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Books in New Departures in Anthropology focus on emerging themes in social and cultural anthropology. With original perspectives and syntheses, authors introduce new areas of inquiry in anthropology, explore developments that cross disciplinary boundaries, and weigh in on current debates.

  • Editorial Boards: Jonathan Spencer, University of Edinburgh, Michael Lambek, University of Toronto and London School of Economics and Political Science

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20 results in New Departures in Anthropology

‘Unruly’ Children
  • Historical Fieldnotes and Learning Morality in a Taiwan Village
  • Jing Xu
  • Published online:
    31 October 2024
    Print publication:
    14 November 2024
  • How do we become moral persons? What about children's active learning in contrast to parenting? What can children teach us about knowledge-making more broadly? Answer these questions by delving into the groundbreaking ethnographic fieldwork conducted by anthropologists Arthur and Margery Wolf in a martial law era Taiwanese village (1958-60), marking the first-ever study of ethnic Han children. Jing Xu skillfully reinterprets the Wolfs' extensive fieldnotes, employing a unique blend of humanistic interpretation, natural language processing, and machine-learning techniques. Through a lens of social cognition, this book unravels the complexities of children's moral growth, exposing instances of disobedience, negotiation, and peer dynamics. Writing through and about fieldnotes, the author connects the two themes, learning morality and making ethnography, in light of social cognition, and invites all of us to take children seriously. This book is ideal for graduate and undergraduate students of anthropology and educational studies.

The Anthropology of Intensity
  • Language, Culture, and Environment
  • Paul Kockelman
  • Published online:
    05 May 2022
    Print publication:
    19 May 2022
  • What counts as too close for comfort? How can an entire room suddenly feel restless at the imminence of a yet unknown occurrence? And who decides whether or not we are already in an age of unliveable extremes? The anthropology of intensity studies how humans encounter and communicate the continuous and gradable features of social and environmental phenomena in everyday interactions. Focusing on the last twenty years of life in a Mayan village in the cloud forests of Guatemala, this book provides a natural history of intensity in exceedingly tense times, through a careful analysis of ethnographic and linguistic evidence. It uses intensity as a way to reframe Anthropology in the age of the Anthropocene, and rethinks classic work in the formal linguistic tradition from a culture-specific and context-sensitive stance. It is essential reading not only for anthropologists and linguists, but also for ecologically oriented readers, critical theorists, and environmental scientists.

Transhumanism
  • From Ancestors to Avatars
  • Jennifer Huberman
  • Published online:
    10 December 2020
    Print publication:
    17 December 2020
  • Transhumanists argue that science and technology will enable us to overcome our biological limitations, both mental and physical, and create a radically enhanced posthuman species and society. In this book, Jenny Huberman examines the values and visions animating the Transhumanist Movement in the United States today, whilst at the same time using the study of transhumanism as a way to introduce a new generation of students to the discipline of cultural anthropology. She explores transhumanist conceptions of revitalization, immortality, the good life, the self, the body, kinship and economy, and compares them to the belief systems of human beings living in other times and places. Providing lively ethnographic insights into a fascinating contemporary socio-cultural movement, this book will be invaluable to students and researchers in anthropology, as well as anyone interested in the phenomenon of transhumanism.

An Anthropology of Deep Time
  • Geological Temporality and Social Life
  • Richard D. G. Irvine
  • Published online:
    04 May 2020
    Print publication:
    28 May 2020
  • In the face of debates about the Anthropocene - a geological epoch of our own making - and contemporary concerns about ecological crisis and the Sixth Mass Extinction, it is more important than ever to locate the timeframe of human activity within the deep time of planetary history. This path-breaking book is a timely critical review of the anthropology of time, exploring our human relationship with the timescale of geological formation. Richard D. G. Irvine shows how the time-horizons of social life are a matter of crucial concern, and lays bare the ways in which human activity becomes severed from the long-term geological and ecological rhythms on which it depends.

Economic Life in the Real World
  • Logic, Emotion and Ethics
  • Charles Stafford
  • Published online:
    13 December 2019
    Print publication:
    02 January 2020
  • This clearly written and engaging book brings together anthropology, psychology and economics to show how these three human science disciplines address fundamental questions related to the psychology of economic life in human societies - questions that matter for people from every society and every background. Based around vivid examples drawn from field research in China and Taiwan, the author encourages anthropologists to take the psychological dimensions of economic life more seriously, but also invites psychologists and economists to pay much more attention than they currently do to cultural and historical variables. In the end, this intrinsically radical book challenges us to step away from disciplinary assumptions and to reflect more deeply on what really matters to us in our collective social and economic life.

