An Anthropology of the Subject: Holographic Worldview in New Guinea and Its Meaning and Significance for the World of Anthropology

"Roy Wagner is a one-of-a-kind anthropologist whose books provide intense intellectual stimulation. His way of connecting the world of New Guinea to the world of anthropology is unique and, well, mind-blowing. . . . He writes books that you actually want to and will read more than once."and#151;Steven Feld, author of Sound and Sentiment

"Wagner asks, daringly, what it would be like to imagine one of the most significant of human activities, the activity of description or representation, as a self-scaling phenomenon. . . . One begins to glimpse a genuine 'alternative anthropology.'"and#151;Marilyn Strathern, author of The Gender of the Gift

An Anthropology of the Subject rounds out the theoretical-philosophical cosmos of one of the twentieth century's most intellectually adventurous anthropologists. Roy Wagner, having turned "culture" and "symbols" inside out (in The Invention of Culture and Symbols That Stand for Themselves, respectively), now does the same for the "subject" and subjectivity. In studying the human subject and the way human culture mirrors itself, Wagner has redefined holography as "the exact equivalence, or comprehensive identity, of part and whole in any human contingency."

Roy Wagner is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Virginia. The classic The Invention of Culture (1975; 1981) is one of a half-dozen highly regarded works of ethnography and theory by Wagner.