Anthropology with an Attitude

Anthropology with an Attitude PDF Author: Johannes Fabian
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804741439
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book collects published and unpublished work over the last dozen years by one of today’s most distinguished and provocative anthropologists. Johannes Fabian is widely known outside of his discipline because his work so often overcomes traditional scholarly boundaries to bring fresh insight to central topics in philosophy, history, and cultural studies. The first part of the book addresses questions of current critical concern: Does it still make sense to search for objectivity in ethnography? What do we gain when we invoke "context” in our interpretations? How does literacy change the work of the ethnographer, and what are the boundaries between ethnology and history? This part ends with a plea for recuperating negativity in our thinking about culture. The second part extends the work of critique into the past by examining the beginning of modern ethnography in the exploration of Central Africa during the late nineteenth century: the justification of a scientific attitude, the collecting of ethnographic objects, the presentation of knowledge in narration, and the role of recognition--given or denied--in encounters with Africans. A final essay examines how the Congolese have returned the "imperial gaze” of Belgium by the work of critical memory in popular history. The ten chapters are framed by two meditations on the relevance of theory and the irrelevance of the millennium.

Anthropology with an Attitude

Anthropology with an Attitude PDF Author: Johannes Fabian
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804741439
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book collects published and unpublished work over the last dozen years by one of today’s most distinguished and provocative anthropologists. Johannes Fabian is widely known outside of his discipline because his work so often overcomes traditional scholarly boundaries to bring fresh insight to central topics in philosophy, history, and cultural studies. The first part of the book addresses questions of current critical concern: Does it still make sense to search for objectivity in ethnography? What do we gain when we invoke "context” in our interpretations? How does literacy change the work of the ethnographer, and what are the boundaries between ethnology and history? This part ends with a plea for recuperating negativity in our thinking about culture. The second part extends the work of critique into the past by examining the beginning of modern ethnography in the exploration of Central Africa during the late nineteenth century: the justification of a scientific attitude, the collecting of ethnographic objects, the presentation of knowledge in narration, and the role of recognition--given or denied--in encounters with Africans. A final essay examines how the Congolese have returned the "imperial gaze” of Belgium by the work of critical memory in popular history. The ten chapters are framed by two meditations on the relevance of theory and the irrelevance of the millennium.

Time and the Other

Time and the Other PDF Author: Johannes Fabian
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231537484
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Get Book Here

Book Description
Time and the Other is a classic work that critically reexamined the relationship between anthropologists and their subjects and reoriented the approach literary critics, philosophers, and historians took to the study of humankind. Johannes Fabian challenges the assumption that anthropologists live in the "here and now," that their subjects live in the "there and then," and that the "other" exists in a time not contemporary with our own. He also pinpoints the emergence, transformation, and differentiation of a variety of uses of time in the history of anthropology that set specific parameters between power and inequality. In this edition, a new postscript by the author revisits popular conceptions of the "other" and the attempt to produce and represent knowledge of other(s).

A Crack in the Mirror

A Crack in the Mirror PDF Author: Jay Ruby
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 1512806439
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 312

