ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the nature of the knowledge that the imagination delivers. Hence Mattia Fumanti considers the relation between imagination, freedom and the senses. Fumanti's conclusion is that imagination offers the anthropologist and his or her informants alike the possibility to constitute, know and place the self in a world beyond the limits of the real. In 'Granite and Steel', Andrew Irving explores the relationship between the thinking, feeling and imagining human body and New York's industrial architecture, infrastructure and buildings. The chapter takes as its primary fieldwork site the enormous granite, steel and concrete suspension bridges that cross New York's East River and connect Manhattan to Brooklyn and Queens. Towering 300 feet into the air and 7000 feet across, the building of these bridges established a new sense of scale against which citizens could imagine and compare their finite, organic bodies and everyday lives.
