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, #2 // April 2018

In this issue authors address the question of how putatively universal rules—imperial dictates, state laws, economic regimes, and consequential categories of social life like “religion,” “the market” and “indigeneity”—are translated into local vernaculars and adapted to local sites and singular needs. The process is rarely without friction, resistance, cost, or contest. To take a hydraulic metaphor, the essays offer a comparative viscosity of the force and limits of
flow. When standardizing classifications infill regional uses and users, what sorts of detours, dams, floods, and muddied waters follow? What new springs irrupt?

2017 CSSH Articles Featured in American Anthropologist’s Year in Review

CSSH is a resolutely interdisciplinary journal, but we cannot help noting (with pride) that nine of our 2017 essays were recently mentioned in Noah Tamarkin’s annual review of noteworthy publications in anthropology, “Time and Relational Possibility: Cultural Anthropology in 2017,” which appears in the current issue of AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST.

June 2018

Congratulations to CSSH author Sebastian R. Prange on the publication of his new monograph, Monsoon Islam: Trade and Faith on the Medieval Malabar Coast.