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Author: Diana Espírito Santo
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040099246
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 284
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Book Description
This book offers an ethnographic and conceptual analysis of contemporary UFO phenomena, focusing specifically on Chilean ufology and the ufological “absurd”, nonsensical instances for their experiencers in which there is no conceptual way out. It asks how anthropology can come to terms with what is not said, what is not known, what is in the dark, or even with what both “is” and “is not”. The work draws on three years of participant observation with empirical ufologists, amateur sky watchers, and contactees of varying kinds in Chile. The chapters mobilize three main bodies of literature to elucidate the ufological absurd: negative theology, anthropology of play and deceit, and the physics of dark matter. They explore notions of parallax, paradox, and trickster anthropology. The author takes UFO phenomena, specifically the absurd aspects, as a heuristic with which to posit a conversation between domains; a conversation which highlights darknesses, finiteness, and the limits of representation and media in anthropology, one that could perhaps signal the route to a new language. Consideration is given to how not-knowing can be a space of extreme productiveness for the discipline. The argument put forward is that only by doing an anthropology that looks outside of itself for conceptual inspiration can we come to terms with the non-representable, the un-conceptualizable, the fully paradoxical. This innovative book will be of particular interest to scholars of anthropological theory and religion.
Author: Diana Espírito Santo
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040099246
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 284
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book offers an ethnographic and conceptual analysis of contemporary UFO phenomena, focusing specifically on Chilean ufology and the ufological “absurd”, nonsensical instances for their experiencers in which there is no conceptual way out. It asks how anthropology can come to terms with what is not said, what is not known, what is in the dark, or even with what both “is” and “is not”. The work draws on three years of participant observation with empirical ufologists, amateur sky watchers, and contactees of varying kinds in Chile. The chapters mobilize three main bodies of literature to elucidate the ufological absurd: negative theology, anthropology of play and deceit, and the physics of dark matter. They explore notions of parallax, paradox, and trickster anthropology. The author takes UFO phenomena, specifically the absurd aspects, as a heuristic with which to posit a conversation between domains; a conversation which highlights darknesses, finiteness, and the limits of representation and media in anthropology, one that could perhaps signal the route to a new language. Consideration is given to how not-knowing can be a space of extreme productiveness for the discipline. The argument put forward is that only by doing an anthropology that looks outside of itself for conceptual inspiration can we come to terms with the non-representable, the un-conceptualizable, the fully paradoxical. This innovative book will be of particular interest to scholars of anthropological theory and religion.
Author: Roger Sansi
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040115632
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 208
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Book Description
Art troubles anthropology. Anthropologists have often taken a philistine, sceptical position of distance towards art and aesthetics as a predominantly Western bourgeois institution. But art, not only as a Western institution, generated its own philistine and iconoclastic revisions and undoings, its anti-art, that have engaged anthropology into its theory and practice. Anthropology is thus part of the trouble with art. But trouble doesn’t necessarily obfuscate, it can also reveal and render visible fault lines and problems; troubles can be assemblages of disparate and even contradictory parts that paradoxically do work together. This volume proposes an anthropology that moves beyond philistinism and the contradictions between critical anthropologies of art and collaborative and experimental anthropologies with art.
