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This anthology provides fresh and original insights into the lives and work of some of the world's leading anthropologists today. The work looks at theoretical reflections over what public anthropology in our time may be, the audiences it may address, and how to put a program of public anthropology into actual practice. It features conversations with anthropologists such as Didier Fassin, John L. and Jean Comaroff, Claudio Lomnitz, David Price, Magnus Marsden, Richard Ashby Wilson, John R. Bowen and Matti Bunzl.

Writing is crucial to anthropology, but which genres are anthropologists expected to master in the 21st century? This book explores how anthropological writing shapes the intellectual content of the discipline and academic careers. First, chapters identify the different writing genres and contexts anthropologists actually engage with. Second, this book argues for the usefulness and necessity of taking seriously the idea of writing as a craft and of writing across and within genres in new ways. Although academic writing is an anthropologist's primary genre, they also write in many others, from drafting administrative texts and filing reports to composing ethnographically inspired journalism and fiction.

In this provocative new book, Margaret M. Bruchac, an Indigenous anthropologist, turns the wordsavageon its head.Savage Kinexplores the nature of the relationships between Indigenous informants such as Gladys Tantaquidgeon (Mohegan), Jesse Cornplanter (Seneca), and George Hunt (Tlingit), and early twentieth-century anthropological collectors such as Frank Speck, Arthur C. Parker, William N. Fenton, and Franz Boas.This book reconceptualizes the intimate details of encounters with Native interlocutors who by turns inspired, facilitated, and resisted the anthropological enterprise. Like other texts focused on this era,Savage Kinfeatures some of the elite white men credited with salvaging material that might otherwise have been lost. Unlike other texts, this book highlights the intellectual contributions and cultural strategies of unsung Indigenous informants without whom this research could never have taken place.These bicultural partnerships transgressed social divides and blurred the roles of anthropologist/informant, relative/stranger, and collector/collected. Yet these stories were obscured by collecting practices that separated people from objects, objects from communities, and communities from stories. Bruchac's decolonizing efforts include \"reverse ethnography\"-painstakingly tracking seemingly unidentifiable objects, misconstrued social relations, unpublished correspondence, and unattributed field notes-to recover this evidence. Those early encounters generated foundational knowledges that still affect Indigenous communities today.Savage Kinalso contains unexpected narratives of human and other-­than-human encounters-brilliant discoveries, lessons from ancestral spirits, prophetic warnings, powerful gifts, and personal tragedies-that will move Native and non-Native readers alike.

Fieldwork in South Asia is a valuable attempt to listen and learn from the memories and significant moments of fieldwork done by anthropologists, sociologists, and even historians from South Asia. The essays lead towards a deeper understanding of concerns of fieldwork located in various field sites across South Asia without assuming or applying fixed normative rules for the whole region. In the process, the volume allows the reader to have an option to locate or relocate ethnographic or other forms of texts in the context of growing methodological contours and dilemmas in the social science.Above all, this is a book about relationships—multi-layered relationships among people encountered in the field, the ethnographic relationship itself, with all its personal raw edges, and relationship with the land and even non-human realms.

U.S. involvement in the Middle East has brought the region into the media spotlight and made it a hot topic in American college classrooms. At the same time, anthropology—a discipline committed to on-the-ground research about everyday lives and social worlds—has increasingly been criticized as \"useless\" or \"biased\" by right-wing forces. What happens when the two concerns meet, when such accusations target the researchers and research of a region so central to U.S. military interests? This book is the first academic study to shed critical light on the political and economic pressures that shape how U.S. scholars research and teach about the Middle East. Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar show how Middle East politics and U.S. gender and race hierarchies affect scholars across their careers—from the first decisions to conduct research in the tumultuous region, to ongoing politicized pressures from colleagues, students, and outside groups, to hurdles in sharing expertise with the public. They detail how academia, even within anthropology, an assumed \"liberal\" discipline, is infused with sexism, racism, Islamophobia, and Zionist obstruction of any criticism of the Israeli state. Anthropology's Politics offers a complex portrait of how academic politics ultimately hinders the education of U.S. students and potentially limits the public's access to critical knowledge about the Middle East.

