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The Blind Man: A Phantasmography [Table Of Contents], Robert Desjarlais

Sociology

“Emerging from an unknown body, enthralling images, and lacerating silences, The Blind Man is written with the force of literature. Desjarlais’s fierce masterpiece reawakens anthropology’s sense of wonder with the affective, spectral nature of worldly encounters. A transformational book.”—João Biehl, Princeton University

The Blind Man: A Phantasmography examines the complicated forces of perception, imagination, and phantasms of encounter in the contemporary world. In considering photographs he took while he was traveling in France, anthropologist and writer Robert Desjarlais reflects on a few pictures that show the features of a man, apparently blind, who begs for money at a religious site …