Product Description: A Companion to the Anthropology of Religion presents a collection of original, ethnographically-informed essays that explore the variety of beliefs, practices, and religious experiences in the contemporary world and asks how to think about religion as a subject of anthropological inquiry...read more

Written over a thirty-year span, Michael Lambek’s essays in this collection point with definitive force toward a single central truth: ethics is intrinsic to social life. As he shows through rich ethnographic accounts and multiple theoretical traditions, our human condition is at heart an ethical one—we may not always be good or just, but we are always subject to their criteria. Detailing Lambek’s trajectory as one anthropologist thinking deeply throughout a career on the nature of ethical life, the essays accumulate into a vibrant demonstration of the relevance of ethics as a practice and its crucial importance to ethnography, social theory, and philosophy. Organized chronologically, the essays begin among Malagasy speakers on the island of Mayotte and in northwest Madagascar. Building from ethnographic accounts there, they synthesize Aristotelian notions of practical judgment and virtuous action with Wittgensteinian notions of the ordinariness of ethical life and the importance of language, everyday speech, and ritual in order to understand how ethics are lived. They illustrate the multiple ways in which ethics informs personhood, character, and practice; explore the centrality of judgment, action, and irony to ethical life; and consider the relation of virtue to value. The result is a fully fleshed-out picture of ethics as a deeply rooted aspect of the human experience. 

A critical examination of women in domestic service in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries makes extensive use of the writings of domestics and contemporary interviews

Product Description: Adapting Wittgenstein's concept of the human species as 'a ceremonial animal', Wendy James writes vividly and readably. Her new overview advocates a clear line of argument: that the concept of social form is a primary key to anthropology and the human sciences as a whole...read more

Product Description: In The Weight of the Past, Michael Lambek explores the complex ways that history shapes, constrains, and enables daily life. Focusing on ritual performances of spirit mediumship in a multifaceted religious landscape, Lambek's analysis reveals the multiple ways that Sakalava "bear" history...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Ecology and the Sacred commemorates and advances the anthropology of Roy A. (Skip) Rappaport. Rappaport was an original and visionary thinker whose writings, like these essays, encompass ecological theory and method; ritual, the sacred, and the cybernetics of the holy; the structural study of social maladaptation or "the anthropology of trouble"; and a policy-engaged anthropology that addresses social complexity and structural disorders in modern contexts...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This book suggests a bold comparative approach to broad cultural differences between Africa and Melanesia. Its theme is personhood, understood in terms of what anthropologists call embodiment. These concepts are applied to questions ranging from the meanings of spirit possession, to the logics of witchcraft and kinship relations, the use of rituals in healing, and even the impact of capitalism...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Tense Past provides a much needed appraisal and contextualization of the upsurge of interest in questions of memory and trauma evident in multiple personality and post-traumatic stress disorders, child abuse, and commemoration of the Holocaust...read more

Product Description: An ethnography of the religious and ethnomedical practices of Malagasy speakers in Mayotte, an island off the coast of East Africa near Madagascar. Based on participant-observation fieldwork, and making extensive use of case histories, Lambek's (anthropology, U...read more

Product Description: Based on intensive ethnographic fieldwork, this book describes and interprets trance behaviour among the Malagasy speakers of Mayotte, a small island in the Comoro Archipelago in the Indian Ocean, off the coast of East Africa. Professor Lambek describes how the people of Mayotte (most often women) enter into trances, during which they believe their bodies are inhabited by spirits...read more