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The authors draw on their 40 years as anthropologists and educators to illustrate through a narrative-style text and photographs what it is like to be an anthropologist and to “do” anthropology—the problems encountered as well as the pleasures and rewards of living in other cultures and learning from other people. Through accounts of their lives and work in varied cultural settings, the authors describe the many forms fieldwork can take, the kinds of questions anthropologists ask, and the common problems they encounter. From these accounts and the experiences of their students, In the Field makes a powerful case for the value of the anthropological approach to knowledge.

Does anthropology have more to offer than just its texts? This book discusses different forms of engaged research practices, which it defines in terms of their constructive intervention into politics. It draws on the author’s experiences working with indigenous peoples fighting for their environment, land rights, and political sovereignty. Describing both short interventions and collaborations spanning decades, it recounts interactions with lawyers and courts, nongovernmental organizations, scientific experts, and transnational corporations. In particular, it calls for greater reflexivity in encouraging engaged anthropologists to pay greater attention to politics beyond the text. The book considers how political commitments affect research, when contributions to political change are elusive, and how the search for alternatives may influence the results. It also asks whether the research continues to matter if the intervention fails, shows how the analysis of local contexts can have global significance, examines how intervention into political conflicts can precipitate backlash, and discusses the political dilemmas of an expert witness. By focusing on the contribution of engaged anthropology toward solving problems in the world, the book articulates a new rationale for why anthropology matters.

This book is about the irreducibility of human evolution to purely biological properties and processes, for human evolution has incorporated the emergence of social relations and cultural histories that are unprecedented in the apes. Human evolution over the last few million years has involved the transformation from biological evolution into biocultural evolution. For several million years, human intelligence, dexterity, and technology all coevolved with one another, although the first two are organic properties and the last is inorganic. Over the last few tens of thousands of years, however, the development of new social roles—notably, spouse, father, in-laws, and grandparents—have been combined with new technologies and symbolic meanings to produce the familiar human species. This leads to a fundamental evolutionary understanding of humans as biocultural ex-apes; reducible neither to an imaginary cultureless biological core nor to our ancestry as apes. Consequently, there can be no “natural history” of the human condition or the human organism that is not a “natural/cultural history.”

Can forests think? Do dogs dream? This book challenges the very foundations of anthropology, calling into question our central assumptions about what it means to be human—and thus distinct from all other life forms. Based on four years of fieldwork among the Runa of Ecuador’s Upper Amazon, the book draws on ethnographic research to explore how Amazonians interact with the many creatures that inhabit one of the world’s most complex ecosystems. Whether or not we recognize it, our anthropological tools hinge on those capacities that make us distinctly human. However, when we turn our ethnographic attention to how we relate to other kinds of beings, these tools (which have the effect of divorcing us from the rest of the world) break down. This book seizes on this breakdown as an opportunity. Avoiding reductionistic solutions, and without losing sight of how our lives and those of others are caught up in the moral webs we humans spin, it skillfully fashions new kinds of conceptual tools from the strange and unexpected properties of the living world itself. The work takes anthropology in a new direction—one that offers a more capacious way to think about the world we share with other kinds of beings.

This book addresses the interplay between modes of writing, modes of understanding, and modes of being in the world. Drawing on literary, anthropological and autobiographical sources, the book explores writing as a technics akin to ritual, oral storytelling, magic and meditation that enables us to reach beyond the limits of everyday life and forge virtual relationships and imagined communities. Although Maurice Blanchot wrote of the impossibility of writing, the passion and paradox of literature lies in its attempt to achieve the impossible—a leap of faith that calls to mind the mystic's dark night of the soul, unrequited love, nostalgic or utopian longing, and the ethnographer's attempt to know the world from the standpoint of others, to put himself or herself in their place. Every writer, whether of ethnography, poetry, or fiction, imagines that his or her own experiences echo the experiences of others, and that despite the need for isolation and silence his or her work consummates a relationship with them.

Challenges to ethnographic authority and to the ethics of representation have led many contemporary anthropologists to abandon fieldwork in favor of strategies of theoretical puppeteering, textual analysis, and surrogate ethnography. This book argues that ethnographies based on these strategies elide important insights. To demonstrate the power and knowledge attained through the fieldwork experience, this book includes chapters by anthropologists working in Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tanzania, the Canadian Arctic, India, Germany, and Russia that shift attention back to the subtle dynamics of the ethnographic encounter. From an Inuit village to the foothills of Kilimanjaro, each account illustrates how, despite its challenges, fieldwork yields important insights outside the reach of textual analysis.

This book is an extended intellectual conversation about the ways personal lives are being undone and remade today. Examining the ethnography of the modern subject, this group of scholars probes the continuity and diversity of modes of personhood across a range of Western and non-Western societies. Contributors consider what happens to individual subjectivity when stable or imagined environments such as nations and communities are transformed or displaced by free trade economics, terrorism, and war; how new information and medical technologies reshape the relation one has to oneself; and which forms of subjectivity and life possibilities are produced against a world in pieces. The transdisciplinary conversation includes anthropologists, historians of science, psychologists, a literary critic, a philosopher, physicians, and an economist. The authors touch on how we think and write about contingency, human agency, and ethics today.

This book examines the complex connections among conceptions of human nature, attitudes toward non-human nature, and ethics. The book proposes an “ethical anthropology” that examines how ideas of nature and humanity are bound together in ways that shape the very foundations of cultures. It discusses mainstream Western understandings of what it means to be human, as well as alternatives to these perspectives, and suggests that the construction of a compelling, coherent environmental ethics will revise our ideas not only about nature but also about what it means to be human. The book begins to integrate theological narratives with scientific ones, looking for a compelling correlation between them where modern and religious sensibilities might both be affirmed.

This collection is a legacy of some of the author's most original work, with a foreword by Aram Yengoyan. Of the chapters, six have never been published and two have not appeared in English until now. Shortly before his death, the author prepared introductions to each section and individual pieces, as well as an intellectual autobiography that introduces the collection as a whole. Sydel Silverman, who completed the editing of the book, says in her preface, “He wanted this selection of his writings over the past half-century to serve as part of the history of how anthropology brought the study of complex societies and world systems into its purview.” The author set the terms for anthropological thinking about peasantries, culture and power, complex societies, and interactions between noncapitalist societies and capitalism.

This book contains chapters written by anthropologists who have experienced the unpredictability and trauma of political violence firsthand. The chapters combine theoretical, ethnographic, and methodological points of view to illuminate the processes and solutions that characterize life in dangerous places. They describe the first, often harrowing, experience of violence, the personal and professional problems that arise as troubles escalate, and the often-surprising creative strategies people use to survive. In the book the chapters give voice to all those affected by the conditions of violence: perpetrators as well as victims, civilians and specialists, black marketeers and heroes, jackals and researchers. Focusing on everyday experiences, the chapters bring to light the puzzling contradictions of lives disturbed by violence: the simultaneous existence of laughter and suffering, of fear and hope. By doing so, they challenge the narrow conceptualization that associates violence with death and war, arguing that instead it must be considered a dimension of living.