


































The Social Life of Concepts

Review by Tiatemsu Longkumer

Andrew Brandel & Marco Motta, eds. 2021. Living with Concepts: Anthropology in the Grip of

Reality. New York: Fordham University Press, 338 pp., ISBN: 978-0-82329-427-5

Anthropology has one of its contours in dealing with how humans use and embody concepts in

their social reality. Joel Robbins (2020) argues that even though anthropologists are mindful of

where their concepts are coming from, anthropology did not have the founding debate about

“concept formation.”  Living with Concepts brings philosophers and anthropologists together to

understand different aspects of concepts such as: What are concepts? How are they made? What

do they do? What do we mean when we talk about concepts? Each chapter expounds on different

aspects of concepts in relation to life. 

Sandra Laugier, in chapter 1, tries to juxtapose philosophy with the everyday textures of being

human through reading works by Emerson, Cavell, and Diamond. She delves into the human

ability to think and the calibration required to be part of the world. In doing so, Laugier explores

“concept” and “experience,” pointing to the experiential aspect of concept called “conceptual

sensibility” in trying to understand concepts in relation to lived experiences. Rasmus Dyring and

Thomas Wentzer, in chapter 2, engage with anthropologists working on the ontological turn and

ask the question, “What is human?” While asking the question in relation to concepts, they delve

into philosophical anthropology to understand the formation of concepts as tied to the “formation

of life” which situates concepts as product and process of conceptualization. Such formation

leads  them  to  see  concepts  as  a  process  of  conceptualization  whereby  understanding

conceptualization as “an experiential responsiveness to the demands that life puts on the living.”

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Veena Das, in chapter 3, ponders on the relationship between the notion of concept and the real.

She further asks how semiotic apparatuses portray the real and how different pictures of reality

might signify different practices and conceptual formation. While delving into these questions,

Das suggests that the normative bounds of a concept are disclosed through its projection into a

new context which needn’t refer back to a rule as it belongs to an “autonomous stratum.” Das

goes on to further suggest that “a concept is not simply capturing what is there but might be

thought of as roaming in the space of possibilities” (p. 104). 

While reading Claude Levi-Strauss and Marcel Griaule, Andrew Brandel, in chapter 4, ponders

anthropology’s  history  of  following  a  rule  and  the  desire  to  describe  phenomena  that  went

against the use of concept in practice. In trying to make his case, Brandel meditates on how

anthropologists  receive  texts  and  claims  that  the  “empirical  encounter  with  texts  is  already

conceptual.”  Such a  claim alludes  to  the  phenomena where  providing a  definition  may run

against the use of concept in practice. Brandel argues that through our conceptual practice, “we

intuit a horizon of use,” revealing the normativity of concepts. Jocelyn Benoist, in chapter 5,

faces  the  question  “Does  concept  give  us  reality?”  Benoist  while  reflecting  on the  question

suggests that philosophy occupies  itself  with concepts and not reality, further  proposing that

concepts are “norms that have been put upon reality” which put “reality into play” at the same

time that they put us in a position to be “right in its regard.” As an illustration of what “life with

concepts” might look like Marco Motta, in chapter 6, looks at “life with zombies” in Haiti and

problematizes  the  anthropological  account  of  “reality”  by  thinking  through  the  relationship

between  reality  and  the  imagined.  Motta  further  complicates  the  notion  of  imagination  by

opening up to the notion of experience and juxtaposing it  as a component of the real. Such

problematization  and  different  configurations  of  relations  between  concept  and  experience

complicate the division between imagination and reality. 

Michael J. Puett, in chapter 7, while critically reading Zhu Xi, asks the question of the coherence

of concepts in the world. Puett argues that life with concepts is not about expressing a coherent

worldview but obtaining new possibilities by working with the endlessly fragile construction of

the world. Describing the fragility of lifeworlds, Michael D. Jackson, in chapter 8, deliberates on

the loss of concepts that may happen through moments of crisis and transition, asking if “the loss

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of a loved one, of a physical ability, of a faith or fortune, or home or homeland…may also be

precipitated by the loss of concepts” (p. 197). Jackson also alludes to concepts, images, and

quasi-humans as alternative ways of giving form to “inchoate experiences,” bringing together the

aspect  of  conceptual  and  lived  reality.  Thus,  propounding  that  concept  formation  in  human

experience, concrete or abstract, makes life thinkable and manageable even in difficult situations.

