Download or read book Philosophy on Fieldwork written by Nils Bubandt and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-07-29 with total page 538 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do we teach analysis in anthropology and other field-based sciences? How can we engage analytically and interrogatively with philosophical ideas and concepts in our fieldwork? And how can students learn to engage critical ideas from philosophy to better understand the worlds they study? Philosophy on Fieldwork provides "show-don’t-tell" answers to these questions. In twenty-six "master class" chapters, philosophy meets anthropological critique as leading anthropologists introduce the thinking of one foundational philosopher – from a variety of Western traditions and beyond – and apply this critically to an ethnographic case. Nils Bubandt, Thomas Schwarz Wentzer and the contributors to this volume reveal how the encounter between philosophy and fieldwork is fertile ground for analytical insight to emerge. Equally, the philosophical concepts employed are critically explored for their potential to be thought "otherwise" through their frictional encounter with the worlds in the field, allowing non-Western and non-elite life experience and ontologies to "speak back" to both anthropology and philosophy. This is a unique and concrete guidebook to social analysis. It answers the critical need for a "how-to" textbook in fieldwork-based analysis as each chapter demonstrates how the ideas of a specific philosopher can be interrogatively applied to a concrete analytical case study. The straightforward pedagogy of Philosophy on Fieldwork makes this an accessible volume and a must-read for both students and seasoned fieldworkers interested in exploring the contentious middle ground between philosophy and anthropology.
Download or read book A Guide to Field Philosophy written by Evelyn Brister and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-01-23 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philosophers increasingly engage in practical work with other disciplines and the world at large. This volume draws together the lessons learned from this work—including philosophers’ contributions to scientific research projects, consultations on matters of policy, and expertise provided to government agencies and non-profits—on how to effectively practice philosophy. Its 22 case studies are organized into five sections: I Collaboration and Communication II Policymaking and the Public Sphere III Fieldwork in the Academy IV Fieldwork in the Professions V Changing Philosophical Practice Together, these essays provide a practical, how-to guide for doing philosophy in the field—how to find problems that can benefit from philosophical contributions, effectively collaborate with other professionals and community members, make fieldwork a positive part of a philosophical career, and anticipate and negotiate the sorts of unanticipated problems that crop up in direct public engagement. Key features: Gives specific advice on how to integrate philosophy with outside groups. Offers examples from working with the public and private sectors, community organizations, and academic groups. Provides lessons learned, often summarized at the end of chapters, for how to practice philosophy in the field.
Download or read book Field Philosophy and Other Experiments written by Brett Buchanan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-05-13 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This agenda-setting collection argues for the importance of fieldwork for philosophy and provides reflections on methods for such ‘field philosophy’ from the interdisciplinary vantage point of the environmental humanities. Field philosophy has emerged from multiple sources – including approaches focused on public and participatory research – and others focused on ethology, multispecies studies, and the environmental humanities more broadly. These approaches have yet to enter the mainstream of the discipline, however, and ‘field philosophy’ remains an open and uncharted terrain for philosophical pursuits. This book brings together leading and emerging philosophers who have engaged in critical and constructive forms of fieldwork, for some over decades, and who, through these articles, demonstrate new possibilities and new experiments for philosophical practices. This collection will be of interest to scholars working across the disciplines of continental philosophy, environmental humanities, science and technology studies, animal studies, cultural anthropology, art, and more. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Parallax.
Download or read book Fieldwork in Familiar Places written by Michele M. Moody-Adams and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-01 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The persistence of deep moral disagreements--across cultures as well as within them--has created widespread skepticism about the objectivity of morality. Moral relativism, moral pessimism, and the denigration of ethics in comparison with science are the results. Fieldwork in Familiar Places challenges the misconceptions about morality, culture, and objectivity that support these skepticisms, to show that we can take moral disagreement seriously and yet retain our aspirations for moral objectivity. Michele Moody-Adams critically scrutinizes the anthropological evidence commonly used to support moral relativism. Drawing on extensive knowledge of the relevant anthropological literature, she dismantles the mystical conceptions of culture that underwrite relativism. She demonstrates that cultures are not hermetically sealed from each other, but are rather the product of eclectic mixtures and borrowings rich with contradictions and possibilities for change. The internal complexity of cultures is not only crucial for cultural survival, but will always thwart relativist efforts to confine moral judgments to a single culture. Fieldwork in Familiar Places will forever change the way we think about relativism: anthropologists, psychologists, historians, and philosophers alike will be forced to reconsider many of their theoretical presuppositions. Moody-Adams also challenges the notion that ethics is methodologically deficient because it does not meet standards set by natural science. She contends that ethics is an interpretive enterprise, not a failed naturalistic one: genuine ethical inquiry, including philosophical ethics, is a species of interpretive ethnography. We have reason for moral optimism, Moody-Adams argues. Even the most serious moral disagreements take place against a background of moral agreement, and thus genuine ethical inquiry will be fieldwork in familiar places. Philosophers can contribute to this enterprise, she believes, if they return to a Socratic conception of themselves as members of a rich and complex community of moral inquirers.
