1. Ajàlá’s Heads: Refl ections on Anthropology and Philosophy in a West African Setting

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. CONTENTS v
3. Acknowledgments vii
4. Introduction. Experiments between Anthropology and Philosophy: Affinities and Antagonisms 1
5. 1. Ajàlá’s Heads: Refl ections on Anthropology and Philosophy in a West African Setting 27
6. 2. The Parallel Lives of Philosophy and Anthropology, 50
7. 3. Th e Difficulty of Kindness: Boundaries, Time, and the Ordinary 71
8. 4. Ethnography in the Way of Theory 94
9. 5. The Search for Wisdom: Why William James Still Matter 119
10. 6. Eavesdropping on Bourdieu’s Philosophers 138
11. 7. How Concepts Make the World Look Different: Affirmative and Negative Genealogies of Th ought 159
12. 8. Philosophia and Anthropologia: Reading alongside Benjamin in Yazd, Derrida in Qum, Arendt in Tehran 188
13. 9. Ritual Disjunctions: Ghosts, Philosophy, and Anthropology 218
14. 10. Henri Bergson in Highland Yemen 234
15. 11. Must We Be Bad Epistemologists? Illusions of Transparency, the Opaque Other, and Interpretive Foibles 254
16. 12. Action, Expression, and Everyday Life: Recounting House hold Events 279
17. References 307
18. Contributors 329
19. Index 333