Download or read book Anthropology Politics and the State written by Jonathan Spencer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-07-19 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years anthropology has rediscovered its interest in politics. Building on the findings of this research, this book, first published in 2007, analyses the relationship between culture and politics, with special attention to democracy, nationalism, the state and political violence. Beginning with scenes from an unruly early 1980s election campaign in Sri Lanka, it covers issues from rural policing in north India to slum housing in Delhi, presenting arguments about secularism and pluralism, and the ambiguous energies released by electoral democracy across the subcontinent. It ends by discussing feminist peace activists in Sri Lanka, struggling to sustain a window of shared humanity after two decades of war. Bringing together and linking the themes of democracy, identity and conflict, this important new study shows how anthropology can take a central role in understanding other people's politics, especially the issues that seem to have divided the world since 9/11.
Download or read book Anthropology Politics and the State South Asian Edition written by Jonathan Spencer and published by . This book was released on 2008-01-23 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years anthropology has rediscovered its interest in politics. Building on the findings of this research, this book offers a new way of analysing the relationship between culture and politics, with special attention to democracy, nationalism, the state and political violence. Beginning with scenes from an unruly early 1980s election campaign in Sri Lanka, it covers issues from rural policing in north India to slum housing in Delhi, presenting arguments about secularism and pluralism, and the ambiguous energies released by electoral democracy across the subcontinent. It ends by discussing feminist peace activists in Sri Lanka, struggling to sustain a window of shared humanity after two decades of war. Bringing together and linking the themes of democracy, identity and conflict, this important study shows how anthropology can take a central role in understanding other people's politics, especially the issues that seem to have divided the world since 9/11.
Download or read book Ethnographies of Power written by Tristan Loloum and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2021-04-01 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Energy related infrastructures are crucial to political organization. They shape the contours of states and international bodies, as well as corporations and communities, framing their material existence and their fears and idealisations of the future. Ethnographies of Power brings together ethnographic studies of contemporary entanglements of energy and political power. Revisiting classic anthropological notions of power, it asks how changing energy related infrastructures are implicated in the consolidation, extension or subversion of contemporary political regimes and discovers what they tell us about politics today.
Download or read book Origins of the State written by Ronald Cohen and published by Philadelphia : Institute for the Study of Human Issues. This book was released on 1978 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics written by David Nugent and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Companion offers an unprecedented overview of anthropology’s unique contribution to the study of politics. Explores the key concepts and issues of our time - from AIDS, globalization, displacement, and militarization, to identity politics and beyond Each chapter reflects on concepts and issues that have shaped the anthropology of politics and concludes with thoughts on and challenges for the way ahead Anthropology’s distinctive genre, ethnography, lies at the heart of this volume
Download or read book The Anthropology of Parliaments written by Emma Crewe and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-05-13 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Anthropology of Parliaments offers a fresh, comparative approach to analysing parliaments and democratic politics, drawing together rare ethnographic work by anthropologists and politics scholars from around the world. Crewe’s insights deepen our understanding of the complexity of political institutions. She reveals how elected politicians navigate relationships by forging alliances and thwarting opponents; how parliamentary buildings are constructed as sites of work, debate and the nation in miniature; and how politicians and officials engage with hierarchies, continuity and change. This book also proposes how to study parliaments through an anthropological lens while in conversation with other disciplines. The dive into ethnographies from across Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and the Pacific Region demolishes hackneyed geo-political categories and culminates in a new comparative theory about the contradictions in everyday political work. This important book will be of interest to anyone studying parliaments but especially those in the disciplines of anthropology and sociology; politics, legal and development studies; and international relations.
Download or read book Anthropology s Politics written by Lara Deeb and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2015-11-11 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: U.S. involvement in the Middle East has brought the region into the media spotlight and made it a hot topic in American college classrooms. At the same time, anthropology—a discipline committed to on-the-ground research about everyday lives and social worlds—has increasingly been criticized as "useless" or "biased" by right-wing forces. What happens when the two concerns meet, when such accusations target the researchers and research of a region so central to U.S. military interests? This book is the first academic study to shed critical light on the political and economic pressures that shape how U.S. scholars research and teach about the Middle East. Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar show how Middle East politics and U.S. gender and race hierarchies affect scholars across their careers—from the first decisions to conduct research in the tumultuous region, to ongoing politicized pressures from colleagues, students, and outside groups, to hurdles in sharing expertise with the public. They detail how academia, even within anthropology, an assumed "liberal" discipline, is infused with sexism, racism, Islamophobia, and Zionist obstruction of any criticism of the Israeli state. Anthropology's Politics offers a complex portrait of how academic politics ultimately hinders the education of U.S. students and potentially limits the public's access to critical knowledge about the Middle East.
