How to Think Like an Anthropologist

How to Think Like an Anthropologist PDF Author: Matthew Engelke
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691193134
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
"What is anthropology? What can it tell us about the world? Why, in short, does it matter? For well over a century, cultural anthropologists have circled the globe, from Papua New Guinea to suburban England and from China to California, uncovering surprising facts and insights about how humans organize their lives and articulate their values. In the process, anthropology has done more than any other discipline to reveal what culture means--and why it matters. By weaving together examples and theories from around the world, Matthew Engelke provides a lively, accessible, and at times irreverent introduction to anthropology, covering a wide range of classic and contemporary approaches, subjects, and practitioners. Presenting a set of memorable cases, he encourages readers to think deeply about some of the key concepts with which anthropology tries to make sense of the world--from culture and nature to authority and blood. Along the way, he shows why anthropology matters: not only because it helps us understand other cultures and points of view but also because, in the process, it reveals something about ourselves and our own cultures, too." --Cover.

How to Think Like an Anthropologist

How to Think Like an Anthropologist PDF Author: Matthew Engelke
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691193134
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 334

Get Book Here

Book Description
"What is anthropology? What can it tell us about the world? Why, in short, does it matter? For well over a century, cultural anthropologists have circled the globe, from Papua New Guinea to suburban England and from China to California, uncovering surprising facts and insights about how humans organize their lives and articulate their values. In the process, anthropology has done more than any other discipline to reveal what culture means--and why it matters. By weaving together examples and theories from around the world, Matthew Engelke provides a lively, accessible, and at times irreverent introduction to anthropology, covering a wide range of classic and contemporary approaches, subjects, and practitioners. Presenting a set of memorable cases, he encourages readers to think deeply about some of the key concepts with which anthropology tries to make sense of the world--from culture and nature to authority and blood. Along the way, he shows why anthropology matters: not only because it helps us understand other cultures and points of view but also because, in the process, it reveals something about ourselves and our own cultures, too." --Cover.

Thinking Like an Anthropologist

Thinking Like an Anthropologist PDF Author: John T. Omohundro
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781283384537
Category : Ethnology
Languages : en
Pages : 439

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Book Description


Anthro-Vision

Anthro-Vision PDF Author: Gillian Tett
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1982140976
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
While today’s business world is dominated by technology and data analysis, award-winning financial journalist and anthropology PhD Gillian Tett advocates thinking like an anthropologist to better understand consumer behavior, markets, and organizations to address some of society’s most urgent challenges. Amid severe digital disruption, economic upheaval, and political flux, how can we make sense of the world? Leaders today typically look for answers in economic models, Big Data, or artificial intelligence platforms. Gillian Tett points to anthropology—the study of human culture. Anthropologists learn to get inside the minds of other people, helping them not only to understand other cultures but also to appraise their own environment with fresh perspective as an insider-outsider, gaining lateral vision. Today, anthropologists are more likely to study Amazon warehouses than remote Amazon tribes; they have done research into institutions and companies such as General Motors, Nestlé, Intel, and more, shedding light on practical questions such as how internet users really define themselves; why corporate projects fail; why bank traders miscalculate losses; how companies sell products like pet food and pensions; why pandemic policies succeed (or not). Anthropology makes the familiar seem unfamiliar and vice versa, giving us badly needed three-dimensional perspective in a world where many executives are plagued by tunnel vision, especially in fields like finance and technology. “Fascinating and surprising” (Fareed Zararia, CNN), Anthro-Vision offers a revolutionary new way for understanding the behavior of organizations, individuals, and markets in today’s ever-evolving world.

An Anthropologist on Mars

An Anthropologist on Mars PDF Author: Oliver Sacks
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0345805887
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 465

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Book Description
From the bestselling author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat • Fascinating portraits of neurological disorder in which men, women, and one extraordinary child emerge as brilliantly adaptive personalities, whose conditions have not so much debilitated them as ushered them into another reality. Here are seven detailed narratives of neurological patients, including a surgeon consumed by the compulsive tics of Tourette's syndrome unless he is operating; an artist who loses all sense of color in a car accident, but finds a new sensibility and creative power in black and white; and an autistic professor who cannot decipher the simplest social exchange between humans, but has built a career out of her intuitive understanding of animal behavior. Sacks combines the well honed mind of an academician with the verve of a true storyteller.

