Anthropology as Cultural Critique

Anthropology as Cultural Critique PDF Author: George E. Marcus
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022622953X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
Using cultural anthropology to analyze debates that reverberate throughout the human sciences, George E. Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer look closely at cultural anthropology's past accomplishments, its current predicaments, its future direction, and the insights it has to offer other fields of study. The result is a provocative work that is important for scholars interested in a critical approach to social science, art, literature, and history, as well as anthropology. This second edition considers new challenges to the field which have arisen since the book's original publication.

Anthropology as Cultural Critique

Anthropology as Cultural Critique PDF Author: George E. Marcus
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022622953X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
Using cultural anthropology to analyze debates that reverberate throughout the human sciences, George E. Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer look closely at cultural anthropology's past accomplishments, its current predicaments, its future direction, and the insights it has to offer other fields of study. The result is a provocative work that is important for scholars interested in a critical approach to social science, art, literature, and history, as well as anthropology. This second edition considers new challenges to the field which have arisen since the book's original publication.

Ethnography through Thick and Thin

Ethnography through Thick and Thin PDF Author: George E. Marcus
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400851807
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
In the 1980s, George Marcus spearheaded a major critique of cultural anthropology, expressed most clearly in the landmark book Writing Culture, which he coedited with James Clifford. Ethnography through Thick and Thin updates and advances that critique for the late 1990s. Marcus presents a series of penetrating and provocative essays on the changes that continue to sweep across anthropology. He examines, in particular, how the discipline's central practice of ethnography has been changed by "multi-sited" approaches to anthropology and how new research patterns are transforming anthropologists' careers. Marcus rejects the view, often expressed, that these changes are undermining anthropology. The combination of traditional ethnography with scholarly experimentation, he argues, will only make the discipline more lively and diverse. The book is divided into three main parts. In the first, Marcus shows how ethnographers' tradition of defining fieldwork in terms of peoples and places is now being challenged by the need to study culture by exploring connections, parallels, and contrasts among a variety of often seemingly incommensurate sites. The second part illustrates this emergent multi-sited condition of research by reflecting it in some of Marcus's own past research on Tongan elites and dynastic American fortunes. In the final section, which includes the previously unpublished essay "Sticking with Ethnography through Thick and Thin," Marcus examines the evolving professional culture of anthropology and the predicaments of its new scholars. He shows how students have increasingly been drawn to the field as much by such powerful interdisciplinary movements as feminism, postcolonial studies, and cultural studies as by anthropology's own traditions. He also considers the impact of demographic changes within the discipline--in particular the fact that anthropologists are no longer almost exclusively Euro-Americans studying non-Euro-Americans. These changes raise new issues about the identities of anthropologists in relation to those they study, and indeed, about what is to define standards of ethnographic scholarship. Filled with keen and highly illuminating observations, Ethnography through Thick and Thin will stimulate fresh debate about the past, present, and future of a discipline undergoing profound transformations.

Heading for the Scene of the Crash

Heading for the Scene of the Crash PDF Author: Lee Drummond
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1785336487
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
American anthropologists have long advocated cultural anthropology as a tool for cultural critique, yet seldom has that approach been employed in discussions of major events and cultural productions that impact the lives of tens of millions of Americans. This collection of essays aims to refashion cultural analysis into a hard-edged tool for the study of American society and culture, addressing topics including the 9/11 terrorist attacks, abortion, sports doping, and the Jonestown massacre-suicides. Grounded in the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, the essays advance an inquiry into the nature of culture in American society.

Critics Against Culture

Critics Against Culture PDF Author: Richard Handler
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299213701
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
A collection of essays on the history of anthropology focused on Benedict, Boss, Sapir, and modernist thought. It explores the roots of anthropology's involvement with the study of American society. They focus on the critique of mass society and the history of the culture concept and examine Boasian anthropologists as critics of mass society.

Comparison in Anthropology

Comparison in Anthropology PDF Author: Matei Candea
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108474608
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 407

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Book Description
Presents a systematic rethinking of the power and limits of comparison in anthropology.

Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice

Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice PDF Author: Michael M. J. Fischer
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822332381
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 504

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Book Description
Table of contents

Writing Culture

Writing Culture PDF Author: James Clifford
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520057296
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
"Humanists and social scientists alike will profit from reflection on the efforts of the contributors to reimagine anthropology in terms, not only of methodology, but also of politics, ethics, and historical relevance. Every discipline in the human and social sciences could use such a book."--Hayden White, author of Metahistory

In Defense of Anthropology

In Defense of Anthropology PDF Author: Herbert S. Lewis
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 1412852897
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
This book argues that the history and character of modern anthropology has been egregiously distorted to the detriment of this intellectual pursuit and academic discipline. The "critique of anthropology" is a product of the momentous and tormented events of the 1960s when students and some of their elders cried, "Trust no one over thirty!" The Marxist, postmodern, and postcolonial waves that followed took aim at anthropology and the result has been a serious loss of confidence; both the reputation and the practice of anthropology has suffered greatly. The time has come to move past this damaging discourse. Herbert S. Lewis chronicles these developments, and subjects the "critique" to a long overdue interrogation based on wide-ranging knowledge of the field and its history, as well as the application of common sense. The book questions discourses about anthropology and colonialism, anthropologists and history, the problem of "exoticizing 'the Other,'" anthropologists and the Cold War, and more. Written by a master of the profession, In Defense of Anthropology will require consideration by all anthropologists, historians, sociologists of science, and cultural theorists.

Anthropology Put to Work

Anthropology Put to Work PDF Author: Les Field
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000180549
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
How do anthropologists work today and how will they work in future? While some anthropologists have recently called for a new "public" or "engaged" anthropology, profound changes have already occurred, leading to new kinds of work for a large number of anthropologists. The image of anthropologists "reaching out" from protected academic positions to a vaguely defined "public" is out of touch with the working conditions of these anthropologists, especially those junior and untenured. The papers in this volume show that anthropology is put to work in diverse ways today. They indicate that the new conditions of anthropological work require significant departures from canonical principles of cultural anthropology, such as replacing ethnographic rapport with multiple forms of collaboration. This volume's goal is to help graduate students and early-career scholars accept these changes without feeling something essential to anthropology has been lost. There really is no other choice for most young anthropologists.

The Ethnological Imagination

The Ethnological Imagination PDF Author: Fuyuki Kurasawa
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816642397
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
Kurasawa (sociology, York U., Toronto) suggests what he calls the ethnological imagination as one of the possible routes out of the impasse created by the apparent exhaustion or inadequacy of Western social theory to deal with cross-cultural thinking, which becomes ever more urgent in light of increasing cultural pluralism and difference in the glo