Download or read book Political Anthropology written by Donald V Kurtz and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-02-13 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The field of political anthropology is complicated by a breadth and depth of interests that include every kind of ethnographically and historically represented political community, and nearly every kind of recorded political practice, behavior, and organization. To make sense of this array of information, political anthropologists examine political topics and issues in the context of research paradigms that include structural-functionalism, pro-cessualism, political economy, political evolution, and, arguably, post-modernism. In Political Anthropology, Donald V. Kurtz examines how anthropologists think about politics, political organizations, and problems fundamental to political anthropology. He explores the ideas with which they address universal political concerns, the paradigms that direct political research by anthropologists, and political topics of special interest.
Download or read book Government of Paper written by Matthew S. Hull and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2012-06-05 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Drawing inspiration from actor-network theory, science studies, and semiotics, this brilliant book makes us completely rethink the workings of bureaucracy as analyzed by Max Weber and James Scott. Matthew Hull demonstrates convincingly how the materiality of signs truly matters for understanding the projects of ‘the state.’” - Katherine Verdery, author of What was Socialism, and What Comes Next? “We are used to studies of roads and rails as central material infrastructure for the making of modern states. But what of records, the reams and reams of paper that inscribe the state-in-making? This brilliant book inquires into the materiality of information in colonial and postcolonial Pakistan. This is a work of signal importance for our understanding of the everyday graphic artifacts of authority.” - Bill Maurer, author of Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason "This is an excellent and truly exceptional ethnography. Hull presents a theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich reading that will be an invaluable resource to scholars in the field of Anthropology and South Asian studies. The author’s focus on bureaucracy, “corruption," writing systems and urban studies (Islamabad) in a post-colonial context makes for a unique ethnographic engagement with contemporary Pakistan. In addition, Hull’s study is a refreshing voice that breaks the mold of current representation of Pakistan through the security studies paradigm." - Kamran Asdar Ali, Director, South Asia Institute, University of Texas
Download or read book Society Against the State written by Pierre Clastres and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-29 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this seminal, founding work of political anthropology, Pierre Clastres takes on some of the most abiding and essential questions of human civilization: What is power? What is society? How, among all the possible modes of political organization, did we come to choose the monolithic State model and its accompanying regimes of coercion? As Clastres shows, other and different regimes do indeed exist, and they existed long before ours — regimes in which power, though it manifests itself everywhere, is nonetheless noncoercive. In such societies, political culture, and cultural practices generally, are not only not submissive to the State model, but they actively avert it, rendering impossible the very conditions in which coercive power and the State could arise. How then could our own “societies of the State” ever have arisen from these rich and complex stateless societies, and why? Clastres brilliantly and imaginatively addresses these questions, meditating on the peculiar shape and dynamics of so-called “primitive societies,” and especially on the discourses with which “civilized” (i.e., political, economic, literate) peoples have not ceased to reduce and contain them. He refutes outright the idea that the State is the ultimate and logical density of all societies. On the contrary, Clastres develops a whole alternate and always affirmative political technology based on values such as leisure, prestige, and generosity. Through individual essays he explores and deftly situates the anarchistic political and social roles of storytelling, homosexuality, jokes, ruinous gift-giving, and the torturous ritual marking of the body, placing them within an economy of power and desire very different from our own, one whose most fundamental goal is to celebrate life while rendering the rise of despotic power impossible. Though power itself is shown to be inseparable from the richest and most complex forms of social life, the State is seen as a specific but grotesque aberration peculiar only to certain societies, not least of which is our own. Not for sale in the U.K. and British Commonwealth, South Africa, Burma, Jordan, and Iraq.
Download or read book The Politics of Anthropology written by Gerrit Huizer and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 533 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Stategraphy written by Tatjana Thelen and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2017-11-30 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stategraphy—the ethnographic exploration of relational modes, boundary work, and forms of embeddedness of actors—offers crucial analytical avenues for researching the state. By exploring interactions and negotiations of local actors in different institutional settings, the contributors explore state transformations in relation to social security in a variety of locations spanning from Russia, Eastern Europe, and the Balkans to the United Kingdom and France. Fusing grounded empirical studies with rigorous theorizing, the volume provides new perspectives to broader related debates in social research and political analysis.
