Living with Concepts

Anthropology in the Grip of Reality

Edited by Andrew Brandel and Marco Motta

Contributor(s): Jocelyn Benoist, Andrew Brandel, Michael Cordey, Veena Das, Rasmus Dyring, Michael D. Jackson, Michael Lambek, Sandra Laugier, Marco Motta, Michael Puett, Lotte Buch Segal and Thomas Schwarz Wentzer

Thinking from Elsewhere

Published: 2021

ISBN: 9780823294275

Page Count: 352

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Price: $39.00

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Description: This volume examines an often taken for granted concept—that of the concept itself. How do we picture what concepts are, what they do, how they arise in the course of everyday life? Challenging conventional approaches that treat concepts as mere tools at our disposal for analysis, or as straightforwardly equivalent to signs to be deciphered, the anthropologists and philosophers in this volume turn instead to the ways concepts are already intrinsically embedded in our forms of life and how they constitute the very substrate of our existence as humans who lead lives in language.

Attending to our ordinary lives with concepts requires not an ascent from the rough ground of reality into the skies of theory, but rather acceptance of the fact that thinking is congenital to living with and through concepts. The volume offers a critical and timely intervention into both contemporary philosophy and anthropological theory by unsettling the distinction between thought and reality that continues to be too often assumed and showing how the supposed need to grasp reality may be replaced by an acknowledgement that we are in its grip.

Contributors: Jocelyn Benoist, Andrew Brandel, Michael Cordey, Veena Das, Rasmus Dyring and Thomas Schwarz Wentzer, Michael D. Jackson, Michael Lambek, Sandra Laugier, Marco Motta, Michael J. Puett, and Lotte Buch Segal
Reviews: “A remarkable collection with genuine interdisciplinary reach, Living with Concepts opens up a critical dialogue between philosophers and anthropologists about the various paths that thinking can take when concepts are rethought as intrinsic to forms of life.”---Jason Throop, UCLA

“Living with Concepts moves between anthropology and philosophy in fresh and fruitful ways that powerfully bring out the moral and political urgency of understanding what is involved in trafficking in concepts. The contributors are united in questioning the legitimacy of assumptions so widespread they might be described as belonging to the zeitgeist.”---Alice Crary, New School for Social Research

A book like this can be recommended to university-level students and scholars across any discipline. For anthropologists, it is a must-read irrespective of the branch one belongs to. - Anthropology Book Forum
Table of Contents: Introduction: Life with Concepts
Andrew Brandel and Marco Motta | 1

1 Concepts of the Ordinary
Sandra Laugier | 29

2 How Life Makes a Conversation of Us: Ontology, Ethics, and Responsive Anthropology
Rasmus Dyring and Thomas Schwarz Wentzer | 50

3 Crisscrossing Concepts: Anthropology and Knowledge-Making
Veena Das | 73

4 The Potencie of Text: Shifting Concepts of Myth and Literature
Andrew Brandel | 110

5 How Social Are Our Concepts?
Jocelyn Benoist | 140

6 Living with Zombies: Forms of Death at the Core of the Ordinary
Marco Motta | 155

7 Creating Worlds: Imagination, Interpretation, and the Subjunctive
Michael J. Puett | 181

8 The Life Course of Concepts
Michael D. Jackson | 197

9 On Sorcery: Life with the Concept
Michael Lambek | 215

10 How Ethical Is Our Life with Concepts? Reflections on Shared Medical Decision Making
Michael Cordey | 243

11 In the Know: The Pain of the Other in Torture Rehabilitation
Lotte Buch Segal | 271

Acknowledgments | 291

References | 293

List of Contributors | 323

Name Index | 325

Subject Index | 329
Details: ISBN-13 9780823294275
Published: 2021-06-15

Trim: 6.000in x 9.000in x 0.000in
Contributors: Contributions: Jocelyn Benoist
Jocelyn Benoist is Professor of Philosophy at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.
Contributions: Andrew Brandel
Andrew Brandel is Lecturer on Social Studies at Harvard University.
Contributions: Michael Cordey
Michael Cordey is Assistant Diplômé in the Institut des Sciences Sociales at the Université de Lausanne.
Contributions: Veena Das
Veena Das is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology at the Johns Hopkins University.
Contributions: Rasmus Dyring
Rasmus Dyring is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Aarhus University. Among Dyring’s works are “From Moral Facts to Human Finitude: On the Problem of Freedom in the Anthropology of Ethics” (HAU, 2018); “The Futures of ‘Us’: A Critical Phenomenology of the Aporias of Ethical Community in the Anthropocene” (Philosophy and Social Criticism, 2021); and “Ellen and the Little One: A Critical Phenomenology of Potentiality in Life with Dementia” (coauthored with Lone Grøn, Anthropological Theory, 2022).
Contributions: Michael D. Jackson
Michael D. Jackson is Distinguished Visiting Professor of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School.
Contributions: Michael Lambek
Michael Lambek holds a Canada Research Chair in Anthropology of Ethical Life at the University of Toronto and is the author of Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action (Fordham University Press, 2010) and The Ethical Condition: Essays on Action, Person, and Value (University of Chicago Press, 2015).
Contributions: Sandra Laugier
Sandra Laugier is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Contemporary Philosophy at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.
Contributions: Marco Motta
Marco Motta is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Bern.
Contributions: Michael Puett
Michael J. Puett is Walter C. Klein Professor of Chinese History and Anthropology at Harvard University.
Contributions: Thomas Schwarz Wentzer
Thomas Schwarz Wentzer is Professor of Philosophy and History of Ideas at Aarhus University.
Contributions: Lotte Buch Segal
Lotte Buch Segal is Lecturer on Cultural Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh.