Moebius Anthropology: Essays on the Forming of Form

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.

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.

Matan Shapiro is Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Security, Economy and Planning at the University of Stavanger, Norway. His publications engage ethnographically and theoretically with topics such as kinship, ritual, play, and cosmology in Northeast Brazil; domestic securitization, pilgrimage, and cryptocurrency in Israel; and, currently, pandemic risk communication in Europe.

Jackie Feldman is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, and head of the Rabb Center for Holocaust Studies. He researches pilgrimage and tourism, focusing on Jewish voyages to Poland, Christian pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and performance in Holocaust museums in Israel and Germany.