Thinking from Elsewhere

Series Editors: Clara Han, Johns Hopkins University; Bhrigupati Singh, Ashoka University and Brown University; Andrew Brandel, Penn State University

“The series will create a new platform for innovative, border-crossing work that cuts to the heart of what is valuable about our field.”—Danilyn Rutherford, Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research

“The vision outlined is both critical and generous, inviting ethnographic and historical work that can truly expand the richness of the worlds brought into discourse by and in anthropology.”—Judith Farquhar, University of Chicago

Thinking from Elsewhere publishes books animated by three touchstones at the heart of the anthropological endeavor: first, a conceptual labor that struggles with and occasionally displaces habitual categories of thought; second, an ethnographic labor animated by a desire to be attentive to life in its singularities; and third, a sustained engagement with other forms of knowledge, without a stable agreement on where knowledge might be found.

Thinking from Elsewhere seeks to expand the horizon of thinking by departing from the increasing compartmentalization of anthropological knowledge into familiar subfields and regional traditions. An “elsewhere” signals an alterity within that may depart from and fragment categories such as west and non-west. An elsewhere may be found within dominant forms of knowledge and in the experimentation with forms of life. Thinking is entangled with elsewheres, which can appear in the form of concepts but also in movements of the heart, the soul, and the body; in forms of relationality; in ancient texts brought back to life; in clinical encounters and afflictions; in the everyday labors of living amidst precarity; in works of literature and film; in expressions of the earth; and in other ways worlds are corroded or made habitable.

Thinking from Elsewhere welcomes boundary-pushing and daring manuscripts that expand our picture of thinking through scrupulous attention to and engagement with a milieu. We encourage manuscripts that take ethnography as generative of anthropological concepts. We also nurture work that extends and displaces anthropological thinking through the route of archival work, as well as through engagement with film, contemporary art, literature, and philosophy. We are interested in the kinds of elsewheres that a new generation of anthropological knowledge might fathom. We are particularly open to manuscripts emerging from centers of anthropology outside of the U.S., U.K., and France.

For junior scholars publishing with TFE, we provide mentoring in terms of manuscript development, tailored to the specific needs of the project and author. We encourage submission of proposals. For more information or to arrange submissions of proposals or manuscripts, please contact the series editors at [email protected] (Clara Han), [email protected] (Andrew Brandel), and [email protected] (Bhrigupati Singh).

International Advisory Board: Roma Chatterji (University of Delhi), Veena Das (Johns Hopkins University), Robert Desjarlais (Sarah Lawrence College), Harri Englund (Cambridge University), Didier Fassin (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton), Angela Garcia (Stanford University), Junko Kitanaka (Keio University), Eduardo Kohn (McGill University), Heonik Kwon (Cambridge University), Michael Lambek (University of Toronto), Deepak Mehta (Ashoka University), Amira Mittermaier (University of Toronto), Sameena Mulla (Emory University), Marjorie Murray (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile), Young-Gyung Paik (Jeju National University), Sarah Pinto (Tufts University), Michael Puett (Harvard University), Fiona Ross (University of Cape Town), Lisa Stevenson (McGill University)