Susan McKinnon

In Kali in Bengali Lives, Suchitra Samanta examines Bengalis’ personal narratives of Kali devotion in the Bhakti tradition. These personal experiences, including miraculous encounters, reflect on broader understandings of divine power. Where the revelatory experience has long been validated in Indian epistemology, the devotees’ own interpretive framework provides continuity within a paradigm of devotion and of the miraculous experience as intuitive insight (anubhuti) into a larger truth. Through these unique insights, the miraculous experience is felt in its emotional power, remembered, and reflected upon. The narratives speak to how the meaning of a religious figure, Kali, becomes personally significant and ultimately transformative of the devotee’s self.

In Kali in Bengali Lives, Suchitra Samanta examines Bengalis’ personal narratives of Kali devotion in the Bhakti tradition. These personal experiences, including miraculous encounters, reflect on broader understandings of divine power. Where the revelatory experience has long been validated in Indian epistemology, the devotees’ own interpretive framework provides continuity within a paradigm of devotion and of the miraculous experience as intuitive insight (anubhuti) into a larger truth. Through these unique insights, the miraculous experience is felt in its emotional power, remembered, and reflected upon. The narratives speak to how the meaning of a religious figure, Kali, becomes personally significant and ultimately transformative of the devotee’s self.

Evolutionary psychology claims to be the authoritative science of "human nature." Its chief architects, including Stephen Pinker and David Buss, have managed to reach well beyond the ivory tower to win large audiences and influence public discourse. But do the answers that evolutionary psychologists provide about language, sex, and social relations add up? Susan McKinnon thinks not. Far from being an account of evolution and social relations that has historical and cross-cultural validity, evolutionary psychology is a stunning example of a "science" that twists evolutionary genetics into a myth of human origins. As McKinnon shows, that myth is shaped by neo-liberal economic values and relies on ethnocentric understandings of sex, gender, kinship, and social relations. She also explores the implications for public policy of the moral tales that are told by evolutionary psychologists in the guise of "scientific" inquiry. Drawing widely from the anthropological record, "Neo-liberal Genetics" offers a sustained and accessible critique of the myths of human nature fabricated by evolutionary psychologists.

Among a growing number of ethnographies of Eastern Indonesia that deal with cosmology, exchange and kinship, this book confronts issues originally broached by Edmund Leach and Claude Levi-Strauss, concerning the relation between hierarchy and equality in asymmetric systems of marriage. Based on fieldwork in the Tanimbar Islands, this book analyzes the simultaneous presence of both closed, asymmetric cycles and open, asymmetric pathways of alliance - or both egalitarian and hierarchical configurations. The book demonstrates that Tanimbarese society is shaped by the existence of multiple, differentially valued forms of marriage, affiliation and residence. Rather than seeing these various forms as analytically separable types, this book demonstrates that it is only by viewing them as integrally related - in terms of culturally specific understandings of ""houses"", gender and exchange - that one can perceive the process through which hierarchy and equality are created.