Recovering the Human Subject Freedom, Creativity and Decision

This volume responds to the often-proclaimed 'death of the subject' in post-structuralist theorizing, and to calls from across the social sciences for 'post-humanist' alternatives to liberal humanism in a distinctively anthropological manner. It asks: can we use the intellectual resources developed in those approaches and debates to reconstruct a new account of how individual human subjects are contingently put together in diverse historical and ethnographic contexts? Anthropologists know that the people they work with think in terms of particular, distinctive, individual human personalities, and that in times of change and crisis these individuals matter crucially to how things turn out. The volume features a classic essay by Caroline Humphrey, 'Reassembling individual subjects', that provides a focus for the debate, and it brings together a distinguished collection of essays, which exhibit a range of theoretical approaches and rich and varied ethnography.

1. Introduction: freedom, creativity, and decision in recovering human subject Barbara Bodenhorn, Martin Holbraad and James Laidlaw; 2. Reassembling individual subjects: events and decisions in troubled times Caroline Humphrey; Part I. Decision: 3. On singularity and the event: further reflections on the ordinary Veena Das; 4. Apathy and revolution: temporal sensibilities in contemporary Mongolia Lars Højer; 5. Apparitions of the Virgin Mary as decision-events Agnieszka Halemba; Part II. Freedom: 6. Incidental connections: freedom and urban life in Mongolia Morten Axel Pedersen; 7. The return to slavery? Nostalgia and a new generation of escape in Southwest China Katherine Swancutt (???) and Jiarimuji (????); Part III. Creativity: 8. Paradoxical pedagogies and humanist double binds Matei Candea; 9. Where in the world are values? Exemplarity, morality, and social process Joel Robbins.

James Laidlaw is the William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology and a Fellow of King's College at the University of Cambridge. His most recent book is The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom (Cambridge, 2014).
Barbara Bodenhorn is a former Newton Trust Lecturer in Social Anthropology and is currently Fellow Emerita of Pembroke College at the University of Cambridge. She is co-editor of An Anthropology of Names and Naming (Cambridge, 2006).
Martin Holbraad is Professor of Social Anthropology at University College London. He is author of Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination (2012), and co-author of The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition (Cambridge, 2017).