Download or read book Excursions in Realist Anthropology written by David Zeitlyn and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-10-16 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Realism has become a dirty word in some social sciences, yet, despite fashionable new approaches involving multiple ontologies and the like, when anthropologists actually produce ethnographic accounts they are, still, indulging in realism in some form. Perhaps this is why ethnography, too, is unfashionable. Given the authors’ background as anthropologists committed to fieldwork, this book provides a theoretical grounding to justify and explain the sorts of accounts that anthropologists produce as the result of ethnographic research. The book’s approach starts from an acceptance that understanding is always incomplete, always improvable. This sort of partiality is viewed throughout the book as a strength. The challenge of anthropology is that it involves forms of translation: often across languages, but always between the unstated and the explicit. Accepting provisionality and incompleteness in the resulting translations provides ways of finding a middle ground between extreme versions of positivism and relativism. As such, this book argues for moderate realisms in a dappled world.
Download or read book An Anthropological Toolkit written by David Zeitlyn and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2022-09-13 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presenting sixty theoretical ideas, David Zeitlyn asks ‘How to write about anthropological theory without making a specific theoretical argument.’ “David Zeitlyn has written a wryly engaging, short book on, essentially, why we should not become theoretical partisans—that, indeed, being a serious theorist means accepting precisely that principle.”—Michael Herzfeld, Harvard University To answer, he offers a series of mini essays about an eclectic collection of theoretical concepts that he has found helpful over the years. The book celebrates the muddled inconsistencies in the ways that humans live their messy lives. There are, however, still patterns discernible: the actors can understand what is going on, they see an event unfolding in ways that are familiar, as belonging to a certain type and therefore, Zeitlyn suggests, so can researchers. From the introduction: This book promotes an eclectic, multi-faceted anthropology in which multiple approaches are applied in pursuit of the limited insights which each can afford.... I do not endorse any one of these idea as supplying an exclusive path to enlightenment: I absolutely do not advocate any single position. As a devout nonconformist, I hope that the following sections provide material, ammunition and succour to those undertaking nuanced anthropological analysis (and their kin in related disciplines).... Mixing up or combining different ideas and approaches can produce results that, in their breadth and richness, are productive for anthropology and other social sciences, reflecting the endless complexities of real life. ...This is my response to the death of grand theory. I see our task as learning how to deal with that bereavement and how to resist the siren lures of those promising synoptic overviews. This book is relevant to anthropology, communication studies, cultural studies and sociology.
Download or read book Rhetoric and Social Relations written by Jon Abbink and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2021-02-02 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the constitutive role of rhetoric in socio-cultural relations, where discursive persuasion is so important, and contains both theoretical chapters as well as fascinating examples of the ambiguities and effects of rhetoric used (un)consciously in social praxis. The elements of power, competition and political persuasion figure prominently. It is an accessible collection of studies, speaking to common issues and problems in social life, and shows the heuristic and often explanatory value of the rhetorical perspective.
Download or read book Rhythms of Writing written by Helena Wulff and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-05-15 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first anthropological study of writers, writing and contemporary literary culture. Drawing on the flourishing literary scene in Ireland as the basis for her research, Helena Wulff explores the social world of contemporary Irish writers, examining fiction, novels, short stories as well as journalism. Discussing writers such as John Banville, Roddy Doyle, Colm Tóibín, Frank McCourt, Anne Enright, Deirdre Madden, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, Colum McCann, David Park, and Joseph O ́Connor, Wulff reveals how the making of a writer’s career is built on the ‘rhythms of writing’: long hours of writing in solitude alternate with public events such as book readings and media appearances. Destined to launch a new field of enquiry, Rhythms of Writing is essential reading for students and scholars in anthropology, literary studies, creative writing, cultural studies, and Irish studies.
Download or read book Adjusting the Lens written by Sigrid Lien and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2021-11-15 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through powerful case studies, Adjusting the Lens addresses the ways that the historical photographic record of Indigenous peoples has been shaped by colonial practices, and explores how this legacy is being confronted by Indigenous art activism and contemporary renegotiations of the past. Contributors to this collection analyze the photographic practices and heritage of communities from North America, Europe, and Australia, revealing how Indigenous people are using old photographs in new ways to empower themselves, revitalize community identity, and decolonize the colonial record.
Download or read book After Society written by João Pina-Cabral and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2020-07-01 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early 1980s, when the contributors to this volume completed their graduate training at Oxford, the conditions of practice in anthropology were undergoing profound change. Professionally, the immediate postcolonial period was over and neoliberal reforms were marginalizing the social sciences. Analytically, the poststructuralist critique of the notion of ‘society’ challenged a discipline that dubbed itself as ‘social’. Here self-ethnography is used to portray the contributors’ anthropological trajectories, showing how analytical and academic engagements interacted creatively over time.
