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Description
What can a neurologist like Oliver Sacks teach us about anthropology? And how has anthropological thinking been quietly operating in his work all along?
An Anthropologist on Sacks reads Sacks as a profoundly anthropological thinker whose neurological case histories function as ethnographic encounters, grounded in attention, participation, narrative breadth, and ethical presence. Drawing on Sacks's published writings, correspondence, and lesser-read reflections, the book traces the implicit methodological and epistemic affinities between his medical practice and the anthropological imagination. It argues that Sacks's humanist science, characterized by an embrace of paradox, constitutes a mode of knowing that resists reduction, honors lived experience, and treats (neuro)diversity not as deficit but as a way of being in the world. Through close readings of his tales, prose, and methodological choices, An Anthropologist on Sacks makes a case for the enduring relevance of Sacks's approach to knowing: one attentive to complexity, ethically engaged with difference, and committed to holding incompatible truths together.
At once a critical intervention and a measured tribute, the book invites readers to reconsider Oliver Sacks as a remarkable writer whose work speaks with particular urgency to anthropology today-and to broader debates about how humane knowledge might still be relevant.
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. Anthropologia. Expanding Anthropology's Human
2. Methodologia. The Listener, the Observer, the Ethnographer
3. Difference. Advocacy and its Discontents
4. Exoticism revisited. All Sorts of Natives
5. Mediation. The Poetics and Politics of Reconciliation
6. Tropology. Writing the Other
7. Reflexivity. A Queer Take
Afterword
Index
About the Author
Product details
| Published | Dec 10 2026 |
|---|---|
| Format | Hardback |
| Edition | 1st |
| Pages | 296 |
| ISBN | 9781666967289 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Dimensions | 9 x 6 inches |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
About the contributors
Reviews
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In this book Apostolidou claims Sacks for Anthropology, yet she achieves more than that. By focusing on the many points in his career where he took the humanistic rather than the scientistic turn, she has claimed this novelist of the neurological for a broader Humanism.
Charles Stewart, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, University College London, UK University College London, UK
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“This is a book that speaks beautifully about how science in general - and medicine in particular - ought to be in our times, having forgotten, and now slowly and painfully rediscovering, what it originally was and what it originally sought to be. And not only science, but also books about science, which should 'bridge the gap between scientific papers and the general reader'. As Sacks wished: 'What I most want to do-in anything I write-is to try and restore something of the communication which seems to have been lost between scientific writing and the common reader.' This very book – informed, thorough, and scholarly, yet accessible – succeeds perfectly in achieving this goal.”
Constantin Potagas, Professor of Neurology and Neuropsychology, University of Athens, Greece

























