Don Handelman’s groundbreaking work in anthropology is showcased in this collection of his most powerful essays, edited by Matan Shapiro and Jackie Feldman. The book looks at the intellectual and spiritual roots of Handelman’s initiation into anthropology; his work on ritual and on “bureaucratic logic”; analyses of cosmology; and innovative essays on Anthropology and Deleuzian thinking. Handelman reconsiders his theory of the forming of form and how this relates to a new theory of the dynamics of time. This will be the definitive collection of articles by one of the most important anthropologists of the late 20th Century.

“[This book offers a] perspective on an extraordinary scholar, one whose versatility and energy goes far beyond what anthropology has generally aspired to in the twentieth-century. This book is a taster not simply of a work of stunning theoretical breadth, offering profound heuristics for our discipline, but of the man who has refused to dis-intricate himself and his personal trajectory from its conceptual premises.” • Ethnos. Journal of Anthropology

“This is scintillating – and an engaging and compelling book… It is an extraordinary comment on the versatility and energy of twentieth century socio-cultural anthropology.” • Marilyn Strathern, University of Cambridge

“An ambitious retrospective of Don Handelman’s intellectual development… An invaluable resource for scholars of anthropology and ritual studies.” • Donna J. Young, University of Toronto Scarborough

Don Handelman is the Sarah Allen Shaine Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.