Andrew Sanchez
Biographic Data
| ID | 3580957 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Andrew Sanchez |
| GIVEN NAMES | Andrew |
| FAMILY NAME | Sanchez |
| SIGNATURE | SANCHEZ A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cambridge |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8660-7505 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 101 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 329 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 37 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 64 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
A mixed-race imagination
Taking inspiration from Queer Theory, this article introduces the analytic framework of Mixed-Race Thought , to consider how a position of racial indeterminacy might prompt mixed-race people and their interlocutors to reflect on the terms and limits of racial classifications, and inspire a more radical conception of them. The article describes this process using the concept of classificatory dissonance . The dissonance of the mixed-race experienc…
A Comment on Alvi and Werth 2024
A labour of love: A review of Parry’s ‘Classes of Labour’
This review discusses Jonathan Parry’s 2020 monograph Classes of Labour in the context of the author’s career trajectory since the 1990s. The review critiques the conceptual framework with which the book understands class relations, and notes that the breadth of the study may be daunting for some readers. However, the review characterises the book as an artisanal masterpiece that shows an ethnographer working at the very peak of their abilities.
Kill your ancestors: The wars of decolonization
This essay explains why debates about the decolonization of anthropology tend to become reactive and confrontational, and outlines a model for why productive critique is central to intellectual progress. In a small, young discipline that values subjectivity and the questioning of ethnocentrism, the decolonial critique of tradition is more likely to be felt as a personalized war on one's professional community and sense of self. Further, the tende…
Vodou Ayisyen
Vodou ayisyen an pran nesans nan kontèks esklavaj la. Yon relijyon fanmi Wa nan peyi Dawome, nan Afrik oksidantal, esklav sou lil Dayiti yo te tranfòme l kòm yon zouti pou yo rekonstui tèt yo ak fos liberasyon an. Konsa, vodou a te jwe yon wòl primodyal nan pi gwo revolisyon eskav yo reyisi nan tout listwa ak nan kreyasyon Ayiti kòm peyi endepandan. Nan komansman, antwopoloji a ki chita sou yon pèspektiv evolisyonis te konsidere vodou a tankou pw…
Prefigurative Politics
Prefigurative politics' refers to how activists embody and enact, within their activism, the socialities and practices they foster for broader society. Inspired by anarchist principles, the core practices characterising prefiguration include participative democracy, horizontality, inclusiveness, and direct action. Gaining visibility with the social movements that blossomed after 1968, and again with the post-1999 movements opposing neoliberal glo…
Pandemics
Pandemics tend to be defined as large epidemics, i.e. as sudden and widespread rises in disease incidence that occur over a very wide area, cross international boundaries, and affect a great number of people. However, this conventional definition neglects the fact that some diseases that reach a global scale, such as influenza or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), are usually considered to be pandemics while other diseases that are similar…
I Am the People: Reflections on Popular Sovereignty Today by Partha Chatterjee
Reviewed by: I Am the People: Reflections on Popular Sovereignty Today by Partha Chatterjee Andrew Sanchez Partha Chatterjee. I Am the People: Reflections on Popular Sovereignty Today. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. 208 pp. I Am the People is Partha Chatterjee’s treatise on the rise of populism in Western Europe and the United States of America. In early 2021, academia is choked with hasty analyses of Brexit and Donald Trump written b…
Latin America
‘Latin’ America is a region constructed in a context of imperial rivalries and disputes about how to build ‘modern’ nations that made it an ‘other America’ distinct from ‘Anglo’ America. Bringing together people without previous historical contact, the diversity of its societies and cultures was increased by the transatlantic slave trade and later global immigration. Building on the constructive relationship that characterises the ties between so…
Phenomenology
Phenomenology is one of the most influential philosophical traditions of the twentieth century and has significantly shaped contemporary anthropological and social theory. This entry shows the various ways in which phenomenology has contributed to contemporary anthropology. In so doing, it also shows that a better understanding of the phenomenological tradition and what it offers social and historical analysis could further contribute to the deve…
Care
