“The Social Life of Spirits makes the argument of the ‘social life of things’ go full circle, cogently arguing that immaterial spirits, just like material things, should be approached as social beings with a life and trajectory. Going beyond beliefs or representations, it proposes to describe spirits through their effects, asking how are spirits made to happen and what do they make happen. This is a brilliant book.”

Roger Sansi, University of London

“This is a great volume of essays, a real testament to the subtleties that emerge out of empirical research—even when on something so ostensibly ‘un-empirical’ as spirits. It makes signal contributions to classic and contemporary debates on presence, evidence, mediation, and materiality that have animated the anthropology of religion ever since E. B. Tylor’s Victorian heyday.”

Matthew Engelke, London School of Economics and Political Science

“What might the world look like if it were to contain all of those things—‘entities’—that are meant, in one way or another, not to exist? How might an anthropology of ‘non-entities’—spirits, dreams, histories, ethers, utopias—proceed without doing violence to its objects’ peculiar manners of (non-)disclosure? A vertiginous exercise in anthropological ‘abduction’—thinking backwards, from effects to plausible causes—this book grounds conceptions of the ineffable in a meticulous survey of its traces, on people, in moments, at places. More than just a ‘social life of spirits,’ the volume offers us glimpses of the irreducibly spiritual life of the social.”

Martin Holbraad, University College London

“Opens the intangible and spiritual to new and profitable considerations in terms of fieldwork, statistics, and the many insights made available by general anthropological reflection.”

Catholic Library World