The Anthropology of the Future
  • Rebecca Bryant, Daniel M. Knight
  • Published online:
    18 March 2019
    Print publication:
    28 March 2019
  • Study of the future is an important new field in anthropology. Building on a philosophical tradition running from Aristotle through Heidegger to Schatzki, this book presents the concept of 'orientations' as a way to study everyday life. It analyses six main orientations - anticipation, expectation, speculation, potentiality, hope, and destiny - which represent different ways in which the future may affect our present. While orientations entail planning towards and imagining the future, they also often involve the collapse or exhaustion of those efforts: moments where hope may turn to apathy, frustrated planning to disillusion, and imagination to fatigue. By examining these orientations at different points, the authors argue for an anthropology that takes fuller account of the teleologies of action.

Emotional Worlds
  • Beyond an Anthropology of Emotion
  • Andrew Beatty
  • Published online:
    14 January 2019
    Print publication:
    07 February 2019
  • Are emotions human universals? Is the concept of emotion an invention of Western tradition? If people in other cultures live radically different emotional lives how can we ever understand them? Using vivid, often dramatic, examples from around the world, and in dialogue with current work in psychology and philosophy, Andrew Beatty develops an anthropological perspective on the affective life, showing how emotions colour experience and transform situations; how, in turn, they are shaped by culture and history. In stark contrast with accounts that depend on lab simulations, interviews, and documentary reconstruction, he takes the reader into unfamiliar cultural worlds through a 'narrative' approach to emotions in naturalistic settings, showing how emotions tell a story and belong to larger stories. Combining richly detailed reporting with a careful critique of alternative approaches, he argues for an intimate grasp of local realities that restores the heartbeat to ethnography.

Comparison in Anthropology
  • The Impossible Method
  • Matei Candea
  • Published online:
    12 November 2018
    Print publication:
    15 November 2018
  • Why and how do social and cultural anthropologists make comparisons? What problems do they encounter in doing so, and how might these be resolved? What, if anything, makes one comparison better than another? This book answers these questions by exploring the many ways in which, from the nineteenth century to the present day, comparative methods have been conceptualised and re-invented, praised and rejected, multiplied and unified. Anthropologists today use comparisons to describe and to explain, to generalise and to challenge generalisations, to critique and to create new concepts. In this multiplicity of often contradictory aims lie both the key challenge of anthropological comparison, and also its key strength. Matei Candea maps a path through that entangled conversation, providing a ground-up re-assessment of the key conceptual issues at the heart of any form of anthropological comparison, whilst creating a bold charter for reconsidering the value of comparison in anthropology and beyond.

The Concept of Action
  • N. J. Enfield, Jack Sidnell
  • Published online:
    29 September 2017
    Print publication:
    12 October 2017
  • When people do things with words, how do we know what they are doing? Many scholars have assumed a category of things called actions: 'requests', 'proposals', 'complaints', 'excuses'. The idea is both convenient and intuitive, but as this book argues, it is a spurious concept of action. In interaction, a person's primary task is to decide how to respond, not to label what someone just did. The labeling of actions is a meta-level process, appropriate only when we wish to draw attention to others' behaviors in order to quiz, sanction, praise, blame, or otherwise hold them to account. This book develops a new account of action grounded in certain fundamental ideas about the nature of human sociality: that social conduct is naturally interpreted as purposeful; that human behavior is shaped under a tyranny of social accountability; and that language is our central resource for social action and reaction.

The Ontological Turn
  • An Anthropological Exposition
  • Martin Holbraad, Morten Axel Pedersen
  • Published online:
    06 April 2017
    Print publication:
    10 March 2017
  • A new and often controversial theoretical orientation that resonates strongly with wider developments in contemporary philosophy and social theory, the so-called 'ontological turn' is receiving a great deal of attention in anthropology and cognate disciplines at present. This book provides the first anthropological exposition of this recent intellectual development. It traces the roots of the ontological turn in the history of anthropology and elucidates its emergence as a distinct theoretical orientation over the past few decades, showing how it has emerged in the work of Roy Wagner, Marilyn Strathern and Viveiros de Castro, as well a number of younger scholars. Distinguishing this trajectory of thinking from related attempts to put questions of ontology at the heart of anthropological research, the book articulates critically the key methodological and theoretical tenets of the ontological turn, its prime epistemological and political implications, and locates it in the broader intellectual landscape of contemporary social theory.

