are to reach a wider audience than their immediate academic circle.”
Redrawing the Map: Two African Journeys
“The genre of post-colonial travelogue demands a new geography — new points of origin, trajectories of meaning, enigmas of arrival…”
From Physics to Anthropology — and Back Again
“Boas and Rivers returned attention to their own culture. The return from the field to the metropolis revealed the fundamental political structures of their tradition in characteristic institutions of modern know-how: the museum, the hospital, the academy and the state.”
Anthropology and the Crisis of the Intellectuals
“Somehow, all of us must devise ways of inserting ourselves meaningfully into the most inclusive versions of human history.”