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This book argues that the central assumption of immunology—that we survive through the recognition and elimination of non-self—has become a defining concept of the modern age. Tracing this immunological understanding of self and other through an incredibly diverse array of venues, from medical research to legal and military strategies and the electronic revolution, the author shows how this defensive way of looking at the world not only destroys diversity but also eliminates the possibility of truly engaging difference, thereby impoverishing our culture and foreclosing tremendous opportunities for personal growth. To illustrate these destructive consequences, he likens the current craze for embracing diversity and the use of politically correct speech to a cultural potluck to which we each bring different dishes, but at which no one can eat unless they abide by the same rules. Similarly, loaning money to developing nations serves as a tool both to make the peoples in those nations more like us and to maintain them in the nonthreatening status of distant dependents. To break free of the resulting downward spiral of homogenization and self-focus, the author suggests that we instead adopt a new defining concept based on embryology, in which development and self-growth take place through a process of incorporation and transformation. In this effort he suggests that we have much to learn from non-Western peoples, such as the Balinese, whose ritual practices require them to take on the considerable risk of injecting into their selves the potential dangers of otherness—and in so doing ultimately strengthen themselves as well as their society.

This book explores language and interaction within a contemporary Native American legal system. Grounded in extensive field research on the Hopi Tribe of northeastern Arizona—on whose appellate court he now serves as Justice Pro Tempore—this work explains how Hopi notions of tradition and culture shape and are shaped by the processes of Hopi jurisprudence. Like many indigenous legal institutions across North America, the Hopi Tribal Court was created in the image of Anglo-American-style law. However, the book shows that in recent years, Hopi jurists and litigants have called for their courts to develop a jurisprudence that better reflects Hopi culture and traditions. Providing insights into the Hopi and English courtroom interactions through which this conflict plays out, the book argues that tensions between the language of Anglo-style law and Hopi tradition both drive Hopi jurisprudence and make it unique. Ultimately, this analyses of the language of Hopi law offer a fresh approach to the cultural politics that influence indigenous legal and governmental practices worldwide.

In every culture intimacy between adults and children is subject to regulation, but it is most often only a taboo. In the last half-century in the West such taboos have become explicit objects for legal regulation. In much of the West, however, the focus has shifted from punishment and healing to “rehabilitation” through therapy. In Germany treatment is in fact a legal right and a personal obligation. “Cruel Attachments” is an anthropological account based on ethnographic research in Berlin, Germany, of the attempt to rehabilitate child sex offenders through therapy, often accompanied by short-term imprisonment. Therapy is charged with creating a person who not only avoids a repeating the crime but a self capable of reflection, introspection, and transformation. Through an explication of this modern secular ritual of rehabilitation, John Borneman theorizes the complex relation between a legal system that demands a change of self, a transformation of the inner state of a person, and a public that is extremely skeptical of the success of rehab rituals. Using select case studies, he follows offenders as they experience a sequence of events––from accusation to admission of culpability, through arrest, trial, imprisonment, treatment, release from prison, and either social reincorporation or indefinite surveillance. Tensions and problems in the relationship between law, therapy, and a skeptical public notwithstanding, the author argues that the turn to therapy within the German mode of rehabilitation of child sex molesters presents a more effective alternative to a punitive model such as is practiced in the United States.

This book discusses the unarticulated unconscious and tacit knowledge, termed “dark matter of the mind,” which underlies and enables verbal communication. Humans, when they speak or interpret, make use of a wide variety of skills and distinctions, in grammar, phonetics, organization of information by importance, and assumptions taken for given, for example, which compose this dark matter. The book’s contention is that this unconscious knowledge is not a product of innate human psychology, but rather of cultural influences and experiences. The book draws on the author’s experience attempting to translate the Bible and its cultural context for the Pirahãs in the Brazilian Amazon as a missionary activity. This missionary activity was hindered by a large number of underlying, largely unspoken, assumptions on the part of the American author on one side and the Pirahãs on the other which it impossible to translate the New Testament in such a way that it would be accessible for the Pirahãs in the same way that is to Americans. The author’s experience as a missionary, along with other studies of cultural conditioning, confirms an understanding of the individual which echoes the Buddhist concept of Anatman, which asserts that there is no innate human nature, but only the self which is entirely composed of memory and experience.

Interweaving personal narratives and family photos with a nuanced assessment of the social impacts of deindustrialization, this book is one part memoir and one part ethnography—providing a much-needed female and familial perspective on cultures of labor and their decline. Through vivid accounts of the author's family's struggles and personal upward mobility, this book reveals the social landscapes of America's industrial fallout, navigating complex tensions among class, labor, economy, and environment. Unsatisfied with the notion that the author's family's turmoil was inevitable in the ever-forward progress of the United States, the book provides a fresh and important counternarrative that gives a new voice to the many Americans whose distress resulting from deindustrialization has too often been ignored.

