From Anthropology to Social Theory

Arpad Szakolczai is Professor of Sociology at University College Cork. His recent books include Comedy and the Public Sphere (2013), Permanent Liminality and Modernity (2016), and Walking into the Void: A Historical Sociology and Political Anthropology of Walking (with Agnes Horvath, 2017). Bjørn Thomassen is Professor at the Department of Social Sciences and Business at Roskilde Universitet, Denmark. His book Liminality and the Modern: Living Through the In-Between (2014) paved the way for novel understandings and applications of the liminality concept.

• Introduction: rethinking social theory with anthropology; Part I. Maverick Anthropologists: 1. Arnold van Gennep: liminal rites and the rhythms of life; 2. Gabriel Tarde and René Girard: imitation and the foundations of social life; 3. Marcel Mauss: from sacrifice to gift-giving or revisiting foundations; 4. Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and Colin Turnbull: participation, experience, and home; 5. Paul Radin: the trickster; 6. Gregory Bateson and Johan Huizinga: Schismogenesis and play; 7. Victor Turner: liminal experiences as the grounding of social theory; Part II. Rethinking Modernity and Its Sociology: 8. A reflexive political anthropology of sociology; 9. A reflexive political anthropology of modernity.

'This book examines thinkers whose work has been fossilised, forgotten or rendered insignificant by subsequent misreadings and provides us with histories of those misreadings and elisions while saliently indicating the profound theoretical capital for social analysis that has been squandered by those practices.' Glenn Bowman, Emeritus Professor of Socio-Historical Anthropology, University of Kent