Download or read book Key Debates in Anthropology written by Tim Ingold and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-12-16 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every year, leading social anthropologists meet to debate a motion at the heart of current theoretical developments in their subject and this book includes the first six of these debates, spanning the period from 1988 to 1993. Each debate has four principal speakers: one to propose the motion, another to oppose it, and two seconders. The first debate addresses the disciplinary character of social anthropology: can it be regarded as a science, and if so, is it able to establish general propositions about human culture and social life? The second examines the concept of society, and in the third debate the spotlight is turned on the role of culture in people's perception of their environments. The fourth debate focuses on the place of language in the formation of culture. The fifth takes up the question of how we view the past in relation to the present. Finally, in the sixth debate, the concern is with the cross-cultural applicability of the concept of aesthetics. With its unique debate format, Key Debates in Anthropology addresses issues that are currently at the top of the theoretical agenda, which register the pulse of contemporary thinking in social anthropology. It will be of value to students who are not only introduced to the different sides of every argument, but are challenged to join in and to develop informed positions of their own.

Download or read book Key Debates in Anthropology written by Tim Ingold and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-12-16 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every year, leading social anthropologists meet to debate a motion at the heart of current theoretical developments in their subject and this book includes the first six of these debates, spanning the period from 1988 to 1993. Each debate has four principal speakers: one to propose the motion, another to oppose it, and two seconders. The first debate addresses the disciplinary character of social anthropology: can it be regarded as a science, and if so, is it able to establish general propositions about human culture and social life? The second examines the concept of society, and in the third debate the spotlight is turned on the role of culture in people's perception of their environments. The fourth debate focuses on the place of language in the formation of culture. The fifth takes up the question of how we view the past in relation to the present. Finally, in the sixth debate, the concern is with the cross-cultural applicability of the concept of aesthetics. With its unique debate format, Key Debates in Anthropology addresses issues that are currently at the top of the theoretical agenda, which register the pulse of contemporary thinking in social anthropology. It will be of value to students who are not only introduced to the different sides of every argument, but are challenged to join in and to develop informed positions of their own.

Download or read book How to Think Like an Anthropologist written by Matthew Engelke and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-18 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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.

Download or read book The Anthropology of Hunter Gatherers written by Vicki Cummings and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-04-11 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A basic introduction to key debates in the study of hunter-gatherers, specifically from an anthropological perspective, but designed for an archaeological readership.

Download or read book Appetites and Identities written by Sara Delamont and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-09-11 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a clear, inviting and fascinating introduction to the social anthropology of Western Europe, illustrating the rich diversity of dialects, cultures and everyday lives of its peoples.

Download or read book Critical Anthropology written by Stephen Nugent and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-06-16 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Editor Stephen Nugent brings together some of critical anthropology’s most influential writings by major scholars, pairing key articles with lively rebuttals and new introductions that detail the continuing influence of these key debates on anthropology over four decades.

Download or read book Comparison in Anthropology written by Matei Candea and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a systematic rethinking of the power and limits of comparison in anthropology.

Download or read book Five Key Concepts in Anthropological Thinking written by Richard John Perry and published by Pearson. This book was released on 2003 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For undergraduate upper-level courses in Anthropological Theory. This highly readable treatment of anthropological theory discusses ideas in a conversational style accessible to undergraduates without oversimplifying the issues. It is unique in focusing on five key concepts--evolution, culture, structure, function, and relativism--placing these core ideas in the forefront to address the contributions of major theorists. It presents competing theoretical positions, engaging students in central debates in anthropology through time and exploring the implications of alternative perspectives.

Download or read book Social and Cultural Anthropology for the 21st Century written by Marzia Balzani and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-11-29 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social and Cultural Anthropology for the 21st Century: Connected Worlds is a lively, accessible, and wide-ranging introduction to socio-cultural anthropology for undergraduate students. It draws on a wealth of ethnographic examples to showcase how anthropological fieldwork and analysis can help us understand the contemporary world in all its diversity and complexity. The book is addressed to a twenty-first-century readership of students who are encountering social and cultural anthropology for the first time. It provides an overview of the key debates and methods that have historically defined the discipline and of the approaches and questions that shape it today. In addition to classic research areas such as kinship, exchange, and religion, topics that are pressing concerns for our times are covered, such as climate change, economic crisis, social media, refugees, sexuality, and race. Foregrounding ethnographic stories from all over the world to illustrate global connections and their effects on local lives, the book combines a focus on history with urgent present-day social issues. It will equip students with the analytical tools that they need to negotiate a world characterized by unprecedented cross-cultural contact, ever-changing communicative technologies and new forms of uncertainty. The book is an essential resource for introductory courses in social and cultural anthropology and as a refresher for more advanced students.

