Anthropology and Political Science

Anthropology and Political Science PDF Author: Myron J. Aronoff
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 085745725X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
What can anthropology and political science learn from each other? The authors argue that collaboration, particularly in the area of concepts and methodologies, is tremendously beneficial for both disciplines, though they also deal with some troubling aspects of the relationship. Focusing on the influence of anthropology on political science, the book examines the basic assumptions the practitioners of each discipline make about the nature of social and political reality, compares some of the key concepts each field employs, and provides an extensive review of the basic methods of research that "bridge" both disciplines: ethnography and case study. Through ethnography (participant observation), reliance on extended case studies, and the use of "anthropological" concepts and sensibilities, a greater understanding of some of the most challenging issues of the day can be gained. For example, political anthropology challenges the illusion of the "autonomy of the political" assumed by political science to characterize so-called modern societies. Several chapters include a cross-disciplinary analysis of key concepts and issues: political culture, political ritual, the politics of collective identity, democratization in divided societies, conflict resolution, civil society, and the politics of post-Communist transformations.

Anthropology and Political Science

Anthropology and Political Science PDF Author: Myron J. Aronoff
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 085745725X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Get Book Here

Book Description
What can anthropology and political science learn from each other? The authors argue that collaboration, particularly in the area of concepts and methodologies, is tremendously beneficial for both disciplines, though they also deal with some troubling aspects of the relationship. Focusing on the influence of anthropology on political science, the book examines the basic assumptions the practitioners of each discipline make about the nature of social and political reality, compares some of the key concepts each field employs, and provides an extensive review of the basic methods of research that "bridge" both disciplines: ethnography and case study. Through ethnography (participant observation), reliance on extended case studies, and the use of "anthropological" concepts and sensibilities, a greater understanding of some of the most challenging issues of the day can be gained. For example, political anthropology challenges the illusion of the "autonomy of the political" assumed by political science to characterize so-called modern societies. Several chapters include a cross-disciplinary analysis of key concepts and issues: political culture, political ritual, the politics of collective identity, democratization in divided societies, conflict resolution, civil society, and the politics of post-Communist transformations.

Handbook of Political Anthropology

Handbook of Political Anthropology PDF Author: Harald Wydra
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1783479019
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 508

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Book Description
This Handbook engages the reader in the major debates, approaches, methodologies, and explanatory frames within political anthropology. Examining the shifting borders of a moving field of enquiry, it illustrates disciplinary paradigm shifts, the role of humans in political structures, ethnographies of the political, and global processes. Reflecting the variety of directions that surround political anthropology today, this volume will be essential reading to understanding the interactions of humans within political frames in a globalising world.

The Politics of Anthropology

The Politics of Anthropology PDF Author: Gerrit Huizer
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110806452
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 533

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Book Description


Ethnographies of Power

Ethnographies of Power PDF Author: Tristan Loloum
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1789209803
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
Energy related infrastructures are crucial to political organization. They shape the contours of states and international bodies, as well as corporations and communities, framing their material existence and their fears and idealisations of the future. Ethnographies of Power brings together ethnographic studies of contemporary entanglements of energy and political power. Revisiting classic anthropological notions of power, it asks how changing energy related infrastructures are implicated in the consolidation, extension or subversion of contemporary political regimes and discovers what they tell us about politics today.

Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture

Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture PDF Author: Lee D. Baker
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822392690
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
In the late nineteenth century, if ethnologists in the United States recognized African American culture, they often perceived it as something to be overcome and left behind. At the same time, they were committed to salvaging “disappearing” Native American culture by curating objects, narrating practices, and recording languages. In Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture, Lee D. Baker examines theories of race and culture developed by American anthropologists during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth. He investigates the role that ethnologists played in creating a racial politics of culture in which Indians had a culture worthy of preservation and exhibition while African Americans did not. Baker argues that the concept of culture developed by ethnologists to understand American Indian languages and customs in the nineteenth century formed the basis of the anthropological concept of race eventually used to confront “the Negro problem” in the twentieth century. As he explores the implications of anthropology’s different approaches to African Americans and Native Americans, and the field’s different but overlapping theories of race and culture, Baker delves into the careers of prominent anthropologists and ethnologists, including James Mooney Jr., Frederic W. Putnam, Daniel G. Brinton, and Franz Boas. His analysis takes into account not only scientific societies, journals, museums, and universities, but also the development of sociology in the United States, African American and Native American activists and intellectuals, philanthropy, the media, and government entities from the Bureau of Indian Affairs to the Supreme Court. In Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture, Baker tells how anthropology has both responded to and helped shape ideas about race and culture in the United States, and how its ideas have been appropriated (and misappropriated) to wildly different ends.