Ethnographic Thinking

Ethnographic Thinking PDF Author: Jay Hasbrouck
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 104000864X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
This second edition of Ethnographic Thinking: From Method to Mindset serves as a primer for practitioners who want to apply ethnography to real-world challenges and commercial ventures. Building on the first edition, each chapter now includes a section focusing on practical advice to help readers activate key insights in their work. The book’s premise — that the thought processes and patterns ethnographers develop through their practice have strategic value beyond consumer insights — remains the same. Using real-world examples, Hasbrouck demonstrates how a more holistic view of an organization can help it benefit from a deeper understanding of its offerings within dynamic cultural contexts. In doing so, he argues that ethnographic thinking helps organizations increase appreciation for openness and exploration, hone interpretive skills, and cultivate holistic thinking; allowing them to broaden perspectives, challenge assumptions, and cross-pollinate ideas between differing viewpoints. Ethnographic Thinking: From Method to Mindset is essential reading for managers and strategists who want to tap into the full potential that an ethnographic perspective offers, as well as those searching more broadly for new ways to innovate. It will also be of value to students and practitioners of applied ethnography, as well as professionals who would like to optimize the value of ethnographic thinking in their organizations.

Introducing Cultural Anthropology

Introducing Cultural Anthropology PDF Author: Brian M. Howell
Publisher: Baker Academic
ISBN: 1493418068
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
What is the role of culture in human experience? This concise yet solid introduction to cultural anthropology helps readers explore and understand this crucial issue from a Christian perspective. Now revised and updated throughout, this new edition of a successful textbook covers standard cultural anthropology topics with special attention given to cultural relativism, evolution, and missions. It also includes a new chapter on medical anthropology. Plentiful figures, photos, and sidebars are sprinkled throughout the text, and updated ancillary support materials and teaching aids are available through Baker Academic's Textbook eSources.

Thinking Like a Climate

Thinking Like a Climate PDF Author: Hannah Knox
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478012404
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
In Thinking Like a Climate Hannah Knox confronts the challenges that climate change poses to knowledge production and modern politics. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among policy makers, politicians, activists, scholars, and the public in Manchester, England—birthplace of the Industrial Revolution—Knox explores the city's strategies for understanding and responding to deteriorating environmental conditions. Climate science, Knox argues, frames climate change as a very particular kind of social problem that confronts the limits of administrative and bureaucratic techniques of knowing people, places, and things. Exceeding these limits requires forging new modes of relating to climate in ways that reimagine the social in climatological terms. Knox contends that the day-to-day work of crafting and implementing climate policy and translating climate knowledge into the work of governance demonstrates that local responses to climate change can be scaled up to effect change on a global scale.

God's Agents

God's Agents PDF Author: Matthew Engelke
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520280474
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
A study of how religion goes public in today's world. Based on over three years of anthropological research, Matthew Engelke traces how a small group of socially committed Christians tackles the challenge of publicity within what it understands to be a largely secular culture.

Stories of Culture and Place

Stories of Culture and Place PDF Author: Michael G. Kenny
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487593716
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Stories of Culture and Place makes use of one of anthropology's most enduring elements—storytelling—to introduce students to the excitement of the discipline. The authors invite students to think of anthropology as a series of stories that emerge from cultural encounters in particular times and places. References to classic and contemporary ethnographic examples—from Coming of Age in Samoa to Coming of Age in Second Life—allow students to grasp anthropology's sometimes problematic past, while still capturing the potential of the discipline. This new edition has been significantly reorganized and includes two new chapters—one on health and one on economic change—as well as fresh ethnographic examples. The result is a more streamlined introductory text that offers thorough coverage but is still manageable to teach.

Coming of Age in Second Life

Coming of Age in Second Life PDF Author: Tom Boellstorff
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691168342
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
Millions of people around the world today spend portions of their lives in online virtual worlds. Second Life is one of the largest of these virtual worlds. The residents of Second Life create communities, buy property and build homes, go to concerts, meet in bars, attend weddings and religious services, buy and sell virtual goods and services, find friendship, fall in love--the possibilities are endless, and all encountered through a computer screen. At the time of its initial publication in 2008, Coming of Age in Second Life was the first book of anthropology to examine this thriving alternate universe. Tom Boellstorff conducted more than two years of fieldwork in Second Life, living among and observing its residents in exactly the same way anthropologists traditionally have done to learn about cultures and social groups in the so-called real world. He conducted his research as the avatar "Tom Bukowski," and applied the rigorous methods of anthropology to study many facets of this new frontier of human life, including issues of gender, race, sex, money, conflict and antisocial behavior, the construction of place and time, and the interplay of self and group. Coming of Age in Second Life shows how virtual worlds can change ideas about identity and society. Bringing anthropology into territory never before studied, this book demonstrates that in some ways humans have always been virtual, and that virtual worlds in all their rich complexity build upon a human capacity for culture that is as old as humanity itself. Now with a new preface in which the author places his book in light of the most recent transformations in online culture, Coming of Age in Second Life remains the classic ethnography of virtual worlds.