Concerning the Bible as jumbo transhistorical interpellation, I’m just finishing trying to argue this at book length (see Sanders, The Invention of Hebrew and the Formation of Ancient Israel, 2007 G*d willing)

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Besides, writing about the Bible is likely to do more to bring anthropology to the attention of people who could seriously use its influence than any number of articles and books that are, at the end of the day, addressed to only a tiny handful of humanity, including both the people studied and the scholars at the intersection of particular theoretical and geographical interests.

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This is essential reading for anyone interested on the bible. It is written from an anthropoligical point of view by one of the greatest anthropologists of our era. There is no claim here to biblical scholarship in its narrow sense. But the Book of Leviticus is shown to be much more than a boring list of sacrificial and purity rituals. The detailed poetic and thematic structures are described both as explanations of what the book is about religiously as well as from a literary point of view. This combination is really engaging. Although some of the associations and structures are forced and general rules are derived from single cases, although frankly I think she gets some things wrong, I have not been so stimulated by a book on the bible for a very long time. Even for someone totally familiar with traditional commentaries this will be an exciting read.

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Ok I\’m done now :)

Seriously though, I think the thing that has changed in anthropology (although it has always been true to a certain extent) is that now \’they read what we write\’ and that this removes the social distance between anthropologists and their research subjects that was previously so comfortable.

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Douglas’s observations about the differences in traditional African societies’ views of risks such as sorcery led her to formulate a functionalist theory of how social structures generate supportive worldviews. She developed this more fully into the Cultural Theory of risk in Risk and Culture, written with political scientist Aaron Wildavsky. While the Cultural Theory of risk has not been hugely important within anthropology, it has made an impact on the inter-disciplinary field of risk perception.

Or, from an Amazon reader review by Thomas H. Hall, of Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood, The World of Goods.

In this book, a renowned structural anthropologist collaborates with an economist to propose an explanation for one of the great mysteries of economics: where do “preferences” come from? Much of neoclassical economics rests on the assumption that, once we know the basic desires and tastes for a given population, we can then understand how people make rational decisions about how to acquire them and how to allocate their resources. The actual preferences themselves, however, are a black box. Douglas & Isherwood tackle this problem, evaluating several theories of “rational” economic actors from cross-cultural and systems theoretical perspectives. Their answer is that many of these mysteries are not so mysterious after all: we have good reasons for valuing the things we value, and many of the apparently frivolous fads and fashions are in fact life-and-death matters. “Good taste” is an index of social connections, of reproductive fitness, of one’s ability to mobilize resources — and in a society increasingly dependent on information and services rather than physical products, the race to remain on the cutting edge becomes like traveling with the Red Queen, faster and faster just to stay in place. Along the way, Douglas throws out a number of gems which are incidental to her argument, including a proposal for why women’s work is always and everywhere valued less than men’s. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in what anthropologists can tell us about the deep logics of behavior in the consumer society.

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Valerio Valeri was a man of great erudition and broad scholarship….He knew nearly 20 languages, and he had a broad philosophical background and a wide knowledge of art and literature. Everything he touched in his particular discipline of anthropology was thus informed by a more general intellectual significance. If anthropology is a project of finding universals in particulars, human significances in relative differences, Valeri was a master of it.

How can we, I wonder, situate what we discover among the handfuls of people whose lives we get to know relatively well in a way that is informed by a more general intellectual significance? Without, that is, returning to the grand narratives of science, progress, salvation or redemption that not only shaped the thinking of our previous generations but continue to shape the thinking of the movers and shakers, policymakers, consumers, tyrants and terrorists whose actions shape the world we inhabit?

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I just want to caution against the idea that MIGHT be implicit here, namely that by looking at bigger groups of people, more connected to the rest of the world, we are looking at “bigger issues.” Sometimes true, perhaps, but one of the strengths of anthropology has always been the contention that people everywhere are relevant to wha tit means to be human. Reading the above I was reminded of something said at the memerial service for Valerio Valeri, about the which he found important things to say about humanity as a whole by studying a community of a few hundred people.

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