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Ways of Baloma and Two Lenins: Now Open Access!
Read further for other events and announcements
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Ways of Baloma
Rethinking magic and kinship from the Trobriands
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by Mark S. Mosko
518 pp. | 6x9 | $40.00 order hardcopy here (
http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/W/bo27544335.html)
or read the full text open access on the HAU Books Website (
https://haubooks.org/ways-of-baloma/)
"Welcome to the twenty-first century, Bronislaw Malinowski."
Roy Wagner
"This erudite and timely volume radically inverts much of the
anthropological canon by offering a reinterpretation of Trobriand society
that yields powerful new insights"
Sarah Franklin
Bronislaw Malinowski’s path-breaking research in the Trobriand Islands
shaped much of modern anthropology’s disciplinary paradigm. Yet many
conundrums remain. For example, Malinowski asserted that baloma spirits of
the dead were responsible for procreation but had limited influence on
their living descendants in magic and other matters, claims largely
unchallenged by subsequent field investigators, until now. Based on
extended fieldwork at Omarakana village—home of the Tabalu “Paramount
Chief”—Mark S. Mosko argues instead that these and virtually all contexts
of indigenous sociality are conceived as sacrificial reciprocities between
the mirror worlds that baloma and humans inhabit.
Informed by a synthesis of Strathern’s model of “dividual personhood” and
Lévy-Bruhl’s theory of “participation,” Mosko upends a century of
discussion and debate extending from Malinowski to anthropology’s other
leading thinkers. His account of the intimate interdependencies of humans
and spirits in the cosmic generation and coordination of “life” (momova)
and “death” (kaliga) strikes at the nexus of anthropology’s received
wisdom, and Ways of Baloma will inevitably lead practitioners and students
to reflect anew on the discipline’s multifold theories of personhood,
ritual agency, and sociality.
****
Praise for Ways of Baloma
"It may sound a little surprising to say that a detailed ethnographic
disquisition on such tried-and-tested subjects as “magic” and “kinship”
among one of the most thoroughly studied societies in our disciplinary
history is bound to raise some anthropological controversy. Ways of baloma
certainly will, though. And that is a good thing [...] Ways of baloma is
one of the most interesting stories ever told about Melanesia."
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, author of The relative native
"Would not the wizards of L’Année Sociologique be surprised to discover
that all of their favorite conceptual glosses like sacrifice, prestation,
ritual, and symbol could all be covered by Mosko’s single broad-scale
analogy? Welcome to the twenty-first century, Bronislaw Malinowski."
Roy Wagner, author of The invention of culture
"This erudite and timely volume radically inverts much of the
anthropological canon by offering a reinterpretation of Trobriand society
that yields powerful new insights into kinship, magic, procreation,
knowledge, representation and life itself. It is consequently an
ethnography which has implications far beyond anthropology through its bold
insistence that we acknowledge more fully the inextricability of any form
of analytic category from the social context in which it is embedded."
Sarah Franklin, editor of Marilyn Strathern’s Before and after gender
"With Ways of baloma, Mark Mosko offers us a wide, deep and new view of the
Trobriander’s ways of thinking, acting, and exchanging not only between
human beings, but with their ancestral spirits, the baloma. Contrary to
what Malinowski wrote about them, the baloma are involved every day in all
the activities of the people. The baloma are the key to understanding what
are life and death, kinship and magic, sacrifices, the body and the soul
for the Trobrianders. The demonstration is superb."
Maurice Godelier, author of The metamorphosis of kinship
"This unique collaboration between an anthropologist and high-ranking
intellectuals presents a radically revised understanding of Trobriand
ethnography. Mosko returned to the Ground Zero of “ethnographic theory”—a
term coined by Malinowski—to produce an analysis deliberately designed as a
provocative and controversial intervention into contemporary debates on the
nature of Melanesian personhood, and the neglected relation between magic
and kinship."
Chris Gregory, author of Gifts and commodities
"Malinowski’s Trobriand ethnography is the most famous case study in social
anthropology. Mosko has done long-term fieldwork in the islands and, on the
centenary of Malinowski’s study, he has come up with a radical
reinterpretation of key features of Trobriand life: magic, fatherhood, and
the ancestors. Drawing on contemporary theoretical perspectives, Mosko has
written the Trobriand ethnography for the twenty-first century."
