Self-Alteration

Many of us feel a pressing desire to be different--to be other than who we are. The essays in Self-Alteration come at the subject of the self and its becoming through case studies of modes of transformation of the self. They do this with social processes and projects that reveal how the self acquires a non-trivial new meaning in and through its very process of alteration.

"Anthropology has only recently focused on one of the basic human experiences: that people set out to change themselves, and they do so using the tools that their culture offers to them. This volume presents a rich array of observations around this theme to carry the conversation forward." - Tanya Luhrmann (author of How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others) "This remarkable volume casts new light on our understanding of selfhood, by looking at the ways different people in different contexts alter themselves." - Jon P. Mitchell (author of Ambivalent Europeans: Ritual, Memory and the Public Sphere in Malta)

JEAN-PAUL BALDACCHINO is a professor of anthropology at the University of Malta in Msida, Malta. He is the coeditor, with Jon Mitchell, of Morality, Crisis and Capitalism: Anthropology for Troubled Times.

CHRISTOPHER HOUSTON is a professor of anthropology at Macquarie University in New South Wales, Australia. He is the author of Theocracy, Secularism, and Islam in Turkey: Anthropocratic Republic and Istanbul, City of the Fearless: Urban Activism, Coup d'État, and Memory in Turkey.