Books
Living with Concept: Anthropology in the grip of Reality, Fordham University Press, 2021 (Edited with Marco Motta)
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 World Of Ciphers: Moving literature and people in Berlin
In the decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Berlin itself has re-emerged as one of the world’s most important nodes in increasingly globalized circuits of literary production and consumption. In A World of Ciphers, I explore the v
Articles & Chapters
“The Prosody of Social Ties: Poetry and Ephemerality in ‘Global’ Berlin.” Current Anthropology. 2020. Vol. 6(4)
This article examines local ways of talking about poetry in contemporary Berlin, as gesturing toward a form of sociality that inheres in intimate though ephemeral moments, the sounds of human voices and bodily co-presence. Drawing on fieldwork in a poetry workshop, as well as in festivals and on the streets, it re-examines anthropological and literary theoretical work on the relationship between textuality, orality, and social organization, to dislodge the historical emphasis on endurance by taking the ephemerality of these relationships seriously. As the stakes of free expression, and its conditions of possibility, are gaining new urgency in Germany, I suggest that attention to the points of contact between multiple registers of sociality and expression, without an assumptive analytical hierarchy, is essential to ethnographic intervention.
“Plotting the field: Fragments and narrative in Malinowski's stories of the baloma,” Anthropological Theory. 2020. Vol 20(1), 29-52 (With Swayam Bagaria)
Anthropologists have long relied on powerful concepts operant in the societies where they have carried out fieldwork to unlock the meanings of various, even seemingly disparate, practices and experiences, and which, in virtue of their sharing a name, are given coherence by ethnographic and ethnological texts. In this essay, we examine how anthropological icons like hau, mana, and the shaman, are created, and suggest that there might be fragments encountered during fieldwork that do not, in themselves, necessarily add up to a coherent whole, but which are fit into stories of these kinds because of the pressure of narrativity within conventional notions of anthropological theory. To illustrate this argument, we draw in particular on Malinowski’s stories of the baloma, Trobriander spirits of the dead, reading his well-known fieldwork diaries alongside his published account, in order to show how life is always stitched across multiple registers of storytelling, some of which take the form of narrative and others that do not. Attending to the space between these modalities, or to their crossings, a different picture of theory begins to emerge, and which hews a bit closer to our ordinary experience of social life.
“Literature and Anthropology,”Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology, M. Aldenderfer, ed. Oxford University Press
Literature is often understood to be one of anthropology’s most recurrent and provocative companions in thought. The relationship between the two has taken a number of different and variously interrelated forms. Perhaps the most familiar of these is the theorization of the anthropologist’s status as a writer; this work tends to take its cue from certain strands of postmodernism and invokes literary techniques as tools through which to address concerns around representation and the evocation of lived experience. A second important, if often overlooked, area of research involves the study of concrete literary practices including reading, writing, performing, sharing, and listening, whether by means of ethnographic fieldwork or anthropological modes of textual analysis. Finally, there are the myriad relationships that anthropologists have maintained with particular literary figures or texts, which have proven essential to their thinking and to their lives.
“Genres of Witnessing:Narrative, Violence, Generations,” Ethnos: Journal of anthropology. Vol. 84(4)
Anthropology has troubled longstanding assumptions about experiences of catastrophic violence, by revealing the limits of trauma theory’s insistence on the cathartic value of public expressions of pain. Ethnography has revealed how the suffering inflicted by such events becomes stitched into the fabric of everyday life. In this paper, we take this insight further by exploring the different genres through which experiences of violence are shared with future generations. If much attention has been paid to the narrative forms that traumatic plots take from the perspective of adults, our work is motivated by a fidelity to the voice of the child, and the ways in which they piece a world together from the debris of social life that they find around them. We are interested in exploring what this piecing together of the world might reveal in terms of the embedding of memories of violence in the textures of everyday life.