A Return to Form

Abstract After many years of implicit and explicit anti-formalisms of various kinds, anthropologists are beginning to rediscover the virtues and appeal of form. The figure of form is rising again, at the intersection between a concern with the recurrent and stable aspects of social and cultural life and an interest in conceptual devices that stand slightly off to the side of the immediacy of emergent flows of life and matter. This piece examines the intellectual conditions of this disciplinary ‘return to form’ (the appreciative implication is intended) and explores some of the conceptual and political affordances of formalism and anti-formalism. This is not a fully fledged manifesto for a new formalism, but it scouts out the conditions of possibility for such a manifesto.