What might become of anthropology if it were to suspend its sometime claims to be a social science? What if it were to turn instead to exploring its affinities with art and literature as a mode of engaged creative practice carried forward in a world heterogeneously composed of humans and other than humans? Stuart McLean claims that anthropology stands to learn most from art and literature not as “evidence” to support explanations based on an appeal to social context or history but as modes of engagement with the materiality of expressive media—including language—that always retain the capacity to disrupt or exceed the human projects enacted through them. At once comparative in scope and ethnographically informed, Fictionalizing Anthropology draws on an eclectic range of sources, including ancient Mesopotamian myth, Norse saga literature, Hesiod, Lucretius, Joyce, Artaud, and Lispector, as well as film, multimedia, and performance art, along with the concept of “fabulation” (the making of fictions capable of intervening in and transforming reality) developed in the writings of Bergson and Deleuze. Sharing with proponents of anthropology’s recent “ontological turn,” McLean insists that experiments with language and form are a performative means of exploring alternative possibilities of collective existence, new ways of being human and other than human, and that such experiments must therefore be indispensable to anthropology’s engagement with the contemporary world.

The SAGE Handbook of Cultural Anthropology is the first instalment of The SAGE Handbook of the Social Sciences series and encompasses major specialities as well as key interdisciplinary themes relevant to the field. Globally, societies are facing major upheaval and change, and the social sciences are fundamental to the analysis of these issues, as well as the development of strategies for addressing them. This handbook provides a rich overview of the discipline and has a future focus whilst using international theories and examples throughout. The SAGE Handbook of Cultural Anthropology is an essential resource for social scientists globally and contains a rich body of chapters on all major topics relevant to the field, whilst also presenting a possible road map for the future of the field. Part 1: Foundations Part 2: Focal Areas Part 3: Urgent Issues Part 4: Short Essays: Contemporary Critical Dynamics

This collection pushes migration and "the minor" to the fore of literary anthropology. What happens when authors who thematize their “minority” background articulate notions of belonging, self, and society in literature? The contributors use “interface ethnography” and “fieldwork on foot” to analyze a broad selection of literature and processes of dialogic engagement. The chapters discuss German-speaking Herta Müller’s perpetual minority status in Romania; Bengali-Scottish Bashabi Fraser and the potentiality of poetry; vagrant pastoralism and “heritagization” in Puglia, Italy; the self-representation of European Muslims post 9/11 in Zeshan Shakar’s acclaimed Norwegian novel; the autobiographical narratives of Loveleen Rihel Brenna and the artist collective Queendom in Norway; the “immigrant” as a permanent guest in Spanish-language children’s literature; and Slovenian roots-searching in Argentina. This anthology examines the generative and transformative potentials of storytelling, while illustrating that literary anthropology is well equipped to examine the multiple contexts that literature engages. Chapter 4 of this book is available open access under a CC By 4.0 license at link.springer.com.

In a time of intense uncertainty, social strife, and ecological upheaval, what does it take to envision the world as it yet may be? The field of anthropology, Anand Pandian argues, has resources essential for this critical and imaginative task. Anthropology is no stranger to injustice and exploitation. Still, its methods can reveal unseen dimensions of the world at hand and radical experience as the seed of a humanity yet to come. A Possible Anthropology is an ethnography of anthropologists at work: canonical figures like Bronislaw Malinowski and Claude Lévi-Strauss, ethnographic storytellers like Zora Neale Hurston and Ursula K. Le Guin, contemporary scholars like Jane Guyer and Michael Jackson, and artists and indigenous activists inspired by the field. In their company, Pandian explores the moral and political horizons of anthropological inquiry, the creative and transformative potential of an experimental practice.

In Writing Anthropology, fifty-two anthropologists reflect on scholarly writing as both craft and commitment. These short essays cover a wide range of territory, from ethnography, genre, and the politics of writing to affect, storytelling, authorship, and scholarly responsibility. Anthropological writing is more than just communicating findings: anthropologists write to tell stories that matter, to be accountable to the communities in which they do their research, and to share new insights about the world in ways that might change it for the better. The contributors offer insights into the beauty and the function of language and the joys and pains of writing while giving encouragement to stay at it—to keep writing as the most important way to not only improve one’s writing but to also honor the stories and lessons learned through research. Throughout, they share new thoughts, prompts, and agitations for writing that will stimulate conversations that cut across the humanities. Contributors. Whitney Battle-Baptiste, Jane Eva Baxter, Ruth Behar, Adia Benton, Lauren Berlant, Robin M. Bernstein, Sarah Besky, Catherine Besteman, Yarimar Bonilla, Kevin Carrico, C. Anne Claus, Sienna R. Craig, Zoë Crossland, Lara Deeb, K. Drybread, Jessica Marie Falcone, Kim Fortun, Kristen R. Ghodsee, Daniel M. Goldstein, Donna M. Goldstein, Sara L. Gonzalez, Ghassan Hage, Carla Jones, Ieva Jusionyte, Alan Kaiser, Barak Kalir, Michael Lambek, Carole McGranahan, Stuart McLean, Lisa Sang Mi Min, Mary Murrell, Kirin Narayan, Chelsi West Ohueri, Anand Pandian, Uzma Z. Rizvi, Noel B. Salazar, Bhrigupati Singh, Matt Sponheimer, Kathleen Stewart, Ann Laura Stoler, Paul Stoller, Nomi Stone, Paul Tapsell, Katerina Teaiwa, Marnie Jane Thomson, Gina Athena Ulysse, Roxanne Varzi, Sita Venkateswar, Maria D. Vesperi, Sasha Su-Ling Welland, Bianca C. Williams, Jessica Winegar