Adam Kuper, author of Anthropology and anthropologists
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Two Lenins
A brief anthropology of time
------------------------------------------------------------
by Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov
170 pp. | 6x9 | $25.00 | order hardcopy here (
http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/T/bo26330975.html)
or read the full text open access on the HAU Books Website (
https://haubooks.org/two-lenins/)
"Ssorin-Chaikov delivers a dazzling brief for how exchanges among market,
gift, and state time have made modernity itself."
Stefan Helmreich
"This is a highly original book. It presents an engaging plot made of three
different events, [...] skillfully woven together, and discussed within a
strong theoretical argument. A great achievement."
Carlos Fausto
In the year of the 100th anniversary of the Soviet revolution, we are
delighted to announce a gem of a short monograph on gifts, time, and
leaders. Two Lenins is the first book-length anthropological examination of
how social reality can be organized around different yet concurrent ideas
of time. Why, the book asks, is a singular notion of time insufficient for
understanding a given ethnographic reality? The scope of the book is
theoretical, yet it is grounded in ethnographic and historical material on
Lenin. The Two Lenins of the book title refers to a multiple figure
embodied in the two main characters and protagonists of this monograph. The
first is the Soviet leader, whom readers will see receiving gifts from
American businessman Armand Hammer in early 1920s. The second is a Siberian
Evenki hunter who is nicknamed “Lenin” and who improvizes postsocialism in
the economic and political uncertainties of post-Soviet transition.
Although the material of the book covers the locations from Moscow to
Siberia and New York, and the periods of the 1920s, 1960s, and 1990s, the
book is neither a study in global history and anthropology nor a
“crosstemporal comparison,” but an ethnographic study of the very category
of time that we use to bridge different historical contexts.
****
Praise for Two Lenins
"What time is it? Many. In this incandescent book, we learn that time is
always composite, a relation among things, made of conflicting
simultaneities, teleologies, and eternities. Working through the timely and
untimely worlds of 1920s Soviet Russia and 1990s indigenous Siberia,
Ssorin-Chaikov delivers a dazzling brief for how exchanges among market,
gift, and state time have made modernity itself."
Stefan Helmreich, author of Sounding the limits of life: Essays in the
anthropology of biology and beyond
"Two Lenins is an ethnographically rich work on comparative exchange and
temporalities within and across the hidden interfaces between the realm of
bureaucracy (represented by Lenin, the Soviet leader) and the life of the
people in remote regions (a Siberian hunter named Lenin). This is an
exemplary work towards the development of a comparative anthropology of the
formal sectors in their historical and local agency."
Jane Guyer, author of Legacies, logics, logistics: Essays in the
anthropology of the platform economy
"Ssorin-Chaikov brilliantly updates an old set of anthropological topics,
the multiplicity of social times and the moral economy of exchange. Scaling
down from the chronotopes of high Soviet modernity to the everyday lives of
Evenki hunters (and their ethnographers) in its aftermath, he provides a
nuanced perspective on the politics of time, the nature of Modernity, and
the deep imbrication of gift, credit and theft in the making and unmaking
of socialist worlds."
Stephan Palmié, author of The cooking of history: How not to study
Afro-Cuban religion
"This is a highly original book. It presents an engaging plot made of three
different events, places and times: the first takes place in Siberia, by
the mid-1990s, and involves a director of a collective farm and an Evenki
man, curiously nicknamed Lenin. The second is the story of the encounter of
the true Lenin with an American businessman in the early 1920s. The last is
the author’s own fieldwork. These three events are skillfully woven
together, and discussed within a strong theoretical argument. A great
achievement."
