ABSTRACT
Giorgio Agamben, Benedict Anderson, Hannah Arendt, Mikhail Bakhtin, Homi Bhabha, Walter Benjamin, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, Manuel Castells, Michel de Certeau, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Patricia Hill Collins, Manuel de Landa, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Anthony Giddens, Antonio Gramsci, Jürgen Habermas, Stuart Hall, Donna Haraway, David Harvey, Martin Heidegger, bell hooks, Bruno Latour, Archille Mbembe, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Valentin Mudimbe, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edward Said, Saskia Sassen, James Scott, Amartya Sen, Guyatri Spivak, Sylvia Wynter, and Ludwig Wittgenstein are among the transdisciplinary social theorists whose names and ideas have been invoked in relatively recent anthropological writings, particularly within sociocultural anthropology.1 Evidence of current trends, emergent shifts, and critical reworkings in anthropologists’ theoretical engagements, particularly those considered most authoritative, can be found in the writings of such anthropologists as Arjun Appadurai, Philippe Bourgois, Karen Brodkin, Jean and John Comaroff, Veena Das, Marisol de la Cadena, Virginia Dominguez, Arturo Escobar, Paul Farmer, James Ferguson, John Gledhill, Akhil Gupta, Charles Hale, John Jackson Jr., Setha Low, Henrietta Moore, Mwenda Ntarangwi, Francis Nyanmjoh, Aihwa Ong, Sherry Ortner, Gustavo Lins Ribeiro, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Nina Glick Schiller, David Scott, Ann Laura Stoler, Deborah Thomas, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Anna Tsing, Gina Ulysse, Mary Weismantel, Patricia Zavella … A brief sampling of anthropologists (some of whom are more visible and widely read than others) across a variety of specialty areas can give us a glimpse of the various ways theory is constructed, appropriated, critiqued, applied, and reworked in social inquiry that ranges from studies of neoliberalism, globalization, transnationalism, diasporas, development, and multiple modernities to those of gender and sexuality, racial identities, violence and social suffering, state restructuring, and plural dimensions of citizenship.
