Pathways: Introduction

How does personhood survive after death? In this collection of essays, written in light of Thomas Abercrombie’s sudden and premature passing in April of 2019, authors reflect on this question, writing about the pathways that he carved and sowed as a teacher, mentor, scholar, and friend. We examine how key concepts from Tom’s eclectic and interdisciplinary work shaped our own intellectual trajectories. Together, these keywords illustrate how the contemporary project of anthropology becomes reworked by a modality of knowledge production that is not imposed upon or extracted from but collaboratively shaped by the people with whom we work. In doing so, they point toward the radical power of inverted hierarchies in both fieldwork and the academy, in which expertise is at once possible and not what we might think it to be. The series speaks to the powerful contribution of a kind and meticulous anthropologist who turned away from theorizing the contemporary in grand-narrative terms, nurturing instead the building of smaller worlds—and caring for the people who reside within them. These entries, often intimate and grounded in the particularities of Andean and Latin American anthropology, attest to Tom’s survival and demonstrate how persons are made from past and future genealogies.