Download or read book The Ground Between written by Veena Das and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-21 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The guiding inspiration of this book is the attraction and distance that mark the relation between anthropology and philosophy. This theme is explored through encounters between individual anthropologists and particular regions of philosophy. Several of the most basic concepts of the discipline—including notions of ethics, politics, temporality, self and other, and the nature of human life—are products of a dialogue, both implicit and explicit, between anthropology and philosophy. These philosophical undercurrents in anthropology also speak to the question of what it is to experience our being in a world marked by radical difference and otherness. In The Ground Between, twelve leading anthropologists offer intimate reflections on the influence of particular philosophers on their way of seeing the world, and on what ethnography has taught them about philosophy. Ethnographies of the mundane and the everyday raise fundamental issues that the contributors grapple with in both their lives and their thinking. With directness and honesty, they relate particular philosophers to matters such as how to respond to the suffering of the other, how concepts arise in the give and take of everyday life, and how to be attuned to the world through the senses. Their essays challenge the idea that philosophy is solely the province of professional philosophers, and suggest that certain modalities of being in the world might be construed as ways of doing philosophy. Contributors. João Biehl, Steven C. Caton, Vincent Crapanzano, Veena Das, Didier Fassin, Michael M. J. Fischer, Ghassan Hage, Clara Han, Michael Jackson, Arthur Kleinman, Michael Puett, Bhrigupati Singh
Download or read book Anthropology and Philosophy written by Sune Liisberg and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present book is no ordinary anthology, but rather a workroom in which anthropologists and philosophers initiate a dialogue on trust and hope, two important topics for both fields of study. The book combines work between scholars from different universities in the U.S. and Denmark. Thus, besides bringing the two disciplines in dialogue, it also cuts across differences in national contexts and academic style. The interdisciplinary efforts of the contributors demonstrate how such a collaboration can result in new and challenging ways of thinking about trust and hope. Reading the dialogues may, therefore, also inspire others to work in the productive intersection between anthropology and philosophy.
Download or read book Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco written by Paul Rabinow and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2016-08-05 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this landmark study, now celebrating thirty years in print, Paul Rabinow takes as his focus the fieldwork that anthropologists do. How valid is the process? To what extent do the cultural data become artifacts of the interaction between anthropologist and informants? Having first published a more standard ethnographic study about Morocco, Rabinow here describes a series of encounters with his informants in that study, from a French innkeeper clinging to the vestiges of a colonial past, to the rural descendants of a seventeenth-century saint. In a new preface Rabinow considers the thirty-year life of this remarkable book and his own distinguished career.
Download or read book Improvising Theory written by Allaine Cerwonka and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-11-15 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars have long recognized that ethnographic method is bound up with the construction of theory in ways that are difficult to teach. The reason, Allaine Cerwonka and Liisa H. Malkki argue, is that ethnographic theorization is essentially improvisatory in nature, conducted in real time and in necessarily unpredictable social situations. In a unique account of, and critical reflection on, the process of theoretical improvisation in ethnographic research, they demonstrate how both objects of analysis, and our ways of knowing and explaining them, are created and discovered in the give and take of real life, in all its unpredictability and immediacy. Improvising Theory centers on the year-long correspondence between Cerwonka, then a graduate student in political science conducting research in Australia, and her anthropologist mentor, Malkki. Through regular e-mail exchanges, Malkki attempted to teach Cerwonka, then new to the discipline, the basic tools and subtle intuition needed for anthropological fieldwork. The result is a strikingly original dissection of the processual ethics and politics of method in ethnography.
