Anthropologies of Revolution: Forging Time, People, and Worlds

by Igor Cherstich, Martin Holbraad

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org.

What can anthropological thinking contribute to the study of revolutions? The first book-length attempt to develop an anthropological approach to revolutions, Anthropologies of Revolution proposes that revolutions should be seen as concerted attempts to radically reconstitute the worlds people inhabit. Viewing revolutions as all-embracing, world-creating projects, the authors ask readers to move beyond the idea of revolutions as acts of violent political rupture, and instead view them as processes of societal transformation that penetrate deeply into the fabric of people's lives, unfolding and refolding the coordinates of human existence.

Genres: Anthropology, Nonfiction, History, Politics, Social Science

213 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 2, 2020

Reviews

[pol.llopart · Rating 5 out of 5]

After a long wait, the book is out, I expected to be thicker, but the compressed 170-page book mixes ethnography and theory perfectly: from Marx, Bakunin, Benjamin to the Iranian Islamic Revolution, the time traveller ancestors of the anti-colonial fight in Zimbabwe or revolutionary Libya the authors frame revolutions into a cosmopolitical framework. The book talks at lengths of the notions of time, personhood, leadership, cosmology imbricated in revolutionary processes or revolutionary states. Sometimes I found the book to be shallow in debating authors, such as Gramsci, or complex ethnographic cases. Still, I understand the difficulty to compress such complexity of themes and authors. A must-read for any anthropologist (or even historians and philosophers) interested in politics, religion, time and personhood.

[Nadja · Rating 3 out of 5]

attempts to amplify the roles internal (local, indigenous, peasant, enslaved) cosmologies play in revolutions, treating them as everything but a singular end of any dichotomy. a necessary contribution toward broadening theories of revolutions. a locus for self-critique, reflection, and future consideration for all social and political scientists.

[Georgie Malone · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5: Though I really enjoyed this book, I couldn’t say I found the authors to have adequately supported all of their conclusions.