People without things

Abstract

It is easy to understand the puzzlement of colleagues who are unsure what to make of the increasing number of anthropologists who bemoan anthropocentrism. We can forgive their sideways glances when they hear that social scientists are now look[ing] to gain maturity by burying the corpse of our imperial majesty: society (Miller 2005: 37). Or when they learn that posthumanism is a growing project in the humanities (Wolfe 2003). Or that the latest iteration of phenomenology has little to do with people and is instead concerned with how objects perceive one another (Harman 2005). © 2010 Springer-Verlag New York.