1st Edition
Re-Creating Anthropology Sociality, Matter, and the Imagination
This book makes a notable contribution to discussions of what anthropology is and should be in the twenty-first century through a reconsideration, from diverse sub-disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, of the interactions between sociality, matter, and the imagination. It explores the imagination in its social contexts, how it is put to work, and how, in its embodied and material forms, it works in practice. The chapters provide detailed case studies, including film-making in Egypt; spirit-possession/exorcism in Italy; Theosophy and the production of knowledge about UFOs; the role of mistakes or glitches in public performances; humans’ varying relationships to the environment; post-coloniality, time, and crisis in anthropology; and artistic creativity.
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Preface
1 Introduction: Social Anthropology as Scepticism, Empathy, and Holism
David N. Gellner
Part I Time
2 ‘"Not an Airy European Fantasy", or: How (De)Colonization Embeds the Anthropological Imagination
Peter Pels
3 Placing Time: Open, Wild, Drift
Caitlin DeSilvey
4 Time and Permanence: In an Epoch of the Anachronic
Michael Rowlands
5 Crisis, Prophecy, and Ethnography: Living in the Waste Land Then and Now
Ramon Sarró
Part II Imagination and the Social
6 Interactional Glitches, Cooperation, and the Paradox of Public Joint Activities
Alessandro Duranti
7 Enskilment and the Emergent Imagination
Iza Kavedžija
8 ‘"She Talks to Angels": Spirit Becomings, Embodied Memories, and Affective Imagination Skills in Catholic Exorcism in Contemporary Italy
Andrea De Antoni
9 The Role of Unproved Ideas in the Production of Knowledge: A Case Study
Timothy Jenkins
10 The Light of a Piece: An Exploration of Materiality and Creative Practice in a Maine Landscape – Notes on a Film Screening
Anna Grimshaw with Elizabeth Hallam
Part III Futures
11 Describing the Future: Predictability, Uncertainty, and Imponderability
Chihab El Khachab
12 Anthropocenic Reconfigurations: Socio-Natures and the Politics of Planetary Health
Melissa Leach
13 Psychological Essentialism: An Anchoring for Anthropological Comparison
Rita Astuti
Afterword: Anthropology and Imagination's Techniques
Dolores P. Martinez
Index
Biography
David N. Gellner is Professor of Social Anthropology and a Fellow of All Souls, University of Oxford, UK.
Dolores P. Martinez is Emeritus Reader in Anthropology at SOAS, University of London, and a Research Affiliate at ISCA, University of Oxford, UK.