Download or read book Perilous States written by George E. Marcus and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Encompassing a range of disciplines—notably anthropology, politics, history, comparative literature, and philosophy—the unprecedented annual publication Late Editions exposes unsettling dilemmas and unprecedented challenges facing cultural studies on the brink of the twenty-first century. Successive volumes will appear annually until the year 2000, each engaging the predicaments of particular institutions, nations, and persons at this point of social, cultural, and political change. The project will test the limits of scholarly conventions by finding new ways to expose cultural formations emerging from the maturation or exhaustion of once-powerful ideas whose validity is now deeply in question. Perilous States, the first volume of Late Editions, presents conversations between American scholars, most of whom are anthropologists, and individuals situated amidst political and social upheaval. Pimarily but not exclusively from Eastern Europe, the cast includes Russian writers, Hungarian scientists and academics, Armenian politicians, Siberian religious and medical leaders, a Gypsy leader, a Polish poet, a French politician, and a white South African musician who is a self-styled Zulu. Their voices unite around themes of democracy, market economy, individual rights, and the reawakened force of suppressed ethnic and racial identities. To obtain fresh perspectives on these cultural and social transformations, the volumes will consist of in-depth conversations, relayed in essay form, between scholars and individuals in other cultures with whom they share affinities. This novel approach blends the immediacy of interviews, the objectivity of journalism, and the intellectual rigor of scholarship. Contributors to this volume are Marjorie Balzer, Sam Beck, David B. Coplan, Michael M. J. Fischer, Nia Georges, Bruce Grant, Douglas R. Holmes, Stella Gregorian, George E. Marcus, Kathryn Milun, Eleni Papagaroufali, Paul Rabinow, Julie Taylor, and Tom White.
Download or read book Mohawk Interruptus written by Audra Simpson and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-27 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mohawk Interruptus is a bold challenge to dominant thinking in the fields of Native studies and anthropology. Combining political theory with ethnographic research among the Mohawks of Kahnawà:ke, a reserve community in what is now southwestern Quebec, Audra Simpson examines their struggles to articulate and maintain political sovereignty through centuries of settler colonialism. The Kahnawà:ke Mohawks are part of the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois Confederacy. Like many Iroquois peoples, they insist on the integrity of Haudenosaunee governance and refuse American or Canadian citizenship. Audra Simpson thinks through this politics of refusal, which stands in stark contrast to the politics of cultural recognition. Tracing the implications of refusal, Simpson argues that one sovereign political order can exist nested within a sovereign state, albeit with enormous tension around issues of jurisdiction and legitimacy. Finally, Simpson critiques anthropologists and political scientists, whom, she argues, have too readily accepted the assumption that the colonial project is complete. Belying that notion, Mohawk Interruptus calls for and demonstrates more robust and evenhanded forms of inquiry into indigenous politics in the teeth of settler governance.
Download or read book Handbook of Political Anthropology written by Harald Wydra and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2018-11-30 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Handbook engages the reader in the major debates, approaches, methodologies, and explanatory frames within political anthropology. Examining the shifting borders of a moving field of enquiry, it illustrates disciplinary paradigm shifts, the role of humans in political structures, ethnographies of the political, and global processes. Reflecting the variety of directions that surround political anthropology today, this volume will be essential reading to understanding the interactions of humans within political frames in a globalising world.
Download or read book Engaged Anthropology written by Stuart Kirsch and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2018-03-30 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Does anthropology have more to offer than just its texts? In this timely and remarkable book, Stuart Kirsch shows how anthropology can—and why it should—become more engaged with the problems of the world. Engaged Anthropology draws on the author’s experiences working with indigenous peoples fighting for their environment, land rights, and political sovereignty. Including both short interventions and collaborations spanning decades, it recounts interactions with lawyers and courts, nongovernmental organizations, scientific experts, and transnational corporations. This unflinchingly honest account addresses the unexamined “backstage” of engaged anthropology. Coming at a time when some question the viability of the discipline, the message of this powerful and original work is especially welcome, as it not only promotes a new way of doing anthropology, but also compellingly articulates a new rationale for why anthropology matters.
Download or read book Thinking beyond the State written by Marc Abélès and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-15 with total page 117 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The French scholar Marc Abélès is one of the leading political and philosophical anthropologists of our time. He is perhaps the leading anthropologist writing on the state and globalization. Thinking beyond the State, a distillation of his work to date, is a superb introduction to his contributions to both anthropology and political philosophy. Abélès observes that while interdependence and interconnection have become characteristic features of our globalized era, there is no indication that a concomitant evolution in thinking about political systems has occurred. The state remains the shield—for both the Right and the Left—against the turbulent effects of globalization. According to Abélès, we live in a geopolitical universe that, in many respects, reproduces alienating logics. His book, therefore, is a primer on how to see beyond the state. It is also a testament to anthropology’s centrality and importance in any analysis of the global human predicament. Thinking beyond the State will find wide application in anthropology, political science and philosophy courses dealing with the state and globalization.
