Review
"Lawyer-turned-anthropologist, Sally Falk Moore has had one of the most diverse careers in anthropology… Comparing Impossibilities – a collection of Moore’s most famous essays on law, anthropology, and Africa – celebrates the breadth and diversity of her career through two different themes: those of processual anthropology and comparative methods.
…Overall, Comparing Impossibilities is a remarkable overview of Sally Falk Moore’s career and contribution to the field of anthropology at large, with a specific focus on her work in Tanzania and in legal anthropology – and especially regarding the transfer of land rights… [it] remains a brilliant demonstration of the ways in which anthropologists can mediate the tension between the ambition to account for situations in process, and the temporal ‘impossibilities’ that arise from the need to do so through their comparison."
-- Emilia Antiglio Review
"This extraordinary collection of essays by Sally Falk Moore, the eminent legal anthropologist, has it all: rigorous thinking, stunning ruminations on method, and hilarious gems from daily life among the anthropologists. Both topical and timeless, this collection shows Moore anticipating by decades entire subfields such as policy studies, anthropology of socialism, gender studies, and anthropology of affect. These explorations in Moore’s processual anthropology and the conceptual tools she developed for the ethnography of a world in constant and sometimes dramatic change are a must read for all students of anthropology, ethnography, policy, post-socialism, property, political economy, and gender, as well as her home areas of law and African studies." -- Julia Elyachar, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Economics at the University of California, Irvine, and author of Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development and the State in Cairo
About the Author
Sally Falk Moore is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Anthropology emerita at Harvard University and an appointed affiliated professor of international legal studies at Harvard Law School. She is the author or editor of many books, including Law as Process, Anthropology and Africa, and Law and Anthropology.