Anthropology and Economy
  • Stephen Gudeman
  • Published online:
    18 December 2015
    Print publication:
    05 January 2016
  • Comparative and critical, Anthropology and Economy offers a uniquely cross-cultural view of economy. Using examples from market and non-market situations, the book shows how economies are built on five increasingly abstract spheres, from the house to community, commerce, finance, and meta-finance. Across these spheres, economy incorporates a tension between self-interested rationality and the mutuality of social relationships. Even when rational processes predominate, as in markets, economies rely on sociability and ritual to operate, whether as cronyism, pleas to divinities or the magical persuasions of advertising. Drawing on data and concepts from anthropology and economics, the book addresses wealth inequality, resource depletion, and environmental devastation especially in capitalism, providing an understanding of their persistence and ideas for controlling them. Given the recent financial crash, Gudeman offers a different understanding of the crisis and suggestions for achieving greater economic stability.

The Subject of Virtue
  • An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom
  • James Laidlaw
  • Published online:
    05 June 2014
    Print publication:
    24 October 2013
  • The anthropology of ethics has become an important and fast-growing field in recent years. This book argues that it represents not just a new subfield within anthropology but a conceptual renewal of the discipline as a whole, enabling it to take account of a major dimension of human conduct which social theory has so far failed adequately to address. An ideal introduction for students and researchers in anthropology and related human sciences.Shows how ethical concepts such as virtue, character, freedom and responsibility may be incorporated into anthropological analysisSurveys the history of anthropology's engagement with morality Examines the relevance for anthropology of two major philosophical approaches to moral life.

A New Anthropology of Islam
  • John R. Bowen
  • Published online:
    05 December 2012
    Print publication:
    02 August 2012
  • In this powerful, but accessible new study, John Bowen draws on a full range of work in social anthropology to present Islam in ways that emphasise its constitutive practices, from praying and learning to judging and political organising. Starting at the heart of Islam - revelation and learning in Arabic lands - Bowen shows how Muslims have adapted Islamic texts and traditions to ideas and conditions in the societies in which they live. Returning to key case studies in Asia, Africa and Western Europe, to explore each major domain of Islamic religious and social life, Bowen also considers the theoretical advances in social anthropology that have come out of the study of Islam. A New Anthropology of Islam is essential reading for all those interested in the study of Islam and for those following new developments in the discipline of anthropology.

Anthropology and the Cognitive Challenge
  • Maurice Bloch
  • Published online:
    05 August 2012
    Print publication:
    28 June 2012
  • This provocative new study one of the world's most distinguished anthropologists proposes that an understanding of cognitive science enriches, rather than threatens, the work of social scientists. Maurice Bloch argues for a naturalist approach to social and cultural anthropology, introducing developments in cognitive sciences such as psychology and neurology and exploring the relevance of these developments for central anthropological concerns: the person or the self, cosmology, kinship, memory and globalisation. Opening with an exploration of the history of anthropology, Bloch shows why and how naturalist approaches were abandoned and argues that these once valid reasons are no longer relevant. Bloch then shows how such subjects as the self, memory and the conceptualisation of time benefit from being simultaneously approached with the tools of social and cognitive science. Anthropology and the Cognitive Challenge will stimulate fresh debate among scholars and students across a wide range of disciplines.

An Anthropology of Ethics
  • James D. Faubion
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    14 April 2011
  • Through an ambitious and critical revision of Michel Foucault's investigation of ethics, James Faubion develops an original program of empirical inquiry into the ethical domain. From an anthropological perspective, Faubion argues that Foucault's specification of the analytical parameters of this domain is the most productive point of departure in conceptualizing its distinctive features. He further argues that Foucault's framework is in need of substantial revision to be of genuinely anthropological scope. In making this revision, Faubion illustrates his program with two extended case studies: one of a Portuguese marquis and the other of a dual subject made up of the author and a millenarian prophetess. The result is a conceptual apparatus that is able to accommodate ethical pluralism and yield an account of the limits of ethical variation, providing a novel resolution of the problem of relativism that has haunted anthropological inquiry into ethics since its inception.

