Michael Carrithers

Durham University | DU · Department of Anthropology

Approaches to landscape are characterized by an unresolved distinction between political representation on the one hand and phenomenology on the other. In this paper we address this distinction by demonstrating how those living in close quarters with landscape (farmers) translate their lived experience into political representation. Through the use...

Referenda can be sad affairs. This time last year, I was in Greece discussing with friends their referendum. It was a difficult visit with many painful conversations. Most were about what the EU meant, what might Grexit have meant, and the way material security was rapidly vanishing: having a decent salary, a job, money in the bank, valuables in ba...

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In this essay on the idea of "anthropological knots" I lay out three closely related ideas. One is that the practice of ethnography may be regarded as being also the practice of philosophy, insofar as philosophy is the pursuit of knowledge about ourselves. The second is that this pursuit of ethnography/philosophy is in its nature ironical, which me...

When compared to the extensive historiography on missionary activity, the anthropology of missions is a relative newcomer, emerging as such in the context of the recent critique of the colonial system. In view of the importance of historiographical literature in outlining the subject, on the one hand, and of the impact of the decolonization of the...

Inspired by the Rhetoric Culture Project, this volume focuses on the use of imagery, narrative, and cultural schemes to deal with predicaments that arise during the course of life. The contributors explore how people muster their resources to understand and deal with emergencies such as illness, displacement, or genocide. In dealing with such circu...

The notion that an animal species is comparable with a human person is unusual but significant in North Atlantic societies. We analyze this trope to make a case for rhetoric culture theory as a powerful form of anthropological analysis. The “species is person” trope has been woven with other tropes to make moral and cosmological arguments in the pr...

The paper considers the trope of ‘persons-in-parivaara’, persons in a retinue, as a rhetorical and social form in South Asia, using Digambar Jain examples, mostly from Maharashtra. As a social form, persons-in-parivaara evokes familiar themes, especially hierarchy in relationships, the vote bank, and Mattison Mines' notion of the ‘big man’. The pap...

Despite the elaborate means human beings deploy to render the world predictable and transparent, we nevertheless continually confront situations which are uncertain and opaque. This is especially so in the modern world, in which supralocal institutions and information mediated from afar allow the actions of strangers beyond our face-to-face knowled...

Inspired by the Rhetoric Culture Project, this volume focuses on the use of imagery, narrative, and cultural schemes to deal with predicatments that arise during the course of life. The contributors explore how people muster their resources to understand and deal with emergencies such as illness, displacement, or genocide. In dealing with such circ...

Tras la caída del Muro de Berlín, los alemanes del este elaboraron para sí mismos nuevas formas de orientación, sirviéndose de relatos construidos a diferentes escalas, desde los más personales hasta los públicos y oficiales. Los miembros de la oposición en la República Demócrata Alemana tuvieron un particular éxito en la construcción de una versió...

In a world of continued and expanding empire, does sociocultural anthropology in itself offer grounds for moral and social criticism? One line in anthropological thought leads to cultural relativism and an awareness that a cloud of alternative possibilites surrounds any moral code. However, a second line, based in reflection on fieldwork and on the...

With the Buddha's awakening came a knowledge of the nature of the human condition that would lead to salvation and the certainty that he had reached liberation from that condition. ‘The awakening’ looks in detail at this experience, analysing the meaning of it, what it meant for the Buddha, and what we have come to understand about it since. The aw...

There exists only an unreliable chronology charting the Buddha's wandering life after he left his home. However, the story is so well connected with the rest of his teaching that we have to assume that there is a great degree of truth in it. ‘To the awakening’ examines this period in the Buddha's life. What did the Buddha discover during this time...

The traditional image of the Buddha poised in meditation wasn't constructed until centuries after his death. How much can we trust such portraits? What did he really look like? ‘Early life and renunciation’ looks at what we can gleam about the Buddha's appearance, personality, and early life. The Buddha was born among the Sakya people and his clan...

Buddhism is a very successful movement. It became a world religion. It was not until the middle of the first millennium after Christ (ten to fifteen centuries after the Buddha was alive) that it established itself as a chief movement in the majority of Asia. Shortly after this it was on the wane in India. ‘The mission and the death’ looks at the hi...

As Jog Maya remarked to me, there are religions enough for everyone to choose, just like vegetables in the morning bazaar. Gellner 1992:70 The family was in continuous communion with a whole range of business associates, gods and men. Bayly 1983:390

Inside the Drama House: Rama Stories and Shadow Puppets in South India. Stuart Blackburn. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. 291 pp.

In the pilgrimage season of 1899 a ‘small but select’ group of Jains met before the temple of the deity Bharamappa near Kolhapur to found the Southern Maharashtra Jain Sabha, the daki mahārarajain sabhā. The intended constituency of the Sabha was the Digambar Jain population of the Southern Maratha Country of the Bombay Presidency, the area includi...

The Jains have exerted an influence on Indian Society and religion out of proportion with their relatively small numbers. The Assembly of Listeners: Jains in Society addresses the sociology of the Jains and discusses the notion of the 'community' based on religious affiliation in India. Topics covered include Jain ideals and identity; women in the...

The Jains have exerted an influence on Indian Society and religion out of proportion with their relatively small numbers. The Assembly of Listeners: Jains in Society addresses the sociology of the Jains and discusses the notion of the 'community' based on religious affiliation in India. Topics covered include Jain ideals and identity; women in the...

Sociocultural anthropology and evolutionary biology have reached the point at which it is possible to give a coherent and synthetic account of the origins of human cultural variability. From a sociocultural perspective what must be explained is not just the fact of varying cultures and societies, but also the human capacity to create, maintain and...

The practices and attitudes of the Digambar Jain ascetics, the munis, of south and southwestern India enshrine an extraordinary emphasis on individualism. In religious imagery this individualism is expressed as the untouched singularity of the liberated soul and the complete self-reliance of the living ascetic. In personal practice this individuali...

In early 1983 Digambar and Svetambar Jains forced into public prominence their struggle over the local Jain pilgrimage site of Bahubali hill in Kolhapur District in southern Maharashtra, in India. By the end of that year the majority Maratha community, Harijans, the local and State Congress Party, the police, the district administration, and the St...

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The shape of the social history of the Theravada Buddhist order-the Sangha-of south and south-east Asia can be described as the consequence of a few enduring principles. First, the Sangha is organised in small face-to-face kin-like groups. Second, monks and laymen are closely interdependent. Third, the Sangha is dispersed throughout the agrarian co...

Sangha and State in Burma: A Study of Monastic Sectarianism and Leadership. by MendelsonE. Michael, edited by FergusonJohn P.. Cornell University Press: Ithaca and London, 1975. Pp. 400. £12.70, $19.50. - Volume 11 Issue 3 - Michael Carrithers

Tras la caída del Muro de Berlín, los alemanes del este elaboraron para sí mismos nuevas formas de orientación, sirviéndose de relatos construidos a diferentes escalas, desde los más personales hasta los públicos y oficiales. Los miembros de la oposición en la República Demócrata Alemana tuvieron un particular éxito en la construcción de una versió...

Traducción de: Why Humans Have Cultures. Explaining Anthropology and Social Diversity Ensayo orientado a responder una de las interrogantes centrales de la antropología y las ciencias sociales, referente a por qué los hombres presentan tal diversidad de culturas y modos de vida. En vez de apelar a los avances tecnológicos como un signo crucial en l...