Author: Diana Espirito Santo
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781032496320
Category : Extraterrestrial anthropology
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
"This book offers an ethnographic and conceptual analysis of contemporary UFO phenomena, focusing specifically on Chilean ufology and the ufological 'absurd', nonsensical instances for their experiencers in which there is no conceptual way out. It asks how anthropology can come to terms with what is not said, not known, with what is in the dark, or even with what both 'is' and 'is not'. The work draws on three years of participant observation with empirical ufologists, amateur sky watchers, and contactees of varying kinds in Chile. The chapters mobilize three main bodies of literature to elucidate the ufological absurd: negative theology, anthropology of play and deceit, and the physics of dark matter. They explore notions of parallax, paradox, and trickster anthropology. The author takes UFO phenomena, specifically the absurd aspects, as a heuristic with which to posit a conversation between domains; a conversation which highlights darknesses, finiteness, the limits of representation and media in anthropology, and that could perhaps signal the route to a new language. Consideration is given to how not-knowing can be a space of extreme productiveness for the discipline. The argument put forward is that only by doing an anthropology that looks outside of itself for conceptual inspiration can we come to terms with the non-representable, the un-conceptualizable, the fully paradoxical. This innovative book will be of particular interest to scholars of anthropological theory and religion"--
Author: Julien Bonhomme
Publisher: HAU Books
ISBN: 0986132586
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 194
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Book Description
While working in Africa, anthropologist Julien Bonhomme encountered an astonishing phenomenon: people being accused of stealing or shrinking the genitals of strangers on the simple occasion of a handshake on the street. As he soon discovered, these accusations can have dramatic outcomes: the “sex thieves” are often targeted by large crowds and publicly lynched. Moreover, such rumors are an extremely widespread practice, having affected almost half of the African continent since the 1970s. In this book, Bonhomme examines the story of the “penis snatcher,” asking larger questions about how to account for such a phenomenon—unique in its spatial and temporal scale—without falling prey to the cliché of Africa as an exotic other. Bonhomme argues that the public belief in sex thieves cannot be considered a superstition or form of mass hysteria. Rather, he brings to light multiple factors that explain the rumor’s success and shows how the cultural dynamic can operate on a vast scale. Analyzing the rumor on both transnational and local levels, he demonstrates how it arises from the ambiguities and dangers of anonymity, and thus that it reveals an occult flipside to everyday social interaction. Altogether, this book provides both richly ethnographic and theoretical understandings of urban sociality and the dynamics of human communication in contemporary Africa and beyond.
Author: Colm A. Kelleher
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416526935
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 324
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Book Description
The author of the controversial bestseller Brain Trust brings his scientific expertise to the chilling true story of unexplained phenomena on Utah's Skinwalker Ranch -- and challenges us with a new vision of reality. For more than fifty years, the bizarre events at a remote Utah ranch have ranged from the perplexing to the wholly terrifying. Vanishing and mutilated cattle. Unidentified Flying Objects. The appearance of huge, otherworldly creatures. Invisible objects emitting magnetic fields with the power to spark a cattle stampede. Flying orbs of light with dazzling maneuverability and lethal consequences. For one family, life on the Skinwalker Ranch had become a life under siege by an unknown enemy or enemies. Nothing else could explain the horrors that surrounded them -- perhaps science could. Leading a first-class team of research scientists on a disturbing odyssey into the unknown, Colm Kelleher spent hundreds of days and nights on the Skinwalker property and experienced firsthand many of its haunting mysteries. With investigative reporter George Knapp -- the only journalist allowed to witness and document the team's work -- Kelleher chronicles in superb detail the spectacular happenings the team observed personally, and the theories of modern physics behind the phenomena. Far from the coldly detached findings one might expect, their conclusions are utterly hair-raising in their implications. Opening a door to the unseen world around us, Hunt for the Skinwalker is a clarion call to expand our vision far beyond what we know.
Author: Robert Temple
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0099257440
Category : Civilization, Ancient
Languages : en
Pages : 726
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Book Description
The most academically credible case for alien visitation. Is the existance of civilisation on earth the result of contact from inhabitants of a planet in the system of the star Sirius prior to 3000BC? There are tribal cultures in present-day Africa whose most sacred and secret and traditions are based on this theory. Central to their cosmology is a body of knowledge concerning the system of the star Sirius that is astounding it in its accuracy of detail, including specific information only recently accessible to modern science. Robert Temple traces the traditions of the Dogon and three related tribes back 5, 000 years to the ancient Mediterranean cultures of Sumer and Egypt. He shows a knowledge dependent on physics and astrophysics, which they claimed was imported to them by visitors from Sirius.