Get Book Here

Book Description
Like Conrad's Marlow, whose tale of journeying into the "heart of darkness" gives us as much insight into one man's personality as it does into the mysteries of the dark world he explored, so the anthropologist's record of another culture contains more than objective, scientific data about his investigation. Embedded within it are clues to the "personality" of anthropology itself: the attitudes, approaches, even prejudices that at any given stage in history are inextricable from the ideology of the anthropologist. Therefore, the mirror he holds up to show us another culture can never be a perfect one. His own professional attitude toward his subject, as well as his choice of medium, are factors that create "cracks" in the mirror of anthropology through which we believe we view the life of other cultures. Hence, the concept of "reflexivity" and the striving to recognize how it warps in the portrayal of anthropological truth lie at the core of the twelve finely wrought essays collected in this volume. Wide ranging in geography as well as viewpoint, they highlight various methods and media (film, ethnography, text) through which an anthropologist chooses to portray a culture, and the various forms, such as art, theater, and ritual, through which a culture portrays itself. Recognizing the link between these two processes provides the key to cultural and methodological self awareness. Reflexivity is defined and clarified in the introduction and in three of the essays, and the remaining nine essays evince the principle through fieldwork and startling case studies. Essays by Jay Ruby and Eric Michaels shed new light on the enormous potential of film and video, showing how a form generally thought to be "nonscientific" can in fact give fresh insight into the scientific premises underlying the discipline's methodology. Essays by Barbara Babcock and Carol Ann Parssinen focus on the novel and ethnography, examining existing works. Anthropologists, as well as students of film, art, and theater, will find that this intriguing work begins to redefine traditional distinctions between science and the arts and brings to light fresh resources that are utilized in the search for anthropological truth. Contributors: Richard Schechner, Victor Turner, Barbara Myerhoff, Jay Ruby, Eric Michaels, Dennis Tedlock, George Marcus, Paul Rabinow, Barbara Babcock, Carol Ann Parssinen, and Dan Rose.

An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence

An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence PDF Author: Bruno Latour
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674728556
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 519

Get Book Here

Book Description
In a new approach to philosophical anthropology, Bruno Latour offers answers to questions raised in We Have Never Been Modern: If not modern, what have we been, and what values should we inherit? An Inquiry into Modes of Existence offers a new basis for diplomatic encounters with other societies at a time of ecological crisis.

Anyone

Anyone PDF Author: Nigel Rapport
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857455230
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Get Book Here

Book Description
The significance that people grant to their affiliations as members of nations, religions, classes, races, ethnicities and genders is evidence of the vital need for a cosmopolitan project that originates in the figure of Anyone – the universal and yet individual human being. Cosmopolitanism offers an alternative to multiculturalism, a different vision of identity, belonging, solidarity and justice, that avoids the seemingly intractable character of identity politics: it identifies samenesses of the human condition that underlie the surface differences of history, culture and society, nation, ethnicity, religion, class, race and gender. This book argues for the importance of cosmopolitanism as a theory of human being, as a methodology for social science and as a moral and political program.

Conceptualizing Iranian Anthropology

Conceptualizing Iranian Anthropology PDF Author: Shahnaz R. Nadjmabadi
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1845457951
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 286

Get Book Here

Book Description
During recent years, attempts have been made to move beyond the Eurocentric perspective that characterized the social sciences, especially anthropology, for over 150 years. A debate on the “anthropology of anthropology” was needed, one that would consider other forms of knowledge, modalities of writing, and political and intellectual practices. This volume undertakes that challenge: it is the result of discussions held at the first organized encounter between Iranian, American, and European anthropologists since the Iranian Revolution of 1979. It is considered an important first step in overcoming the dichotomy between “peripheral anthropologies” versus “central anthropologies.” The contributors examine, from a critical perspective, the historical, cultural, and political field in which anthropological research emerged in Iran at the beginning of the twentieth century and in which it continues to develop today.

Political Attitudes

Political Attitudes PDF Author: Camelia Florela Voinea
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118833147
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 348

