This volume examines an often taken for granted concept—that of the concept itself. How do we picture what concepts are, what they do, how they arise in the course of everyday life? Challenging conventional approaches that treat concepts as mere tools at our disposal for analysis, or as straightforwardly equivalent to signs to be deciphered, the anthropologists and philosophers in this volume turn instead to the ways concepts are already intrinsically embedded in our forms of life and how they constitute the very substrate of our existence as humans who lead lives in language.

Attending to our ordinary lives with concepts requires not an ascent from the rough ground of reality into the skies of theory, but rather acceptance of the fact that thinking is congenital to living with and through concepts. The volume offers a critical and timely intervention into both contemporary philosophy and anthropological theory by unsettling the distinction between thought and reality that continues to be too often assumed and showing how the supposed need to grasp reality may be replaced by an acknowledgement that we are in its grip.

Contributors: Jocelyn Benoist, Andrew Brandel, Michael Cordey, Veena Das, Rasmus Dyring and Thomas Schwarz Wentzer, Michael D. Jackson, Michael Lambek, Sandra Laugier, Marco Motta, Michael J. Puett, and Lotte Buch Segal

Introduction: Life with Concepts
Andrew Brandel and Marco Motta | 1

1 Concepts of the Ordinary
Sandra Laugier | 29

2 How Life Makes a Conversation of Us: Ontology, Ethics, and Responsive Anthropology
Rasmus Dyring and Thomas Schwarz Wentzer | 50

3 Crisscrossing Concepts: Anthropology and Knowledge-Making
Veena Das | 73

4 The Potencie of Text: Shifting Concepts of Myth and Literature
Andrew Brandel | 110

5 How Social Are Our Concepts?
Jocelyn Benoist | 140

6 Living with Zombies: Forms of Death at the Core of the Ordinary
Marco Motta | 155

7 Creating Worlds: Imagination, Interpretation, and the Subjunctive
Michael J. Puett | 181

8 The Life Course of Concepts
Michael D. Jackson | 197

9 On Sorcery: Life with the Concept
Michael Lambek | 215

10 How Ethical Is Our Life with Concepts? Reflections on Shared Medical Decision Making
Michael Cordey | 243

11 In the Know: The Pain of the Other in Torture Rehabilitation
Lotte Buch Segal | 271

Acknowledgments | 291

References | 293

List of Contributors | 323

Name Index | 325

Subject Index | 329