Publications

A Grammar of the Thangmi Language
by Mark Turin This two volume, 990-page monograph is a grammar of Thangmi, an endangered Tibeto-Burman language spoken in the districts of Dolakha and Sindhupalcok in central-eastern Nepal. The language is spoken by upwards of 30,000 people belonging to an ethnic group of the same name, as well as by community members in Darjeeling, India. [...]

Recasting Anthropological Knowledge
Edited by Maja Petrovic-Steger and Jeanette Edwards. This volume is an example of the duplex nature of the anthropological relation. Its contributors, a distinguished team of international contributors, all former students of Marilyn Strathern, acknowledge and analyse the felt impact of their specific interpersonal relationship with their teacher, and address the conceptual engagement with her [...]

Human Rights and African Airwaves by Harri Englund
Human Rights and African Airwaves focuses on a popular Chichewa news bulletin, Nkhani Zam’maboma, broadcast on Malawi’s public radio. Highlighting obligation and mutual dependence, the programme expresses grievances and injustices that are closest to Malawi’s impoverished public in popular idioms and local narrative forms. The book argues that the most effective claims against injustices are [...]

Still Life by Henrietta Moore
How adequate are our theories of globalisation for analysing the worlds we share with others?  In this provocative new book, Henrietta Moore asks us to step back and re-examine in a fresh way the interconnections normally labeled ‘globalisation’. Rather than beginning with abstract processes and flows, Henrietta Moore starts by analyzing the hopes, desires and [...]

Transactions in Taste: the Collaborative Lives of Everyday Bengali Food
by Manpreet K. Janeja In a radical departure from previous ethnographies of food, this book by Manpreet K. Janeja asks how and why food is pivotal to social relations and forms of identity that emerge as normal and not-normal. It does so by describing the production, consumption, distribution, and disposal of ‘normal Bengali food’ in [...]

Collaborative Nationalism: The Politics of Friendship on China’s Mongolian Frontier
Collaborative Nationalism traces the regional and global significance of the Mongols in the fierce competition among China, Japan, Mongolia, and Russia to appropriate the Mongol heritage.

El Alto, Rebel City. Self and Citizenship in Andean Bolivia
Sian Lazar's book is an analysis of everyday practices and experiences of citizenship in the indigenous city of El Alto, Bolivia.

‘The Intimate State: Love-Marriage and the Law in Delhi’, by Dr Perveez Mody
‘The Intimate State’ provides an ethnography of love-marriages in the late 1990s in Delhi, identifying the ways in which marriage is ever more a pitch of intense political contestation. It bears upon anthropological understandings of marriageability, urban morality, gender, kinship and the study of the individual and the couple in contemporary India. The Intimate State: [...]

The Headless State: Aristocratic Orders, Kinship Society, and Misrepresentations of Nomadic Inner Asia
In this groundbreaking work, social anthropologist David Sneath aggressively dispels the myths surrounding the history of steppe societies and proposes a new understanding of the nature and formation of the state.

Religion, Anthropology and Cognitive Science
This book examines longstanding debates in the anthropology of religion concerning the connections between ritual and meaning, belief, politics, emotion, development, and gender. But it examines these old topics from a radically new perspective: that of the cognitive science of religion. As such the volume identifies potential solutions to established problems but it also sets [...]