Download or read book In the Field written by Prof. George Gmelch and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2018-05-11 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an invaluable look at what cultural anthropologists do when they are in the field. Through fascinating and often entertaining accounts of their lives and work in varied cultural settings, the authors describe the many forms fieldwork can take, the kinds of questions anthropologists ask, and the common problems they encounter. From these accounts and the experiences of the student field workers the authors have mentored over the years, In the Field makes a powerful case for the value of the anthropological approach to knowledge.
Download or read book Available Light written by Clifford Geertz and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-12 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Clifford Geertz, one of the most influential thinkers of our time, here discusses some of the most urgent issues facing intellectuals today. In this collection of personal and revealing essays, he explores the nature of his anthropological work in relation to a broader public, serving as the foremost spokesperson of his generation of scholars, those who came of age after World War II. His reflections are written in a style that both entertains and disconcerts, as they engage us in topics ranging from moral relativism to the relationship between cultural and psychological differences, from the diversity and tension among activist faiths to "ethnic conflict" in today's politics. Geertz, who once considered a career in philosophy, begins by explaining how he got swept into the revolutionary movement of symbolic anthropology. At that point, his work began to encompass not only the ethnography of groups in Southeast Asia and North Africa, but also the study of how meaning is made in all cultures--or, to use his phrase, to explore the "frames of meaning" in which people everywhere live out their lives. His philosophical orientation helped him to establish the role of anthropology within broader intellectual circles and led him to address the work of such leading thinkers as Charles Taylor, Thomas Kuhn, William James, and Jerome Bruner. In this volume, Geertz comments on their work as he explores questions in political philosophy, psychology, and religion that have intrigued him throughout his career but that now hold particular relevance in light of postmodernist thinking and multiculturalism. Available Light offers insightful discussions of concepts such as nation, identity, country, and self, with a reminder that like symbols in general, their meanings are not categorically fixed but grow and change through time and place. This book treats the reader to an analysis of the American intellectual climate by someone who did much to shape it. One can read Available Light both for its revelation of public culture in its dynamic, evolving forms and for the story it tells about the remarkable adventures of an innovator during the "golden years" of American academia.
Download or read book Anthropological Locations written by Akhil Gupta and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-09-01 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Among the social sciences, anthropology relies most fundamentally on "fieldwork"—the long-term immersion in another way of life as the basis for knowledge. In an era when anthropologists are studying topics that resist geographical localization, this book initiates a long-overdue discussion of the political and epistemological implications of the disciplinary commitment to fieldwork. These innovative, stimulating essays—carefully chosen to form a coherent whole—interrogate the notion of "the field," showing how the concept is historically constructed and exploring the consequences of its dominance. The essays discuss anthropological work done in places (in refugee camps, on television) or among populations (gays and lesbians, homeless people in the United States) that challenge the traditional boundaries of "the field." The contributors suggest alternative methodologies appropriate for contemporary problems and ultimately propose a reformation of the discipline of anthropology.
Download or read book The Challenge of Epistemology written by Christina Toren and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2011-10-01 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Epistemology poses particular problems for anthropologists whose task it is to understand manifold ways of being human. Through their work, anthropologists often encounter people whose ideas concerning the nature and foundations of knowledge are at odds with their own. Going right to the heart of anthropological theory and method, this volume discusses issues that have vexed practicing anthropologists for a long time. The authors are by no means in agreement with one another as to where the answers might lie. Some are primarily concerned with the clarity and theoretical utility of analytical categories across disciplines; others are more inclined to push ethnographic analysis to its limits in an effort to demonstrate what kind of sense it can make. All are aware of the much-wanted differences that good ethnography can make in explaining the human sciences and philosophy. The contributors show a continued commitment to ethnography as a profoundly radical intellectual endeavor that goes to the very roots of inquiry into what it is to be human, and, to anthropology as a comparative project that should be central to any attempt to understand who we are.
