In this beautiful book, Ivan Brady paints worlds for us with language. Always a poet, even in his most scholarly writing, in this volume Brady merges prose and poetry into what, in an older kind of anthropological practice, might’ve been called “vignettes” but what he does in this book is teach us that by rendering a slice of the world through observation, poetics, and deep anthropological knowledge, he can allow us to travel with him to worlds unseen, and perhaps now unseeable. — Paige West, Claire Tow Professor of Anthropology, Barnard College and Columbia University |