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This collection brings together leading anthropologists and philosophers working in a wide range of contexts in order to rethink an oft taken for granted concept—the concept of the concept itself. How do we picture what concepts are, what they do, how they arise in the course of everyday life? Challenging conventional approaches that treat concepts as mere tools at our disposal for analysis, or as straightforwardly equivalent to signs to be deciphered, the twelve contributors to Living with Concepts instead looks at the ways in which concepts are already intrinsically embedded in our forms of life, and thus how they constitute the very substrate of our existence as humans who lead lives in language. In other words, attention to our ordinary lives with concepts requires not a movement of ascent from the rough ground of reality into the skies of theory, but rather acceptance of the fact that thinking is congenital to living with and through concepts. Living with Concepts offers a critical and timely intervention into both contemporary philosophy and anthropological theory by deeply unsettling a distinction between thought and reality that is still too often smuggled back into the fold. In its place, the book takes the first step toward an anthropological practice guided by a realistic spirit—one in which the supposed need to grasp reality is replaced by an acknowledgement that we might instead be in its grip.

After the collapse of state socialism, Russia’s healthcare system, much like the rest of the country’s economic and social sphere, underwent massive restructuring, while the public saw the rise to prominence of a variety of nonbiomedical therapies. Formulated as a possible aid to a beleaguered healthcare infrastructure, or as questionable care of last resort, “traditional medicine” in post-socialist Russia was tasked with redressing—and often blamed for—the fraught state of the body politic, while biomedicine itself became increasingly perceived as therapeutically insufficient. The popularization of ethnically and culturally marked forms of care in Russia presents a peculiar paradox in a political context often characterized by a return to robustly homogenizing state policies. In a context where displays of cultural, religious, and ethnic difference are tightly woven with anxieties about Russia’s status as a modern state, the rise of a therapeutic sphere that tended toward multiplicity, fragmentation, bricolage, and a certain ontological agnosticism in the treatment of bodies and subjects appears, at the very least, counterintuitive. Mixing Medicines is an ethnography of therapeutic life at the peripheries of the state, set in the Siberian region of Buryatia that unexpectedly finds itself at the forefront of projects of medical integration via a local tradition of “Tibetan medicine.” The book follows the therapeutic encounters between traditional healing and the different regulatory modalities that seek to incorporate it, exploring how projects of medical integration in Siberia articulate competing conceptualizations of universality, regional belonging, national inclusion, and the ethics of caring for bodies and subjects.

Based on long-term ethnographic research in the art world of Istanbul and Berlin, The National Frame rethinks the role of art in state governance. It argues that artistic practices, arts patronage and sponsorship, collecting and curating art, and the modalities of censorship, just like official cultural policies, continue to be refracted through the conceptual lens of the nation-state—despite the intensified and much-studied globalization of art. By examining discussions on the civilizing function of art in Germany and Turkey and moments in which art is seen to cede this function, the book reveals the histories of violence on which the production, circulation, and presentation—indeed our very understanding—of art are predicated. It is in the process of disavowing this violence that contemporary art as a global practice keeps being called back into the national frame. Turkey and Germany occupy different places in dominant geopolitical and civilizational imaginaries that have construed the world in terms of “East” and “West,” and, more recently, “Islam” and “Christianity” as incommensurable entities. Unlike German art, art from Turkey is often seen as merging “traditional” and modern motifs, and expressive of “Turkish culture.” Working against this asymmetric perception the book fosters a comparative perspective by showing that Germany and Turkey share a long, troubling history of cultural encounters and political affiliation and similar struggles in claiming modern nationhood. The joint analysis of both cases reveals how art is configured politically and socially and why art has been at once vital and unwieldy for national projects.

