Description
Book Synopsis‘Becoming – An Anthropological Approach to Understandings of the Person in Java’ is an ethnographic monograph that examines the ways in which the peoples of a peri-urban locality in East Java, Indonesia conceive of the person, by looking at how their everyday practices relate to understandings of ethnicity, kinship, Islam and gender. The volume is also a thought experiment that aims to make a theoretical contribution to the discipline of anthropology by proposing the concept of the ‘diaphoron’ person and re-deploying the method of ‘total ethnography’.
Trade Review‘“Becoming – An Anthropological Approach to Understandings of the Person in Java” is a virtuoso and literally ground-breaking adaption of the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari for anthropological fieldwork. Kostas Retsikas demonstrates that there is a highly flexible and extremely useful methodological apparatus at the heart of Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis and doing so it opens a new theoretical door for the field of anthropology.’ —Ian Buchanan, editor of ‘Deleuze Studies’
‘Konstantinos Retsikas has written a comprehensive and complex book [which] opens up a number of new ways to understand the person and supplements these views with a distinct emphasis on forms of communication. […] “Becoming” is unquestionably worth reading, not only for young scholars but also for Javanologists and other academics interested in understanding the person as well as understanding Java and the person in Java.’ —Susanne Rodemeier, ‘South East Asia Research’
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations; Acknowledgements; Prolegomenon; Chapter 1: The Becoming of Place: Moving, Clearing, Inhabiting; Chapter 2: The Perception of Difference: Embodying, Reversing, Encompassing; Chapter 3: The Blood of Affinity: Marrying, Procreating, Housing; Chapter 4: Matters of Scale: Feeding, Praying, Sharing; Chapter 5: A Pulsating Universe: Annihilating, Enhancing, Magnifying; Chapter 6: The Marital and the Martial: Gendering, Killing, Oscillating; Epilogue; Bibliography; Index
