The Ground Between: Anthropologists Engage Philosophy

The guiding inspiration of this book is the attraction and distance that mark the relation between anthropology and philosophy. This theme is explored through encounters between individual anthropologists and particular regions of philosophy. Several of the most basic concepts of the discipline - including notions of ethics, politics, temporality, self and other, and the nature of human life - are products of a dialogue, both implicit and explicit, between anthropology and philosophy. These philosophical undercurrents in anthropology also speak to the question of what it is to experience our being in a world marked by radical difference and otherness. In The Ground Between, twelve leading anthropologists offer intimate reflections on the influence of particular philosophers on their way of seeing the world, and on what ethnography has taught them about philosophy. Ethnographies of the mundane and the everyday raise fundamental issues that the contributors grapple with in both their lives and their thinking. With directness and honesty, they relate particular philosophers to matters such as how to respond to the suffering of the other, how concepts arise in the give and take of everyday life, and how to be attuned to the world through the senses. Their essays challenge the idea that philosophy is solely the province of professional philosophers, and suggest that certain modalities of being in the world might be construed as ways of doing philosophy. Contributors: Joao Biehl, Steven C. Caton, Vincent Crapanzano, Veena Das, Didier Fassin, Michael M. J. Fischer, Ghassan Hage, Clara Han, Michael Jackson, Arthur Kleinman, Michael Puett, Bhrigupati Singh. Veena Das is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology at The Johns Hopkins University and author of Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Michael Jackson is Distinguished Professor of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School and author of Life Within Limits: Well-being in a World of Want, also published by Duke University Press. Arthur Kleinman is the Esther and Sidney Rabb Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University and author of What Really Matters: Living a Moral Life amidst Uncertainty and Danger. Bhrigupati Singh is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Brown University, and author of Gods and Grains: Lives of Desire in Rural India.