Download or read book Anthropology and the Western Tradition written by Jacob Pandian and published by . This book was released on 1985 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work presents an interpretation of anthropology, its intellectual & social functions, its structure & meaning. Focuses on the question of why it is considered necessary & valid to study other peoples in order to understand ourselves & the nature of humankind.

Download or read book The Making of Anthropology written by Jacob Pandian and published by Vedams eBooks (P) Ltd. This book was released on 2004 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book offers an interpretation of anthropology as a discourse that contrasts the western self and the non-western other and shows that the organizing principle of this discourse was the Judeo-Christian episteme of the "Other in Us" that the Christian Church Fathers developed to define why the pagan others were endowed with negative, ungodly attributes of humanity. It is pointed out that the anthropological application of this episteme to represent and explain the colonized non-western others resulted in the emergence of eurocentric, hierarchical models of humanity, and that although these models of humanity were largely replaced by pluralistic models in the late 20 century, anthropology has continued to be linked with the episteme of the other in us"--Dust jacket.

Download or read book Western Conceptions of the Individual written by Brian Morris and published by Berg Publishers. This book was released on 1991-08 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a comprehensive study of the varying conceptions of the human subject in the Western intellectual tradition. Although informed by an anthropological perspective, the author draws on material from all the major intellectual disciplines that have contributed to this tradition and offers biographical and theoretical vignettes of all the major Western scholars. By scrutinizing the classical texts of the Western tradition, he succeeds in delineating the differing conceptions of the human individual which emerge from these writings, and gives a guide to the most important ideas in Western cultural traditions.

Download or read book Western Conceptions of the Individual written by Brian Morris and published by Bloomsbury Academic. This book was released on 1991-08-01 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a comprehensive study of the varying conceptions of the human subject in the Western intellectual tradition. Although informed by an anthropological perspective, the author draws on material from all the major intellectual disciplines that have contributed to this tradition and offers biographical and theoretical vignettes of all the major Western scholars. By scrutinizing the classical texts of the Western tradition, he succeeds in delineating the differing conceptions of the human individual which emerge from these writings, and gives a guide to the most important ideas in Western cultural traditions.

Download or read book The Creature with Ideas and Power An Investigation of Anthropology and Human Culture written by John J. Sheehan and published by Cognella Academic Publishing. This book was released on 2017-01-17 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Creature with Ideas and Power: An Investigation of Anthropology and Human Culture analyzes human beings as biological creatures capable of developing ideas and then manipulating their environments to conform to those ideas. The book presents culture as the intellectual medium through which ideas are made manifest. It takes readers on an intellectually stimulating journey from the origins of physical anthropology in evolution, genetics, and primatology to today's globalized world of international integration. The text explores the development of western cultures, the cultures of early tribal peoples, oral and written traditions as demonstrated in artifacts, and the basic elements that comprise a society. Students also learn about family, kinship, and marriage, cultural bonds and genetic inheritance, and how humans extract and use resources. The book includes an ethnographic study of the Haudenosaunee as an example of how the various sub-disciplines in anthropology come together to tell the story of a people. The Creature with Ideas and Power helps students understand the biological creature that is Homo sapiens and learn how cultures are both physically and socially derived. The book was written for anthropology and cultural anthropology courses.

Download or read book The Anthropology of Western Religions written by Murray J. Leaf and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2014-05-21 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world’s “great” religions depend on traditions of serious scholarship, dedicated to preserving their key texts but also to understanding them and, therefore, to debating what understanding itself is and how best to do it. They also have important public missions of many kinds, and their ideas and organizations influence many other important institutions, including government, law, education, and kinship. The Anthropology of Western Religions: Ideas, Organizations, and Constituencies is a comparative survey of the world’s major religious traditions as professional enterprises and, often, as social movements. Documenting the principle ideas behind Western religious traditions from an anthropological perspective, Murray J. Leaf demonstrates how these ideas have been used in building internal organizations that mobilize or fail to mobilize external support.

Download or read book Sources of Western Tradition Volume One Plus Volume Two written by Marvin Perry and published by . This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A primary source reader covers the history of ideas.