There are many universal assumptions about what care is and how it ought to be provided. Such assumptions are widely embedded in public debates, government policies, and institutional forms of support. This entry presents three areas of anthropological work on how care is practised around the world in order to challenge these assumptions and demonstrate how care varies in unexpected ways. First, the entry explores how care is structured and, in p…
Visual Anthropology
Visual anthropology encompasses two parallel aims: the production of anthropological media (including ethnographic film, video, photography, drawing, interactive media, etc.) as well as the anthropological analyses of media (including films, videos, photography, drawings, etc.). Conceptually, visual anthropology draws on theoretical and methodological connections between human perception and imagination, the use and production of audiovisual medi…
Monsters
Monsters are not only key protagonists in myths, legends, fairy tales, fiction, and films; they also haunt cellars, cyberspace, and crossroads. Based on encounters with monsters in their fieldsites, anthropologists define monsters as inherently social entities but with a defiant relationship to order. This entry showcases that monsters haunt humans in culturally distinct ways. Emphasising the comparative potential of monsters, it highlights the w…
Climate Change
Climate change, largely a product of human activities, is arguably the most comprehensive and dramatic challenge facing humanity. In the first decades of this century, its implications have become a major concern in anthropology. The first part of this entry shows why the contribution of anthropology is important to the interdisciplinary study of, and engagement with, climate change. Anthropology teaches us that climate change has to be related t…
Vodou Haïtien
Le vodou haïtien a été formé dans le contexte de l’esclavage. Culte de la famille royale au Dahomey, en Afrique Occidentale, il a été transformé par les esclaves de l’île d’Haïti en moyen de reconstruction de soi et en force de libération. D’où le rôle primordial que le vodou a joué dans la plus grande révolte réussie d’esclaves de l’histoire et dans la création d’Haïti indépendante. Initialement, l’anthropologie basée sur une perspective évoluti…
Sharing
Sharing is a particularly versatile and widespread human practice that features in all domains of life, including religion and politics, family life, and economics. It has a long ethnographic record but it is only recently that it has reached centre stage in social theory and in public awareness. However, not everything that is called ‘sharing’ qualifies as such in a comparative and more technical sense. This entry seeks to distinguish sharing fr…
Mind
There is something phenomenologically basic about the human experience of awareness, or consciousness. All ethnographies describe people who think, feel, imagine, hope, and are aware. Yet anthropologists have shown that different social worlds understand mental life (we will call this ‘mind’) in different ways. Different cultures imagine mental life differently, both in what thought can do, and how one might draw the boundary between mind and wor…
Cannibalism
Cannibalism, the eating of one’s own kind, is a practice that occurs in both humans and non-humans. Some people consumed their own kin to ensure that their spirits joined those of their ancestors; others ate their enemies in anger in the context of warfare, in some cases to acquire the powers of those they had defeated; and others ate sorcerers who they thought brought them disease and death. Archaeologists provided evidence of prehistoric cannib…
Writing Anthropology
Writing is key in anthropology, as one of its main modes of communication. Teaching, research, publications, and outreach all build on, or consist of, writing. This entry traces how anthropological writing styles have evolved over time according to changing politics in the discipline. It starts out in the late nineteenth century, showing how early writings in the discipline aimed to be objective. While writing anthropology in a literary mode goes…
Freedom of Speech
Free speech is a familiar concept. It is an established ideal of liberalism and democratic politics, and the subject of political debate and conflict across diverse historical and cultural contexts. Free speech has not primarily been considered, however, as a set of lived, valued, and contested practices, mediated by various linguistic, ethical, and material forms. While anthropology has not traditionally occupied itself with free speech, it has …
History
Anthropology and history are inseparable, sharing concerns with societies other than the one we currently inhabit—whether in time or in space. This entry considers how the relation between anthropology and history developed since the late nineteenth century when anthropology professionalised as a discipline. Initially, anthropology was wedded to a form of history that was conjectural, based on hypothetical ideas of societal development deriving f…
Buddhism
