Michael Lambek

Michael Lambek holds a BA from McGill and a PhD from the University of Michigan. He has conducted long-term fieldwork in the western Indian Ocean (Mayotte and Madagascar) since 1975 and for shorter periods in Europe. From 2006-2020 he held a Canada Research Chair in the Anthropology of Ethical Life, under which he founded the Centre for Ethnography at UTSC. He has written on spirit possession, Islam, the anthropology of knowledge, therapeutic practice, ritual and religion, ethical judgment, kinship, memory, and historicity, among other topics. He is currently interested in the intersection of anthropology with philosophy and especially in articulating the ethical dimensions of action and thought.  

Professor Lambek was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2000. He has served as President of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion (2003-5) and held a split appointment as Professor at the London School of Economics. (2006-2008). His books have been awarded the Elliott P. Skinner Book Award from the Association for Africanist Anthropology (2019) and short-listed for the Victor Turner Prize (2003) and the Harold Adams Innis Book Prize and Herskovits Award (1994). He has delivered the Hawthorne Lecture, the Geertz Lecture and key-notes to both the Israel Anthropological Association and the Australian Anthropological Society. In 2016-17 he held a fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin and in 2019 delivered a Tanner Lecture at the Department of Philosophy, University of Michigan. He is founding editor of the Anthropological Horizons monograph series at University of Toronto Press and co-editor of the New Departures series at Cambridge University Press. From 2012-2020 he served as Chair, Department of Anthropology UTSC. 

Education

• PhD, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1978

Publications 

Books  

• Under review People Who Live in Glass Houses: Biography of a Modern Bourgeois Family. 
• In press Concepts and Persons. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 
• 2018 Island in the Stream: An Ethnographic History of Mayotte. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 
• 2015 The Ethical Condition: Essays on Action, Person, and Value. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.  
• 2015 with Veena Das, Didier Fassin, and Webb Keane. Four Lectures on Ethics: Anthropological Perspectives. Chicago: HAU Books. 
• 2002 The Weight of the Past: Living with History in Mahajanga, Madagascar. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 
• 1993 Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte: Local Discourses of Islam, Sorcery, and Spirit Possession. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.  
• 1981 Human Spirits: A Cultural Account of Trance in Mayotte. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cambridge Studies in Cultural Systems, Clifford Geertz, series editor. Reissued 2009. 

Edited Books  

• 2013 Contest for Land in Madagascar: Environment, Ancestors and Development, Sandra J.T.M. Evers, Gwyn Campbell, Michael Lambek (eds.). Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers.  
• 2013 A Companion to the Anthropology of Religion. Janice Boddy and Michael Lambek (eds.). Boston: Wiley-Blackwell. Paper edition in 2015. 
• 2010 Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language and Action. New York: Fordham University Press. 
• 2008 A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion. Second (expanded) edition. Boston: Blackwell.  A substantial selection of classical and contemporary essays with introduction and editorial commentary. Original edition 2002. 
• 2003/4 Illness and Irony: On the Ambiguity of Suffering in Culture, with Paul Antze. New York: Berghahn. Co-published as Social Analysis 47(2). 
• 2001 Ecology and the Sacred: Engaging the Anthropology of Roy A. Rappaport, with Ellen Messer. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 
• 1998 Bodies and Persons: Comparative Perspectives from Africa and Melanesia, with Andrew Strathern. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 
• 1996 Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory, with Paul Antze. New York: Routledge. 

Selected articles (from 2007 on) 

