An Anthropology of Nothing in Particular

An Anthropology of Nothing in Particular PDF Author: Martin Demant Frederiksen
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
ISBN: 178535700X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 136

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Book Description
There have been claims that meaninglessness has become epidemic in the contemporary world. One perceived consequence of this is that people increasingly turn against both society and the political establishment with little concern for the content (or lack of content) that might follow. Most often, encounters with meaninglessness and nothingness are seen as troubling. "Meaning" is generally seen as being a cornerstone of the human condition, as that which we strive towards. This was famously explored by Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning in which he showed how even in the direst of situations individuals will often seek to find a purpose in life. But what, then, is at stake when groups of people negate this position? What exactly goes on inside this apparent turn towards nothing, in the engagement with meaninglessness? And what happens if we take the meaningless seriously as an empirical fact?

An Anthropology of Nothing in Particular

An Anthropology of Nothing in Particular PDF Author: Martin Demant Frederiksen
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
ISBN: 178535700X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 136

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Book Description
There have been claims that meaninglessness has become epidemic in the contemporary world. One perceived consequence of this is that people increasingly turn against both society and the political establishment with little concern for the content (or lack of content) that might follow. Most often, encounters with meaninglessness and nothingness are seen as troubling. "Meaning" is generally seen as being a cornerstone of the human condition, as that which we strive towards. This was famously explored by Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning in which he showed how even in the direst of situations individuals will often seek to find a purpose in life. But what, then, is at stake when groups of people negate this position? What exactly goes on inside this apparent turn towards nothing, in the engagement with meaninglessness? And what happens if we take the meaningless seriously as an empirical fact?

Interdisciplinary Approaches to Human Communication

Interdisciplinary Approaches to Human Communication PDF Author: Brent D. Ruben
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351309986
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 173

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Book Description
This volume brings together diverse and divergent essays on communication as viewed by outstanding scholars in various disciplines. The authors review the mainstream of each approach to communication, sketch the dimensions of that concern, and discuss the problems and potential for future progress.Contents: Lee Thayer, "Communication: Sine Qua Non of the Behavioral Sciences"; Hubert Frings, "Zoology"; Alfred G. Smith, "Anthropology"; Richard W. Budd, "General Semantics"; Brent D. Ruben, "General System Theory"; Joseph M.R. Del-gado, "Neurophysiology"; Herbert Blumer, "Symbolic Interaction"; and Peter L. Berger, "Sociology of Knowledge."

Anthropology and Civilizational Analysis

Anthropology and Civilizational Analysis PDF Author: Johann P. Arnason
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 143846939X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
Brings social and cultural anthropologists into dialogue with historical sociology and illustrates the continued potential of the concept of civilization for all participants. The concept of civilization has a long but checkered history in anthropology, and anthropological materials have been of great importance for the development of civilizational analysis in historical sociology. Anthropology and Civilizational Analysis brings these diverse fields together and explores a wide range of topics pertaining to civilization, from classical theories to contemporary rhetorical discourses, including detailed case studies of concrete practices documented through archival and ethnographic research. While many scholars and the wider public still think of civilization in simplistic terms, viewing it in terms of Enlightenment notions of progress and evolution to higher stages, others have pluralized the term only to create essentialized units which are only tenuously linked to historical processes. In this book contributors use dynamic approaches, including those rooted in the seminal writings of Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, opening up the dimension of civilization as an important complement to other key terms such as society and culture in social science and historical analysis.

Theologically Engaged Anthropology

Theologically Engaged Anthropology PDF Author: J. Derrick Lemons
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192518755
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
After years of discussion within the field of anthropology concerning how to properly engage with theology, a growing number of anthropologists now want to engage with theology as a counterpart in ethnographic dialogue. Theologically Engaged Anthropology focuses on the theological history of anthropology, illuminating deeply held theological assumptions that humans make about the nature of reality, and illustrating how these theological assumptions manifest themselves in society. This volume brings together leading anthropologists and theologians to consider what theology can contribute to cultural anthropology and ethnography. It provides anthropologists and theologians with a rationale and framework for using theology in anthropological research.

The Cell Phone

The Cell Phone PDF Author: Heather Horst
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000190080
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
Few modern innovations have spread quite so quickly as the cell phone. This technology has transformed communication throughout the world. Mobile telecommunications have had a dramatic effect in many regions, but perhaps nowhere more than for low-income populations in countries such as Jamaica, where in the last few years many people have moved from no phone to cell phone. This book reveals the central role of communication in helping low-income households cope with poverty. The book traces the impact of the cell phone from personal issues of loneliness and depression to the global concerns of the modern economy and the transnational family. As the technology of social networking, the cell phone has become central to establishing and maintaining relationships in areas from religion to love. The Cell Phone presents the first detailed ethnography of the impact of this new technology through the exploration of the cell phone's role in everyday lives.

