Michael Lambek | University of Toronto (original) (raw)
Papers by Michael Lambek
Imagine if Claude Lévi-Strauss had attempted to apply the methods and goals of The elementary str... more Imagine if Claude Lévi-Strauss had attempted to apply the methods and goals of The elementary structures of kinship to the substance of The savage mind, that is, to offer a systematic account and comparison of the possibilities and limits of the forms for imagining the place of human beings in the world, in relation to other kinds of being and in internal relation to ourselves. This is what Philippe Descola sets out to do in Beyond nature and culture (2013a). The measure of the book is how far he accomplishes this ambitious goal. In fact, Beyond nature and culture is a magnificent achievement. It offers a beau-tiful and complex model and is written with great precision of thought and elegance of language, a tour de force of both coherent argument and ethnographic compre-hension. But as it would be boring simply to sing its praises and churlish to poke holes in little pieces of the argument, I turn to some of the big questions it raises. My comments are directed to the larger frame a...
Writing Anthropology, 2020
Anthropologie et Sociétés, 2000
The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 1987
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2015
It is not obvious or straightforward to write about happiness or even to know who or what the sub... more It is not obvious or straightforward to write about happiness or even to know who or what the subject of our description should be: an individual or a society; a moment, an event, or a life; a semantic category or an embodied experience? Is happiness reached through struggle or found in complacency? It could be considered as an emotion or a virtue, as psychological or social, individual or collective, evanescent or long term, an ideal or a condition. This article finesses some of these distinctions, addressing happiness through the life of a single individual, a retired Swiss farmer. It inquires into happiness in a society that is generally known for its wellbeing, order, and prosperity, but also for its work ethic and perhaps for being boring, confronting stereotypes while implicitly showing the way individual and collective happiness are interconnected. In a series of informal conversations, the elderly farmer describes his life and the things that made him happy, including his ca...
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2016
The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science, 2006
History and Anthropology, 2017
The Weight of the Past, 2002
The Weight of the Past, 2002
Religion and Society
A Portrait in Scenes by Amira MittermaierFor Saba by Susan HardingRecollections of a Friendship b... more A Portrait in Scenes by Amira MittermaierFor Saba by Susan HardingRecollections of a Friendship by Michael Lambek
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Études rurales
VERY STUDENT OF SOCIETY, whether anthropologist or historian, has to address the task of delimiti... more VERY STUDENT OF SOCIETY, whether anthropologist or historian, has to address the task of delimiting the unit of study and then rationalizing those limits. 1 This takes place along at least three dimensions, temporal, geographical, and sociocultural. Time and space allow arbitrary cutoff points, but it is less easy to delimit boundaries with respect to the social. At first glance, one might suppose that each island of the western Indian Ocean contains a discrete culture or society, bounded from the others by its shoreline and available for distinct synchronic analysis, thereby providing the classic prototype or stereotype beloved of 20th century anthropology and especially of its critics. But a closer examination shows immediately that this is not the case. Not only is there intensive migration and travel among the islands today, but there has been a continuous circulation of goods, ideas, and people, and a waxing and waning of military, political, and economic power for a very long time, bringing with it an overlap, imbrication, and fermentation of cultural practices and social formations. This goes back to the very first Études rurales, juillet-décembre 2014, 194 : 63-78 Kinded People (karazan'olo). duction des ancêtres royaux implique la reproduction des distinctions sociales entre, d'une part, les membres du clan royal et, d'autre part, les razan'olo formant une Keywords caste de serviteurs royaux et une « espèce particulière » Ngazidja (Grande Comore), Mayotte, Madagascar, the de personnes (karazan'olo). gift, wedding, funeral, rites de passage, action Mots clés Ngazidja (Grande Comore), Mayotte, Madagascar, don, mariage, funérailles, rites de passage, action Strathern, Marilyn-1988, The Gender of the Gift.
Culture, medicine and psychiatry, Jun 1, 2017
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2016
A response to Descola, Philippe. 2016. “Transformation transformed.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic... more A response to Descola, Philippe. 2016. “Transformation transformed.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (3): 33–44; and a contribution to the HAU (Volume 6.3) Lectures section on “Teleologies of structuralism,” edited by Alejandro I. Paz.
Signs Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 1983
Many of the relatively early papers in the emerging anthropological literature on women were conc... more Many of the relatively early papers in the emerging anthropological literature on women were concerned with comparing the status of women and men in a given society. In such studies, the selection of criteria for evaluating relative status becomes a central problem. Papers ...
Omaly Sy Anio Revue D Etudes Historiques, 1987
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2016
A Companion to the Anthropology of Religion, 2014
Imagine if Claude Lévi-Strauss had attempted to apply the methods and goals of The elementary str... more Imagine if Claude Lévi-Strauss had attempted to apply the methods and goals of The elementary structures of kinship to the substance of The savage mind, that is, to offer a systematic account and comparison of the possibilities and limits of the forms for imagining the place of human beings in the world, in relation to other kinds of being and in internal relation to ourselves. This is what Philippe Descola sets out to do in Beyond nature and culture (2013a). The measure of the book is how far he accomplishes this ambitious goal. In fact, Beyond nature and culture is a magnificent achievement. It offers a beau-tiful and complex model and is written with great precision of thought and elegance of language, a tour de force of both coherent argument and ethnographic compre-hension. But as it would be boring simply to sing its praises and churlish to poke holes in little pieces of the argument, I turn to some of the big questions it raises. My comments are directed to the larger frame a...
