Weiss, Margot (ed. ). Unsettling queer anthropology: foundations, reorientations, and departures. 344 pp. , illus. , bibliogr. Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 2024. 29. 95 (paper)

Unsettling queer anthropology: foundations, reorientations, and departures is a critical work for anyone who is interested in how ‘queer’ has become a scholarly conceptual object and its potentials and limits. Indeed, the book unsettles queer anthropology by arguing that queer anthropology is both a site of potential that can open to liberatory futures and a site of limit that has inherited the problematic colonial, imperialist, and racist legacies of a wider anthropology and wider queer studies. The book offers important insights on queer anthropology's history, various genealogies and counter-genealogies of its thought, as well as critical debates within the field today, while simultaneously offering future potential avenues. It is both field-describing as well as field-changing in its theoretical, methodological, as well as formal explorations, and is a must read for any student, teacher, and scholar of queer anthropology. The book is organized into three sections. The first, ‘Foundations’, offers alternative genealogies that produce new ways of thinking about the very question of what ‘queer anthropology’ is as a field and its relation to larger fields, methods, disciplines, and anti-disciplinary spaces. This section explores Black (and queer) Study as a site that is larger and perhaps more attuned to a personal and political anthropology of the ‘utterly precious’ that goes beyond any discipline (Allen); challenges the problematic understanding of queer anthropology as the provider of raw data that must be combined with a proper queer theory emanating simultaneously from ‘nowhere’ and from North America to offer forms of queer empiricism that are theoretically rich and grounded in a complex world (Weiss); and problematizes queer anthropology's entanglements with colonial and racialized ‘social sciences of intimacy’ that continuously reproduce a Western logic of free and individual subjectivity unencumbered by the historical, political, and social contingencies that mark access for the social scientist (Morgensen). The ‘Reorientations’ section of the book discusses and reorients theoretical and topical frameworks that have had a large role in queer anthropology. This section is invested in kinship's disciplining but also potential in remaking worlds (Ramberg); radical possibilities of shifting language towards total inclusivity (Boellstorff); performance as a site of investigation and theorizing that is ‘fleshy’ and attuned to material realities beyond queer theory's investment in performativity as a site of transgression (Horton); the importance of anthropological inquiry on queer transnationalism and regionalism that might challenge problematic assumptions about the ‘culture’ concept and its uses (Wilson); and the necessity of a queer anthropology of geopolitics that problematizes not only ‘queer’ but also the ‘state’ and their relationship (Shakhsari). And, finally, the ‘Departures’ section of the book looks towards new areas of inquiry: how a queer anthropology might unsettle notions of Black queer anthropology that is intricately tied to creative writing and visual art as a site of rejuvenation and inspiration outside of exploitative academia (in a roundtable with McGlotten, Gill, Green, Lane, and Otu); the ‘trans’ subject as a stable object of inquiry that problematically standardizes notions of quality of life, and how a framework of trans vitalities can be more attuned to the life-making spaces and possibilities of actual trans life and difference (Edelman); anthropological methods of ethnography as uncritically ableist and the possibilities of ‘cripping ethnography’ through collaborative methods (Durban); assumptions about essentialism through a ‘queer harnessing of biology’ (Parreñas); ‘apocalyptic time’ through indigenous and queer time that is future and re-generation oriented (Spice); and queer as necessarily outrageous, scandalous, extraordinary, or exotic, offering the space of the ‘queer endotic’ (Manalansan). These discussions, considered together, bring up new debates and questions in queer anthropology that work through these three themes of ‘foundations’, ‘reorientations’, and ‘departures’ but lead to other themes. While each of these essays is critical towards an understanding of the field that we call queer anthropology today, the book also offers interesting new lines of investigation and inquiry. One such site of inquiry is whether there is a need for a queer anthropology. Should the task of those who think of their work as ‘queer’ within the discipline of anthropology, in other words, seek to contribute to the discipline, or perhaps create alliances and allegiances elsewhere and otherwise? These discussions point to a yet unsettled future for ‘queer’ in anthropology – an ethnographic that is not ethnocartographic nor exploitative and that radically disturbs boundaries between ‘self’ and ‘other’, the personal and political, the scholarly and the lively/vital – perhaps towards leftist traditions that go far beyond the academy and discipline.