Volume 60, #4 // October 2018

CSSH AT SIXTY At sixty-years strong, the journal remains as fit and agile as ever. The print edition is now accompanied by a dynamic website including interviews, conversations between authors, features on the research processes behind groundbreaking articles, and much more. Ten years ago, in honor of the journal’s half-century jubilee, we celebrated the occasion with an expanded issue. We’re pleased to continue that tradition on this anniversary, presenting fifteen extraordinary essays.

CSSH Essay on Indigeneity in the Andaman Islands

In recent days, much international media attention has been paid to the death of a young American missionary killed on 16 November on North Sentinel Island in India’s Andaman Islands. In her October 2017 article in Comparative Studies in Society and History, “Developing Terra Nullius: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Indigeneity in the Andaman Islands,” Uditi Sen analyzed the Islands’
long history of colonial and postcolonial incursion into and occupation of indigenous lands. The article is now available to download for free.

The Specificity of Sources: Simona Cerutti and Isabelle Grangaud discuss their Goody Award-winning essay with Andrew Shryock

To celebrate CSSH‘s 60th anniversary in 2018, the journal’s editors organized an annual article award in commemoration of the late Sir Jack Goody (1919-2015). Jack Goody was a frequent author and contributor to the journal over the course of five decades. The award named in his honor is granted to the article that best represents the mission…

Announcing the Inaugural Winners of the Jack Goody Award

CSSH is thrilled to announce that Simona Cerutti and Isabelle Grangaud’s essay, “Sources and Contextualizations: Comparing Eighteenth-Century North Africa and Western European Institutions” is the inaugural winner of CSSH’s Jack Goody Award. The jury was composed of Gregory Starrett, Sherry Ortner, and Krishan Kumar.

Remote Sensing: Alireza Doostdar, Graham M. Jones, Larisa Jasarevic, Alaina Lemon, and Andrew Shryock discuss new approaches to occult and magical things

In recent years, CSSH has seen a spike in essays that explore the paranormal, extrasensory, and metaphysical. These pieces fall outside the wide range of essays on magic and religion that have filled our pages for decades. They are unlike the ontology essays accumulating everywhere. The authors of this new genre do not look to…

Afterlives

How does one do scholarship in dialogue with the dead? After reading Chris Moffat’s essay, “Politics and the Work of the Dead in Modern India,” we thought he might have good answers to that question. So we asked him. Read on for his intriguing response.

Volume 60, #3 // July 2018

Thing theories, object-human recursion, and materiality already seem familiar and domesticated. All to the good, as it’s often not until the fickle winds of theoretical fashion shift that the most serious work can begin. We are still just scratching the surface in discerning and understanding the agencies or other capacities of things, and their limits—whether theorizing them, understanding their implications from different disciplinary perspectives, or documenting their configurations in the world. Many of this issue’s essays undertake the
reckoning of things and the challenges they pose of value, risk, calculation, and commensurability. None of the essays are predictable, none follow wellworn paths.