Buddhism has existed for around two and half millennia, and is practiced by over 500 million people in the world today. The anthropology of Buddhism spans the breadth of the Buddhist world and provides rich ethnographic accounts of the religion as lived in diverse social contexts. Anthropological studies have evolved from early taxonomic work to the study of continuities and reinterpretations of socially embedded Buddhist traditions. Today, they …
Postsocialism
The collapse of the socialist societies in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union drastically changed the lives of millions of people and offered a new and exciting field of research possibilities. ‘Postsocialism’ emerged as an interim term to describe the lives of people who had formerly lived under socialism. Some scholars of postsocialism assumed a quick transition for these societies to neoliberal forms of government and economy. However, postso…
Depression
Depression, which psychiatrists regard as a most common mental illness, has been examined by anthropologists especially closely since the 1980s. While most medical experts consider depression as a universal, neurobiological disease that requires a global public health intervention, anthropologists instead ask why the illness known in psychiatry as ‘depression’ appears to have been extremely rare in much of the world until very recently. They also…
Masculinity
To know what men are, anthropologists look beyond dictionary definitions, personal experience, and opinions and study societies across the globe and throughout history. They study not only people who call themselves men, but also people who call themselves men only some of the time, people who have testicles but know they’re not men, people with ovaries who know they are men, and many more. Until the early 1980s, anthropology’s contribution to th…
Ontological Turn, The
Culture' is in many ways the most fundamental of anthropological concepts. Yet it has been the subject of a range of critical interventions in the course of the discipline's history, the most recent of which is the 'ontological turn'. Proponents of the ontological turn argue that 'culture' carries with it significant metaphysical baggage. In particular, they point out that it implies that although human beings may differ in their ideas about or v…
Deadwood and paternalism: Rationalizing casual labour in an Indian company town
This article is based upon ethnographic research in the Indian company town of Jamshedpur, in the Tata Motors and Telcon companies. I relate the local shift towards casual labour since the 1990s to managerial discourses that rationalize this development. I argue that whilst flexible accumulation may represent a global transformation of employment regimes, the local implementation of this process relies upon a discursive continuity with the past. …
Prefigurative Politics
Prefigurative politics' refers to how activists embody and enact, within their activism, the socialities and practices they foster for broader society. Inspired by anarchist principles, the core practices characterising prefiguration include participative democracy, horizontality, inclusiveness, and direct action. Gaining visibility with the social movements that blossomed after 1968, and again with the post-1999 movements opposing neoliberal glo…
Digital Anthropology
The digital' is defined here as new technologies that are ultimately reducible to binary code. These have made many cultural artefacts easier and quicker to both reproduce and to share. The first section of this entry is concerned with populations and worlds that are largely the result of digital technologies. The second section examines the more general use and consequences of digital technologies on diverse populations around the world. Rather …
Animism
Animism is a particular sensibility and way of relating to various beings in the world. It involves attributing sentience to other beings that may include persons, animals, plants, spirits, the environment, or even items of technology, such as cars, robots, or computers. Through ethnographic examples drawn from animistic societies worldwide, this entry examines key themes in the study of animism, from principles of animation to attributing sentie…
Questioning success: Dispossession and the criminal entrepreneur in urban India
Conceptual divisions between the formal and informal sector are a marked feature of studies of Indian neoliberal dispossession, which juxtapose the experiences of an insecure informal workforce with their counterparts in an increasingly privileged and hegemonic formal sector. I suggest that dispossession be conceptually extended to areas of formal, urban India that experience economic liberalisation as a loss of job security and engage with the i…
Profane Relations: The Irony of Offensive Jokes in India
On the shopfloor of an Indian automobile plant, a multi-ethnic workforce exchanges potentially offensive ethnic jokes with one another while remaining largely silent on actual incidences of communal violence. This paper shows how silence and profane humour are important aspects of an inter-ethnic sociality in the workplace, which distances itself from the retaliatory logics of communal violence. Speaking in the indirect register of irony, I argue…
