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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.

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.

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.

“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.