Michael  Lambek,  in  chapter  9,  reflecting  on  Mayotte’s  understanding  of  sorcery,  tries  to

understand sorcery from the lens of “ordinary ethics,” which focuses on ethical life rather than

the hard questions of ethics. Through such reflection, Lambek tries to assert how anthropological

thinking  emerges  and  is  tested  through  their  fieldwork.  For  Lambek,  ethics  is  a  form  of

exercising  practical  judgment,  and  concepts  enable  us  to  use  certain  words  in  certain

circumstances. Thus, the reality of a concept (here, sorcery) cannot be settled within a single

language game, establishing a connection between ethics and concepts in everyday life. 

Michael Cordey, in chapter 10, delineates the concept of ethical decision-making through an

example from medicine and health policy called shared decision making (SDM). He bases his

argument on fieldwork conducted in a Swiss neurorehabilitation hospital among people who are

waking up from a coma and asks the medical professional if “treating a patient’s pneumonia with

an antibiotic constitutes a ‘futile’ intervention” (p. 244). Cordey suggests that there constitutes a

“futile” intervention with a particular “texture” that can be heard through their tone of voice in

such  treatment.  Consequently,  Cordey  argues  against  the  rational  and  deliberative  view  of

decision-making in an ordinary everyday life setting. The question of ethics, as Cordey argues, is

“about the difficulties to stitch together what really matters to people in particular situation” as

they work through the different “textures” of “futility” (p. 244). Lotte Buch Segal, in chapter 11,

explores the expression of concepts in the form of pain caused by violence. Such expression

while forming a community also reveals a form of fragility and vulnerability as it demands the

acknowledgment  of  the  other.  Buch  Segal  tries  to  understand  such  sensation  in  terms  of

“secondary traumatization” through the process of “bearing and being with the voice of others,”

recognizing the “fragility” of language. She argues that “anthropological theory of being with the

pain  of  others  as  a  shared  language  hinged on the  knowledge  that  working  with  people  in

immense pain is knowing the failure of the voice and the simultaneous return of it” (pp. 274-

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275).  Thus,  expression  of  pain  is  a  form  of  demand  on  the  witness  that  subsumes  an

acknowledgement of the pain of the other and the other itself.

An interesting aspect of the book is that each chapter is in dialogue with another, where certain

lines of thought are resonated throughout the chapters. The common thread across each chapter is

the implicit critique that concepts can be manipulated at will, and that concepts are equivalent to,

or function as, a sign. Each chapter is a product of extensive dialogue amongst the authors, and

each contribution has certain foundational premises that are implicitly or explicitly agreed upon.

In doing so, the book puts forward three views of concepts: Firstly, concepts are tools that enable

us to translate between experiences, unraveling an otherwise hidden reality; secondly, concepts

tell  us something about what is  going on in reality over there; and thirdly,  concepts are not

merely signs but are also an affective aspect of lived reality. The books’ proposal goes beyond

the classical view of concepts - which proposes that concepts are encapsulated in definitions

where philosophy and other sciences are to discover and sharpen the definition of concepts -

while voicing different opinions on how their views apply contextually in relation to life. The

diversity of opinions further reinstates the notion that concepts are intimately linked with life in

particular and “social ontology” (Epstein 2015) in general. The discussion can be furthered by

trying to understand “concepts” as “social kinds” through “metamodernism” (Josephson Storm

2021). 

This book is not just a rhetorical dabble on concepts, but it expounds on how concepts come to

life in everyday human and non-human interaction. As the reader goes through each chapter, it

will be made clear that this book is not just a different take on what concepts are but also what

concepts  do.  A book like this can be recommended to university-level students and scholars

across  any  discipline.  For  anthropologists,  it  is  a  must-read  irrespective  of  the  branch  one

belongs to.

 

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Works Cited

Epstein, Brian. 2015. The Ant Trap: Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences. Oxford

University Press.

Josephson Storm, Jason Ananda. 2021.  Metamodernism: The Future of Theory. University of

Chicago Press.

Robbins, Joel. 2020. Theology and Anthropology of Christian Life. Oxford University Press.

Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. Student in the Department of Anthropology at North-Eastern

Hill University, Shillong: India. He is working on the Anthropology of Religion. 

© 2022 Tiatemsu Longkumer

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https://nehu.academia.edu/TiatemsuLongkumer

