Holding Worlds Together: Ethnographies of Knowing and Belonging

Holding Worlds Together: Ethnographies of Knowing and Belonging PDF Author:
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781845459673
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description

Holding Worlds Together: Ethnographies of Knowing and Belonging

Holding Worlds Together: Ethnographies of Knowing and Belonging PDF Author:
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781845459673
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Get Book Here

Book Description


Holding Worlds Together

Holding Worlds Together PDF Author: Marianne E. Lien
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781845452506
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
Studies of globalization tend to foreground movements, mobilities or flows, while structures that remain stable and unchanged are often ignored. This volume foregrounds the latter. Discarding the term “globalization” for analytic purposes, this volume suggests that the significance of globalizing processes is best understood as an experiential, imaginary and epistemological dimension in people’s lives. The authors explore how meaningful relations are made when the “socially local is not necessarily the geographically near” and how connections are made and unmade that reach beyond the specificity of time and place. Finally, this volume is about the ways knowledge and received wisdom are challenged and recast through processes of re-scaling, and how the understanding of locality and identity are transformed as a result.

The Retreat of the Social

The Retreat of the Social PDF Author: Bruce Kapferer
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1782387196
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 131

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Book Description
The powerful individualist and subjectivist turn in anthropology - a turn that cannot be easily separated from larger political processes of neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism - is one factor resulting in notions of the social and of society as becoming little else than empty shells of small or no analytical value. The essays presented here, all by leading anthropologists, take a variety of positions on the matter of the retreat of the social. All demonstrate that if anthropology and other social sciences are to fulfill the task of a critical understanding of the diverse realities in which we all must live, these disciplines will find it impossible to so do without a strong concept of the social.

The Problem of Context

The Problem of Context PDF Author: Roy Dilley
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781571817006
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
The apparently simple notion that it is contextualization and invocation of context that give form to our interpretations raises important questions about context definition. Moreover, different disciplines involved in the elucidation and interpretation of meanings construe context indifferent ways. How do these ways differ? And what analytical strategies are adopted in order to suggest that the relevant context is "self-evident"? The notion of context has received less attention than is due such a central, key concept in social anthropology, as well as in other related disciplines. This collection of contributions from a group of leading social anthropologists and anthropological linguists addresses the question of how the idea of context is constructed, invoked, and deployed in the interpretations put forward by social anthropologists. The ethnographic focus embraces peoples from regions such as Bali, Europe, Malawi, and Zaire. Primarily theoretical in its aims, the work also draws on expertise from anthropological linguistics and philosophy in order to set the issue as much in a comparative disciplinary perspective as in a comparative cross-cultural one. R.M. Dilley is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews.

Existential Anthropology

Existential Anthropology PDF Author: Michael Jackson
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781845451226
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
Inspired by existential thought, but using ethnographic methods, Jackson explores a variety of compelling topics, including 9/11, episodes from the war in Sierra Leone and its aftermath, the marginalization of indigenous Australians, the application of new technologies, mundane forms of ritualization, the magical use of language, the sociality of violence, the prose of suffering, and the discourse of human rights. Throughout this compelling work, Jackson demonstrates that existentialism, far from being a philosophy of individual being, enables us to explore issues of social existence and coexistence in new ways, and to theorise events as the sites of a dynamic interplay between the finite possibilities of the situations in which human beings find themselves and the capacities they yet possess for creating viable forms of social life.

Critical Junctions

Critical Junctions PDF Author: Don Kalb
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781845450298
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
"A book about theory and method in the humanities and social sciences. It reacts to what has become known as the "cultural turn," a shift toward semiotics, discourse, and representations and away from other sorts of determinations that started in the early 1980s and that has dominated social thinking for a long string of years. The book is based in a reconsideration of the meeting of two disciplines that helped to launch the cultural turn: anthropology and history. Specifically, it criticizes the ideas of hermeneutics and "thick description" (Clifford Geertz) that have come to play a key role in the encounter of anthropology and history and then in the cultural turn. It led to the renewed cherishing of what Gupta and Ferguson have called paradigms of "peoples and places," saturated pictures of universes, both small and large, of meaning ina more of less frozen standstill-an intellectual precursor to the cultural xenophobia of our times. Against this, the present book embraces praxis and "critical junctions": the connections in space (in and out of a relations of power and dependency, and what Eric Wolf has called the "interstitial relations" between apparently separate institutional domains. In this way the book adds to the current revival of institutionally based "global ethnography," which studies "up and outward" (the journal of Ethnography is a good example)."--Preface

The Anthropologist as Writer

The Anthropologist as Writer PDF Author: Helena Wulff
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1785330195
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
Writing is crucial to anthropology, but which genres are anthropologists expected to master in the 21st century? This book explores how anthropological writing shapes the intellectual content of the discipline and academic careers. First, chapters identify the different writing genres and contexts anthropologists actually engage with. Second, this book argues for the usefulness and necessity of taking seriously the idea of writing as a craft and of writing across and within genres in new ways. Although academic writing is an anthropologist’s primary genre, they also write in many others, from drafting administrative texts and filing reports to composing ethnographically inspired journalism and fiction.

On the Order of Chaos

On the Order of Chaos PDF Author: Mark S. Mosko
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781845450236
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
The essays in this volume collectively transform perspectives previously experienced as divergent, conflicting, and inconsistent into a common and complex orientation to problems central to the natural and social sciences involving transitions between order and disorder."--Jacket.

Anthropologists in a Wider World

Anthropologists in a Wider World PDF Author: Paul Dresch
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781571818003
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
A dozen papers reflect the newer perspective of studying historical patterns, wider regions, and global networks beyond traditional anthropological fieldwork. New wave scholars reflect on their field and desk experiences and may let the field come to them; e.g., an ethnomusicologist studies the fieldwork of others and observes non- Western performances in a British museum. Includes bandw photos of authors' studies and a substantial bibliography. The editors and contributors are from the U. of Oxford, where the social and cultural anthropology department held a 1997 seminar on the teaching of methods on which this volume is based. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

The Global Idea of 'the Commons'

The Global Idea of 'the Commons' PDF Author: Donald Macon Nonini
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781845454852
Category : Commons
Languages : en
Pages : 150

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Book Description
During the last three decades, corporations allied with scientists and universities, national and regional governments, and international financial institutions have, through a variety of mechanisms associated with neo-liberal globalization, acted to dispossess large proportions of the world's population of their commons' resources and enclose them for profit making. In response, throughout the global South and in the cities of the global North, large numbers of people have formed movements to defend the commons in all their variety. The idea of the commons has thus emerged as a global idea, and commons have emerged as sites of conflict around the world. The essays in this forum assess strategically the situations of selected commons in a variety of diagnostic sites where they exist, the ways in which they are being transformed by the incursions of capital and state, and the ways in which they are becoming the locus of struggle for those who depend on them to survive. Donald M. Nonini is Professor of Anthropology and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Anthropology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He has published numerous books, articles, and book chapters on Southeast Asian state formation, the cultural politics of Chinese transnationalism in and from Southeast Asia, and local politics in the southern United States. Recent articles include "Diasporas and Globalization" (2005) and "Indonesia Seen by Its Outside Insiders: Its Chinese Alters in Transnational Space" (2006). His latest book, co-written with Dorothy Holland et al., is Local Democracy Under Siege: Activism, Public Interests and Private Politics (2007).