Download or read book Critical Junctions written by Don Kalb and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2005 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A book about theory and method in the humanities and social sciences. It reacts to what has become known as the "cultural turn," a shift toward semiotics, discourse, and representations and away from other sorts of determinations that started in the early 1980s and that has dominated social thinking for a long string of years. The book is based in a reconsideration of the meeting of two disciplines that helped to launch the cultural turn: anthropology and history. Specifically, it criticizes the ideas of hermeneutics and "thick description" (Clifford Geertz) that have come to play a key role in the encounter of anthropology and history and then in the cultural turn. It led to the renewed cherishing of what Gupta and Ferguson have called paradigms of "peoples and places," saturated pictures of universes, both small and large, of meaning ina more of less frozen standstill-an intellectual precursor to the cultural xenophobia of our times. Against this, the present book embraces praxis and "critical junctions": the connections in space (in and out of a relations of power and dependency, and what Eric Wolf has called the "interstitial relations" between apparently separate institutional domains. In this way the book adds to the current revival of institutionally based "global ethnography," which studies "up and outward" (the journal of Ethnography is a good example)."--Preface

Download or read book An Anthropology of Nothing in Particular written by Martin Demant Frederiksen and published by John Hunt Publishing. This book was released on 2018-08-31 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There have been claims that meaninglessness has become epidemic in the contemporary world. One perceived consequence of this is that people increasingly turn against both society and the political establishment with little concern for the content (or lack of content) that might follow. Most often, encounters with meaninglessness and nothingness are seen as troubling. "Meaning" is generally seen as being a cornerstone of the human condition, as that which we strive towards. This was famously explored by Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning in which he showed how even in the direst of situations individuals will often seek to find a purpose in life. But what, then, is at stake when groups of people negate this position? What exactly goes on inside this apparent turn towards nothing, in the engagement with meaninglessness? And what happens if we take the meaningless seriously as an empirical fact?

Download or read book Collaborators Collaborating written by Monica Konrad and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2012-05-01 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As bio-capital in the form of medical knowledge, skills and investments moves with greater frequency from its origin in First World industrialized settings to resource-poor communities with weak or little infrastructure, countries with emerging economies are starting to expand new indigenous science bases of their own. The case studies here, from the UK, West Africa, Sri Lanka, Papua New Guinea, Latin America and elsewhere, explore the forms of collaborative knowledge relations in play and the effects of ethics review and legal systems on local communities, and also demonstrate how anthropologically-informed insights may hope to influence key policy debates. Questions of governance in science and technology, as well as ethical issues related to bio-innovation, are increasingly being featured as topics of complex resourcing and international debate, and this volume is a much-needed resource for interdisciplinary practitioners and specialists in medical anthropology, social theory, corporate ethics, science and technology studies.

Download or read book Redrawing Anthropology written by Tim Ingold and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-08 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why should anthropologists draw? The answer proposed in this groundbreaking volume is that drawing uniquely brings together ways of making, observing and describing. In twelve chapters, a team of authors from the UK, Europe, North America and Australia explore the potential of a graphic anthropology to change the way we think about creativity and perception, to grasp the dynamics of improvisatory practice, and to refocus the study of material culture from ready-made objects onto the flows of materials involved in the generation of things. Drawing on expertise in fields ranging from craftwork, martial arts, and dance to observational cinema and experimental film, they ask what it means to follow materials, to learn movements and to draw lines. Along the way, they contribute to key debates on what happens in making, the relation between design and performance, how people acquire bodily skills, the place of movement in human self-awareness, the relation between walking and imagination, and the perception of time. This book will appeal not just to social, cultural and visual anthropologists but to archaeologists and students of material culture, as well as to scholars across the arts, humanities and social sciences with interests in perception, creativity and material culture.