Public Justice and the Anthropology of Law
  • Ronald Niezen
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    21 October 2010
  • In this powerful, timely study Ronald Niezen examines the processes by which cultural concepts are conceived and collective rights are defended in international law. Niezen argues that cultivating support on behalf of those experiencing human rights violations often calls for strategic representations of injustice and suffering to distant audiences. The positive impulse behind public responses to political abuse can be found in the satisfaction of justice done. But the fact that oppressed peoples and their supporters from around the world are competing for public attention is actually a profound source of global difference, stemming from differential capacities to appeal to a remote, unknown public. Niezen's discussion of the impact of public opinion on law provides fresh insights into the importance of legally-constructed identity and the changing pathways through which it is being shaped - crucial issues for all those with an interest in anthropology, politics and human rights law.

After Kinship
  • Janet Carsten
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    24 November 2003
  • This innovative book takes a look at the anthropology of kinship and the comparative study of relatedness. Kinship has historically been central to the discipline of anthropology but what sort of future does it have? What is the impact of recent studies of reproductive technologies, of gender, and of the social construction of science in the West? What significance does public anxiety about the family, or new family forms in the West have for anthropology's analytic strategies? The study of kinship has rested on a distinction between the 'biological' and the 'social'. But recent technological developments have made this distinction no longer self-evident. What does this imply about the comparison of kinship institutions cross-culturally? Janet Carsten gives an approachable view of the past, present, and future of kinship in anthropology, which will be of interest not just to anthropologists but to social scientists generally.

Anthropology, Politics, and the State
  • Democracy and Violence in South Asia
  • Jonathan Spencer
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    19 July 2007
  • In recent years anthropology has rediscovered its interest in politics. Building on the findings of this research, this book, first published in 2007, analyses the relationship between culture and politics, with special attention to democracy, nationalism, the state and political violence. Beginning with scenes from an unruly early 1980s election campaign in Sri Lanka, it covers issues from rural policing in north India to slum housing in Delhi, presenting arguments about secularism and pluralism, and the ambiguous energies released by electoral democracy across the subcontinent. It ends by discussing feminist peace activists in Sri Lanka, struggling to sustain a window of shared humanity after two decades of war. Bringing together and linking the themes of democracy, identity and conflict, this important new study shows how anthropology can take a central role in understanding other people's politics, especially the issues that seem to have divided the world since 9/11.

The Anthropology of Texts, Persons and Publics
  • Karin Barber
  • Published online:
    23 December 2009
    Print publication:
    20 December 2007
  • What can texts - both written and oral - tell us about the societies that produce them? How are texts constituted in different cultures, and how do they shape societies and individuals? How can we understand the people who compose them? Drawing on examples from Africa and other countries, this original study sets out to answer these questions, by exploring textuality from a variety of angles. Topics covered include the importance of genre, the ways in which oral genres transcend the here-and-now, and the complex relationship between texts and the material world. Barber considers the ways in which personhood is evoked, both in oral poetry and in written diaries and letters, discusses the audience's role in creating the meaning of texts, and shows textual creativity to be a universal human capacity expressed in myriad forms. Engaging and thought-provoking, this book will be welcomed by anyone interested in anthropology, literature and cultural studies.

Witchcraft, Sorcery, Rumors and Gossip
  • Pamela J. Stewart, Andrew Strathern
  • Published online:
    20 November 2009
    Print publication:
    24 November 2003
  • Witchcraft, Sorcery, Rumors, and Gossip combines two classic topics in social anthropology in a new synthesis: the study of witchcraft and sorcery and the study of rumours and gossip. It shows how rumour and gossip are invariably important as catalysts for accusations of witchcraft and sorcery, and demonstrates the role of rumour and gossip in the genesis of social and political violence, as in the case of both peasant rebellions and witch-hunts. Examples supporting the argument are drawn from Africa, Europe, India, Papua New Guinea, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia. They include discussions of witchcraft trials in Essex, England in the seventeenth century, witch-hunts and vampire narratives in colonial and contemporary Africa, millenarian movements in New Guinea, the Indian Mutiny in nineteenth-century Uttar Pradesh, and rumours of construction sacrifice in Indonesia.