Social Reproduction
Social reproduction is a lens through which to analyse the persistence of society over time, even as its human and material components keep changing. Its main value is in identifying and explaining tensions that emerge between the logic that reproduces society, and the continued survival (biological reproduction) and wellbeing of the population. Its origins are in Karl Marx’s critique of capitalist society, as governed by a drive towards accumula…
Anthropocene
The Anthropocene' is a term that is increasingly used to define a new planetary epoch: one in which humans have become the dominant force shaping Earth's bio-geophysical composition and processes. Although it originated in the Earth Sciences, it has since been widely adopted across academia and the public sphere as a catch-all description for the overwhelming impact of human activity on the planet. This entry examines how anthropologists have eng…
Relations
To make a topic from one of anthropology's principal means and objects of study, investigating relations through relations, is offered in the spirit of reflexive enquiry. The entry is not confined to anthropological works, touching briefly on certain philosophical dimensions and drawing in writers from other fields. However, it is organised around the way anthropologists have refined and expanded the application of relations through their diverse…
Values
The concept of values has recently re-emerged as the object of explicit theoretical attention in a number of disciplines, including anthropology. The aim of this entry is to review the different anthropological approaches that come together under the label of ‘value theory’. At present, these can be sorted into structuralist and action-oriented camps. The former treats values as objective phenomena embedded in cultural structures; the latter conc…
Ethics / Morality
It is possible to argue that the anthropology of ethics has always been part of the discipline but also that it is a radically new and transformative venture. This entry explains why both are true. It describes how moral life has long been generally understood in anthropology, how this came to seem insufficient, and the ways that have been proposed recently for improvement. We review the main intellectual traditions that have inspired these new d…
Sons of Soil, Sons of Steel: Autochthony, Descent and the Class Concept in Industrial India
Inspired by E. P. Thompson's modelling of class as the contingent outcome of historical processes, this paper explores how autochthony and descent came to inform the boundaries of industrial workforces in the Indian steel towns of Jamshedpur and Rourkela. We suggest that if class is a historical object, then it relates to other forms of power and identity in ways that question the use of rigid analytic typologies. In the private sector Tata compa…
Canon Fire
Despite sustained critical attention to the politics of knowledge, contemporary anthropology disproportionately engages with ideas produced by academics based in European and North American universities. The 'decolonizing the curriculum' movement speaks to core areas of anthropological interest while making a critical comment on the academic structures in which anthropologists produce their work. The articles in this collection interrogate the te…
The Indian Gift: A critical debate
IntroductionIn 1986 Jonathan Parry's 'The Gift, the Indian Gift and the "Indian Gift"' claimed to overturn conventional understandings of Marcel Mauss, by arguing that market societies most idealize the distinction between gifts and commodities, and gift giving need not entail reciprocity. Based on an analysis of Hindu religious gifts, Parry proposed a broad framework for understanding how ideologies of exchange function in different economic and…
Capitalism, Violence and The State
In the Tata company town of Jamshedpur, incisive popular discourses of corruption posit a mutually beneficial relationship between ‘legitimate’ institutions and organised criminality, a dynamic believed to enable pervasive transformations in the city’s industrial and financial infrastructures. This article situates this local discourse within the wider body of anthropological work on South Asian corruption, noting a discursive departure from the …
Metrics
Numbers, enumeration, and the quantification of contemporary life seem to govern our existence more and more. Particularly since the dawn of the twenty-first century, the importance of quantification for governance has grown, and anthropologists have increasingly turned their attention to the ramifications of metrics, or numeric representation that translates assumed realities into numbers (Rottenburg & Merry 2015: 2). They study whether and how …
Animals
What role do nonhuman animals play in human social life? This question has long interested anthropologists, who have provided various answers, themselves reflective of broader theoretical trends within the discipline. For much of the twentieth century, animals were regarded as material and/or conceptual resources for humans, with different anthropologists regarding one or the other aspect as more important. More recently, anthropologists have sou…
