Cited by 148Posthumanist Ethics and ActivismAnthropological Studies and InsightsGeographies of human-animal interactions

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 58 of the 61 references it cites were found in a registry or an index; none of the 31 sources its claims cite is checked for support yet.

People Without Things

Fowles, Severin·2010·An Anthropology of Absence

Abstract

It is easy to understand the puzzlement of colleagues who are unsure what to make of the increasing number of anthropologists who bemoan anthropocentrism. We can forgive their sideways glances when they hear that social scientists are “now look[ing] to gain maturity by burying the corpse of our imperial majesty: society” (Miller 2005: 37). Or when they learn that posthumanism is a growing project in the humanities (Wolfe 2003). Or that the latest iteration of phenomenology has little to do with people and is instead concerned with how objects perceive one another (Harman 2005).

Overview

AI snapshot

Written from the paper’s full text.

TL;DR

Fowles argues that the recent “turn toward things” in social theory has a blind spot: absence, which can function as an object-like presence with material and political effects. Through examples such as Latour’s gun debate, Argentina’s disappeared, Neolithic faceless figurines, and stateless/neo-primitivist politics, he calls for treating absences as part of the material world.

Key findings

  • The turn toward things usefully counters the textual turn but over-privileges tangible presence; absences can be “quasi-presences” that intrude, resist, prompt action, and have material consequences, as with misplaced keys or the Argentine disappeared.
  • In Latour’s citizen-gun example, Fowles argues the NRA’s position implies citizenship is already a person-plus-gun hybrid, so the “crossed-out gun” is a politicized absence rather than a neutral missing object.
  • Anthropological and evolutionary accounts have long defined nonmodern or stateless societies by what they lack; Clastres’s “society against the state” and neo-primitivists show absence can be cultivated, aggressive, and politically constructive rather than merely a source of longing.
  • Crossland’s work on Argentina’s disappeared concerns “thousands of individuals” abducted and killed under military rule in the late 1970s and early 1980s; Fowles also notes claims that humans have inhabited increasingly entangled material worlds over “the past 40,000 or so years.”

Methods

  • Design: conceptual and theoretical essay, not an empirical study; it critiques materiality/thing theory through close readings of Latour, Morgan, Clastres, Bailey, Crossland, and related literature.
  • Data/sample: no formal sample or dataset; the argument draws on illustrative archaeological, ethnographic, historical, and political examples, including Neolithic figurines, the Argentine disappeared, the NRA gun debate, colonial nakedness discourse, and neo-primitivism.
  • Main analysis: juxtaposes presence/absence, materiality/immateriality, and symmetry to argue that absences are not reducible to ideas and should be treated as object-like participants in social and material worlds.

Limitations

  • The author states that the strong postcolonial “thing-rhetoric” needs “a more extensive treatment than I am able to offer here,” and that his comparison to Latour’s project is “hardly fair.”
  • The author also states it is “not the place to discuss Latour’s broader claims,” and a footnote records the editors’ critique that interweaving Olsen, Pinney, and Miller does a disservice to their individual arguments, which Fowles calls “a fair critique.”
  • Evident from the text: the essay offers no empirical data, systematic sampling, or formal comparative method; its claims rest on selected illustrative cases, and it does not provide clear criteria for distinguishing object-like absences from ideas or for adjudicating between competing interpretations.

Model-written summary. Check it against the paper before relying on it.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1007/978-1-4419-5529-6_2

Cites

58 of 58 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Nothing to recompute.

Verification

Claims the paper makes

49 Own interpretation · 10 Sources not found · 8 Not checked yet · 7 No full text of the sources · 6 No basis given

Verify all 4 references — free account

Show all 19 claims

  • Probably not a substantial claim. 54
  • It may state two separate claims as one. 19
  • The quote only partly states this claim. 4
61 of 61
  • The authors state this as an assumption.

    The State was not a novel institutional apparatus cut from whole cloth in the Near East some six millennia ago, but is better understood as a frightening image of systematic domination that has always haunted human societies.

    “First, it is taken as axiomatic that 'the State' was not a novel institutional apparatus cut from whole cloth in the Near East some six millennia ago, but is better understood as a frightening image of systematic domination that has always haunted human societies.”
  • The authors state this as an assumption.

    The State is never merely absent.

    “The second assumption follows from the first: insofar as the State has always been with us as a dangerous possibility, it is never merely absent.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The world can be divided into a world of ideas and a world of encounter.

    “This makes the absent thing an odd expatriate of the world of ideas that has taken up residence in the world of encounter.”
3 of 3

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

Each contradiction between two passages listed here was confirmed by an independent check.

2 of 2

Citations

Cites

Show all 61 references

Research works printed but not linked: 8

  1. Brown, B. 2004. Thing theory. In: Things, ed. B. Brown, 1-16. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  2. ———. (2010) A people’s history of the American Southwest. In: Considering Complexity, ed. S. Alt. Denver: University of Colorado Press.
  3. Robb, J. 2004. The extended artefact and the monumental economy: a methodology for material agency. In Rethinking Materiality: The Engagement of Mind with the Material World, eds. E. DeMarrais, C. Gosden and C. Renfrew, 131-139. Cambridge: McDonald Institute Monographs.
  4. Rousseau, J.-J. 1992 [1754]. Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality. In The Collected Writings of Rousseau, Vol. 3, eds. R.D. Masters and C. Kelly, 17-67. Hanover: University Press of New England.
  5. Serres, M. 2007 [1980]. The Parasite, translated by L. R. Schehr. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
  6. Tanaka, K. 1998. Absence of the Buddha Image in Early Buddhist Art. New Delhi: D.K. Printworld.
  7. Zerzan, J. 1994a. Future primitive. In Future Primitive and Other Essays, pp. 15-46. New York: Autonomedia.
  8. Zerzan, J. 1994b. Feral. In Future Primitive and Other Essays, pp. 144-146. New York: Autonomedia.

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Metadata

Authors
Fowles, S.
Affiliations
Columbia University (US)
Corresponding author
Fowles, Severin
Venue
An Anthropology of Absence
Published
2010
Pages
23-41
OpenAlex
W19985196
Cited by
148
References
61
Citations by year
2026: 3 · 2025: 4 · 2024: 4 · 2023: 17 · 2022: 23 · 2021: 21 · 2020: 20 · 2019: 8 · 2018: 19 · 2017: 8 · 2016: 5 · 2015: 7 · 2014: 3 · 2013: 4 · 2012: 2
FWCI
22.77
Type
book chapter
Language
en
Open access
closed
Locations
Springer eBooks (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Cultural Studies › Posthumanist Ethics and Activism
  • Social Sciences › Anthropology › Anthropological Studies and Insights
  • Social Sciences › Geography, Planning and Development › Geographies of human-animal interactions
Keywords
anthropocentrism, posthumanism, phenomenology, objects, materiality, social criticism, anthropological theory

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