Jašarević’s beautifully evocative, itinerant ethnography weaves along and sutures together trajectories that, at first, might appear to stand at a distance, their collocations seeming accidents of wandering. On the one end of Health and Wealth there are the open air, small scale markets, typical of post-war, post-socialist Bosnia and many other post-socialist spaces, where a multitude of commodities, from banal …
The concept of placebo is predicated on the opposition between active and inert, deploying this opposition to assert that an action or substance with no inherent active principle can have a paradoxical effect “as if” it were active.1 My thesis is that there is no such thing as the inert in human affairs, relationships, or experience. Think of the …
THANK YOU to Richard Baxstrom, Nancy Rose Hunt, Tanya Luhrmann, and Pamela Reynolds, for taking the trouble to read and to comment on The Anti-Witch. I felt great pleasure in the idea that Matthew Carey had managed to recreate for you not only my work, but also life in the Bocage, with its tragedies, its flavor, and sometimes its …
I was utterly delighted to read Jeanne Favret-Saada’s account of the tarot cards used by dewitchers like Madame Flora to understand her clients more deeply and to give them good advice. I, too, in my early work with British witches and magicians, watched many tarot card readings. I learned to read tarot cards myself and did so, not only for …
Science, Medicine, and Anthropology