Hunting and gathering
Hunting and gathering constitute the oldest human mode of making a living, and the only one for which there is an uninterrupted record from human origins to the present. Correspondingly, there has been a lot of anthropological attention devoted to hunting and gathering with an initial confidence that one could directly observe human nature by studying hunter-gatherers. More recently, however, anthropologists have grown cautious not to draw analog…
Kill your ancestors: The wars of decolonization
This essay explains why debates about the decolonization of anthropology tend to become reactive and confrontational, and outlines a model for why productive critique is central to intellectual progress. In a small, young discipline that values subjectivity and the questioning of ethnocentrism, the decolonial critique of tradition is more likely to be felt as a personalized war on one's professional community and sense of self. Further, the tende…
Postsocialism
The collapse of the socialist societies in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union drastically changed the lives of millions of people and offered a new and exciting field of research possibilities. ‘Postsocialism’ emerged as an interim term to describe the lives of people who had formerly lived under socialism. Some scholars of postsocialism assumed a quick transition for these societies to neoliberal forms of government and economy. However, postso…
Political Ecology
Political ecology is a critical research field within anthropology and related disciplines that examines how and why economic structures and power relations drive environmental change in an increasingly interconnected world. Initially it was most well-known for investigating the practices and impacts of large-scale resource development projects in subsistence-oriented communities in the Global South. Over time, political ecology has expanded its …
Resistance
With images of protest and dissent widespread and frequently circulated in news broadcasts and social media posts, resistance to prevailing power structures seems to be an expected and regular feature of contemporary life. This entry explores how anthropology has linked these spectacular moments of resistance to broader social questions. It further explains how identifying a particular practice or process as a form of resistance is not always str…
Anthropological and Historical Perspectives on India's Working Classes
With reference to original ethnographic and historical research on India, the papers collected in this forum suggest conceptual refinements that might re-centre the study of class in regional scholarship. Through discussions of class politics in industrial, construction and agricultural contexts, the authors interrogate the conceptual oppositions between stably employed fordist labour forces and the 'working poor' that have often constrained ethn…
Bureaucracy
Bureaucracy quite literally translates into rule by public office (‘bureau’). The anthropology of bureaucracy can be seen as falling under two broad approaches. Firstly, there is an expanding corpus of work that concentrates its attention on explaining how different bureaucracies – from different arms of the state to NGOs to supranational organizations – actually function; what their ‘inner worlds’ are like; and why and how they produce the resul…
Anthropology, Politics and the State: Democracy and Violence in South Asia by Jonathan Spencer
Capitalism, Violence and The State
In the Tata company town of Jamshedpur, incisive popular discourses of corruption posit a mutually beneficial relationship between ‘legitimate’ institutions and organised criminality, a dynamic believed to enable pervasive transformations in the city’s industrial and financial infrastructures. This article situates this local discourse within the wider body of anthropological work on South Asian corruption, noting a discursive departure from the …
Questioning success: Dispossession and the criminal entrepreneur in urban India
Conceptual divisions between the formal and informal sector are a marked feature of studies of Indian neoliberal dispossession, which juxtapose the experiences of an insecure informal workforce with their counterparts in an increasingly privileged and hegemonic formal sector. I suggest that dispossession be conceptually extended to areas of formal, urban India that experience economic liberalisation as a loss of job security and engage with the i…
Deadwood and paternalism: Rationalizing casual labour in an Indian company town
This article is based upon ethnographic research in the Indian company town of Jamshedpur, in the Tata Motors and Telcon companies. I relate the local shift towards casual labour since the 1990s to managerial discourses that rationalize this development. I argue that whilst flexible accumulation may represent a global transformation of employment regimes, the local implementation of this process relies upon a discursive continuity with the past. …
Economic Anthropology
