Bücher der Reihe Ethnography, Theory, Experiment

Built around key events, from the eviction of a self-managed social centre in Copenhagen in 2007 to the Climate Summit protests in 2009, this book contributes to anthropological literature on contemporary Euro-American politics foreshadowing recent waves of public dissent. Stine Krijer explores political forms among left radical and anarchist activists in Northern Europe focusing on how forms of action engender time. Drawing on anthropological literature from both Scandinavia and the Amazon, this ethnography recasts theoretical concerns about body politics, political intentionality, aesthetics, and time.

Our political age is characterized by forms of description as 'big' as the world itself: talk of 'public knowledge' and 'public goods,' 'the commons' or 'global justice' create an exigency for modes of governance that leave little room for smallness itself. Rather than question the politics of adjudication between the big and the small, this book inquires instead into the cultural epistemology fueling the aggrandizement and miniaturization of description itself. Incorporating analytical frameworks from science studies, ethnography, and political and economic theory, this book charts an itinerary for an internal anthropology of theorizing. It suggests that many of the effects that social theory uses today to produce insights are the legacy of baroque epistemological tricks. In particular, the book undertakes its own trompe l'oeil as it places description at perpendicular angles to emerging forms of global public knowledge. The aesthetic 'trap' of the trompe l'oeil aims to capture knowledge, for only when knowledge is captured can it be properly released.

Violent Becomings sheds light on violence in the periods of colonial and postcolonial state formation by conceptualizing the state not as the bureaucratically ordered polity of the nation-state, but as a continuously evolving and violently challenged mode of social ordering.

Exploring the notion of masculinity among the Bugkalot, Cutting Cosmos is not only an experimental, anthropological study of the paradoxes around which Bugkalot society revolves, but also a reflection on anthropological theory and writing.

Co-authored by three anthropologists with long-term expertise studying Pentecostalism in Africa and Melanesia, and in recognition of the increasingly non-territorial nature of religion in the contemporary world, Going to Pentecost offers an experimental approach to the study of global religious movements, and Pentecostalism in particular.

The Children of Gregoria portrays a struggling Mexico, told through the story of the Rosales family. This book highlights their voices and allows them to tell their own stories in an accessible, literary manner without prejudice, persecution or judgment.

In one form or another, water participates in the making and unmaking of people's lives, practices, and stories. Contributors analyse the union of water and social lives, thereby challenging anthropologists to foreground the mutable character of their subjects and responsibly engage with the generative role of cultural analysis.

In one form or another, water participates in the making and unmaking of people's lives, practices, and stories. Contributors analyse the union of water and social lives, thereby challenging anthropologists to foreground the mutable character of their subjects and responsibly engage with the generative role of cultural analysis.

Focusing on the major ceremonial cycle of the Enawene-nawe people, Vital Diplomacy sheds new light on classic Amazonian themes.

Loving cows, then killing them. The relation with cattle in Mursi country is shaped by the dichotomy between the value given to it during life and the death imposed upon it. The killing of cattle may be brief and inflicted with few words, but it is preceded by a series of intense aesthetic practices, such as body painting and adornments, colour poetics, poems and oratory art. This book investigates the link between the nurturing and killing of cattle with Mursi daily life and finds that these rituals cut across pastoralism, social organisation and politics in forming the very fabric of Mursi society.