Carlos Fausto, author of Warfare and shamanism in Amazonia
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Events
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1. Paris: Small Workshop Series
<https://www.dropbox.com/s/lfwlk10nawzc12m/imagination%20%281%29.pdf?dl=0>
Access the abstracts here:
<
https://www.dropbox.com/s/xjy9wu8jbe5pd5p/Severi%20da%20Col%20Imagination%202017%20abstracts%20final.pdf?dl=0
>
Anthropologie de l’Imagination – 2018 Small Workshop Series, Musée de quai
Branly – Jacques Chircac
37 quai Branly, 75007 Paris
Info: [log in to unmask]
Organisateurs
Carlo Severi, Directeur d’études à l’EHESS
Gıovanni da Col, Centre for Ethnographic Theory, SOAS
a. Vendredi 20 Mars 14h30 – 18h, Salle de Cinéma
The Utopia of the Other’s Material Life: Imagination and Critique in Papuan
Primitivist Tourism Encounters
Rupert Stasch (Cambridge)
**
Bodies of Lenin: Biochemistry of Communist Futures
Alexei Yurchak (UC Berkeley)
b. Mercredi 25 Avril 14h30-18h, Salle de Cinéma
Image, Infrastructure, Imagination
Patricia Spyer (Graduate Institute Geneva)
**
The Narrow Road to the Interior: Contemporary Japanese Artists and the
Emergent Imagination
Iza Kavedžija (University of Exeter)
c. Vendredi 22 Juin 14h30 – 18h, Salle de Cinéma
Imaginary Reciprocity: Vietnamese Rituals for Displaced Souls
Heonik Kwon (Trinity College, Cambridge)
**
Affixing Souls, Fixing the Social: Ten Years after Ghosts of War in Vietnam
Paul Sorrentino (Centre Asie du Sud-Est, EHESS)
-------
2. USA: Stephen F. Gudeman Lecture
Announcing the Stephen F. Gudeman Lectureship in Anthropology at the
University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, to be published in HAU!
The Gudeman Lectureship in Anthropology is a new series that will be hosted
by the Department of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota-Twin
Cities in honor of the many years Stephen F. Gudeman was a faculty member
who worked in its intellectually open and supportive environment. The
Lectureship is meant as a stage for talks in Social and Cultural
Anthropology that focus on the following topics: economies in relation to
their social contexts, the wider effects of economy on society, the use of
ethnography in the study of contemporary life, and the impact of
ethnographic research on social theory.
The first Gudeman Lecture will be given by Adam Kuper on Monday, 1 October
2018
“Deconstructing Anthropology”
Anthropology started out as the science of the savage. It has become the
science of the Other. The Other is our opposite number, our alter-ego,
ourselves turned upside down. The savage was the last free man, perhaps –
at one with nature and the spirit world, an intuitive artist. For Darwin,
however, he was little better than an animal; for Lévy-Bruhl, he was
pre-logical; in Freudian fantasy, he was polymorphically promiscuous. He
has been represented as the binary opposite of Economic Man by Malinowski
and Mauss – and, sometimes, by Gudeman.
I will invite you to deconstruct anthropology’s most venerable avatars: the
savage, the primitive, the tribesman, the indigenous; the man of culture
and the civilized person; the rationalist and the irrationalist; the
individual and the “dividual”. Perhaps we can then make a start on the
reconstruction of the discipline.
3. ADAK 2018, the Annual Debate of Anthropological Keywords
2018 Keyword:
ATTENTION
Webb Keane (Michigan), Tanya Luhrmann (Stanford), Tom Boellstorff (UC
Irvine), Emmanuel Grimaud (CNRS), Shalini Shankar (Northwestern), Natasha
Dow Schüll (NYU)
Editors/Organisers: Giovanni da Col, Grégory Delaplace, Carole McGranahan
How do humans and non-humans attract, divert, focus or capture one’s
attention? At a time when public interest, social media, and corporate
strategies are dominated by concerns over an “attention economy,” an
ex-Google strategist claims we are facing “the largest, most standardised
and most centralised form of attentional control in human history”.
Anthropology is uniquely positioned to address the ways attention and
distraction economies erode human will, limit the capacity to focus, and
generate new forms of addictions through elaborated algorithms, persuasive
designs, and triggers. Since its foundation, our discipline has inquired
into what properties makes a ritual persuasive and effective, frame
different realities, distinguish an event from the everyday, an omen or
supernatural sign from a random happenstance, and which conditions of
relevance and salience ground the very fabric of human sociality. The
transmission of religious ideas and the very essence of religion have been
connected to attention-grabbing pragmatic and cognitive constellations:
“sticky" and “catchy” representations have been showed to embed
contradictory principles or to violate cognitively intuitive expectations.
