The long read

Rehumanising scholarship

Dr Farhan Samanani tests himself in a very public way – by working through a commercial publisher

This isn’t about me – this is about the value of knowledge in a hurting world. But I hope readers will forgive me if I start on more personal territory.

My first book, ‘How to Live With Each Other: An Anthropologists’ Notes for Sharing a Divided World’, will come out in March 2022. At its heart, it’s a book based on my PhD research, where I spent nearly a year and a half living in the London neighbourhood of Kilburn as an ethnographer. Kilburn teems with difference, and I wanted to understand how residents made sense of this diversity, how it came to matter, and then how they found ways of connecting across meaningful differences.

The book, however, will come out with a commercial publisher. And in order to tell the sort of story that would be compelling to a wider audience, it has become about much more than my ethnographic work in Kilburn. It weaves together stories from across democratic societies, as well as from the vast record of human diversity studied by anthropologists. It combines history, philosophy, anthropology, psychology, literature and science and technology studies in as lively a way as I could manage. It was a tricky thing to write.

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