An Anthropologist on Sacks: Seven Paradoxical Lessons

This book traces the implicit methodological and epistemic alliances of Oliver Sacks’ work with the disciplinary foundations of a seemingly unrelated area: that of sociocultural anthropology.This is especially important at a time when interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary work has been gradually becoming the canon; it is even more so in an era increasingly dominated by automated and artificial intellectual stimulation, because the virtues celebrated throughout his work defend a profoundly humanist stance in science, medicine, education and, not least, as this book argues, anthropology.Written after a three-year period of systematic research, the book uncovers the unnoticed similarities between neurological and ethnographic pursuits and offers the reader fresh anthropological readings through the fascinating tales of a great thinker.It puts emphasis on the unique prose developed by Sacks to communicate his research findings and on the participatory techniques he employed long before t