Download or read book Relations written by Marilyn Strathern and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-17 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The concept of relation holds a privileged place in how anthropologists think and write about the social and cultural lives they study. In Relations, eminent anthropologist Marilyn Strathern provides a critical account of this key concept and its usage and significance in the English-speaking world. Exploring relation's changing articulations and meanings over the past three centuries, Strathern shows how the historical idiosyncrasy of using an epistemological term for kinspersons (“relatives”) was bound up with evolving ideas about knowledge-making and kin-making. She draws on philosophical debates about relation—such as Leibniz's reaction to Locke—and what became its definitive place in anthropological exposition, elucidating the underlying assumptions and conventions of its use. She also calls for scholars in anthropology and beyond to take up the limitations of Western relational thinking, especially against the background of present ecological crises and interest in multispecies relations. In weaving together analyses of kin-making and knowledge-making, Strathern opens up new ways of thinking about the contours of epistemic and relational possibilities while questioning the limits and potential of ethnographic methods.

Download or read book Anthropology and Law written by Mark Goodale and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2017-05-02 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An introduction to the anthropology of law that explores the connections between law, politics, and technology From legal responsibility for genocide to rectifying past injuries to indigenous people, the anthropology of law addresses some of the crucial ethical issues of our day. Over the past twenty-five years, anthropologists have studied how new forms of law have reshaped important questions of citizenship, biotechnology, and rights movements, among many others. Meanwhile, the rise of international law and transitional justice has posed new ethical and intellectual challenges to anthropologists. Anthropology and Law provides a comprehensive overview of the anthropology of law in the post-Cold War era. Mark Goodale introduces the central problems of the field and builds on the legacy of its intellectual history, while a foreword by Sally Engle Merry highlights the challenges of using the law to seek justice on an international scale. The book’s chapters cover a range of intersecting areas including language and law, history, regulation, indigenous rights, and gender. For a complete understanding of the consequential ways in which anthropologists have studied, interacted with, and critiqued, the ways and means of law, Anthropology and Law is required reading.

Download or read book Engaging Anthropology written by Thomas Hylland Eriksen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-05-26 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anthropology ought to have changed the world. What went wrong? Engaging Anthropology takes an unflinching look at why the discipline has not gained the popularity and respect it deserves in the twenty-first century. From identity to multicultural society, new technologies to work, globalization to marginalization, anthropology has a vital contribution to make. While showcasing the intellectual power of the discipline, Eriksen takes the anthropological community to task for its unwillingness to engage more proactively with the media in a wide range of current debates. If anthropology matters as a key tool with which to understand modern society beyond the ivory towers of academia, why are so few anthropologists willing to come forward in times of national or global crisis? Eriksen argues that anthropology needs to rediscover the art of narrative and abandon arid analysis and, more provocatively, anthropologists need to lose their fear of plunging into the vexed issues modern societies present. Engaging Anthropology makes an impassioned plea for positioning anthropology as the universal intellectual discipline. Eriksen has provided the wake-up call we were all awaiting.

Download or read book Anthropology and Migration written by Caroline B. Brettell and published by Rowman Altamira. This book was released on 2003-09-08 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brettell's new book provides new insight into the processes of migration and transnationalism from an anthropological perspective. It has been estimated at the turn of the millennium that 160 million people are living outside of their country of birth or citizenship. The author analyzes macro and micro approaches to migration theory, utilizing her extensive fieldwork in Portugal as well as research in Germany, Brazil, France, the United States and Canada. Key issues she discusses include: the value of immigrant incorporation vs. assimilation models; the impacts on individual, household and community as well as institutions and states; the role of ethnicity and ethnic groups; the effects of clandestine or illegal immigration; the differing commitments to host vs. sending communities; the shift from city enclaves to suburban areas; the constraints and opportunities that lead to ethnic entrepreneurship; the role of religion in transnational linkages; and the differing experiences of men and women as migrants. Brettell also explores the relevance of life histories and oral narratives in understanding the immigration process and the mediation of boundaries in a new society. This book provides a fresh perspective on the contemporary experience of migration and will be indispensable to instructors and researchers in anthropology, race and ethnic studies, immigration studies, urban studies, sociology, and international relations.