Policy Worlds

Policy Worlds PDF Author: Cris Shore
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857451170
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
There are few areas of society today that remain outside the ambit of policy processes, and likewise policy making has progressively reached into the structure and fabric of everyday life. An instrument of modern government, policy and its processes provide an analytical window into systems of governance themselves, opening up ways to study power and the construction of regimes of truth. This volume argues that policies are not simply coercive, constraining or confined to static texts; rather, they are productive, continually contested and able to create new social and semantic spaces and new sets of relations. Anthropologists do not stand outside or above systems of governance but are themselves subject to the rhetoric and rationalities of policy. The analyses of policy worlds presented by the contributors to this volume open up new possibilities for understanding systems of knowledge and power and the positioning of academics within them.

Political Anthropology

Political Anthropology PDF Author: Donald V Kurtz
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429966814
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
The field of political anthropology is complicated by a breadth and depth of interests that include every kind of ethnographically and historically represented political community, and nearly every kind of recorded political practice, behavior, and organization. To make sense of this array of information, political anthropologists examine political topics and issues in the context of research paradigms that include structural-functionalism, pro-cessualism, political economy, political evolution, and, arguably, post-modernism. In Political Anthropology, Donald V. Kurtz examines how anthropologists think about politics, political organizations, and problems fundamental to political anthropology. He explores the ideas with which they address universal political concerns, the paradigms that direct political research by anthropologists, and political topics of special interest.

Political Ethnography

Political Ethnography PDF Author: Edward Schatz
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226736784
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
Scholars of politics have sought in recent years to make the discipline more hospitable to qualitative methods of research. Lauding the results of this effort and highlighting its potential for the future, Political Ethnography makes a compelling case for one such method in particular. Ethnography, the contributors amply demonstrate in a wide range of original essays, is uniquely suited for illuminating the study of politics. Situating these pieces within the context of developments in political science, Edward Schatz provides an overarching introduction and substantive prefaces to each of the volume’s four sections. The first of these parts addresses the central ontological and epistemological issues raised by ethnographic work, while the second grapples with the reality that all research is conducted from a first-person perspective. The third section goes on to explore how ethnographic research can provide fresh perspectives on such perennial topics as opinion, causality, and power. Concluding that political ethnography can and should play a central role in the field as a whole, the final chapters illuminate the many ways in which ethnographic approaches can enhance, improve, and, in some areas, transform the study of politics.

A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics

A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics PDF Author: David Nugent
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470692936
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 528

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Book Description
This Companion offers an unprecedented overview of anthropology’s unique contribution to the study of politics. Explores the key concepts and issues of our time - from AIDS, globalization, displacement, and militarization, to identity politics and beyond Each chapter reflects on concepts and issues that have shaped the anthropology of politics and concludes with thoughts on and challenges for the way ahead Anthropology’s distinctive genre, ethnography, lies at the heart of this volume

Political Anthropology

Political Anthropology PDF Author: Ted C. Lewellen
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN: 0897898915
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In the foreword to the first edition, renowned anthropologist Victor Turner wrote that this book was a succinct and lucid account of the sporadic growth of political anthropology over the past four decades . . . the introduction we have all been waiting for. Unique in its field, this book offers a comprehensive overview of political anthropology, including its history, its major research findings, and its theoretical concerns both past and present. The third edition has been significantly updated and expanded, with extensive changes in many chapters, two new chapters, a new Preface that replaces the Introduction of the first two editions, an updated Glossary and Suggested Readings list, and an expanded Bibliography. In a clearly written style, this introduction also provides the background necessary for further study. The new chapters cover such topics as the politics of identity, and the transition from modernism to postmodernism. As with the earlier editions, this third edition of what has become a classic in the discipline still serves as a basic text and structure for a full course.