Books
Moving Words: Literature, Memory and Migration in Berlin
University of Toronto Press, forthcoming
In the decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Berlin has emerged as one of the world’s most important nodes in increasingly globalized circuits of literary production and consumption. Affordable housing, low costs of living, and a long history of avant-garde and subversive writing, have all attracted thousands of migrant writers, readers, publishers and critics to the cityRooted in ethnographic fieldwork, historical archives, and textual analysis, Moving Words explores the claims people make on and for literature as it carries them through Berlin on irregular and intersecting paths. Each chapter foregrounds one of the innumerable contexts in which life in the city was made literary - from old neighborhood bookshops to new reading circles, NGOs working to secure asylum for writers living in exile to specialized workshops for young migrant poets. But instead of reading these diverse scenes through a single, overarching story about what in Germany is often called its “welcome culture” and its limits, the book dwells on their differences, their tensions, and their contradictions. Literature was simultaneously one way people found their footing in the world and one way people were excluded; in other words, literature proved both a profound site of domination, and a resource for resisting and transforming those conditions. Attending to the everyday lives of writers and readers, booksellers and translators, offers a crucial new vantage on the politics of difference in contemporary Europe, at a moment marked by resurgent nationalism and migrant “crisis.”
Living with Concepts: Anthropology in the Grip of Reality
Andrew Brandel and Marco Motta, eds.
Fordham University Press, 2021
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 our lives? 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.
A Matter of Detail: Anthropology, Philosophy, and Aesthetics
Andrew Brandel, Veena Das, Sandra Laugier, Perig Pitrou, eds.
University of Toronto Press, forthcoming
Details of course do provide a focal point of attention in ordinary language philosophy and in ethnographic writing, but they are mobilized more often than not to support a larger argument, to fleshout a context, to make a text lively, or to show an author’s command over a milieu. It is difficult to find a sustained reflection on the idea of detail itself. Despite the seeming ubiquity of our shared concern with detail within anthropology and philosophy, we have seldom paused to consider what we mean when we talk about details and how they matter. Based on sustained dialogue among philosophers and anthropologists over several years, this book brings the work that detail, details, and detailing do in ethnographic and philosophical thinking to the fore.