The Impossibility of Self

Tapp's most speculative book, and the hardest. It is an extended essay rather than an ethnography, working through how Hmong identity was constructed historically and what happens to the idea of a self when the community holding it is scattered across continents. He is arguing with anthropology as much as describing the Hmong, which makes this the wrong first book and a rewarding fourth or fifth. Read it after Culture and Customs of the Hmong, where the same author writes plainly, and the shift in register is the point. It sits here as the theoretical end of the shelf, for readers who want the discipline's arguments rather than its findings. For graduate readers and anthropologists.