Mindtraps, decoys, games, or magic tricks can be objects of ethnographic
scrutiny not only as entry points into human intelligence and cunning, but
also and more profoundly as world-making technologies whereby environments
are created or tweaked in order to create new affordances for different
kinds of beings: spirits to be stopped, animals to be lured into death or
cooperation, audiences to be amazed or surprised or youths to be initiated.
Attention – its unequal distribution or its gradual acquisition through
apprenticeship – is indeed the key to discoverable realms: game that
becomes visible to a hunter, matter that becomes sensible to a potter,
riddles and jokes and puns that become revelatory to an initiate, or
culture that becomes translatable to an ethnographer. As humans navigate
through constellations of beings endowed with different perceptive and
affective propensities, anthropologists cultivate ways to attend to
relations created or made impossible at the meeting point of heterogeneous
regimes of attention. This year’s Annual Debate on Anthropological Keywords
aims to bring attention to the forefront of anthropological concern and
theorising, and to provide a strong and distinctly ethnographic voice to
the rising chorus of interdisciplinary interest in attention.
ADAK, or the Annual Debate of Anthropological Keywords is a theory
initiative from AES/American Ethnological Society, HAU and L’Homme, a joint
intellectual endeavour of these learned societies and journals from three
distinguished anthropological traditions. The first debate was held at the
2016 AAA meetings in Minneapolis with the keyword FAKE, with the
participation of Veena Das (JHU), Alexei Yurchak (UC Berkeley), Gabriella
Coleman (McGill), Carlo Severi (EHESS), Graham Jones (MIT), John L.
Jackson Jr. (UPenn), and the second at the 2017 AAA meeting in Washington
DC, around HUMANISM, with Saba Mahmood (UC Berkeley), Didier Fassin
(Princeton), Joel Robbins (Cambridge), Lucy Suchman (Lancaster), Hugh
Gusterson (George Washington U), Danilyn Rutherford (UC Santa Cruz).
4. Call for participants:
Network of Ethnographic Theory panel at the European Association of Social
Anthropologists (EASA) in Stockholm, 14-17 August 2018
The EASA Network of Ethnographic Theory
https://networkofethnographictheory.wordpress.com/ is happy to invite
submissions for its upcoming panel at EASA 2018 Conference. Please see
below for a short and long abstract.
To propose a paper please go to:
https://nomadit.co.uk/easa/easa2018/conferencesuite.php/panels/6688
Title: Xenophilia: New departures in the anthropology of hospitality and
strangerhood
Convenors
Marianna Keisalo (Aarhus University)
Claudio Sopranzetti (Oxford University)
Giovanni da Col (SOAS)
Chair: John Borneman (Princeton University)
Discussant: Arjun Appadurai (New York University)
Short Abstract
This panel explores "xenophilia" as a mode of engagement through which
anthropologists can enrich and reconfigure processes of staying, moving and
settling, inviting us to think and theorise spaces where people develop
strategies and schemas to generate or welcome stranger-ness.
Long abstract
Contemporary and historical processes of staying, moving and settling are
giving way to increasingly heterogeneous milieus of social hybridity
punctuated by people developing a more sustained relationship with the
strange, alien, uncanny and unfamiliar dimensions of the mundane - whether
this relates to another person, object or entity. Anthropologists have
extensively explored such processes through notions and concepts of
cosmopolitanism, border-work, ethics and mobility. We suggest that
"xenophilia" (Napier 2017; Borneman and Ghassen-Fachandi 2017) can provide
an apt prism through which anthropologists can enrich and reconfigure such
fields of literature. On the one hand, xenophilia's links to hospitality
(philoksenia) are apparent and urge us to rethink the latter as mediated by
global processes of staying, moving and settling. On the other hand,
understood as the reverse of philoksenia, xenophilia invites us to think
and theorise spaces where everyone and everything has the potential to
appear as strange, and where people develop social, cultural and ethical
codes of conduct to regulate such everyday encounters with strangeness.
This panel invites contributes which seek to ethnographically and
theoretically develop the concept of xenophilia as an emergent,
contemporary phenomenon, or as a historically sustained one. Contributions
can focus on, but are not restricted to, cases of otherness,
ethno-historical and cross-cultural explorations of welcoming the other,
human relations with spirit-worlds, ethics, xenophilic spaces and material
culture.