Download or read book Tradition as Truth and Communication written by Pascal Boyer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1990-03-30 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tradition is a central concept in the social sciences, but it is commonly treated as unproblematic. Dr. Boyer insists that social anthropology requires a theory of tradition, its constitution and transmission. He treats tradition "as a type of interaction which results in the repetition of certain communicative events," and therefore as a form of social action. Tradition as Truth and Communication deals particularly with oral communication and focuses on the privileged role of licensed speakers and the ritual contexts in which certain aspects of tradition are characteristically transmitted. Drawing on cognitive psychology, Dr. Boyer proposes a set of general hypotheses to be tested by ethnographic field research. He has opened up an important new field for investigation within social anthropology.

Download or read book Sources of the Western Tradition From the Renaissance to the present written by and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The History of Anthropology written by Regna Darnell and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2021-10 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The History of Anthropology Regna Darnell offers a critical reexamination of the Americanist tradition centered around the figure of Franz Boas and the professionalization of anthropology as an academic discipline in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Focused on researchers often known as the Boasians, The History of Anthropology reveals the theoretical schools, institutions, and social networks of scholars and fieldworkers primarily interested in the anthropology and ethnography of North American Indigenous peoples. Darnell's fifty-year career entails seminal writings in the history of anthropology's four fields: cultural anthropology, ethnography, linguistics, and physical anthropology. Leading researchers, theorists, and fieldwork subjects include Edward Sapir, Daniel Brinton, Mary Haas, Franz Boas, Leonard Bloomfield, Benjamin Lee Whorf, Stanley Newman, and A. Irving Hallowell, as well as the professionalization of anthropology, the development of American folklore scholarship, theories of Indigenous languages, Southwest ethnographic research, Indigenous ceremonialism, text traditions, and anthropology's forays into contemporary public intellectual debates. The History of Anthropology is the essential volume for scholars, undergraduates, and graduate students to enter into the history of the Americanist tradition and its legacies, alternating historicism and presentism to contextualize anthropology's historical and contemporary relevance and legacies.

Download or read book How Natives Think written by Marshall Sahlins and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1996-08-14 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Western scholars write about non-Western societies, do they inevitably perpetuate the myths of European imperialism? Can they ever articulate the meanings and logics of non-Western peoples? Who has the right to speak for whom? Questions such as these are among the most hotly debated in contemporary intellectual life. In How "Natives" Think, Marshall Sahlins addresses these issues head on, while building a powerful case for the ability of anthropologists working in the Western tradition to understand other cultures. In recent years, these questions have arisen in debates over the death and deification of Captain James Cook on Hawai'i Island in 1779. Did the Hawaiians truly receive Cook as a manifestation of their own god Lono? Or were they too pragmatic, too worldly-wise to accept the foreigner as a god? Moreover, can a "non-native" scholar give voice to a "native" point of view? In his 1992 book The Apotheosis of Captain Cook, Gananath Obeyesekere used this very issue to attack Sahlins's decades of scholarship on Hawaii. Accusing Sahlins of elementary mistakes of fact and logic, even of intentional distortion, Obeyesekere portrayed Sahlins as accepting a naive, enthnocentric idea of superiority of the white man over "natives"—Hawaiian and otherwise. Claiming that his own Sri Lankan heritage gave him privileged access to the Polynesian native perspective, Obeyesekere contended that Hawaiians were actually pragmatists too rational and sensible to mistake Cook for a god. Curiously then, as Sahlins shows, Obeyesekere turns eighteenth-century Hawaiians into twentieth-century modern Europeans, living up to the highest Western standards of "practical rationality." By contrast, Western scholars are turned into classic custom-bound "natives", endlessly repeating their ancestral traditions of the White man's superiority by insisting Cook was taken for a god. But this inverted ethnocentrism can only be supported, as Sahlins demonstrates, through wholesale fabrications of Hawaiian ethnography and history—not to mention Obeyesekere's sustained misrepresentations of Sahlins's own work. And in the end, although he claims to be speaking on behalf of the "natives," Obeyesekere, by substituting a home-made "rationality" for Hawaiian culture, systematically eliminates the voices of Hawaiian people from their own history. How "Natives" Think goes far beyond specialized debates about the alleged superiority of Western traditions. The culmination of Sahlins's ethnohistorical research on Hawaii, it is a reaffirmation for understanding difference.