Economic anthropology emerged in the twentieth century at the interface between sociocultural anthropology (commonly known as ethnology in earlier times, hereafter anthropology) and economics (in earlier nomenclature commonly political economy). The latter is nowadays predominantly a universalizing discipline, theorizing deductively on the basis of maximizing individuals and firms. By contrast, anthropologists tend to work inductively from their …
Anthropological and Historical Perspectives on India's Working Classes
With reference to original ethnographic and historical research on India, the papers collected in this forum suggest conceptual refinements that might re-centre the study of class in regional scholarship. Through discussions of class politics in industrial, construction and agricultural contexts, the authors interrogate the conceptual oppositions between stably employed fordist labour forces and the 'working poor' that have often constrained ethn…
Sons of Soil, Sons of Steel: Autochthony, Descent and the Class Concept in Industrial India
Inspired by E. P. Thompson's modelling of class as the contingent outcome of historical processes, this paper explores how autochthony and descent came to inform the boundaries of industrial workforces in the Indian steel towns of Jamshedpur and Rourkela. We suggest that if class is a historical object, then it relates to other forms of power and identity in ways that question the use of rigid analytic typologies. In the private sector Tata compa…
Criminal Capital: Violence, Corruption and Class in Industrial India
Criminal Capital explores the relationship between neoliberalism, criminality and the reshaping of class in modern India. It discusses how the political vocabularies of urban industrial workers reflect the processes by which power is distributed across the region. Based upon field research among a ‘casualised’ workforce in the industrial city of Jamshedpur, the book examines the links between the decline of employment security, and criminality in…
Anthropology Museums and Museum Anthropology
This entry provides an overview of the history, politics and changing roles of anthropology museums. It explores the developing field of museum anthropology, which encompasses the work that anthropologists do within museums and the anthropological study of museums. Museum anthropology is situated within recent theoretical frameworks that underpin the study of objects and the relation between people and things. A central concern is the changing re…
Tribe
The concept of ‘tribal society’ is one of the most prominent and popular ‘anthropological’ notions of our time, yet within western social and cultural anthropology it has been largely abandoned as a sociological category. Although the origin of the word was rooted in the ancient Roman tribus, the modern concept of tribe emerged in the era of Euroamerican colonial expansion. It became the standard term for the social units of peoples considered pr…
Science
Science' features twice in anthropology. On the one hand, science is an object of anthropological enquiry, in much the same way as ‘kinship’, ‘religion’, or ‘nationalism’. Anthropologists have studied scientific practices and practitioners ethnographically, and have traced the effects of scientific knowledge in other spheres of human activity. Alongside other scholars in ‘science and technology studies,’ anthropologists have raised questions such…
Matriliny
Matriliny is a way of reckoning kinship descent and belonging through the female line. This entry discusses some of the forms matrilineal kinship may take in practice before considering how anthropologists have understood matriliny since the mid-twentieth century. It looks in turn at three dominant (mis)understandings of matriliny, namely: (1) that matriliny is simply another way of structuring male authority and thus of no meaningful consequence…
Feasting
Feasts are special meals (food out of the ordinary in kind or quantity) shared among an enlarged circle of people. They are occasions for many kinds of activities, not only eating and talking, but musical performances, formal speech, prayer and sacrifice, politicking and commerce. Feasts are ubiquitous throughout the world and human history: consider museums filled to brimming with the knives, jugs, cups and platters of past feasts. Archaeologist…
Landscape
When we think about landscape, we tend to think of natural scenery, empty of people; of a view, spread in front of our eyes; or of a backdrop, a stage for people’s movements and activities. The anthropology of landscape challenges all of these ideas. By sharing and observing local lives through ethnographic fieldwork, anthropologists have realised that landscapes matter deeply to people: they care about the landscapes they inhabit, materially sha…
Values
The concept of values has recently re-emerged as the object of explicit theoretical attention in a number of disciplines, including anthropology. The aim of this entry is to review the different anthropological approaches that come together under the label of ‘value theory’. At present, these can be sorted into structuralist and action-oriented camps. The former treats values as objective phenomena embedded in cultural structures; the latter conc…
