An exciting and cutting-edge volume of essays, which collectively and singularly aim to challenge the conventions of connectivity and relationality in social theory and description through a serious and crucially ethnographic reflection on the category of ‘detachment’

Introduction: Matei Candea, Jo Cook, Catherine Trundle and Thomas Yarrow
Part I: Professionalism and expertise
1. Some merits and difficulties of detachment – Maryon MacDonald
2. Virtuous detachments in engineering practice – on the ethics of (not) making a difference – Penny Harvey and Hannah Knox
3. Artisanal affection: detachment in human-animal relations within intensive pig production in Britain – Kim Crowder
4. Comment – Veena Das
Part II: Ritual and religion
5. Engaged disbelief: problematics of detachment in Christianity and in the anthropology of Christianity – Joel Robbins
6. Detachment and ethical regard – James Laidlaw
7. Detachment, difference and separation: Levi-Strauss at the wedding feast – Caroline Humphrey
8. Comment – Michael Carrithers
Part III: Detaching and situating knowledge
9. The capacity for re-description: environments for hyphens – Alberto Corsín Jiménez
10. Test sites: attachments and detachments in community-based ecotourism – Casper Bruun Jensen and Brit Ross Winthereik
11. Learning to experience the truth: the role of detachment in mindfulness-based therapy in Thailand – Joanna Cook
12. Ignorance and the ethics of detachment among Mongolian Tibetan Buddhists in Inner Mongolia, China – Jonathan Mair
13. Comment – Marilyn Strathern
Index

The social sciences have in recent decades forgotten that life is constituted as much through practices of detachment as through relating and engaging. This diagnosis forms the starting point of this interdisciplinary volume, which questions one of the most fundamental tenets of social theory by focusing on detachment, an important but neglected aspect of social life. Ideas of detachment have come under critical fire in a range of disciplinary contexts, including in relation to discussions of scientific method, international development and western knowledge more generally. Correspondingly, the ‘cultural turn’ has coincided with the valorisation of connection, relationship and engagement as analytic frameworks for thinking about ethics and knowledge production in the humanities and social sciences. These theoretical developments relate to broader social, cultural and economic shifts. ‘Engagement’ has become a key word in public life, from politics, the media, and policy making, through to art and science, as the role of detached ‘experts’ is reconfigured and questioned. Going against the grain of this turn to ‘engagement’, this book challenges the relational basis of social theory and correspondingly brings to light the productive aspects of disconnection, distance and detachment. Rather than treating detachment simply as the moral inversion of compassion and engagement, the volume brings together empirical studies and theoretical comments by leading anthropologists, sociologists, and science studies scholars. Taken together these illustrate the range of contexts within which distance and disconnection can offer meaningful frameworks for action. Positioned at the cutting edge of social theory, this landmark volume will be widely read by students and academics across the social sciences and humanities.