Arnd Schneider and Christopher Wright (2010) edit interesting reflections on Anthropology and Art. – ‘Between Art and Anthropology’ (Berg). As described in the book, it is ‘productively exploring the implications of the new anthropology of the senses’.

To wander into the field of applied anthropology, and having been a practitioner and consultant in this field, I still see David Mosse’s ‘Cultivating Development ‘(Pluto Press) as one of the most ‘zingy’ and thoughtful explorations of practitioner anthropology in the development ‘world’. It is a few years old now (2005) and I have some qualifications but I still smile at the accuracy of his comment that a particular project went out of vogue with the donors and ‘had become the flared trousers of the late 1990s DFID (UK donor agency) wardrobe’. Since then he has been working with David Lewis following some interesting themes about anthropologists as brokers in this arena.

That Godelier looks really good (and not just because I called the decline of marriage years ago — you read it here first, folks!)

The grist for Godelier’s mill is the correlation of heterosexuals’ demand for the right to divorce with homosexuals’ demand for the right to marry.

(1) The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom by James Laidlaw; and

(2) Guerrilla Auditors: The Politics of Transparency in Neoliberal Paraguay (about how militant peasants work with and through bureaucracies and documents) by Kregg Hetherington

I bring recall this anecdote here because it seems to me that the articles recommended so far are very much in what I still think of as the AES gloom-and-doom tradition. All are well worth reading and thinking about. By way of balance, however, I would include the first issue of the Journal of Business Anthropology, which is open source and free to download.

Another book I’d highly recommend is Stephen Lansing’s “Perfect Order: Recognizing Complexity in Bali” (2006). It’s a follow-up to his famous “Priests and Programmers,” but with more historical depth and a compelling use of mathematical models to describe the development of Bali’s subak water-management cooperatives.

But of course, they also have to learn basic anthropology. Subsistence strategies, kinship charts, political organization, the types of religious practice, and so on. […] So I’ve spent 11 years deepening my understanding of the basics — to the point, I fear, where I’ve fallen almost completely out of touch with the state of the art.

If you want to do basic and bleeding edge at the same time, Godelier’s big kinship book (as in jam-packed; it’s actually relatively small physically) was translated into English in 2011: http://www.versobooks.com/books/1021-the-metamorphoses-of-kinship. From Robert Barnes’ review essay of the original at http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0010417506000132.

The preeminent place of anthropology in the study of kinship has thus been confirmed, Godelier concludes, and experts in other fields are now turning to anthropology to answer their questions. However, just at the moment when their advice is needed, the majority of anthropologists have ceased to be interested in the topic. Though kinship was once thought to be the finest flower of anthropology, to which the great names all made a contribution, today it is treated by anthropologists as a non-subject. It is no longer taught in many universities in the United States and in some in Europe. The “postmodernists” rarely mention the topic. However, instead of disappearing, it has just migrated to other domains of anthropology, seized by new questions which reshape it. The analysis of kinship has simply deserted the place where anthropology roamed for decades, entangled in false problems that in principle are insoluble. The voids left by this desertion are not necessarily a sign that the announced death has already taken place.

https://www.academia.edu/7950537/Reframing_Social_Reality_in_the_Post-Exotic_Conjuncture_A_New_Ethos_of_Anthropological_Inquiry

However, telling as it is of Marcus’ position, I believe it is much less valuable than John Comaroff’s 2010 article titled “The End of Anthropology, Again: On the Future of an In/Discipline”. Of course, I can only speak from my point of limited experience, but this article more aptly answers the question ‘what do today’s anthropologists do?’ than any other work I’ve come across (and it’s a fairly short article). It should also be able to direct you to other relevant works, and I know I extracted a whole lot of new references from this article. Johannes Fabian goes even further, and in a 2012 article titled “Cultural Anthropology and the Question of Knowledge” he asks if ‘anthropology’ is a meaningful signifier today, and discusses how we might think about ‘anthropological knowledge’.

Lastly, Matti Bunzl has a fairly interesting 2008 article titled “The Quest for Anthropological Relevance: Borgesian Maps and Epistemological Pitfalls” which similarly details the developments of post-Writing Culture anthropology. I found the combined effect of these articles to be a very pleasant update and they reveal the highly politicized status of current epistemology – a point that Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, as one of the principal contributors to the ‘ontological turn’, makes in his 2013 article “The Relative Native”. No clue if any of this is really helpful or new to you, but I loved all of these.