Download or read book Sources of the Western Tradition written by Marvin Perry and published by Houghton Mifflin. This book was released on 2007-10 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With a collection of 300 sources, each accompanied by an introductory essay and review questions, this two-volume primary source reader emphasizes the intellectual history and values of the Western tradition. Sources are grouped around important themes in European history, allowing students to analyze and compare multiple documents. The Seventh Edition features additional sources by and about women, new attention to cultural and artistic documents, and updates to introductions and review questions.

Download or read book Sacred Discontent written by Herbert N. Schneidau and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1977 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Doctrine of the Subtle Body in Western Tradition written by George Robert Stow Mead and published by . This book was released on 1919 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book A Critique of Western Theological Anthropology written by Bo-Myung Seo and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book attempts to articulate some of the inadequacies of the 20th century Western theological anthropologies and pursue the possibility of one that is more attentive to the conditions of life that still dictate the non-Western world. As professor Seo points out the question of theological and philosophical anthropology has characteristically been framed as the question of the self rather than the question of the other. The radicality and creativity of this project can be seen in the attempt to lay the groundwork for just such a reversal of the most basic and seemingly self-evident character of philosophical and theological anthropology. What would it mean if the most basic question were that of the other rather than that of the self?The impetus for raising this sort of fundamental question is the realization that the basic categories for reflection upon the self have also been implicated in the West's project of colonial expansion and domination in the modern period. The notions of subjectivity and responsibility, of freedom and temporality have all been bound up not only in the way of thinking about the subject but also in the global project of subjection. modernization not only an achievement, but also something done to others or to the other of the West, who become thereby what Professor Seo calls othered selves. What would it mean to think of the human, as human, from the position not of the triumphant self but that of the othered self, the one made other and constructed as other? This is the daring and provocative question which this treatise raises for the reader. One of the most remarkable features of this essay is that it does not begin with a simple repudiation of the Western tradition, or in simple characterizations of that tradition, or indulge in caricature. The author is one who is deeply steeped in the philosophical and theological traditions of the West. Indeed the breadth and depth of his sympathetic reading of this tradition is evident on every page. into his argument, Seo's discussions of thinkers as diverse as Hegel and Kant, Husserl and Heidegger, Sartre and Wittgenstein, Rahner and Pannenberg, Rosenzweig and Buber, reveals a generous and probing intelligence that goes to the heart of the positions and perspectives that are to be engaged. At the same time, positions with which he is deeply sympathetic like those of Anselm Min, Enrique Dussel, Walter Benjamin or, especially, Emmanuel Levinas, are not simply offered as models to be emulated but are carefully and critically engaged. The first chapters of the book offer what may be termed, following Foucault, a genealogy of several of the most basic concepts of philosophical and theological anthropology. The emphasis upon the freedom as constitutive of the subject opens the discussion. Moving from the theological perspective on the bondage of the will in Augustine and Luther Seo shows how the modern conception of the rational freedom of the will was constructed in the work of Kant and Hegel. that can make reason the instrument of genocide. The theological tradition has taken up, in Rahner and Pannenberg, the idea of freedom as an essential openness to the world, or in Tillich and Niebuhr the idea of a finite freedom. But what has not been fundamentally interrogated is the very character of this supposedly self-grounded freedom, a freedom that strains against the limits posed by the other and regards the world to which it is open as the field of its own expansive operation. Similarly the idea of history or of the subject as embedded in and as productive of history is subjected to a close genealogical investigation. These investigations are not unrelated since the openness to the world is at the same time openness to the future, and history becomes the name of the extension of control over both space and time. One of the most remarkable of the insights of this chapter is the recognition that the idea of history is itself determined by a certain privileged location in the present and toward the future. backward looking, or bound to the past. The Western self is, in contrast, turned confidently toward a future that extends its own control of the present. Theology, for its part has taken the notion of eschatology as itself a kind of orientation toward the future as the goal toward which our efforts approximate. Yet professor Seo shows that the biblical eschatology seems to entail not a continuation but a radical disruption of the present, a reversal with which Western notions of progress and openness to the future can scarcely contend. He finds the perspectives of Walter Benjamin helpful in suggesting what this might mean within the domain of thought. What has been shown to this point is that the philosophical and theological anthropologies of the West have both exalted the human subject and also served to legitimate or at least acquiesce in the Western project of domination. Thus it is important to ask what a liberative anthropology might look like. Here he will argue both for the importance as well as the limitations of liberation theology. upon the very categories that have served as foundational for the Western privileging of the subject. He proposes that a third world perspective might better begin with what it means to be third in the sense of marginal and with the reality of pain, as that which seems least amenable to rational analysis and notions of freedom but which may more concretely anchor thought in the bodily reality of those who are othered. He will return to this suggestion at the end of the essay. The last half of the book is an engagement with the idea or the question of the other as this has been developed in 20th century Western thought. The point here is to uncover both the main impediments to a thinking of the other and the resources available for rethinking this theme. Seo first points to the challenge faced by thinking in coming to terms with the other, whether in terms of Husserl's alter ego, Heidegger's mitten or even Sartre's reflections on the gaze of the other. He does not simply reference the philosophical tradition however. theological attempts to think the other, whether in Brunner and Gogarten or in the Jewish reflections of Buber and Rosenzweig. The thinker who offers the most promise for breaking out of the Western fixation on the self, however, is Emmanuel Levinas. As the thinker par excellence of the other Levinas is the thinker who is most helpful to Seo's project of thinking through the question of the other. Among the many useful insights of his discussion of Levinas is the suggestion that Levinas has recourse to quasi religious categories (face, infinite, height, widows and orphans, and so on) precisely because the philosophical tradition has so occluded the question of the other as to make recourse to the alien traditions of biblical thought necessary to break out of the impasses in which this tradition finds itself. Yet, as Seo points out, with help from Enrique Dussel, Levinas does not yet think from the standpoint of the other. This is the result of attempting to remain faithful to the phenomenological method which Levinas also seeks to overturn. moving toward a consideration that goes beyond the self-other dichotomy to embrace a sense of the we. Can this be thought in such a way as not to fall back into what Levinas has rightly characterized as the tendency to think the other as the same with the self? Can the common sense of being made other open up a new form of thinking that begins with solidarity rather than the assimilation of the other to the self? What role might attention to the experience of pain, the other's and one's own play in such a turn to the other, as the other?It is with provocative questions such as these that the reader is left to ponder the magnitude of the revolution in thought that is opened up by the question of the other. This is an essay in philosophical theology that takes seriously the best features of what might be termed a post-modern style. Deeply immersed in the literature of what has often called itself the theological and philosophical tradition, it nonetheless clearly underlines the particularity of this tradition as decidedly implicated in the specific cultural and political projects of the West.