In recent years, crucial questions have been raised about anthropology as a discipline, such as whether ethnography is central to the subject, and how imagination, reality and truth are joined in anthropological enterprises. These interventions have impacted anthropologists and scholars at large. This volume contributes to the debate about the interrelationships between ethnography and anthropology and takes it to a new plane. Six anthropologists with field experience in Egypt, Greece, India, Laos, Mauritius, Thailand and Switzerland critically discuss these propositions in order to renew anthropology for the future. The volume concludes with an Afterword from Tim Ingold.

This book focuses on the example of surrogate motherhood to explore the interplay between new reproductive technologies and new ethnographic writing technologies. It seeks to interrogate the potential of fictional multimodality in ethnography and to illuminate the generative possibilities of digital artefacts in anthropological research. It also makes a case for the tailor-made character of ethnographic writing in the digital era, arguing that research quests and representational modalities can be paired together to develop unique narrative forms, corresponding to each particular topic’s traits and analytical affordances. Focusing on the intersections of assisted reproduction technologies and digitally mediated writing, this study casts light upon the value of the affective, the fictional and the ‘real’ in the anthropological research and writing of relatedness. Analyzing the situated knowledge of ethnographers and research interlocutors, it experiments with multimodal storytelling and revisits the century-long debate on the affinity between an object of study and the possibilities for its representation. As the first attempt to bring together digital anthropology, fiction writing and the ethnography of surrogacy, this book fuses the genealogy of feminist critique on the orthodox, phallocentric, and heteronormative aspects of academic discourse with the input of digital humanities vis-à-vis troubling the conventional formal properties of scholarly writing.

How do we teach analysis in anthropology and other field-based sciences? How can we engage analytically and interrogatively with philosophical ideas and concepts in our fieldwork? And how can students learn to engage critical ideas from philosophy to better understand the worlds they study? Philosophy on Fieldwork provides "show-don’t-tell" answers to these questions. In twenty-six "master class" chapters, philosophy meets anthropological critique as leading anthropologists introduce the thinking of one foundational philosopher – from a variety of Western traditions and beyond – and apply this critically to an ethnographic case. Nils Bubandt, Thomas Schwarz Wentzer and the contributors to this volume reveal how the encounter between philosophy and fieldwork is fertile ground for analytical insight to emerge. Equally, the philosophical concepts employed are critically explored for their potential to be thought "otherwise" through their frictional encounter with the worlds in the field, allowing non-Western and non-elite life experience and ontologies to "speak back" to both anthropology and philosophy. This is a unique and concrete guidebook to social analysis. It answers the critical need for a "how-to" textbook in fieldwork-based analysis as each chapter demonstrates how the ideas of a specific philosopher can be interrogatively applied to a concrete analytical case study. The straightforward pedagogy of Philosophy on Fieldwork makes this an accessible volume and a must-read for both students and seasoned fieldworkers interested in exploring the contentious middle ground between philosophy and anthropology.

Vertiginous Life provides a theory of the intense temporal disorientation brought about by life in crisis. In the whirlpool of unforeseen social change, people experience confusion as to where and when they belong on timelines of previously unquestioned pasts and futures. Through individual stories from crisis Greece, this book explores the everyday affects of vertigo: nausea, dizziness, breathlessness, the sense of falling, and unknowingness of Self. Being lost in time, caught in the spin-cycle of crisis, people reflect on belonging to modern Europe, neoliberal promises of accumulation, defeated futures, and the existential dilemmas of life held captive in the uncanny elsewhen.

If we see that our contemporary condition is one of war and widely diffused complexity, how do we understand our most basic ethical motivations? What might be the aims of our political activity? A War on People takes up these questions and offers a glimpse of a possible alternative future in this ethnographically and theoretically rich examination of the activity of some unlikely political actors: users of heroin and crack cocaine, both active and former. The result is a groundbreaking book on how anti–drug war political activity offers transformative processes that are termed worldbuilding and enacts nonnormative, open, and relationally inclusive alternatives to such key concepts as community, freedom, and care.