Publications

Dr Anthony J. Pickles: Money Games: Gambling in a Papua New Guinea TownGambling in Papua New Guinea, despite being completely absent prior to the Colonial era, has come to supersede storytelling as the region’s main nighttime activity. Money Games is an ethnographic monograph which reveals the contemporary importance of gambling in urban Papua New …

This collection of new and previously published work by David Sneath, Director of the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit, explores the historical processes that have made and remade Mongolia as it is today: the construction of ethnic and national cultures from the aristocratic orders of the past; the transformations of political economy and ‘noma…

Why and how do social and cultural anthropologists make comparisons? What problems do they encounter in doing so, and how might these be resolved? What, if anything, makes one comparison better than another? This book answers these questions by exploring the many ways in which, from the nineteenth century to the present day, comparative methods hav…

Indeterminacy: Waste, Value, and the Imagination Edited by Catherine Alexander and Andrew SanchezWhat happens to people, places and objects that do not fit the ordering regimes and progressive narratives of modernity? Conventional understandings imply that progress leaves such things behind, and excludes them as though they were valueless waste. Th…

Based on a conference held in Cambridge to mark Caroline Humphrey’s retirement from the Sigrid Rausing Professorship of Social Anthropology, this volume includes a reprint of Humphrey’s already classic 2008 article, ‘Reassembling Individual Subjects’, which serves as a focus for debate. Responding to decades of 'anti-humanist’ deconstruction of the…

For many years, the department of Social Anthropology has run a series of lectures entitled Schools and Styles of Anthropological Theory, which formed the core of the second-year theory paper. This series, in which members and associates of the department each gave one or two lectures to address theoretical topics of special interest and expertise,…

After Difference: Queer Activism in Italy and Anthropological TheoryQueer activism and anthropology are both fundamentally concerned with the concept of difference.  Yet they are so in fundamentally different ways.  The Italian queer activists in this book value difference as something that must be produced, in opposition to the identity politics t…

Professor Harri Englund: Gogo Breeze: Zambia’s Radio Elder and the Voices of Free SpeechA self-styled grandfather on air, Gogo Breeze seeks intimacy over the airwaves and dispenses advice on a wide variety of grievances and transgressions. Multiple voices are broadcast and juxtaposed through call-ins and dialogue, but free speech finds its ally in …

The new publication, The Social Life of Politics, by Dr Sian Lazar of Cambridge University, examines the intimate, personal, and family dimensions of two political activist groups: the Union of National Civil Servants (UPCN) and the Association of State Workers (ATE).Dr Sian Lazar: The Social Life of Politics: Ethics, Kinship, and Union Activism in…

Dr Sian Lazar: Where Are The Unions? Workers and Social Movements in Latin America, the Middle East and EuropeThe first fully comprehensive comparison of the Latin American ‘turn to the left’, the Middle East and North African ‘Arab Spring’ and the Occupy and anti-austerity movements of Europe and North America, with a focus on the apparent lack of…

Criminal Capital: Violence, corruption and class in industrial IndiaDr Andrew SanchezCriminal 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. …

Ethnographic Plague: Configuring Disease on the Chinese-Russian FrontierDr Christos LynterisChallenging the concept that since the discovery of the plague bacillus in 1894 the study of the disease was dominated by bacteriology, Ethnographic Plague argues for the role of ethnography as a vital contributor to the configuration of plague at the turn o…

MARRIAGE RITES AND RIGHTSEDITED BY
JOANNA MILES, PERVEEZ MODY AND REBECCA PROBERTRecent years have seen extensive discussion about the continuing retreat from marriage, the increasing demand for the right to marry from previously excluded groups, and the need to protect those who do not wish to marry from being forced to do so. At the same time, we…