Introduction 1
Part 1 Some Thoughts on the Origins of Our Current Predicament
1. Manners, Deference, and Private Property: Or, Elements for a General Theory of Hierarchy 13
2. The Very Idea of Consumption: Desire, Phantasms, and the Aesthetics of Destruction from Medieval Times to the Present 57
3. Turning Modes of Production Inside-Out: Or, Why Capitalism Is a Transformation of Slavery (short version) 85
4. Fetishism as Social Creativity: Or, Fetishes Are Gods in the Process of Construction 113
Part II Provisional Autonomous Zone: Dilemmas of Authority in Rural Madagascar
5. Provisional Autonomous Zone: Or, The Ghost-State in Madagascar 157
6. Dancing with Corpses Reconsidered: An Interpretation of Famadihana (in Arivonimamo, Madagascar) 181
7. Love Magic and Political Morality in Central Madagascar, 1875-1990 223
8. Oppression 255
Part III Direct Action, Direct Democracy, and Social Theory
9. The Twilight of Vanguardism 301
10. Social Theory as Science and Utopia: Or, Does the Prospect of a General Sociological Theory Still Mean Anything in an Age of Globalization? 313
11. There Never Was a West: Or, Democracy Emerges From the Spaces in Between 329
12. On the Phenomenology of Giant Puppets: Broken Windows, Imaginary Jars of Urine, and the Cosmological Role of the Police in American Culture 375
Index 419