Suchergebnisse

00_Cover -- 00_Halftitle -- 00a_Info -- 00b_Malinowski -- 00c_Titlepage -- 00d_Copyright -- 00e_Dedication -- 00f_Contents -- 01_Acknowledgments -- 02_Note on transliteration -- 03_Introduction -- 04_Chapter 1 -- 05_Chapter 2 -- 06_Chapter 3 -- 07_Chapter 4 -- 08_Conclusion -- 09_References -- 10_Backmatter -- 11_Backmatter_1 -- 12_Backcover

Trust occupies a unique place in contemporary discourse. Seen as both necessary and good, it is variously depicted as enhancing the social fabric, lowering crime rates, increasing happiness, and generating prosperity. It allows for complex political systems, permits human communication, underpins financial instruments and economic institutions, and holds society itself together. There is scant space within this vision for a nuanced discussion of mistrust. With few exceptions, it is treated as little more than a corrosive absence. This monograph, instead, proposes an ethnographic and conceptual exploration of mistrust as a legitimate epistemological stance in its own right. It examines the impact of mistrust on practices of conversation and communication, friendship and society, as well as politics and cooperation, and suggests that suspicion, doubt, and uncertainty can also ground ways of organizing human society and cooperating with others.

In the preface to his Second Discourse, on the origin of inequality and whether or not it could be justified by natural law, Rousseau cast a disapproving eye over the ample contemporary literature on the topic: "Among the most serious writers, one can hardly find two who are of the same opinion on this point. Without speaking of the ancient philosophers, who seem to have tried their best to contradict each other on the most fundamental principles" (Rousseau 1992 [1755]: 13). In The Dawn of Everything (2021), the anthropologist David Graeber and the archaeologist David Wengrow breathe new life into this classical polemical tradition. They begin by criticizing the current fashion for essays that appeal to the immemorial past to justify their frequently banal and conservative analysis of the present. Steven Pinker, Yuval Harari, Robin Dunbar, Jared Diamond, Walter Scheidel, Francis Fukuyama, and Ian Morris are explicitly named as so many variations on the liberal mystification of social evolution. Graeber and Wengrow's self-proclaimed "new history of humanity," however, runs the risk of leaving the reader with the same disappointment the author of the Second Discourse expressed over the proliferation of unwarranted stances. It is worthwhile, therefore, stating very clearly, and from the start, what separates this particular text from its peers.

Trust occupies a unique place in contemporary discourse. Seen as both necessary and good, it is variously depicted as enhancing the social fabric, lowering crime rates, increasing happiness, and generating prosperity. It allows for complex political systems, permits human communication, underpins financial instruments and economic institutions, and holds society itself together. There is scant space within this vision for a nuanced discussion of mistrust. With few exceptions, it is treated as little more than a corrosive absence. This monograph, instead, proposes an ethnographic and conceptual exploration of mistrust as a legitimate epistemological stance in its own right. It examines the impact of mistrust on practices of conversation and communication, friendship and society, as well as politics and cooperation, and suggests that suspicion, doubt, and uncertainty can also ground ways of organizing human society and cooperating with others.

Claude Lévi-Strauss's essay "Les mathématiques de l'homme," originally published in 1956, is the least known of all his publications. It is also arguably his most prescient, capturing the enduring possibilities and latent pitfalls in anthropology's relationship with mathematics that have continued to beset the discipline to the present day. The aim of presenting a new translation of this essay is to prompt reflections on the changing landscape of research on and teaching of anthropology, which is still as tangled up with the philosophy and practice of mathematics as it was then.

THE GRECANICI OF SOUTHERN
ITALY: Governance, Violence,
and Minority Politics
By Stavroula Pipyrou. Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. 256 pp.
Hardback. ISBN 978-0-8122-4830-2.FOUR DECADES ON: Vietnam, the
United States, and the Legacies of
the Second Indochina War
Edited by Scott Laderman and Edwin A.
Martini. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2013. 334 pp. Paperback. ISBN
978-0-8223-5474-1.FROM THE LAND OF SHADOWS:
War, Revolution, and the Making
of the Cambodian Diaspora
By Khatharya Um. New York: New York
University Press, 2015. 272 pp. Hardback.
ISBN 978-1-4798-0473-3.NATIONALISM, LANGUAGE,
AND MUSLIM EXCEPTIONALISM
By Tristan James Mabry. Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. 264 pp.
Hardback. ISBN 978-0-8122-4691-9.CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTORS IN
ISRAEL: Citizenship, Sacrifice, Trials
of Fealty
By Erica Weiss. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2014. 216 pp. Hardback.
ISBN 978-0-8122-4592-9.