In the past fifteen years, there has been a virtual explosion of anthropological literature arguing that morality should be considered central to human practice. Out of this explosion new and invigorating conversations have emerged between anthropologists and philosophers. Moral Engines: Exploring the Ethical Drives in Human Life includes essays from some of the foremost voices in the anthropology of morality, offering unique interdisciplinary conversations between anthropologists and philosophers about the moral engines of ethical life, addressing the question: What propels humans to act in light of ethical ideals?

In the past fifteen years, there has been a virtual explosion of anthropological literature arguing that morality should be considered central to human practice. Out of this explosion new and invigorating conversations have emerged between anthropologists and philosophers. Moral Engines: Exploring the Ethical Drives in Human Life includes essays from some of the foremost voices in the anthropology of morality, offering unique interdisciplinary conversations between anthropologists and philosophers about the moral engines of ethical life, addressing the question: What propels humans to act in light of ethical ideals?

Imagistic Care explores ethnographically how images function in our concepts, our writing, our fieldwork, and our lives. With contributions from anthropologists, philosophers and an artist, the volume asks: How can imagistic inquiries help us understand the complex entanglements of self and other, dependence and independency, frailty and charisma, notions of good and bad aging, and norms and practices of care in old age? And how can imagistic inquiries offer grounds for critique? Cutting between ethnography, phenomenology and art, this volume offers a powerful contribution to understandings of growing old. The images created in words and drawings are used to complicate rather than simplify the world. The contributors advance an understanding of care, and of aging itself, marked by alterity, spectral presences and uncertainty. Contributors: Rasmus Dyring, Harmandeep Kaur Gill, Lone Gron, Maria Louw, Cheryl Mattingly, Lotte Meinert, Maria Speyer, Helle S. Wentzer, Susan Reynolds Whyte

This volume examines an often taken for granted concept-that of the concept itself. How do we picture what concepts are, what they do, how they arise in the course of everyday life? Challenging conventional approaches that treat concepts as mere tools at our disposal for analysis, or as straightforwardly equivalent to signs to be deciphered, the anthropologists and philosophers in this volume turn instead to the ways concepts are already intrinsically embedded in our forms of life and how they constitute the very substrate of our existence as humans who lead lives in language. Attending to our ordinary lives with concepts requires not an ascent from the rough ground of reality into the skies of theory, but rather acceptance of the fact that thinking is congenital to living with and through concepts. The volume offers a critical and timely intervention into both contemporary philosophy and anthropological theory by unsettling the distinction between thought and reality that continues to be too often assumed and showing how the supposed need to grasp reality may be replaced by an acknowledgement that we are in its grip. Contributors: Jocelyn Benoist, Andrew Brandel, Michael Cordey, Veena Das, Rasmus Dyring and Thomas Schwarz Wentzer, Michael D. Jackson, Michael Lambek, Sandra Laugier, Marco Motta, Michael J. Puett, and Lotte Buch Segal

This volume examines an often taken for granted concept-that of the concept itself. How do we picture what concepts are, what they do, how they arise in the course of everyday life? Challenging conventional approaches that treat concepts as mere tools at our disposal for analysis, or as straightforwardly equivalent to signs to be deciphered, the anthropologists and philosophers in this volume turn instead to the ways concepts are already intrinsically embedded in our forms of life and how they constitute the very substrate of our existence as humans who lead lives in language. Attending to our ordinary lives with concepts requires not an ascent from the rough ground of reality into the skies of theory, but rather acceptance of the fact that thinking is congenital to living with and through concepts. The volume offers a critical and timely intervention into both contemporary philosophy and anthropological theory by unsettling the distinction between thought and reality that continues to be too often assumed and showing how the supposed need to grasp reality may be replaced by an acknowledgement that we are in its grip. Contributors: Jocelyn Benoist, Andrew Brandel, Michael Cordey, Veena Das, Rasmus Dyring and Thomas Schwarz Wentzer, Michael D. Jackson, Michael Lambek, Sandra Laugier, Marco Motta, Michael J. Puett, and Lotte Buch Segal

Imagistic Care explores ethnographically how images function in our concepts, our writing, our fieldwork, and our lives. With contributions from anthropologists, philosophers and an artist, the volume asks: How can imagistic inquiries help us understand the complex entanglements of self and other, dependence and independency, frailty and charisma, notions of good and bad aging, and norms and practices of care in old age? And how can imagistic inquiries offer grounds for critique? Cutting between ethnography, phenomenology and art, this volume offers a powerful contribution to understandings of growing old. The images created in words and drawings are used to complicate rather than simplify the world. The contributors advance an understanding of care, and of aging itself, marked by alterity, spectral presences and uncertainty. Contributors: Rasmus Dyring, Harmandeep Kaur Gill, Lone Grøn, Maria Louw, Cheryl Mattingly, Lotte Meinert, Maria Speyer, Helle S. Wentzer, Susan Reynolds Whyte