Writing Anthropology, 2020
Anthropologie et Sociétés, 2000
The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 1987
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2015
It is not obvious or straightforward to write about happiness or even to know who or what the sub... more It is not obvious or straightforward to write about happiness or even to know who or what the subject of our description should be: an individual or a society; a moment, an event, or a life; a semantic category or an embodied experience? Is happiness reached through struggle or found in complacency? It could be considered as an emotion or a virtue, as psychological or social, individual or collective, evanescent or long term, an ideal or a condition. This article finesses some of these distinctions, addressing happiness through the life of a single individual, a retired Swiss farmer. It inquires into happiness in a society that is generally known for its wellbeing, order, and prosperity, but also for its work ethic and perhaps for being boring, confronting stereotypes while implicitly showing the way individual and collective happiness are interconnected. In a series of informal conversations, the elderly farmer describes his life and the things that made him happy, including his ca...
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2016
The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science, 2006
History and Anthropology, 2017
The Weight of the Past, 2002
The Weight of the Past, 2002
Religion and Society
A Portrait in Scenes by Amira MittermaierFor Saba by Susan HardingRecollections of a Friendship b... more A Portrait in Scenes by Amira MittermaierFor Saba by Susan HardingRecollections of a Friendship by Michael Lambek
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Études rurales
VERY STUDENT OF SOCIETY, whether anthropologist or historian, has to address the task of delimiti... more VERY STUDENT OF SOCIETY, whether anthropologist or historian, has to address the task of delimiting the unit of study and then rationalizing those limits. 1 This takes place along at least three dimensions, temporal, geographical, and sociocultural. Time and space allow arbitrary cutoff points, but it is less easy to delimit boundaries with respect to the social. At first glance, one might suppose that each island of the western Indian Ocean contains a discrete culture or society, bounded from the others by its shoreline and available for distinct synchronic analysis, thereby providing the classic prototype or stereotype beloved of 20th century anthropology and especially of its critics. But a closer examination shows immediately that this is not the case. Not only is there intensive migration and travel among the islands today, but there has been a continuous circulation of goods, ideas, and people, and a waxing and waning of military, political, and economic power for a very long time, bringing with it an overlap, imbrication, and fermentation of cultural practices and social formations. This goes back to the very first Études rurales, juillet-décembre 2014, 194 : 63-78 Kinded People (karazan'olo). duction des ancêtres royaux implique la reproduction des distinctions sociales entre, d'une part, les membres du clan royal et, d'autre part, les razan'olo formant une Keywords caste de serviteurs royaux et une « espèce particulière » Ngazidja (Grande Comore), Mayotte, Madagascar, the de personnes (karazan'olo). gift, wedding, funeral, rites de passage, action Mots clés Ngazidja (Grande Comore), Mayotte, Madagascar, don, mariage, funérailles, rites de passage, action Strathern, Marilyn-1988, The Gender of the Gift.
Culture, medicine and psychiatry, Jun 1, 2017
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2016
A response to Descola, Philippe. 2016. “Transformation transformed.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic... more A response to Descola, Philippe. 2016. “Transformation transformed.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (3): 33–44; and a contribution to the HAU (Volume 6.3) Lectures section on “Teleologies of structuralism,” edited by Alejandro I. Paz.
Signs Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 1983
Many of the relatively early papers in the emerging anthropological literature on women were conc... more Many of the relatively early papers in the emerging anthropological literature on women were concerned with comparing the status of women and men in a given society. In such studies, the selection of criteria for evaluating relative status becomes a central problem. Papers ...
Omaly Sy Anio Revue D Etudes Historiques, 1987
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2016
A Companion to the Anthropology of Religion, 2014
Fordham University Press, 2021
This volume examines an often taken for granted concept—that of the concept itself. How do we pic... more This volume examines an often taken for granted concept—that of the concept itself. How do we picture what concepts are, what they do, how they arise in the course of everyday life? Challenging conventional approaches that treat concepts as mere tools at our disposal for analysis, or as straightforwardly equivalent to signs to be deciphered, the anthropologists and philosophers in this volume turn instead to the ways concepts are already intrinsically embedded in our forms of life and how they constitute the very substrate of our existence as humans who lead lives in language.
Attending to our ordinary lives with concepts requires not an ascent from the rough ground of reality into the skies of theory, but rather acceptance of the fact that thinking is congenital to living with and through concepts. The volume offers a critical and timely intervention into both contemporary philosophy and anthropological theory by unsettling the distinction between thought and reality that continues to be too often assumed and showing how the supposed need to grasp reality may be replaced by an acknowledgement that we are in its grip.
Contributors: Jocelyn Benoist, Andrew Brandel, Michael Cordey, Veena Das, Rasmus Dyring and Thomas Schwarz Wentzer, Michael D. Jackson, Michael Lambek, Sandra Laugier, Marco Motta, Michael J. Puett, and Lotte Buch Segal
https://www.fordhampress.com/9780823294275/living-with-concepts/
