In this powerful new work, Simone Toji reconsiders ethnography as a form of appreciation of the contradictions inherent in the making of life itself. Recovering Bronislaw Malinowski's idea of the "imponderabilia of actual life" as an inspiring ethnog...

Fakes, forgery, counterfeits, hoaxes, frauds, knock-offs – such terms speak, ostensibly, to the inverse of truth or the obverse of authenticity and sincerity. Do all cultures equally spend an incredible amount of energy and labor on detecting differe...

"The Mafia? What is the Mafia? Something you eat? Something you drink? I don't know the Mafia. I have never seen it". So said Mommo Piromalli, a Ndrangheta crime boss, to a journalist in the seventies. In "Mafiacraft", Deborah Puccio-Den explores the...

This collection brings together leading social anthropologists, historians, philosophers of science and mathematics, and researchers in artificial intelligence to discuss the ontological presuppositions used in indigenous, Eastern, and Western societ...

From 1971 to 1972, William E. Mitchell undertook fieldwork on suffering and healing among the Lujere of Papua New Guinea's Upper Sepik River Basin. At a time when it was not yet common to make colonial agencies a subject of anthropological study, Mit...

This collection highlights a key metaphor in contemporary discourse about economy and society. The contributors explore how references to reality and the real economy are linked both to the utopias of collective well-being, supported by real monies a...

In 1931 Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote his famous "Remarks on Frazer's "Golden Bough", published posthumously in 1967. At that time, anthropology and philosophy were in close contact – continental thinkers drew heavily on anthropology's theoretical terms,...

Missionary, linguist, and ethnographer Emile Petitot (1838-1916) was known for his work in Canada's Northwest Territories and as the author of a corpus including the first grammar of an Amerindian language and an astonishing body of transcribed ritua...

Across the Western world, full membership of society is established through entitlements to space and formalized in the institutions of property and citizenship. Those without such entitlements are deemed less than fully human as they struggle to fin...

In this long-awaited sequel to "The Invention of Culture", Roy Wagner tackles the logic and motives that underlie cultural invention. Could there be a single, logical factor that makes the invention of the distinction between self and other possible,...