This article is part of the following series: Book forum
When Nancy Rose Hunt suggests that her book “joins the ferment” of colonial aggressions and uncertainties “while taking up harm and pleasure in a shrunken colonial milieu and in postcolonial historiography too” (4), an uninitiated reader might mistake Hunt’s appraisal of her project as attempting the impossible labor of largeness of scope and precision of subject. After spending time …
This article is part of the following series: Book forum
Science, Reason, Modernity: Readings for an Anthropology of the Contemporary is many things — a carefully curated selection of classic texts ranging from Immanuel Kant’s “An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’” and Max Weber’s “Science as a Vocation,” to Georges Canguilhem’s “The Question of Normality in the History of Biological Thought” and Paul Rabinow’s “Anthropos Today: Reflections …
This article is part of the following series: Book forum
Harris Solomon’s Metabolic Living traces patterns of consumption, calories, and chronic disease to tell a story about the enfolding––the absorption and regulation––of food in and about the body in Mumbai. Solomon’s book is a powerful ethnographic reflection on how factors held as exterior (local and global cuisine, evolving and competing norms regarding eating and body image) are wholly interiorized. …
This article is part of the following series: Book forum
This article is part of the following series: Book forum
Sabine Arnaud’s On Hysteria: The Invention of a Medical Category Between 1670 and 1820 focuses on the socio-medical category before its better-known (and more heavily studied) late nineteenth century instantiations, not to trace the prehistory of hysteria from the seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries, but in order to demonstrate how hysteria takes unexpected form during these earlier epochs. The …
This article is part of the following series: Book forum
Carlo Caduff’s The Pandemic Perhaps: Dramatic Events in a Public Culture of Danger (University of California Press, 2015) is a story of the influenza pandemic that never was. Caduff tells this story from an American perspective through his encounters with scientists and other actors who engage in the august work of “preparedness,” but in doing so, often draw upon …