Translation is an intimate, daily, and often frustrating experience in my life and work. While English has begun to colonize…
Anthropological translations: Strategy, content, audience
anthropology
The Universal Enemy—A reply
In the few months since its publication—and notwithstanding the emergence of a global pandemic that has irrevocably altered imaginations of…
Social drama, universalisms’ political violence, and transnational law
In a perhaps somewhat contrapuntal response to the provocation to see the broader world differently than we may otherwise, as…
Solid ground (“Idioms of the left”)
It has been fascinating to read Darryl Li’s The Universal Enemy at a time when national boundaries—not to mention political…
Practices of relation: Fernando and Harding
In this exchange, Mayanthi Fernando and Susan Harding reflect on the norms and taboos of the secular academy and on…
Modernity’s residues
How is modernity sticky—prone to leaving a residue? How are secularization theses still affecting us “as gelatinous or glutinous matters…
Secularism’s enchantments and disenchantments: A reply to Goto-Jones and Zhan
Read side by side, these two stunning commentaries on Magic’s Reason—for which I am immensely grateful—both seem to revolve around…
Thinking with/through analogies
Jones takes his readers on an ethnohistorical journey that traverses instrumental magic (which is mostly occult and “primitive”), stage magic…
Dangerous doubles and magical ethics
As the superstar-magician walks through an urban shanty in the middle of his television special Magic Man (1998), David Blaine’s…
Modernity’s resonances—An introduction
Respondents to the books were asked—and gamely agreed— to reflect on how these works “challenge and correct the discursive and philosophical modes of investigation…