Knut Christian Myhres book is a meticulous work of linguistic and historical anthropology, combining elements of classic ethnography with an updated attentiveness to the mutually constitutive entanglements of language, material practice, and social life [It] is a thought-provoking addition to the growing literature on ontologies, histories, and bodily life in Africa. JRAI (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute)
Returning Life stands to benefit varied anthropological projects. On the one hand, it makes a valuable contribution to our understandings of life and life force in Africa and points the way for Africanist anthropologists keen to rethink classical topics in light of current disciplinary concerns and theoretical turns: not least in relation to the New Melanesian ethnography as well as diverse material, ontological, and posthuman turns. On the other, the book shows what can be achieved by caring deeply for a local vernacular while keeping in view the analysts conceptual tools and the underappreciated work they do in our analyses. Current Anthropology
This monograph is extremely interesting, highly readable and an anthropologically important contribution to the exploration of relations between human and other forms of life, demonstrating how the material, immaterial and language are interwoven. At its best it is, in addition, also strikingly beautiful in all its descriptions of the care that Chagga people exert over life itself and its many expressions of life-force. This in itself is reason enough to read the book. Norsk Antropologisk Tidsskrift
Returning Life is an outstanding, historically oriented ethnography of Kilimanjaro which shows the life of language in the everyday by focusing on the concreteness of events, persons, and spaces. It is a terrific contribution to anthropological theory and to the bridges between anthropology and philosophy. Veena Das, Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University.
Bringing together in perspicuous relation Wittgensteinian and Chagga forms of life, this meticulous work itself reopens and revivifies African ethnography more broadly. A major achievement. Michael Lambek, Canada Research Chair, University of Toronto.