The Logic of Environmentalism

The Logic of Environmentalism PDF Author: Vassos Argyrou
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781845450328
Category : Anthropology
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Although modernity's understanding of nature and culture has now been superseded by that of environmentalism, the power to define the meaning of both, and hence the meaning of the world itself, remains in the same (Western) hands. This bold argument is at the center of this provocative book that challenges the widespread assumption that environmentalism reflects a radical departure from modernity. Our perception of nature may have changed, the author maintains, but environmentalism remains a thoroughly modernist project. It reproduces the cultural logic of modernity, a logic that finds meaning in unity and therefore strives to efface difference, and to reconfirm the position of the West as the source of all legitimate signification.

Kant's Lectures on Anthropology

Kant's Lectures on Anthropology PDF Author: Alix Cohen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 131619437X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Kant's lectures on anthropology, which formed the basis of his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), contain many observations on human nature, culture and psychology and illuminate his distinctive approach to the human sciences. The essays in the present volume, written by an international team of leading Kant scholars, offer the first comprehensive scholarly assessment of these lectures, their philosophical importance, their evolution and their relation to Kant's critical philosophy. They explore a wide range of topics, including Kant's account of cognition, the senses, self-knowledge, freedom, passion, desire, morality, culture, education and cosmopolitanism. The volume will enrich current debates within Kantian scholarship as well as beyond, and will be of great interest to upper-level students and scholars of Kant, the history of anthropology, the philosophy of psychology and the social sciences.

Being and Nothingness

Being and Nothingness PDF Author: Jean-Paul Sartre
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0671867806
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 869

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Book Description
Sartre explains the theory of existential psychoanalysis in this treatise on human reality.

Theory Can Be More than It Used to Be

Theory Can Be More than It Used to Be PDF Author: Dominic Boyer
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501700898
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Within anthropology, as elsewhere in the human sciences, there is a tendency to divide knowledge making into two separate poles: conceptual (theory) vs. empirical (ethnography). In Theory Can Be More than It Used to Be, Dominic Boyer, James D. Faubion, and George E. Marcus argue that we need to take a step back from the assumption that we know what theory is to investigate how theory—a matter of concepts, of analytic practice, of medium of value, of professional ideology—operates in anthropology and related fields today. They have assembled a distinguished group of scholars to diagnose the state of the theory-ethnography divide in anthropology today and to explore alternative modes of analytical and pedagogical practice. Continuing the methodological insights provided in Fieldwork Is Not What It Used to Be, the contributors to this volume find that now is an optimal time to reflect on the status of theory in relation to ethnographic research in anthropology and kindred disciplines. Together they engage with questions such as, What passes for theory in anthropology and the human sciences today and why? What is theory’s relation to ethnography? How are students trained to identify and respect anthropological theorization and how do they practice theoretical work in their later career stages? What theoretical experiments, languages, and institutions are available to the human sciences? Throughout, the editors and authors consider theory in practical terms, rather than as an amorphous set of ideas, an esoteric discourse of power, a norm of intellectual life, or an infinitely contestable canon of texts. A short editorial afterword explores alternative ethics and institutions of pedagogy and training in theory.

Evolutionism In Cultural Anthropology

Evolutionism In Cultural Anthropology PDF Author: Robert L. Carneiro
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429969228
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Examines the history of evolutionism in cultural anthropology, beginning with its roots in the 19th century, through the half-century of anti-evolutionism, to its reemergence in the 1950s, and the current perspectives on it today. No other book covers the subject so fully or over such a long period of time.. Evolutionism and Cultural Anthropology traces the interaction of evolutionary thought and anthropological theory from Herbert Spencer to the twenty-first century. It is a focused examination of how the idea of evolution has continued to provide anthropology with a master principle around which a vast body of data can be organized and synthesized. Erudite and readable, and quoting extensively from early theorists (such as Edward Tylor, Lewis Henry Morgan, John McLennan, Henry Maine, and James Frazer) so that the reader might judge them on the basis of their own words, Evolutionism and Cultural Anthropology is useful reading for courses in anthropological theory and the history of anthropology. 0813337666 Evolutionism in Cultural Anthropology : a Critical History