The Method of Hope examines the relationship between hope and knowledge by investigating how hope is produced in various forms of knowledge—Fijian, philosophical, anthropological. The book discusses the hope entailed in a wide range of Fijian knowledge practices such as archival research, gift giving, Christian church rituals, and business practices, and compares it with the concept of hope in the work of philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and Richard Rorty. The book participates in on-going debates in social theory about how to reclaim the category of hope in progressive thought. The book marks a significant departure from other such efforts by combining a detailed ethnographic analysis of the production of hope in Fijian knowledge practices with an imaginative reading of well-known philosophical texts. The aim is to carve out a space for a new kind of relationship between anthropology and philosophy.

"Documents" reflects on the new challenges to humanistic social science in a world in which the subjects of research increasingly share the professional passions and problems of the researcher.
Documents are everywhere in modern life, from the sciences to bureaucracy to law; at the same time, fieldworkers document social realities by collecting, producing, and exchanging documents of their own. Capping off a generation of reflection and critique about the promises and pitfalls of ethnographic methods, the contributors explore how ethnographers conceive, grasp, appreciate, and see patterns, demonstrating that the core of the ethnographic method now lies in the way ethnographers respond to, and increasingly share the professional passions and problems of, their subjects.
"Sophisticated and provocative. The original and unique focus of this volume effectively opens up a new arena of critique that will move ethnography and qualitative inquiry forward in a way that few other works do."
--George Marcus, Department of Anthropology, Rice University
"This edited collection asks how an understanding of documentary forms sheds light on the creation and circulation of modern forms of knowledge, expertise, and governance. This is a major intervention in how we understand the everyday practice and techne of the documentary impulse and documentary apparatuses of law, bureaucratic review, and other institutions of modernity, as well as linguistic anthropology, literary theory, and law. The topic of "Documents" is not just of interest because of epistemological quandaries in the human sciences over textualization and interpretation, but also because the domains to which we increasinglyturn our attention are themselves auto-documentary."--William M. Maurer, Chair and Associate Professor, Anthropology, University of California, Irvine
Contributors: Mario Biagioli, Donald Brenneis, Carol Heimer, Hirokazu Miyazaki, Adam Reed, Annelise Riles, and Marilyn Strathern.
Annelise Riles is Professor of Law and Anthropology at Cornell University.

Hope is an integral part of social life. Yet, hope has not been studied systematically in the social sciences. Editors Hirokazu Miyazaki and Richard Swedberg have collected essays that investigate hope in a broad range of socioeconomic situations and phenomena across time and space and from a variety of disciplinary vantage points. Contributors survey the resilience of hope, and the methodological implications of studying hope, in such experiences as farm collectivization in mid-twentieth-century communist Romania, changing employment relations under Japan's neoliberal reform during the first decade of the twenty-first century, the dynamics of innovation and replication in a West African niche economy, and Barack Obama's 2008 political campaign of hope in the midst of the unfolding global financial crisis. The Economy of Hope shifts the analytic of anthropological and sociological investigations from knowledge to hope, presents case studies on the loss of collective hope, and concludes by offering techniques for replicating hope. In the hands of Miyazaki and Swedberg and their distinguished contributors, hope becomes not only a method of knowledge but also an essential framework for the sociocultural analysis of economic phenomena. Contributors: Yuji Genda, Jane Guyer, Hirokazu Miyazaki, Annelise Riles, Richard Swedberg, Katherine Verdery.

For many financial market professionals worldwide, the era of high finance is over. The times in which bankers and financiers were the primary movers and shakers of both economy and society have come to an abrupt halt. What has this shift meant for the future of capitalism? What has it meant for the future of the financial industry? What about the lives and careers of financial operators who were once driven by utopian visions of economic, social, and personal transformation? And what does it mean for critics of capitalism who have long predicted the end of financial institutions? Hirokazu Miyazaki answers these questions through a close examination of the careers and intellectual trajectories of a group of pioneering derivatives traders in Japan during the 1990s and 2000s.

In a speech delivered in Japanese at Cornell University, atomic bomb survivor Tomokazu Ihara describes the bombing of his home city of Nagasaki in 1945, traces his activism against nuclear proliferation, and issues an impassioned plea for a world without nuclear weapons. Cornell Global Perspectives is an imprint of Cornell University's Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. The works examine critical global challenges, often from an interdisciplinary perspective, and are intended for a non-specialist audience. The Distinguished Speaker Series presents edited transcripts of talks delivered at Cornell, both in the original language and in translation.

For many financial market professionals worldwide, the era of high finance is over. The times in which bankers and financiers were the primary movers and shakers of both economy and society have come to an abrupt halt. What has this shift meant for the future of capitalism? What has it meant for the future of the financial industry? What about the lives and careers of financial operators who were once driven by utopian visions of economic, social, and personal transformation? And what does it mean for critics of capitalism who have long predicted the end of financial institutions? Hirokazu Miyazaki answers these questions through a close examination of the careers and intellectual trajectories of a group of pioneering derivatives traders in Japan during the 1990s and 2000s.