Download or read book Mambila Divination written by David Zeitlyn and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-02-20 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a major contribution to the study and analysis of divination, based on continuing fieldwork with the Mambila in Cameroon. It seeks to return attention to the details of divinatory practice, using the questions asked and life histories to help understand the perspective of the clients rather than that of the diviners. Drawing on a corpus of more than 600 cases, David Zeitlyn reconsiders theories of divination and compares Mambila spider divination with similar systems in the area. A detailed case study is examined and analysed using conversational analytic principles. The regional comparison considers different kinds of explanation for different features of social organization, leading to a discussion of the continuing utility of moderated functionalism. The book will be of interest to area specialists and scholars concerned with religion, rationality, and decision-making from disciplines including anthropology, African studies, and philosophy.
Download or read book Framing Community Disaster Resilience written by Hugh Deeming and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2019-01-29 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An essential guide to the foundations, research and practices of community disaster resilience Framing Community Disaster Resilience offers a guide to the theories, research and approaches for addressing the complexity of community resilience towards hazardous events or disasters. The text draws on the activities and achievements of the project emBRACE: Building Resilience Amongst Communities in Europe. The authors identify the key dimensions of resilience across a range of disciplines and domains and present an analysis of community characteristics, networks, behaviour and practices in specific test cases. The text contains an in-depth exploration of five test cases whose communities are facing impacts triggered by different hazards, namely: river floods in Germany, earthquakes in Turkey, landslides in South Tyrol, Italy, heat-waves in London and combined fluvial and pluvial floods in Northumberland and Cumbria. The authors examine the data and indicators of past events in order to assess current situations and to tackle the dynamics of community resilience. In addition, they put the focus on empirical analysis to explore the resilience concept and to test the usage of indicators for describing community resilience. This important text: Merges the forces of research knowledge, networking and practices in order to understand community disaster resilience Contains the results of the acclaimed project Building Resilience Amongst Communities in Europe - emBRACE Explores the key dimensions of community resilience Includes five illustrative case studies from European communities that face various hazards Written for undergraduate students, postgraduates and researchers of social science, and policymakers, Framing Community Disaster Resilience reports on the findings of an important study to reveal the most effective approaches to enhancing community resilience. The emBRACE research received funding from the European Community‘s Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007-2013 under grant agreement n° 283201. The European Community is not liable for any use that may be made of the information contained in this publication.
Download or read book Navigating the Future written by Monica Minnegal and published by ANU Press. This book was released on 2017-06-08 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Navigating the Future draws on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with Kubo people and their neighbours, in a remote area of Papua New Guinea, to explore how worlds are reconfigured as people become increasingly conscious of, and seek to draw into their own lives, wealth and power that had previously lain beyond their horizons. In the context of a major resource extraction project—the Papua New Guinea Liquefied Natural Gas (PNG LNG) Project–taking shape in the mountains to the north, the people in this area are actively reimagining their social world. This book describes changes in practice that result, tracing shifts in the ways people relate to the land, to each other and to outsiders, and the histories of engagement that frame those changes. Inequalities are emerging between individuals in access to paid work, between groups in potential for claiming future royalties, and between generations in access to information. As people at the village of Suabi strive to make themselves visible to the state and to petroleum companies, as legal entities entitled to receive benefits from the PNG LNG Project, they are drawing new boundaries around sets of people and around land and declaring hierarchical relationships between groups that did not exist before. They are struggling to make sense of a bureaucracy that is foreign to them, in a place where the state currently has minimal presence. A primary concern of Navigating the Future is with the processes through which these changes have emerged, as people seek to imagine—and work to bring about—a radically different future for themselves while simultaneously reimagining their own past in ways that validate those endeavours.
Download or read book Mobilities of Return written by John Taylor and published by ANU Press. This book was released on 2017-12-15 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent decades, the term ‘mobility’ has emerged as a defining paradigm within the humanities. For scholars engaged in the multidisciplinary topics and perspectives now often embraced by the term Pacific Studies, it has been a much more longstanding and persistent concern. Even so, specific questions regarding ‘mobilities of return’—that is, the movement of people ‘back’ to places that are designated, however ambiguously or ambivalently, as ‘home’—have tended to take a back seat within more recent discussions of mobility, transnationalism and migration. This volume situates return mobility as a starting point for understanding the broader context and experience of human mobility, community and identity in the Pacific region and beyond. Through diverse case studies spanning the Pacific region, it demonstrates the extent to which the prospect and practice of returning home, or of navigating returns between multiple homes, is a central rather than peripheral component of contemporary Pacific Islander mobilities and identities everywhere.
