Luther and Calvin applied the term fanatic to those who sought to destroy civil society in order to establish the Kingdom of God, the "false prophets" and their followers who, early on in the Reformation, began smashing images in churches and rebelling against princes. Civil Society and Fanaticism is organized around this seminal moment of religious and political iconoclasm, an outburst of hatred against mediations and representation. The author shows that civil society and fanaticism have been consistently present as conjoined notions in Western political thought since the...

At farmers' markets, we expect to see fruit bursting with juicy sweetness and vegetables greener than a golf course. For Michele de La Pradelle these expectations are mostly the result of a show performed by merchants and sustained by our propensity to see what we want to see there. Hailed upon its release in France, the award-winning "Market Day in Provence" lays bare the mechanisms of the contemporary outdoor market by providing a definitive account of the centuries-old institution at Carpentras, a city near Avignon in the south of France famous for its quintessential public street market....

If the end of exoticism is one of the characteristics of our time, and if classical anthropology based its study of alterity on this exotic distance from the other, is anthropology still possible, and if so, to what end? The author uses these questions as a point of departure for a probing interrogation of ethnological practice, starting with Levi-Strauss. For several years, the author has advocated an anthropology of -proximity- in place of the usual anthropology of distance. He has studied such emblematic places of Western modernity as the Parisian Metro, or such emblematic -non-places- as...