Get Book Here

Book Description
Political Science has traditionally employed empirical research and analytical resources to understand, explain and predict political phenomena. One of the long-standing criticisms against empirical modeling targets the static perspective provided by the model-invariant paradigm. In political science research, this issue has a particular relevance since political phenomena prove sophisticated degrees of context-dependency whose complexity could be hardly captured by traditional approaches. To cope with the complexity challenge, a new modeling paradigm was needed. This book is concerned with this challenge. Moreover, the book aims to reveal the power of computational modeling of political attitudes to reinforce the political methodology in facing two fundamental challenges: political culture modeling and polity modeling. The book argues that an artificial polity model as a powerful research instrument could hardly be effective without the political attitude and, by extension, the political culture computational and simulation modeling theory, experiments and practice. This book: Summarizes the state of the art in computational modeling of political attitudes, with illustrations and examples featured throughout. Explores the different approaches to computational modeling and how the complexity requirements of political science should determine the direction of research and evaluation methods. Addresses the newly emerging discipline of computational political science. Discusses modeling paradigms, agent-based modeling and simulation, and complexity-based modeling. Discusses model classes in the fundamental areas of voting behavior and decision-making, collective action, ideology and partisanship, emergence of social uprisings and civil conflict, international relations, allocation of public resources, polity and institutional function, operation, development and reform, political attitude formation and change in democratic societies. This book is ideal for students who need a conceptual and operational description of the political attitude computational modeling phases, goals and outcomes in order to understand how political attitudes could be computationally modeled and simulated. Researchers, Governmental and international policy experts will also benefit from this book.

Anthropology Beyond Culture

Anthropology Beyond Culture PDF Author: Richard G. Fox
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000180573
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 263

Get Book Here

Book Description
Culture is a vexed concept within anthropology. From their earliest studies, anthropologists have often noted the emotional attachment of people to their customs, even in cases where this loyalty can make for problems. Do anthropologists now suffer the same kind of disability with respect to their continuing emotional attachment to the concept of culture? This book considers the state of the culture concept in anthropology and finds fault with a ‘love it or leave it' attitude. Rather than pledging undying allegiance or summarily dismissing it, the volume argues that anthropology can continue with or without a concept of culture, depending on the research questions being asked, and, furthermore, that when culture is retained, no single definition of it is practical or necessary.Offering sensible solutions to a topic of hot debate, this book will be essential reading for anyone seeking to learn what a concept of culture can offer anthropology, and what anthropology can offer the concept of culture.

Anthropology's Interrogation of Philosophy from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century

Anthropology's Interrogation of Philosophy from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century PDF Author: Jerome Fanning Marsden Carroll
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498558011
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Get Book Here

Book Description
Anthropology's Interrogation of Philosophy from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century presents and discusses key aspects of the German tradition of philosophical anthropology from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, centering on the concept of anthropology as a study of the ‘whole, concrete man’ (Heinrich Weber, 1810). Philosophical anthropology appears during the last decades of the eighteenth century in the often practically-oriented writings of men such as Ernst Platner, Karl Wezel, and Johann Herder, and is then taken up in the twentieth century by thinkers including Max Scheler, Helmut Plessner, Arnold Gehlen, and Hans Blumenberg. In presenting this tradition, the book serves two primary purposes. Firstly, it introduces English readers in a coherent manner to key aspects of a two-hundred year tradition in German thought. Secondly, the book analyzes in an unprecedented manner, even in German scholarship, the connections between the philosophical debates associated with anthropology at the end of the eighteenth century and ongoing philosophical issues in the twentieth century. Specifically, author Jerome Carroll argues that late eighteenth century anthropology diverges pointedly from traditional, "foundational" approaches to philosophy, for instance rejecting philosophy’s quest for absolute foundations for knowledge or a priori categories and turning to a more descriptive account of man’s "being in the world." Notably, by drawing on the epistemological, ontological, and methodological aspects and implications of anthropological holism, this book reads the philosophical significance of classical twentieth century anthropology through the lens of eighteenth century writings on anthropology.

Behavioral Anthropology

Behavioral Anthropology PDF Author: Theodore D. Graves
Publisher: Rowman Altamira
ISBN: 9780759105737
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 430

Get Book Here

Book Description
Behavioral Anthropology is a unique introductory text that combines an intellectual biography with an overview of the methodological principles of cross-cultural research. Each chapter deals with a specific methodological issue: research design; the role of theory; strategies for measuring behavior; psychological or situational variables; samples and surveys simple and complex methods of data analysis and interpretation. For those interested in the behavioral approach, this book will be a valuable reference and teaching tool.