Medicine, Rationality and Experience

Medicine, Rationality and Experience PDF Author: Byron J. Good
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521425766
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Get Book Here

Book Description
Biomedicine is often thought to provide a scientific account of the human body and of illness. In this view, non-Western and folk medical systems are regarded as systems of 'belief' and subtly discounted. This is an impoverished perspective for understanding illness and healing across cultures, one that neglects many facets of Western medical practice and obscures its kinship with healing in other traditions. Drawing on his research in several American and Middle Eastern medical settings, in this 1993 book Professor Good develops a critical, anthropological account of medical knowledge and practice. He shows how physicians and healers enter and inhabit distinctive worlds of meaning and experience. He explores how stories or illness narratives are joined with bodily experience in shaping and responding to human suffering and argues that moral and aesthetic considerations are present in routine medical practice as in other forms of healing.

Medicine, Rationality and Experience

Medicine, Rationality and Experience PDF Author: Byron J. Good
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521425766
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Get Book Here

Book Description
Biomedicine is often thought to provide a scientific account of the human body and of illness. In this view, non-Western and folk medical systems are regarded as systems of 'belief' and subtly discounted. This is an impoverished perspective for understanding illness and healing across cultures, one that neglects many facets of Western medical practice and obscures its kinship with healing in other traditions. Drawing on his research in several American and Middle Eastern medical settings, in this 1993 book Professor Good develops a critical, anthropological account of medical knowledge and practice. He shows how physicians and healers enter and inhabit distinctive worlds of meaning and experience. He explores how stories or illness narratives are joined with bodily experience in shaping and responding to human suffering and argues that moral and aesthetic considerations are present in routine medical practice as in other forms of healing.

Kinship and the Social Order

Kinship and the Social Order PDF Author: Meyer Fortes
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1351510045
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 364

Get Book Here

Book Description
One of the world's most eminent social anthropologists draws upon his many years of study and research in the field of kinship and social organization to review the development of anthropological theory and method from Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881) to anthropologists of the 1960s. It is the central argument of this book that the structuralist theory and method developed by British and American anthropologists in the study of kinship and social organization is the direct descendant of Morgan's researches. The volume starts with a re-examination of Morgan's work. Professor Fortes demonstrates how a tradition of misinterpretation has disguised the true import of Morgan's discoveries. He follows with a detailed analysis of the work of Rivers and Radcliffe-Brown and the generation of anthropologists inspired by them. The author states his own point of view as it has developed in the framework of modern structuralist theory, with ethnographic examples examined in depth. He shows that the social relations and institutions conventionally grouped under the rubric of kinship and social organization belong simultaneously to two complementary domains of social structure, the familial and the political. Meyer Fortes' contribution to the field of anthropology can best be understood in the context of balance of forces between these domains of the personal and public. In the latter part of the book, he gives detailed attention to the principal conceptual issues that have confronted research and theory in the study of kinship and social organizations since Morgan's time. He shows that kinship institutions are autonomous, not mere by-products of economic requirements, and demonstrates the moral base of kinship in the rule of amity.

Reciprocity and Redistribution in Andean Civilizations

Reciprocity and Redistribution in Andean Civilizations PDF Author: John V. Murra
Publisher: Hau
ISBN: 9780997367553
Category : Andes Region
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
John V. Murra's Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures, originally given in 1969, are the only major study of the Andean "avenue towards civilization." Collected and published for the first time here, they offer a powerful and insistent perspective on the Andean region as one of the few places in which a so-called "pristine civilization" developed. Murra sheds light not only on the way civilization was achieved here--which followed a fundamentally different process than that of Mesopotamia and Mesoamerica--he uses that study to shed new light on the general problems of achieving civilization in any world region. Murra intermixes a study of Andean ecology with an exploration of the ideal of economic self-sufficiency, stressing two foundational socioeconomic forces: reciprocity and redistribution. He shows how both enabled Andean communities to realize direct control of a maximum number of vertically ordered ecological floors and the resources they offered. He famously called this arrangement a "vertical archipelago," a revolutionary model that is still examined and debated almost fifty years after it was first presented in these lecture. Written in a crisp and elegant style and inspired by decades of ethnographic fieldwork, this set of lectures is nothing less than a lost classic, and it will be sure to inspire new generations of anthropologists and historians working in South America and beyond.

The Meaning of Money in China and the United States

The Meaning of Money in China and the United States PDF Author: Emily Martin
Publisher: Hau
ISBN: 9780990505020
Category : Money
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
Emily Martin’s Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures, The meaning of money in China and the United States, inaugurates the Hau-Morgan Lectures Initiative with the University of Rochester. Martin’s lectures—hitherto unedited—are an instant classic, not only for scholars of China and the United States, but for those working in the history and anthropology of money. As relevant and timely now as it was twenty-eight years ago, this lecture series highlights the vicissitudes of money beyond tired theoretical divides between global political economy and local symbolic relativism. In a time when economic forecasts show that China will soon pass the US as the world’s leading economic power, Martin’s lectures could not be more germane, more insightful, and more poised for an ethnographic critique of the economic present.

Prey Into Hunter

Prey Into Hunter PDF Author: Maurice Bloch
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521423120
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 136

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this book Maurice Bloch synthesises a radical theory of religion.

The Anthropology of Justice

The Anthropology of Justice PDF Author: Lawrence Rosen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521367400
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 136

Get Book Here

Book Description
Law has often been seen as a relatively autonomous domain, one in which a professional elite sharply control the impact of broader social relations and cultural concepts. By contrast this study asserts that the analysis of legal systems, like the analysis of social systems generally, requires an understanding of the concepts and relationships encountered in everyday social life. Using as its substantive base the Islamic law courts of Morocco, the study explores the cultural basis of judicial discretion. From the proposition that in Arabic culture relationships are subject to considerable negotiation the idea is developed that the shaping of facts in a court of law, the use of local experts, and the organization of the judicial structure all contribute to the reliance on local concepts and personnel to inform the range of judicial discretion. By drawing comparisons with the exercise of judicial discretion in America the study demonstrates that cultural concepts deeply inform the evaluation of issues and the shapes of a judge's decision. The Anthropology of Justice is not only the first full-scale study of the actual operations of the actual operations of a modern Islamic law court anywhere in the Arab world but a demonstration of the theoretical basis on which a cultural analysis of the law may be founded.

After Nature

After Nature PDF Author: Marilyn Strathern
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521426800
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Get Book Here

Book Description
After Nature is a timely account of fundamental constructs in English kinship at a moment when advances in reproductive technologies are raising questions about the natural basis of kinship relations.

Death in Banaras

Death in Banaras PDF Author: Jonathan P. Parry
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521466257
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 348

Get Book Here

Book Description
A study of Hindu death rituals and the sacred specialists who perform them in the Indian city of Banaras.

The Work of Culture

The Work of Culture PDF Author: Gananath Obeyesekere
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226615995
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 380

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume is the product of two decades of field research by one of Sri Lanka's distinguished anthropological interpreters.

Magic, Science and Religion and the Scope of Rationality

Magic, Science and Religion and the Scope of Rationality PDF Author: Stanley J. Tambiah
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521376310
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 204

Get Book Here

Book Description
This accessible and illuminating book explores the classical opposition between magic, science and religion.