Routes/Worlds

Elizabeth Povinelli's anthropology of the otherwise locates itself within forms of life that run counter to dominant modes of being under late settler liberalism. In Routes & Worlds, she considers the emergence of new worlds and the extinguishing of old ones, seeking to develop a social imaginary that can sustain radical potentiality without turning a blind eye to our deep interdependence.

In these essays, Povinelli moves from a discussion of the anthropology of the gift to a look at the contemporary debates between Bruno Latour and Peter Sloterdijk about the relative values of network and sphere theory, and offers reflections on two recent projects--a graphic memoir and augmented reality venture--that elaborate what she terms embagination a visual and spatial metaphor of anthropology as a woven bag in which things circulate.