More from Our Catalog

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.

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.

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.

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.

Adapting the discontinuous and multi-tonal critical procedures of works like Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus and Laura Riding’s Anarchism Is Not Enough, Jerome McGann subjects current literary studies to a patacritical investigation. The investigation centers in the interpretation of a notorious modern riddle: “Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” Working by indirection and from multiple points of view, the book argues that aesthetics is always a science of exceptions, and that any given critical practice is also always an exception from itself. The book works from two assumptions: first, that the riddle of the dog conceals an allegory about book culture and is addressed to the academic custodians of book culture; and second, that any  explanation of the riddle is necessarily implicated in the problem posed by the riddle. It therefore remains to be seen—it is the reader’s part to decide—whether the book is a friend to man or—perhaps like the riddle of the dog—“too dark to read.”