“A remarkable achievement. Bakke deftly shows us how a system most of us are happy to ignore–the electrical grid–is both inseparable from everything we think of as civilization and on the verge of complete failure.”

“The Grid is a lucid and thought-provoking book.”

“This book, about our aging electrical grid, fits in one of my favorite genres: ‘Books About Mundane Stuff That Are Actually Fascinating.’ … even if you have never given a moment’s thought to how electricity reaches your outlets, I think this book would convince you that the electrical grid is one of the greatest engineering wonders of the modern world. I think you would also come to see why modernizing the grid is so complex and so critical for building our clean-energy future.”

“In this brilliant, Möbius strip ethnography of Slovenian art and politics, Bakke offers readers a disconcerting, hilarious, and dead serious account of some of our disturbing days’ troubles with doubles.”

“Brilliant, provocative, and entertaining, Gretchen Bakke has produced an unconventional ethnography in which the likes of Slavoj Žižek and Melania Trump are served up as paradigmatic of a ‘Slovene’ kind of subjectivity—one that rejects the notion of an inner ‘truth’ of a person that needs to be excavated and expressed. The Likeness reveals the American cultural assumptions that undergird our theories of ethics.”

“This volume is a very welcome corrective to the bifurcation of anthropological inquiry into the arts that has sustained the surprisingly persistent notion of ‘non-Western’ and ‘contemporary’ arts as inevitably distinct and discontinuous fields of practice. With insightful and cogent introductions to each section, and an inspired selection of historical and recent scholarship, this reader is an invaluable resource for teaching a re-aligned anthropology of the arts.”

“This collection makes a compelling case for artful expression as a key to human experience cross-culturally. The book covers contemporary anthropological theory, the anthropology of the arts, and contemporary social issues, and engages effectively with the challenge of studying aesthetic expressiveness as part of everyday lived experience rather than as a separate sphere of activity.”

“Here a thematic emphasis on doing or making has produced an array of essay experiments representing among the most imaginative and grounded anthropologists working today.”

“This weird and wonderful book will make you think differently about art, about anthropology, and about their unexpected intersections and collusions.”

“Take a walk. Be sure to bring along this excellent book. Let its ideas and tones wash over what you see and hear. Things may begin to show their seams, revealing stitchwork to trace, new knots to make, the threads of little worlds to come.”