Download or read book Fieldwork for Human Geography written by Richard Phillips and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2012-03-28 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A highly readable and superbly fun guide to the why and how of doing fieldwork in human geography... I recommend it highly to any geographer-wannabes and practicing-geographers. The latter group, including myself, might well rediscover the fun of doing geography." - Professor Henry Yeung, National University of Singapore "An excellent introduction to the art and science of fieldwork. It makes clear that fieldwork is not just about getting out of the classroom and gaining first-hand experience of places, it is about instilling passion about those places." - Professor Stuart C. Aitken, San Diego State University "An indispensible guide to fieldwork that will enrich the practice of geography in a myriad of different ways. In particular, the diverse materials presented here will encourage students and academics alike to pursue new approaches to their work and instil a greater understanding of the conceptual and methodological breadth of their discipline." - Professor Matthew Gandy, University College London "If fieldwork is an indispensable component of geographical education then this book is equally essential to making the most of fieldwork...This book gives students the tools to realise the full potential of what, for many, is the highlight of their geography degree." - Professor Noel Castree, Manchester University Fieldwork is a core component of Human Geography degree courses. In this lively and engaging book, Richard Phillips and Jennifer Johns provide a practical guide to help every student get the most out of their fieldwork. This book: Encourages students to engage with fieldwork critically and imaginatively Explains methods and contexts Links the fieldwork with wider academic topics. It looks beyond the contents of research projects and field visits to address the broader experiences of fieldwork: working in groups, understanding your ethical position, developing skills for learning and employment and opening your eyes, ears and minds to the wider possibilities of your trip. Throughout the book, the authors present first person descriptions of field experiences and predicaments, written by fieldtrip leaders and students from around the world including the UK, Canada, Singapore, Australia and Africa.
Download or read book Out in the Field written by Ellen Lewin and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Lesbian and gay anthropologists write in "Out in the Field" about their research and personal experiences in conducting fieldwork, about the ethical and intellectual dilemmas they face in writing about lesbian or gay populations, and about the impact on their careers of doing lesbian/gay research. The first volume in which lesbian and gay anthropologists discuss personal experiences, "Out in the Field" offers compelling illustrations of professional lives both closeted and out to colleagues and fieldwork informants. It also concerns aligning career goals with personal sexual preferences and speaks directly to issues of representation and authority currently being explored throughout the social sciences.
Download or read book Shifting Worlds Shaping Fieldwork written by Susan Ossman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-04-19 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reflecting on fieldwork for the twenty-first century, anthropologist and artist Susan Ossman invites readers on a journey across North Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and North America. She reveals that fieldwork today is not only about being immersed in a place or culture; instead, it is an active way of focusing attention and engendering encounters and experiences. She conceives a new kind of autoethnography, making art and ethnography equal partners to follow three "waves" of her research on media, globalization, and migration. Ossman guides the reader through diverse settings, including a colonial villa in Casablanca, a Cairo beauty salon, a California mall-turned-gallery, the Berlin Wall, and Amsterdam’s Hermitage museum. She delves into the entanglements of solitary research and collective action. This book is a primer for current anthropology and an invitation to artists and scholars to work across boundaries. It vividly shows how fieldwork can shape scenes for experiments with multiple outcomes, from conceptual advances to artworks, performances to dialogue and community making.
Download or read book Anthropologists in the Field written by Lynne Hume and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An excellent introduction to real-world ethnography, this book covers short- and long-term participant observation and ethnographic interviewing and uses diverse cultures as cases.
Download or read book Demands of the Day written by Paul Rabinow and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-05-23 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Demands of the Day asks about the logical standards and forms that should guide ethical and experimental anthropology in the twenty-first century. Anthropologists Paul Rabinow and Anthony Stavrianakis do so by taking up Max Weber’s notion of the “demands of the day.” Just as the demand of the day for anthropology decades ago consisted of thinking about fieldwork, today, they argue, the demand is to examine what happens after, how the experiences of fieldwork are gathered, curated, narrated, and ultimately made available for an anthropological practice that moves beyond mere ethnographic description. Rabinow and Stavrianakis draw on experiences from an innovative set of anthropological experiments that investigated how and whether the human and biological sciences could be brought into a mutually enriching relationship. Conceptualizing the anthropological and philosophic ramifications of these inquiries, they offer a bold challenge to contemporary anthropology to undertake a more rigorous examination of its own practices, blind spots, and capacities, in order to meet the demands of our day.