Author: David Graeber
Publisher: Melville House
ISBN: 1612193757
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 274
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Book Description
From the author of the international bestseller Debt: The First 5,000 Years comes a revelatory account of the way bureaucracy rules our lives Where does the desire for endless rules, regulations, and bureaucracy come from? How did we come to spend so much of our time filling out forms? And is it really a cipher for state violence? To answer these questions, the anthropologist David Graeber—one of our most important and provocative thinkers—traces the peculiar and unexpected ways we relate to bureaucracy today, and reveals how it shapes our lives in ways we may not even notice…though he also suggests that there may be something perversely appealing—even romantic—about bureaucracy. Leaping from the ascendance of right-wing economics to the hidden meanings behind Sherlock Holmes and Batman, The Utopia of Rules is at once a powerful work of social theory in the tradition of Foucault and Marx, and an entertaining reckoning with popular culture that calls to mind Slavoj Zizek at his most accessible. An essential book for our times, The Utopia of Rules is sure to start a million conversations about the institutions that rule over us—and the better, freer world we should, perhaps, begin to imagine for ourselves.
Author: Tom Chivers
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
ISBN: 9781474608787
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 304
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Book Description
'The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made of atoms which it can use for something else' This is a book about AI and AI risk. But it's also more importantly about a community of people who are trying to think rationally about intelligence, and the places that these thoughts are taking them, and what insight they can and can't give us about the future of the human race over the next few years. It explains why these people are worried, why they might be right, and why they might be wrong. It is a book about the cutting edge of our thinking on intelligence and rationality right now by the people who stay up all night worrying about it. Along the way, we discover why we probably don't need to worry about a future AI resurrecting a perfect copy of our minds and torturing us for not inventing it sooner, but we perhaps should be concerned about paperclips destroying life as we know it; how Mickey Mouse can teach us an important lesson about how to programme AI; and why Spock is not as logical as we think he is.
Author: Anthony D'Andrea
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134110502
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Book Description
Global Nomads provides a unique introduction to the globalization of countercultures, a topic largely unknown in and outside academia. Anthony D’Andrea examines the social life of mobile expatriates who live within a global circuit of countercultural practice in paradoxical paradises. Based on nomadic fieldwork across Spain and India, the study analyzes how and why these post-metropolitan subjects reject the homeland in order to shape an alternative lifestyle. They become artists, therapists, exotic traders and bohemian workers seeking to integrate labor, mobility and spirituality within a cosmopolitan culture of expressive individualism. These countercultural formations, however, unfold under neo-liberal regimes that appropriate utopian spaces, practices and imaginaries as commodities for tourism, entertainment and media consumption. In order to understand the paradoxical globalization of countercultures, Global Nomads develops a dialogue between global and critical studies by introducing the concept of 'neo-nomadism' which seeks to overcome some of the shortcomings in studies of globalization. This book is an essential aide for undergraduate, postgraduate and research students of Sociology, Anthropology of Globalization, Cultural Studies and Tourism Studies.
Author: Peter Dickens
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113418980X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 271
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Book Description
Space weaponry, satellite surveillance and communications, and private space travel are all means in which outer space is being humanized: incorporated into society’s projects. But what are the political implications of society not only being globalized, but becoming ‘cosmic’? Our ideas about society have long affected, and been affected by, our understanding of the universe: large sections of our economy and society are now organized around humanity’s use of outer space. Our view of the universe, our increasingly ‘cosmic’ society, and even human consciousness are being transformed by new relations with the cosmos. As the first sociological book to tackle humanity’s relationship with the universe, this fascinating volume links social theory to classical and contemporary science, and proposes a new ‘cosmic’ social theory. Written in a punchy, student-friendly style, this timely book engages with a range of topical issues, including cyberspace, terrorism, tourism, surveillance and globalization.