This book takes as its object of analysis the relationship between literature and anthropology in France during the twentieth century, a moment that marked ethnography’s rise to prominence as a field science as well as the discipline’s openness to literary modes of writing that stood alongside more conventional anthropological monographs. The book argues that this openness to literature served as a textual counterpart to the institutionalization of anthropology in France, which occurred after the discipline publicly cut its ties with travel writing as a literary genre in order to become a “serious” scientific endeavor. Chapters approach this paradox through a striking observation about ethnographic writing in France beginning in the 1930s: upon their return from fieldwork, many ethnographers produced two written accounts of their research experience, the first being a rather dry, scholarly monograph, and the second a more “literary” text that was much more difficult to classify since it was too aesthetically and philosophically stylized to be a pure ethnographic documentary of everyday life. The book demonstrates how these anthropological “second books” represent a uniquely French phenomenon and bespeak an engagement with a broader conversation between science and literature in France. Chapters engage a variety of texts, from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes tropiques and Michel Leiris’s L’Afrique fantôme to works by Marcel Griaule and Marcel Mauss, ending with a reading of Roland Barthes’s anthropologically inspired criticism that points to how literature and the social sciences in France jointly created and participated in the same intellectual field throughout the twentieth century.

How do people make sense of their experiences? How do they understand possibility? How do they limit possibility? These questions are central to all the human sciences. Here, the book offers a powerfully creative new way to think about human experience: the notion of imaginative horizons. Imaginative horizons are the blurry boundaries that separate the here and now from what lies beyond, in time and space. These horizons, this book argues, deeply influence both how we experience our lives and how we interpret those experiences, and this book here sets himself the task of exploring the roles that creativity and imagination play in our experience of the world.

Starting from the observed fact that humans construct themselves using information carried in two separate channels, one cultural and consisting largely of symbols, the other genetic and consisting largely of DNA, this book explores the consequences for human socio-cultural systems of the relationship between the two components of this dual inheritance model and of the key differences between them. Using a wide array of ethnographic cases, the book shows that while socio-cultural systems vary greatly, any one of them when analyzed will reveal the effects of the necessary tension between the two modes of information transmission across generations. The analysis of the ethnographic material shows that a dual inheritance model does a better job of accounting for distinctive characteristics of human societies than does an account based on either ordinary evolutionary theory or social-cultural construction theory alone. The key distinctions between the modes of transmission of the two types of information are that genetic information cannot produce exact replicas of itself, can only create a small number of close relatives, operates on an agenda based on the logic of inclusive fitness, and must be accomplished by copulation; while cultural information can inform large numbers of replicas of itself that can approximate to identity, operates on an agenda based on the establishment of wide-ranging groups united by symbolic kinship, and is transmitted in a public arena in which copulation is excluded or restricted. These differences generate many observed distinctive forms of human society.

Though New York’s Lower East Side today is heavily gentrified, it spent decades as an infamous site of blight, open-air drug dealing, and class conflict—an emblematic example of the tattered state of 1970s and ’80s Manhattan. Those decades of strife, however, also gave the Lower East Side something unusual: a radical movement that blended urban homesteading and European-style squatting into something never before seen in the United States. Ours to Lose tells the story of that social movement through a close look at a diverse group of Lower East Side squatters who occupied abandoned city-owned buildings in the 1980s, fought to keep them for decades, and eventually began a long, complicated process to turn their illegal occupancy into legal cooperative ownership. The squatters had made moral and political claims on urban space that, in a rare turn of events, turned into legal rights. These persistent squatters created almost a dozen low-income, limited equity co-operative buildings in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in New York but also, more intangibly, a sprawling network of chosen family, a history of struggle, a repertoire of tactics, and a story that continues to inspire others to ask: Is it possible to create a space outside of capitalism? Combining oral history and ethnography, Ours to Lose not only tells a little-known New York City story, it also shows how property shapes our sense of ourselves as social beings and explores the ethics of homeownership and debt in post-recession America.

It is the anthropologist's fate to always be between things: countries, languages, cultures, even realities. But rather than lament this, the author celebrates the creative power of the between, showing how it can transform us, changing our conceptions of who we are, what we know, and how we live in the world. Beginning with his early days with the Peace Corps in Africa and culminating with a recent bout with cancer, this book is an evocative account of the circuitous path the author's life has taken, offering a fascinating depiction of how a career is shaped over decades of reading and research. He imparts his accumulated wisdom not through grandiose pronouncements but by drawing on his gift for storytelling. Tales of his apprenticeship to a sorcerer in Niger, his studies with Claude Lévi–Strauss in Paris, and his friendships with West African street vendors in New York City accompany philosophical reflections on love, memory, power, courage, health, and illness. Graced with humor and narrative elegance, this book is both the story of a distinguished career and a profound meditation on coming to terms with the impermanence of all things.