New Books In Anthropology

In Professor Zeitlyn's words, anthropology “has had enough of the big ideas already” -especially theories with a big ‘T’. In a discipline that seems to be constantly beset by ‘turns’, or agonising over its status and ‘commensurability’ across cultural differences, Professor Zeitlyn in his latest book An Anthropological Toolkit: Sixty Useful Concepts (Berghahn Books, 2022) offers a way through the weeds, in presenting a way “to write about anthropological theory, without making a specific theoretical argument.” Drawing on an immense wealth of fieldwork and ethnographic experience, which has included anything from sociolinguistics and divination, to life-history writing and research on photography and football clubs, the book is also a call to embrace the messiness of writing about others’ lives as best we can, as humbly as possible. The book will appeal to new graduates or veterans alike, presenting through a host of mini-essays an eclectic mix of theoretical concepts he has found helpful over the years. As he