What does it mean to connect as Moroccans via mass media when there is widespread feeling of communicative failure? This book approaches the question by exploring situated talk about communicative failure, which speaks to how Moroccans seek to shape social and political relations in urban Fez. Over the last decade, laments of language and media failure in Fez have focused on communicative channels and were not just about social relations that used to be and had been lost, but also what ought to be and had yet to be realized. These channels, or mediums that connected people, ranged from objects such as devotional prayer beads and remote controls; to interactional forms such as storytelling registers, dress styles, and non-standard Arabic writing; and to media platforms like television news, Moroccan religious stations, or WhatsApp group chats. This book describes these multimodal channels and analyzes how, why, and when they moved from facilitator (intermediating connecting mechanism) to meddler (mediating sociality actor). Laments about communicative channel failures precipitated relationality projects by the state and several Fassi calibrations of those efforts. These laments were ways of speaking that created Moroccanness, the feeling of participating in the ongoing formations of Moroccan public relationality. Rather than furthering the discourse about Morocco’s conflict between liberal secularists and religious conservatives, this ethnography shows the subtle range of ideologies and practices evoked in Fassi homes to calibrate appropriate Moroccan sociality and political consciousness.

Textures of the Ordinary: Doing Anthropology after Wittgenstein is an exploration of everyday life in which anthropology finds a companionship with philosophy. Based on two decades of ethnographic work among low-income urban families in India, Das shows how the notion of texture allows her to align her ethnography with stunning anthropological moments in Wittgenstein and Cavell as well as in literary texts from India. Das poses a compelling question—how might we speak of a human form of life when the very idea of the human has been put into question? The response to this question, Das argues, does not lie in some foundational idea of the universal as that of human nature or the human condition but in a close attention to the diverse ways in which the natural and the social mutually absorb each other within overlapping forms of life. The book shows how reality as ordinary and domestic is impaired not only by catastrophic events but also by the repetitive and corrosive soft knife of everyday violence and deprivation. It advances a view of ordinary ethics as attentiveness to the other and the ability of small acts of care to stand up to horrific violence. The book also presents a picture of thinking in which concepts and experience are shown to be mutually vulnerable and ethnography is treated as intimately connected to autobiography as a form of reflection emanating from the impersonal regions of the self.

This book considers the day-to-day lives of young Muslims on the island of Lamu (Kenya) who live simultaneously “on the edge and in the center”: they are situated at the edge of the (inter)national economy and at the margins of Western notions of modernity; yet they are concurrently the focus of (inter)national campaigns against Islamic radicalization and are at the heart of Western (touristic) imaginations of the untouched and secluded. What does it mean to be young, modern, and Muslim in this context? And how are these denominators differently imagined and enacted in daily encounters? Documenting the everyday lives of Lamu youth, this ethnography explores how young people negotiate different cultural, religious, political and economic pressures and expectations through nuanced deployments of language, dress, and bodily comportment. It thereby illustrates how seemingly mundane practices—from how young people greet others, to how they walk, dress, and talk—can become tactics in the negotiation of moral personhood. A central concern of the book lies with the shifting meaning and ambiguity of such everyday signs and thus the dangers of semiotic misconstrual. By examining this uncertainty of interpretation in projects of self-fashioning, the book highlights how shifting and scalable discourses of tradition, modernity, secularization, nationalism, and religious piety inform changing notions of moral subjectivity. Documenting how Lamu youth navigate this contested field in a fast-changing place with a fascinating history, this book offers a distinctly linguistic anthropological approach to discussions of ethical self-fashioning and everyday Islam.

For many inside and outside the legal academy, the right place to look for law is in constitutions, statutes, and judicial opinions. This book looks for law in the "wrong places"-sites and spaces in which no formal law appears. These may be geographic regions beyond the reach of law, everyday practices ungoverned or ungovernable by law, or works of art that have escaped law's constraints. Looking for Law in All the Wrong Places brings together essays by leading scholars of anthropology, cultural studies, history, law, literature, political science, race and ethnic studies, religion, and rhetoric to look at law from the standpoint of the humanities. Beyond showing law to be determined by or determinative of distinct cultural phenomena, the contributors show how law is itself interwoven with language, text, image, and culture. Many essays look for law in the kinds of "wrong places" where there appears to be no law. They find in these places not only reflections and remains of law, but rules and practices that seem indistinguishable from law and raise challenging questions about the locations of law and law's meaning and function. Other essays do the opposite: rather than looking for law in places where law does not obviously appear, they look in statute books and courtrooms from perspectives that are presumed to have nothing to say about law. Looking at law sideways, upside down, or inside out defamiliarizes law. These essays show what legal understanding can be gained when law is denied its proper domain.