Download or read book Living with Concepts written by Andrew Brandel and published by Fordham University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines an often taken for granted concept—that of the concept itself. How do we picture what concepts are, what they do, how they arise in the course of everyday life? Challenging conventional approaches that treat concepts as mere tools at our disposal for analysis, or as straightforwardly equivalent to signs to be deciphered, the anthropologists and philosophers in this volume turn instead to the ways concepts are already intrinsically embedded in our forms of life and how they constitute the very substrate of our existence as humans who lead lives in language. Attending to our ordinary lives with concepts requires not an ascent from the rough ground of reality into the skies of theory, but rather acceptance of the fact that thinking is congenital to living with and through concepts. The volume offers a critical and timely intervention into both contemporary philosophy and anthropological theory by unsettling the distinction between thought and reality that continues to be too often assumed and showing how the supposed need to grasp reality may be replaced by an acknowledgement that we are in its grip. Contributors: Jocelyn Benoist, Andrew Brandel, Michael Cordey, Veena Das, Rasmus Dyring and Thomas Schwarz Wentzer, Michael D. Jackson, Michael Lambek, Sandra Laugier, Marco Motta, Michael J. Puett, and Lotte Buch Segal
Download or read book New Mana written by Matt Tomlinson and published by ANU Press. This book was released on 2016-04-13 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘Mana’, a term denoting spiritual power, is found in many Pacific Islands languages. In recent decades, the term has been taken up in New Age movements and online fantasy gaming. In this book, 16 contributors examine mana through ethnographic, linguistic, and historical lenses to understand its transformations in past and present. The authors consider a range of contexts including Indigenous sovereignty movements, Christian missions and Bible translations, the commodification of cultural heritage, and the dynamics of diaspora. Their investigations move across diverse island groups—Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, Hawai‘i, and French Polynesia—and into Australia, North America and even cyberspace. A key insight that the volume develops is that mana can be analysed most productively by paying close attention to its ethical and aesthetic dimensions. Since the late nineteenth century, mana has been an object of intense scholarly interest. Writers in many fields including anthropology, linguistics, history, religion, philosophy, and missiology have long debated how the term should best be understood. The authors in this volume review mana’s complex intellectual history but also describe the remarkable transformations going on in the present day as scholars, activists, church leaders, artists, and entrepreneurs take up mana in new ways.
Download or read book Nature Wars written by Roy Ellen and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2020-11-01 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Organized around issues, debates and discussions concerning the various ways in which the concept of nature has been used, this book looks at how the term has been endlessly deconstructed and reclaimed, as reflected in anthropological, scientific, and similar writing over the last several decades. Made up of ten of Roy Ellen’s finest articles, this book looks back at his ideas about nature and includes a new introduction that contextualizes the arguments and takes them forward. Many of the chapters focus on research the author has conducted amongst the Nuaulu people of eastern Indonesia.
Download or read book Fall out from Fukushima written by Giulia de Togni and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-11-24 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book shows how the Fukushima plaintiffs have challenged narratives of safety and risk containment produced by TEPCO and the Japanese government through offering new empirical data on risk perceptions and life choices of some nuclear evacuees. Considering the Fukushima evacuees’ disappearance from public discourse in Japan, the book engages with theoretical writings on risk, neoliberal governmentality and citizen science. Chapters draw on a wide range of anthropologically-related methodologies including socio-linguistics, participant observation, and qualitative interviews. Themes of self-governance, resistance, gender, kinship, class and social change surface throughout, setting the Fukushima experience in a broad historical, social, and comparative context. This is the first ethnographic account of the Fukushima litigation and the first extensive qualitative study documenting the worldviews and living conditions of nuclear evacuees who moved outside Fukushima Prefecture, with a particular focus on underrepresented groups (single mothers, elderly and disabled evacuees). The history of industrial disasters and the role of citizens in shaping environmental policy in Japan is also evaluated. Fall-out from Fukushima sets out to be a manifesto for understanding and supporting post-nuclear disaster societies, and will appeal to students and scholars of social, legal, and linguistic anthropology, science and technology studies, as well as Japanese studies.
Download or read book Campsteading written by Derek Brereton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-25 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The campstead is an American institution. After the Civil War, with neo-colonialism, environmentalism, and arts-and-crafts on the rise, some families sought rural locations for rustic camps. There they raised their children in the summertime. Around Squam Lake, after some eight generations, twenty-one such camps remain in these families. The Squam area thus becomes a natural place to study relationships of persons and places, families and landscape, and humans and the world. Our present concerns for environmental stewardship, open space protection, and core values instead of consumerism, make this a good time to revisit the simple American Campstead. Rustic camping itself revisited aspects of the American frontier. Just as the western frontier was disappearing, some families resorted to remnants of the first frontier among mountains and lakes of the Northeast. Through campsteads, these families preserved elements of the frontier ethos. Campsteads facilitate particular experiences involving nature and family. Brereton investigates campstead experience, and through it the nature of human experience generally. This book is the first detailed account of campsteading, the first application of critical realism in anthropology, and the first anthropological use of John Dewey's evolutionary model of experience. Building on Dewey, the author further analyses experience into its levels, orders, and features.
Download or read book Excursions written by Michael Jackson and published by Duke University Press Books. This book was released on 2007-10-24 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVPhilosophical meditations on a series of journeys the author has taken to various places around the world./div
Download or read book The Challenge of Anthropology written by Robin Fox and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on 1994-01-01 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Challenge of Anthropology is a companion to Robin Fox's highly successful Encounter with Anthropology. Fox illustrates how anthropology must constantly learn from the natural and behavioral sciences. The Challenge of Anthropology takes the author's own work as a barometer of the state of discipline, and shows the range of possibilities anthropology offers. Fox covers a vast array of topics: the psychology of aggression, war, and ideology; Frazer and Virgil; social complexity; kinship and marriage, prejudice and cognition; mythology; and Marxism, among others.
