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4 books match the query 'Lambek, Michael'

cover of Difficult Attachments: Anxieties of Kinship and Care

Difficult Attachments

Anxieties of Kinship and Care

Kathryn E. Goldfarb

Rutgers University Press, 2025

Anthropologists have long considered kinship as the basis for social solidarity. Indeed, the idea that kinship is grounded in positive sociality has found its way into most anthropological accounts and has served as an orienting framework directing decades of scholarly research. But what about when it is not? What about instances when kinship is anything but ‘warm and fuzzy’ but is characterized, instead, by neglect, violence, negative affect, or a lack of nurturance and care? In the three interlinked sections of this volume, the view that kinship is about “solidarity” and “care” is challenged by exploring how kin relations are not only about connection and inclusion but also about disconnection, exclusion, neglect, and violence. Kinship relationships that feel “positive” and “good” take a great deal of perseverance and work; there is nothing “natural” about kinship ties as being based on positive sociality. In these chapters, the contributors take seriously the contingency of kinship relations (the moments when kinship breaks down or is a source of suffering) and how this prompts scholars to develop new theoretical and methodological perspectives.
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cover of Four Lectures on Ethics: Anthropological Perspectives

Four Lectures on Ethics

Anthropological Perspectives

Michael Lambek, Veena Das, Didier Fassin, and Webb Keane

HAU, 2015

Anthropology has recently seen a lively interest in the subject of ethics and comparative notions of morality and freedom. This masterclass brings together four of the most eminent anthropologists working in this field—Michael Lambek, Veena Das, Didier Fassin, and Webb Keane—to discuss, via lectures and responses, important topics facing anthropological ethics and the theoretical debates that surround it.
           
The authors explore the ways we understand morality across many different cultural settings, asking questions such as: How do we recognize the ethical in different ethnographic worlds? What constitutes agency and awareness in everyday life? What might an anthropology of ordinary ethics look like? And what happens when ethics approaches the political in both Western and non-Western societies. Contrasting perspectives and methods—and yet in complimentary ways—this masterclass will serve as an essential guide for how an anthropology of ethics can be formulated in the twenty-first century. 
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cover of Sovereigns of Gold, Spirits of Silver: Ritual, History, and Hierarchy in Madagascar

Sovereigns of Gold, Spirits of Silver

Ritual, History, and Hierarchy in Madagascar

Maurizio Esposito La Rossa

HAU, 2026

How the inhabitants of Western Madagascar reshape their collective identity and negotiate their place within contemporary society through royal rituals and the reinterpretation of the past.

In a postcolonial republic marked by recurrent crises, royal hierarchy continues to frame social inequalities. Within this context, both the descendants of slaves and the newly rich seek to claim or legitimize new hierarchical positions by reformulating historical narratives and establishing them through royal rituals. Focusing on a cult dedicated to the spirits of the ancestors of the Silver Dynasty, Maurizio Esposito La Rossa investigates the categories of “silver” and “gold” that structure the hierarchy of the Sakalava monarchy and are also mobilized by politicians to legitimize their power.

Through multi-sited ethnography, the book offers a broader reflection on the link between narratives and places and on contrasting ways of conceiving history. Whereas Western historiography—and the rise of the nation-state—tends to produce unified historical narratives, the Sakalava monarchies conceive of history as rooted in specific places and social groups, where multiple versions coexist and contend. Combining the divergent demands of a historical anthropology and an anthropology of history, this book endeavors to recount another history of the Sakalava monarchy, without neglecting the polyphony that characterizes it. By tracing how the past is mobilized, transformed, and contested in the present, the book speaks to anthropologists, historians, and readers interested in the intricate entanglements of history, ritual, and political power in postcolonial settings.
 

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cover of The Ethical Condition: Essays on Action, Person, and Value

The Ethical Condition

Essays on Action, Person, and Value

Michael Lambek

University of Chicago Press, 2015

Written over a thirty-year span, Michael Lambek’s essays in this collection point with definitive force toward a single central truth: ethics is intrinsic to social life. As he shows through rich ethnographic accounts and multiple theoretical traditions, our human condition is at heart an ethical one—we may not always be good or just, but we are always subject to their criteria. Detailing Lambek’s trajectory as one anthropologist thinking deeply throughout a career on the nature of ethical life, the essays accumulate into a vibrant demonstration of the relevance of ethics as a practice and its crucial importance to ethnography, social theory, and philosophy.

Organized chronologically, the essays begin among Malagasy speakers on the island of Mayotte and in northwest Madagascar. Building from ethnographic accounts there, they synthesize Aristotelian notions of practical judgment and virtuous action with Wittgensteinian notions of the ordinariness of ethical life and the importance of language, everyday speech, and ritual in order to understand how ethics are lived. They illustrate the multiple ways in which ethics informs personhood, character, and practice; explore the centrality of judgment, action, and irony to ethical life; and consider the relation of virtue to value. The result is a fully fleshed-out picture of ethics as a deeply rooted aspect of the human experience. 
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