After ethnos

For most of the twentieth century, anthropologists understood themselves as ethnographers. The art of anthropology was the fieldwork-based description of faraway others--of how social structures secretly organized the living-together of a given society, of how a people had endowed the world surrounding them with cultural meaning. While the poetics and politics of anthropology have changed dramatically over the course of a century, the basic equation of anthropology with ethnography--as well as the definition of the human as a social and cultural being--has remained so evident that the possibility of questioning it occurred to hardly anyone. In this book, the author endeavors to decouple anthropology from ethnography--and the human from society and culture--and explores the manifold possibilities of practicing a question-based rather than an answer-based anthropology that emanates from this decoupling. What emerges from the author's provocations is a new understanding of anthropology as a philosophically and poetically inclined, fieldwork-based investigation of what it could mean to be human when the established concepts of the human on which anthropology has been built increasingly fail us.

All of it -- On anthropology (free from ethnos) -- Anthropology and philosophy (differently) -- Philosophy/philosophy -- Thought/abstract, thought/concrete (the problem with modernism) -- Friction (the already thought and known) -- Of the human (after "the human") -- Cataloguing -- Anti-humanism -- A disregard for theory -- No ontology -- On the field (itself) -- Difference(s) in time (assemblages) -- Not history -- Epochal (no more) -- On the actual (rather than the emergent) -- The new/different (of movement / in terms of movement) -- Why and to what ends (philosophy, politics, poetry) -- Coda: a dictionary of (anthropological) common places -- One last question.