Mediterraneanist Anthropology
The Mediterranean is one of the most underrated areas in anthropological imagination. On the one hand, its shores have furnished the most complex formulations of the unfolding dynamics of society and culture in time. On the other hand, most Euro-American treatises of alternative social worlds fly over the Mediterranean en route to places taken to be more radically different. After a short view of the historiographical debate regarding the Mediter…
Citizenship
What is citizenship? The word itself is now used in a wide range of arenas, from citizenship education in schools to development agencies’ programmes of good governance, and public statements from multinationals about their ‘corporate citizenship’. It is being used, it seems, to evoke virtues such as equality in rights, respectful engagement between citizen (individual or corporate) and wider national society, participation in and knowledge about…
Resistance
With images of protest and dissent widespread and frequently circulated in news broadcasts and social media posts, resistance to prevailing power structures seems to be an expected and regular feature of contemporary life. This entry explores how anthropology has linked these spectacular moments of resistance to broader social questions. It further explains how identifying a particular practice or process as a form of resistance is not always str…
Colonialism / Postcolonialism
The giant composite field of colonialism and postcolonialism studies has had a transforming effect on modern anthropology. Anthropologists have been innovative users of its multidisciplinary perspectives, and key contributors to its challenging accounts of past and contemporary global life and experience. The call to prioritise colonial and postcolonial perspectives in the framing of anthropology's central research questions has greatly extended …
Human Rights
Human rights, as described in documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, are a set of moral and legal principles that apply to all human beings irrespective of their age, sex, religion, nationality, and other such characteristics. Yet they can only ever be claimed and applied in specific historical and cultural circumstances. It is from recognising this basic paradox between a universal principle and its practical application th…
Gambling
Gambling occurs when a person commits one or more valuable items (a ‘stake’) to an event or series of events packaged together, and where the result determines a loss or win at a rate agreed before the final stake is committed. The practice is or was not present everywhere and is often marginal in a given society, and some gambling variations escape the boundaries of this definition. Some include financial speculation within the phenomenon of gam…
Profane Relations: The Irony of Offensive Jokes in India
On the shopfloor of an Indian automobile plant, a multi-ethnic workforce exchanges potentially offensive ethnic jokes with one another while remaining largely silent on actual incidences of communal violence. This paper shows how silence and profane humour are important aspects of an inter-ethnic sociality in the workplace, which distances itself from the retaliatory logics of communal violence. Speaking in the indirect register of irony, I argue…
Ontological Turn, The
Culture' is in many ways the most fundamental of anthropological concepts. Yet it has been the subject of a range of critical interventions in the course of the discipline's history, the most recent of which is the 'ontological turn'. Proponents of the ontological turn argue that 'culture' carries with it significant metaphysical baggage. In particular, they point out that it implies that although human beings may differ in their ideas about or v…
Voice
Voice is a salient category in our contemporary lives. We speak of marginalised groups ‘lacking voice’ and celebrate their efforts at ‘raising their voices’; we are advised to listen to our ‘inner voice’ and be ‘vocal’ in our opinions. Such idioms closely associate voice with individuality, agency, and authority. Anthropologists have sought to denaturalise these associations, showing them to be the product of a particular ideology of voice that i…
Ethics / Morality
It is possible to argue that the anthropology of ethics has always been part of the discipline but also that it is a radically new and transformative venture. This entry explains why both are true. It describes how moral life has long been generally understood in anthropology, how this came to seem insufficient, and the ways that have been proposed recently for improvement. We review the main intellectual traditions that have inspired these new d…
Sociology (92 works) · Political science (61 works) · Law (54 works) · Politics (47 works) · Epistemology (43 works) · Anthropology (39 works) · Philosophy (35 works) · Social science (29 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (26 works) · Ethnography (26 works)