Bücher der Reihe Lifeworlds: Knowledges, Politi

Exploring compliance from an anthropological perspective, this book offers a varied and international selection of chapters covering taxation, corporate governance, medicine, development, carbon offsetting, irregular migration and the building trade. Compliance emerges as more than the opposite of resistance: instead, it appears as a valuable heuristic approach for understanding collective life, as a means by which actors strive to accommodate themselves to others. This perspective transcends conventional distinctions between power and resistance, and offers to open up new avenues of anthropological enquiry.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a London high school, Individually Ourselves demonstrates how young people elaborate notions of individual personhood through their friendships, and pervasive peer ethics, shaped in and through relations of power and inequality. By examining the interplay between ourselves and others during such a formative time of life, the book addresses how individuality is produced in everyday life and how our interactions help create the person we become.