Michael M.J. Fischer
Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and Professor of Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

As part of a collective project on anthropology and philosophy (Bhighu Singh, Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Michael Jackson, eds.), I reread some of my ethnographic work in Iran attempting to use some of the theorists and philosophers I drew upon for social theory parallels and possible clues in European historical experience with which to create social theory attentive to experiences elsewhere. The hope is perhaps that illumination may be cast back and forth, but more importantly, to provide points of attachment for creative and productive dialogue beyond mere comparison, beyond the dialectic of seeing (theoria) and conceptualizing (theory), attentive as well to the affective body of interpersonal emotions, the tropes of vulnerability and calls for social justice, and the ear, face, and critical apparatuses of the other as places for ethical ethnographic exchange. At issue are both catacoustics and ringing the changes in Yazd and Washington D.C.; in Qum and Paris; and in Tehran. My philosophers, lovers of wisdom, are social hierogyphic characters, here and there, and everywhere. I plot each of the three Parts to evoke a constellation of (1) urban place, (ii) historical horizons, (iii) communication circuits or infrastructure, (iv) new (especially dissertation) ethnographies in which the writers have serious stakes ("skin in the game"); (v) theorists there and here, then and now.