Anthropology mourns one of its greatest practitioners, Roy Wagner, who died on 10 September 2018. To honour Wagner and his intellectually inexhaustible work, we are re-issuing for free access a Special Issue of Social Analysis that was first published in 2002. The eponymous “Reinventing The Invention of Culture”, edited by David Murray and Joel Robbins, sought to assess the influence of Wagner’s renown book, following the twenty-fifth anniversary of its publication.

We re-issue this Special Issue to recognize Roy Wagner’s contributions to the field of anthropology. The texts it assembles were written by an array of authors who were in different ways touched by this brilliance and seek to convey it by transposing Wagner’s thinking in their own fields of interest. The collection adds to a steadily growing body of work that seeks to extend Wagner’s astounding insights in ways he would tag as ‘metaphoric’ (1981). To aid readers who may be inspired to navigate this literature, we have included below a bibliography of Wagner’s major works, as well as a list of works by others in which his vast and influential ideas can be experienced.

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