People's Car explores one of the major movements for resisting the acquisition of land by the government in the interests of siting a Tata Motors car factory in Singur, India. The factory becomes the alibi for nuanced interrogations that are both material and theoretical on resistance, changing rural realities in globalizing India and the very nature and idea of land. It asks why such long drawn resistances against corporate industrialization coexist with political rhetoric and slogans promoting fast paced industrialization. It argues that such contradictory rhetoric and promises target divided sentiments in rural India where land is more than a simple agricultural plot to middle caste small and marginal landowners aspiring nonfarm futures. People's Car breaks new ground by ethnographically establishing the incommensurability between land and money. Such incommensurability or non-equivalence, the book shows, simultaneously drives protests against land acquisition and fuels the demands for non-farm jobs and industrialization, the crux of rural middle-caste aspirational politics. It questions the dominant trend of romanticizing rural life and associated anti-development protests that uses the clichéd dichotomous tropes—rural Bharat vs. urban India.

For many today politics is characterized above all else by disappointment. Inspired by years of ethnographic research with the global anti-drug war movement, Disappointment addresses this disappointment by offering a framework for a politics that rises to the demand of our radical finitude. A politics that rises to the demand of radical finitude is a politics that finds its problems, antagonists, motivations, strategies, tactics, in a word, its call to action, in a world grounded in nothing other than the situations and existents that constitute it. This book takes up the challenge of offering such a framework by showing how ontological starting points have real political implications. A central argument of World-Building is that what is normally called ontology, politics, and ethics are actually three aspects or modalities of the same tradition, and therefore a critical engagement with one necessitates a critical engagement with the other two; that is, with the ontological tradition as a whole. This realization allows us to see how an alternative ontological starting point may lead to alternative political and ethical possibilities. With this as its task, Disappointment offers a critical hermeneutics of the dominant ontological tradition of our time and does so by means of both deconstruction and conceptual creativity. The politics of world-building that results seeks to move beyond metaphysical humanism and its exhausted concepts such as rights, responsibility and dignity, and begin to enact an ontology of worlds by means of such concepts as situation, dwelling, and attunement.

This is an intellectual biography of Gregory Bateson, one of the most important holistic writers of the twentieth century, whose qualitative approach to information and intelligence in living systems challenges modern science’s exclusive attachment to technical premises of cyber-information and Artificial Intelligence. Hesubstitutes ‘pattern’ and ‘meaning’ for the ‘thinginess’ of data and places his emphasis on ‘mapping’ and gestalt. His approach appears first in his anthropological studies of New Guinea culture and ‘body/mind’ interaction in Balinese which he undertook with his spouse, Margaret Mead. Later, he shows how patterns of relationship and communication exist at a ‘higher,’ or meta-level, to those of biophysical interaction. Perceptions of ‘difference’ and the ‘difference that makes a difference’ create contexts for interpersonal communication; these ‘mind-like’ characteristics are also apparent in the world of living systems, enabling species to co-evolve in a mutually supportive manner—unlike natural selection. One of his legacies is biosemiotics, which focuses on the ability of all organisms and all cells to respond to patterns, even in microorganisms like bacteria and viruses. All are semiotic, that is, they can interpret and develop meaningful preferences in their ordering of events. In ecology, his ‘post-genomic’ stance considers organism-plus-environment as the fundamental unit of life, and not the gene; in so doing he turns many notions of causality ‘upside-down.’ Bateson’s holism yields an ecological aesthetics, never achieved in any of the natural sciences, which underlines the moral divide between sustainable creativity and current biocide in planetary biodiversity.