• 2019 Remarks on Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough: Ritual in the Practice of Life. In The Mythology in Our Language: Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough by Ludwig Wittgenstein. Stephan Palmié and Giovanni da Col, Eds. Chicago: Hau books. Pp. 179-196 
• 2018 After Death: Event, Narrative, Feeling. In Antonius Robben, ed. A Companion to the Anthropology of Death. Wiley. Pp. 87-101. 
• 2018 On the Immanence of Ethics. Moral Engines: Exploring the Ethical Drives in Human Life, Cheryl Mattingly, Rasmus Dyring, Maria Louw, and Thomas Schwarz Wentzer, eds. Berghahn. Pp. 137-154. 
• 2016 Word as Act: Varieties of Semiotic Ideology in the Interpretation of Religion. In Words, Ernst van den Hemel and Asja Szafraniec, Eds. New York: Fordham University Press. Co-published in slightly revised form in Companion to the Anthropology of Religion.  
• 2016  On being present to history: Historicity and brigand spirits in Madagascar. Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6(1): 317-341. 
• 2016  On Contradiction. In David Berliner, ed. Hau Debate: Anthropology and the study of contradictions. Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6(1): 1-27. 
• 2015 After Life. In Veena Das and Clara Han (Eds) An Anthropology of Living and Dying in the Contemporary World. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pp. 629-47. 
• 2015 Both/And. In What is Existential Anthropology? Edited by Michael Jackson and Albert Piette. Oxford: Berghahn. Pp. 58-83. 
• 2015 Is Religion Free? In Politics of Religious Freedom, Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Saba Mahmood and Peter Danchin, eds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pp. 289-300 
• 2015 Le Bonheur Suisse, Again. In Harry Walker and Iza Kavedzija (Eds) The Values of Happiness: Ethnographic Perspectives on Living Well. Special issue of Hau 5(3): 111-34. Also published as a Hau book. 
• 2015 The Hermeneutics of Ethical Encounters. In Speaking Ethically Across Borders, Jonathan Mair and Nicholas Evans, Eds. Special section of Hau 5 (2): 227-250. 
• 2014   The interpretation of lives or life as interpretation: Cohabiting with spirits in the Malagasy world. American Ethnologist 41(3): pp. 491-503.  
• 2014 The Elementary Structures of Being (Human). Comment on Philippe Descola’s Beyond Nature and Culture. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4(2): 245-251. 
• 2013 Kinship, Modernity, and the Immodern. In Susan McKinnon and Fenella Cannell (Eds.) Vital Relations: Modernity and the Persistent Life of Kinship. Santa Fe: School of Advanced Research. Pp. 241-260. 
• 2011 Catching the Local. Anthropological Theory 11(2): 197-221. 
• 2011  Kinship as Gift and Theft: Acts of Succession in Mayotte and Ancient Israel. American Ethnologist 38(1): 1-15. 
• 2010       How To Make Up One’s Mind: Reason, Passion, and Ethics in Spirit Possession. University of Toronto Quarterly 79(2) Special issue on Models of Mind, Marlene Goldman and Jill Matus, Eds. Pp. 720-741. 
• 2009 Terror’s Wake: Trauma and Its Subjects. Afterword to Kristen Brown Golden and Bettina Bergo (Eds) The Trauma Controversy: Philosophical and Interdisciplinary Dialogues. Albany: SUNY Press. Pp. 235-62. 
• 2008   “Measuring — or Practising Well-Being?” In Culture and Well-being: Anthropological Approaches to Freedom and Political Ethics, Alberto Corín, ed. London: Pluto. pp. 115-133. 
• 2008   “Provincializing God? Provocations from an Anthropology of Religion.” In Religion: Beyond a Concept, Hent de Vries, ed. New York: Fordham University Press. pp. 120-138. 
• 2008   “Value and Virtue.” Anthropological Theory 8 (2): 133-157 
• 2007 Sacrifice and the Problem of Beginning: Reflections from Sakalava Mythopraxis. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13(1): 19-38. 
• 2007 On Catching Up with Oneself: Learning to Know that One Means What One Does. In David Berliner & Ramon Sarró (Eds) Learning Religion. Oxford: Berghahn. Pp. 65-81. 
• 2007 How Do Women Give Birth? In Rita Astuti, Jonathan Parry, and Charles Stafford (Eds) Questions of Anthropology. Oxford: Berg. Pp. 197-225. 
• 2007 The Cares of Alice Alder: Recuperating Kinship and History in Switzerland. In Janet Carsten (Ed) Ghosts of Memory: Essays on Remembrance and Relatedness.  Oxford: Blackwell. Pp. 218-240. 

Lectures/Podcasts 

• April 1, 2016, Visiting Anthropology Seminar, University of Helsinki. “Ethnography and History: Marriage as Moral Horizon in Mayotte.” Listen here.  

Current Graduate Students 

• Almirasadat Alihosseini
• Jing Jing Liu
• Hannah Mayne
• Matthew Pettit
• Victoria Sheldon
• Keiran Way