Stephan Palmié

In 1931, Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote his famous Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, published posthumously in 1967. At that time, anthropology and philosophy were in close contact—continental thinkers drew heavily on anthropology’s theoretical terms, like mana, taboo, and potlatch, in order to help them explore the limits of human belief and imagination. Now the book receives its first translation by an...

Thinking with Ngangas offers a comparative investigation of Afro-Cuban ritual and Western science that aims to challenge the rationality of Western expert practices. Inspired by the exercises of Father Lafitau, an eighteenth-century Jesuit priest and proto-ethnographer who compared the lives of the Iroquois to those of the ancient Greeks, Stephan Palmié embarks on a series of unusual comparative investigations of...