This festschrift is situated within the contexts of the 'Writing Culture' debate, the 'Rhetoric Culture' project, and the legacy of anthropologist Stephen Tyler's work on language and representation. While Writing Culture (1986) alerted readers to the power of ethnographers over their field, Writing in the Field alerts readers to the power of the field over its ethnographers. Rather than reprise familiar debates about writing and representation, the book's individual chapters elucidate how anthropological fieldwork is a highly fraught, provisional, and incomplete practice enmeshed in the gaps...

This book is inspired by material culture studies. Essays center on the idea that matter and materiality are integral dimensions of social life. The diversity of their subjects is reflected in the various approaches that bring together archeology, cultural heritage, artifacts, commodities, the human body, and the study of space. United by a common interest in various social matter(s), and coming from diverse schools of thought and academic traditions, the book is by no means an effort to present a clear, cohesive, collective manifesto. On the contrary, there might be differences in the way...

This festschrift for Josephus D.M. Platenkamp brings some central concerns of anthropology into focus: social morphology, exchange, cosmology, history, and practical applications. Ranging across several disciplines and continents, but with a preference for Southeast Asia, the contributions look at a common approach that unites these diverse themes. In this view, the most constitutive relationships of society are based on exchange. Exchange and ritual articulate central values of a society, thus appearing as parts in relationship to a whole. These relationships encompass both human and...