The Ways We Stretch Toward One Another

written by Todd Meyers

Thoughts on Anthropology through the Work of Pamela Reynolds

The Ways We Stretch Toward One Another is a collection of essays on the work of Pamela Reynolds. The essays take cues from Reynolds’ decades-long contributions to the field of anthropology in different ways. The authors weave Reynolds’ groundbreaking scholarship on the anthropology of childhood––of labour, of family, of resistance, justice, war and suffering––through the terms of their own work, in places and contexts that may at first appear quite distant from the villages of Zimbabwe and townships of South Africa that feature in Reynolds’ ethnographies. The Ways We Stretch Toward One Another is about anthropologists stretching in thought and practice toward one another, between generations, toward the people encountered in the field, through worlds entered and past, and how, in turn, these worlds lean into our own. At the core of each essay is a question about how we learn, how we pass lessons on, how we assume the mantle of anthropology for understanding the contemporary world––something that often requires folding intellectual friendships into the tools of our practice. The Ways We Stretch Toward One Another demonstrates how a master anthropologist has come to shape the priorities of others, in terms that are both creative and aware.

Contributors: Thomas Cousins, Stefanos Geroulanos, Todd Meyers, Pamela Reynolds, Fiona Ross, and Vaibhav Saria; and a Foreword by Francis B. Nyamnjoh

Todd Meyers

Todd Meyers is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Society, Health, and Medicine at New York University--Shanghai.