Description
In a time of intense uncertainty, social strife, and ecological upheaval, what does it take to envision the world as it yet may be? The field of anthropology, Anand Pandian argues, has resources essential for this critical and imaginative task. Anthropology is no stranger to injustice and exploitation. Still, its methods can reveal unseen dimensions of the world at hand and radical experience as the seed of a humanity yet to come. A Possible Anthropology is an ethnography of anthropologists at work: canonical figures like Bronislaw Malinowski and Claude Levi-Strauss, ethnographic storytellers like Zora Neale Hurston and Ursula K. Le Guin, contemporary scholars like Jane Guyer and Michael Jackson, and artists and indigenous activists inspired by the field. In their company, Pandian explores the moral and political horizons of anthropological inquiry, the creative and transformative potential of an experimental practice.
Table of Contents
Introduction. An Ethnographer among the Anthropologists 1
1. The World at Hand: Between Scientific and Literary Inquiry 15
2. A Method of Experience: Reading, Writing, Teaching, Fieldwork 44
3. For the Humanity Yet to Come: Politics, Art, Fiction, Ethnography 77
Coda. The Anthropologist as Critic 110
Acknowledgments 123
Notes 127
Bibliography 141
Index 155
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