Here is the beginning of the introduction, from the Detachment book:

This volume urges a reconsideration of the productive potential of disconnection, distance and detachment, as ethical, methodological and philosophical commitments. In so doing, we write against the grain of a strong tendency in contemporary social theory and public life. Engagement has, in a wide range of contexts, become a definitive and unquestionable social good, one that encompasses or abuts with a number of other seductive cultural tropes, such as participation, democracy, voice, equality, diversity and empowerment. Conversely, detachment has come to symbolise a range of social harms: authoritarianism and hierarchy, being out of touch, bureaucratic coldness and unresponsiveness, a lack of empathy, and passivity and inaction. Yet as this book argues, in a wide range of settings detachment is still socially, ethically and politically valued, and the relationship between detachment and engagement is not simple or singular.

The volume developed as a result of an ongoing and collaborative enquiry into detachment by the editors. Beginning with a discussion over a glass of wine on a sunny afternoon in December 2008, we reflected on the diverse ways in which we each separately encountered detachment in our work. In examining the disciplinary relationship between archaeology and anthropology, Yarrow found that it is precisely the disconnection and difference between the ways in which these disciplines produce knowledge that sets up the possibility for productive engagement (Garrow and Yarrow 2010). Following Candea’s fieldwork in a research station in the Kalahari desert, where behavioural biologists observe the daily lives of meerkats, he was struck by the peculiar non-interactive relations researchers established with the wild meerkats they studied through what they called ‘habituation’ (Candea 2010; 2013a). This was no ideological pretence of objective distance, but an embodied practice of detached relationality– a detachment which in turn required volunteers to detach themselves from parts of themselves (Candea 2013a,b).1

In her work on vipassana meditation, Cook (2010) explored the ways in which Thai monastics engage with specific ascetic introspection techniques in order to cultivate forms of detachment that are consistent with Buddhist teachings. Thai Buddhist monastics work to cultivate experiential insight into the tenets of impermanence, suffering and non-self through meditative discipline. Trundle (2014) found that for the migrant charity givers in Italy she studied, empathy and compassion did not rest simply on processes of connection - mimicry, transference and imagination, as many scholars have theorised. Rather crucial to their works was a recognition of disconnection, the boundaries that could not be crossed and a failure to appreciate the true nature of recipients’ suffering, which created the ethical, structural and affective drive to give. These initial conversations gave rise to a series of interconnected work- shops and a conference on the theme of detachment, following our collective sense that similar issues seemed to find resonance in these diverse ethnographic contexts. This volume emerges as the culmination of these conversations and conferences.

Thinking about detachment provides fresh entry points into a range of empirical contexts. But our aim here is more than simply collecting a set of vignettes. We wish to put detachment centre stage as a conceptual problem. Taking detachment seriously does not equate to rejection of relational theories and approaches. Nor does it entail a nostalgic return to older analytics of pure distanced knowledge or solitary disconnected agents. Nor are we calling for a suspension of critical reflection on the potential dangers and limits of tropes and practices of detachment. What we are asking, however, is that detachment be allowed the same ethnographic and conceptual air- time as its opposites. In so doing, the chapters in this volume bring to the foreground the many ways in which detachment and engagement are interwoven; the ways in which they limit, complement and enable each other. A focus on detachment forces us to ask ethnographic questions about the temporality of relations, their intensity, what makes them stick. Is each particular form of detachment a negation, a concealment, an interruption? And conversely, are relations forms that endure and cannot be purposefully unmade, like Umberto Eco’s persistent strands of memory (1988)? Are they vectors that pass, energies that must be continually channelled, or are they deciduous pledges whose maintenance requires daily care?

Our aim in this book, in sum, is to bring detachment back to the forefront of theorising in the social sciences and humanities. Our contention is that social theory has tended to naturalise the idea that relations are prior to the entities they connect. Questioning this understanding, we attempt to open up an analytic vocabulary that allows for a more nuanced understanding of the terms in which entities are defined and related. Thus our approach entails an analytic levelling, proposing that neither relations nor entities come first (Candea 2010; Yarrow and Jones 2014). We suggest that this provides a better platform from which to con- sider the ethnographic senses in which people themselves afford ethical or epistemic priority to practices associated with relating and detaching.

I’m afraid I can’t provide the rest of the full text here for copyright reasons. But, for any amateurs of typologies out there, here’s another peek, from pp:19-22:

Drawing on the classic structuralist technique of the table of crossed binaries (see table 1), we could begin by highlighting two fundamental distinctions which cut across invocations of detachment in the chapters that follow. The first is the distinction between completed detachment (detachment as a state) and ongoing detachment (detachment as a process or activity). The second is the distinction between accounts which are in the first person (detachment from the actor’s point of view) and those given from a third-party perspective (detachment between any two entities described ‘from the outside’).

The distinction between state and process is fairly straightforward. In some cases detachment is something which is being done. We see this as a cutting or a drawing away, as when organs are detached from a body, as in Maryon McDonald’s chapter (Chapter 1) on surgeons and anatomy classes, or the separation between producers and their product, as in Hannah Knox and Penny Harvey’s chapter (Chapter 2) on engineers in Peru. It is also visible in the disconnections drawn between humans and the animals they tend, as exemplified in Kim Crowder’s chapter (Chapter 3) on British pig farmers, or in the reflective distance created between persons and their own thoughts, illustrated in Joanna Cook’s chapter (Chapter 11) on mindfulness therapy in Britain.

In other cases detachment is a state in which a thing or person finds itself as the outcome of such a process: a state of being unattached to some other thing or person, as in the detachment of the person from the office within new systems of university audit culture, as Corsin-Jimenez describes in Chapter 9, which seeks conceptual purchase from juxtaposing varied forms of interface and effect, from Baroque aesthetics, to digital software and modern university life. Or, as in Chapter 10 where Casper Jensen and Brit Winthereik’s examine an international development project in Vietnam aimed at building a long house and micro-­enterprises, in which the local ‘community’, the project and the aid workers find themselves detached from each other in various ways.

[…]

Whether or not a detached stance is considered to be possible or only desired or hoped for, it is clearly the ‘first-person’ equivalent of what we have described above as a state. By contrast, the first-person equivalent of detachment as process is that staple of the anthropology of ethics: self-conscious perfectible practice, or to put it more simply and with a nod to Foucault, an ascetic. In sum, we could map these two crossed binaries as in Table 1.

Table 1. Steps towards a typology of detachment

	Third-party	First person
Completed	Detachment as state	Detachment as stance
Ongoing	Detachment as Process	Detachment as Ascetic

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