Download or read book From Grammar to Politics written by Alessandro Duranti and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1994-08-22 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Innovative and thorough scholarship by an acknowledged leader in his field, one which lies at the often quite baffling intersection of linguistics and anthropology."—Donald L. Brenneis, Editor, American Ethnologist

Download or read book The Problem of Evil in the Western Tradition written by Joseph F. Kelly and published by Liturgical Press. This book was released on 2015-03-06 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The question of evil presents a profound challenge to humanity—why do we do what we know to be wrong? This is especially a challenge to religious believers. Why doesn't an all-good and omnipotent God step in and put an end to evil? The Problem of Evil in the Western Tradition examines how Western thinkers have dealt with the problem of evil, starting in ancient Israel and tracing the question through post-biblical Judaism, Early Christianity (especially in Africa), the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and to the twenty-first century when science has raised new and important issues. Joseph Kelly covers the book of Job, the book of Revelation, Augustine of Hippo, Aquinas, Luther, Marlow, Milton, Voltaire, Hume, Mary Shelley, Darwin, Jung, Flannery O'Connor, Karl Rahner, Teilhard de Chardin, and modern geneticists. Chapters are "Some Perspectives on Evil," "Israel and Evil," "The New Adam," "Out of Africa," "The Broken Cosmos," "The Middle Ages," "Decline and Reform of Humanism," "The Devil's Last Stand," "Rationalizing Evil," "The Attack on Christianity," "Dissident Voices," "Human Evil in the Nineteenth Century," "Science, Evil, and Original Sin," "Modern Literary Approaches to Evil," "Some Scientific Theories of Evil," and "Modern Religious Approaches to Evil." Joseph F. Kelly, Ph.D., is professor of religious studies at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio. He is the author of The World of the Early Christians, published by The Liturgical Press.