This detailed and comprehensive guide provides biographical information on the most influential and significant figures in world anthropology, from the birth of the discipline in the nineteenth century to the present day. Each of the fifteen chapters focuses on a national tradition or school of thought, outlining its central features and placing the anthropologists within their intellectual contexts. Fully indexed and cross-referenced, The Routledge Dictionary of Anthropologists will prove indispensable for students of anthropology.

Encountering Morocco introduces readers to life in this North African country through vivid accounts of fieldwork as personal experience and intellectual journey. We meet the contributors at diverse stages of their careers-from the unmarried researcher arriving for her first stint in the field to the seasoned fieldworker returning with spouse and children. They offer frank descriptions of what it means to take up residence in a place where one is regarded as an outsider, learn the language and local customs, and struggle to develop rapport. Moving reflections on friendship, kinship, and belief within the cross-cultural encounter reveal why study of Moroccan society has played such a seminal role in the development of cultural anthropology.

Strangers to Relatives is an intimate and illuminating look at a typical but misunderstood part of anthropological fieldwork in North America: the adoption and naming of anthropologists by Native families and communities. Adoption and naming have long been a common way for Native peoples in Canada and the United States to deal with strangers who are not enemies. For over a century, adoption and naming have also served as an important means for many Native American and First Nation communities to become connected to the anthropologists visiting and writing about them.   In this outstanding volume, leading anthropologists in the United States and Canada discuss this issue by focusing on the cases of such prominent earlier scholars as Lewis Henry Morgan and Franz Boas. They also share personal experiences of adoption and naming and offer a range of stimulating perspectives on the significance of these practices in the past and today. The contributors explore the impact of adoption and naming upon the relationship between scholar and Native community, considering in particular two key issues: How does adoption affect the fieldwork and subsequent interpretations by anthropologists, and in turn, how are Native individuals and communities themselves affected by adopting an outside scholar whose aim is to learn and write about them?   Strangers to Relatives not only sheds valuable light on how anthropology fieldwork is conducted but also makes a seminal contribution to our understanding of the ongoing, often troubled relationship between the academy and Native communities.

In looking back on four decades of anthropology in the field, Clifford Geertz creates a personal history that is also a retrospective reflection on developments in the human sciences amid political, social, and cultural changes in the world.

Dans l’univers visuel des Wichís, peuple d’anciens chasseurs-cueilleurs du Gran Chaco, les animaux et les plantes occupent une place prépondérante. Cet article décrit l’histoire culturelle, les stratégies figuratives, les caractéristiques plastiques et le contexte de production, circulation et consommation des quatre formes visuelles wichís les plus importantes – les figures des jeux de ficelle, les motifs tressés, les sculptures en bois et les graphismes – afin de pouvoir discuter certaines interprétations de leurs significations. L’analyse met en valeur que non seulement les Wichís ont une relation intime – économique et symbolique – et une connaissance approfondie de la forêt du Chaco mais aussi que leur « représentations » zoomorphes et phytomorphes servent, de différentes manières, à construire et à reconstruire une façon de penser et d’établir des liens entre soi, avec les autres et avec le monde. En el universo visual de los wichís, un pueblo de antiguos cazadores-recolectores del Gran Chaco, los animales y las plantas tienen un lugar preponderante. En este artículo, se describe la historia cultural, las estrategias figurativas, las características plásticas y el contexto de producción, circulación y consumo de las cuatro formas visuales wichís más importantes - las figuras de hilo, los diseños enlazados, las tallas de madera y los grafismos - a fin de poder discutir algunas interpretaciones de sus significados. El análisis pone de manifiesto que los wichís no sólo mantienen una relación íntima - económica y simbólica - y un conocimiento minucioso del bosque chaqueño, sino que sus « representaciones » zoo y fitomorfas sirven, de diversos modos, para construir y reconstruir un modo de pensar y relacionarse entre sí, con los otros y con el mundo. In the visual universe of the wichís, an ancient nation of hunter-gatherers in the Gran Chaco, animals and plants occupy an outstanding place. This article describes cultural history, figurative strategies, plastic features and the context of production, circulation and comsuption of the four main wichís’ visual forms - string figures, braided patterns, wood carvings and graphics - in order to be able to discuss some of the interpretations of their meanings. The analysis highlights that wichís not only maintain an intimate relation - economical and symbolical - and a thorough knowlege of the Chaco’s forest, but that their animal and plant-like «figures» serve in different ways to build and rebuild a way of thinking, creating relations with themselves, the others and the world.