------------------------------------------------------------
Online Gods: A Podcast about Digital Cultures in India and Beyond
From Project ONLINERPOL (http://www.fordigitaldignity.com/) and HAU
How are digital interactions remoulding the public sphere in India and
elsewhere? What do online cultures and debates do to questions of faith,
the nation and belonging? How can anthropologists research the digital
world? How can we examine the digital by inhabiting the digital?
Online Gods is a monthly podcast on digital cultures and their political
ramifications, featuring lively conversations with scholars and activists.
Listen to Episode 6: Cyberfeminism and Content Creation <
https://www.haujournal.org/haunet/onlinegods.php>
------------------------------------------------------------
Coming Soon from HAU:
Acting for Others, by Pascale Bonnemère
< https://haubooks.org/acting-for-others/>
Classic Concepts in Anthroplogy, by Valerio Valeri
< https://haubooks.org/classic-concepts-in-anthropology/>
------------------------------------------------------------
HAU Books Titles 2015-2017:
Available through the University of Chicago Press
<http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/publisher/pu3432000_3432001.html>
Gifts and Commodities by Chris Gregory (with a foreword by Marilyn
Strathern)
The Anti-Witch by Jeanne Favret-Saada (Translated by Matthew Carey with a
foreword by Veena Das)
The Chimera Principle by Carlo Severi (Translated by Janet Lloyd with a
foreword by David Graeber)
The Meaning of Money in China and the United States by Emily Martin (with a
foreword by Eleana Kim and an afterword by Jane Guyer and Sidney Mintz)
Magic: A Theory from the South by Ernesto de Martino (Translated by Dorothy
Louise Zinn)
Four Lectures on Ethics by Michael Lambek, Veena Das, Didier Fassin, and
Webb Keane
Translating Worlds edited by William F. Hanks and Carlo Severi
The Relative Native by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (with an afterword by Roy
Wagner)
Comparing Impossibilities by Sally Falk Moore (with a foreword by John
Borneman)
The Gift: Expanded Edition by Marcel Mauss (Selected, introduced, and
translated by Jane I. Guyer and with a foreword by Bill Maurer)
Before and After Gender: Sexual Mythologies of Everyday Life by Marilyn
Strathern (Edited with an introduction by Sarah Franklin, and with an
afterword by Judith Butler)
Why We Play: An Anthropological Study by Roberte Hamayon (Translated by
Damien Simon and with a foreword by Michael Puett)
The Sex Thieves: The Anthropology of a Rumor by Julien Bonhomme (Translated
by Dominic Horsfall and with a foreword by Philippe Descola)
Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society by Émile Benveniste (with
a foreword by Giorgio Agamben)
Values of Happiness: Toward an Anthropology of Purpose in Life edited by
Iza Kavedžija and Harry Walker
Reciprocity and Redistribution in Andean Civilizations: The 1969 Lewis
Henry Morgan Lectures by John V. Murra (Prepared by Freda Yancy Wolf and
Heather Lechtman)
World: An Anthropological Examination by João de Pina-Cabral (Malinowski
Monographs Series)
Ways of Baloma by Mark S. Mosko (Malinowski Monograph Series)
The Art of Life and Death by Andrew Irving (Malinowski Monograph Series)
Mistrust: An Ethnographic Theory by Matthew Carey (Malinowski Monograph
Series)
From Hospitality to Grace: A Julian Pitt-Rivers Omnibus by Julian
Pitt-Rivers, edited by Giovanni da Col and Andrew Shryock
On Kings by David Graeber and Marshall Sahlins
Two Lenins by Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov (Malinowski Monograph Series)
The Fire of the Jaguar <https://haubooks.org/the-fire-of-the-jaguar/> by
Terence S. Turner
The Owners of Kinship by Luiz Costa, with a foreword by Janet Carsten
(Malinowski Monograph Series)
***
– The HAU Books Editorial Team
HAU Books. Open Access. Reviewed by the Best.
Marketed and Printed by the University of Chicago Press.
Paperback Only. Fast. Affordable.
Publish Different.
HAU Books: Like the Best, Just Free.
--
Faun Rice
HAU Books, Editorial Assistant
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