Download or read book The Anthropology of Intentions written by Alessandro Duranti and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-08 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This multidisciplinary study explores how people make sense of each other's actions.
Download or read book The Anthropology of Intentions written by Alessandro Duranti and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-08 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How and to what extent do people take into account the intentions of others? Alessandro Duranti sets out to answer this question, showing that the role of intentions in human interaction is variable across cultures and contexts. Through careful analysis of data collected over three decades in US and Pacific societies, Duranti demonstrates that, in some communities, social actors avoid intentional discourse, focusing on the consequences of actions rather than on their alleged original goals. In other cases, he argues, people do speculate about their own intentions or guess the intentions of others, including in some societies where it was previously assumed they avoid doing so. To account for such variation, Duranti proposes an 'intentional continuum', a concept that draws from phenomenology and the detailed analysis of face-to-face interaction. A combination of new essays and classic re-evaluations, the book draws together findings from anthropology, linguistics and philosophy to offer a penetrating account of the role of intentions in defining human action.
Download or read book Methods of Desire written by Aurora Donzelli and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2019-08-31 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, Indonesia has undergone a radical program of administrative decentralization and neoliberal reforms. In Methods of Desire, author Aurora Donzelli explores these changes through an innovative perspective—one that locates the production of neoliberalism in novel patterns of language use and new styles of affect display. Building on almost two decades of fieldwork, Donzelli describes how the growing influence of transnational lending agencies is transforming the ways in which people desire and voice their expectations, intentions, and entitlements within the emergent participatory democracy and restructuring of Indonesia’s political economy. She argues that a largely overlooked aspect of the Era Reformasi concerns the transition from a moral regime centered on the expectation that desires should remain hidden to a new emphasis on the public expression of individuals’ aspirations. The book examines how the large-scale institutional transformations that followed the collapse of the Suharto regime have impacted people’s lives and imaginations in the relatively remote and primarily rural Toraja highlands of Sulawesi. A novel concept of the individual as a bundle of audible and measurable desires has emerged, one that contrasts with the deep-rooted reticence toward the expression of personal preferences. The spreading of foreign discursive genres such as customer satisfaction surveys, training sessions, electoral mission statements, and fundraising auctions, and the diffusion of new textual artifacts such as checklists, flowcharts, and workflow diagrams are producing forms of citizenship, political participation, and moral agency that contrast with the longstanding epistemologies of secrecy typical of local styles of knowledge and power. Donzelli’s long-term ethnographic study examines how these foreign protocols are being received, absorbed, and readapted in a peripheral community of the Indonesian archipelago. Combining a telescopic perspective on our contemporary moment with a microscopic analysis of conversational practices, the author argues that the managerial forms of political rationality and the entrepreneurial morality underwriting neoliberal apparatuses proliferate through the working of small cogs, that is, acts of speech. By examining these concrete communicative exchanges, she sheds light on both the coherence and inconsistency underlying the worldwide diffusion of market logic to all domains of life.
Download or read book Despite Good Intentions written by Thomas W. Dichter and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than thirty-five years, Thomas W. Dichter has worked in the field of international development, managing and evaluating projects for nongovernmental organizations, directing a Peace Corps country program, and serving as a consultant for such agencies as USAID, UNDP, and the World Bank. On the basis of this extensive and varied experience, he has become an outspoken critic of what he terms the "international poverty alleviation industry." He believes that efforts to reduce world poverty have been well-intentioned but largely ineffective. On the whole, the development industry has failed to serve the needs of the people it has sought to help. To make his case, Dichter reviews the major trends in development assistance from the 1960s through the 1990s, illustrating his analysis with eighteen short stories based on his own experiences in the field. The analytic chapters are thus grounded in the daily life of development workers as described in the stories. Dichter shows how development organizations have often become caught up in their own self-perpetuation and in public relations efforts designed to create an illusion of effectiveness. Tracing the evolution of the role of money (as opposed to ideas) in development assistance, he suggests how financial imperatives have reinforced the tendency to sponsor time-bound projects, creating a dependency among aid recipients. He also examines the rise of careerism and increased bureaucratization in the industry, arguing that assistance efforts have become disconnected from important lessons learned on the ground. In the end, Dichter calls for a more light-handed and artful approach to development assistance, with fewer agencies andexperts involved. His stance is pragmatic, rather than ideological or political. What matters, he says, is what works, and the current practices of the development industry are simply not effective.
Download or read book Other Intentions written by Lawrence Rosen and published by School for Advanced Research Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intentionality - the attribution of inner states - has long been the preserve of philosophical abstraction, psychological theorizing, and religious dictate. Yet intentionality is above all a social and cultural phenomenon. In Other Intentions, nine scholars from fields as diverse as philosophy, anthropology, medieval literature, and the law examine at the cultural level specific ethnographic, literary, and legal cases in which the question of inner states proves illuminating. The authors argue that while intentionality might at first appear to be a wholly abstract phenomenon, it is, in fact, deeply entwined with the nature and distribution of power, the portrayal of events, the assessment of personhood, and the social assignment of moral and legal responsibility. This volume brings new insight to our understanding of our own and others' intentions.
Download or read book Linguistic Anthropology written by Alessandro Duranti and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1997-09-04 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alessandro Duranti introduces linguistic anthropology as an interdisciplinary field which studies language as a cultural resource and speaking as a cultural practice. The theories and methods of linguistic anthropology are introduced through a discussion of linguistic diversity, grammar in use, the role of speaking in social interaction, the organisation and meaning of conversational structures, and the notion of participation as a unit of analysis. Linguistic Anthropology will appeal to undergraduate and graduate students.
Download or read book Between Bombs and Good Intentions written by Rainer Baudendistel and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2006-05-01 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have highlighted again the precarious situation aid agencies find themselves in, caught as they are between the firing lines of the hostile parties, as they are trying to alleviate the plight of the civilian populations. This book offers an illuminating case study from a previous conflict, the Italo-Ethiopian war of 1935-36, and of the humanitarian operation of the Red Cross during this period. Based on fresh material from Red Cross and Italian military archives, the author examines highly controversial subjects such as the Italian bombings of Red Cross field hospitals, the treatment of Prisoners of War by the two belligerents; and the effects of Fascist Italy’s massive use of poison gas against the Ethiopians. He shows how Mussolini and his ruthless regime, throughout the seven-month war, manipulated the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) – the lead organization of the Red Cross in times of war, helped by the surprising political naïveté of its board. During this war the ICRC redefined its role in a debate, which is fascinating not least because of its relevance to current events, about the nature of humanitarian action. The organization decided to concern itself exclusively with matters falling under the Geneva Conventions and to give priority to bringing relief over expressing protest. It was a decision that should have far-reaching consequences, particularly for the period of World War II and the fate of Jews in Nazi concentration camps.
Download or read book Fictionalizing Anthropology written by Stuart J. McLean and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2017-11-22 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What might become of anthropology if it were to suspend its sometime claims to be a social science? What if it were to turn instead to exploring its affinities with art and literature as a mode of engaged creative practice carried forward in a world heterogeneously composed of humans and other than humans? Stuart McLean claims that anthropology stands to learn most from art and literature not as “evidence” to support explanations based on an appeal to social context or history but as modes of engagement with the materiality of expressive media—including language—that always retain the capacity to disrupt or exceed the human projects enacted through them. At once comparative in scope and ethnographically informed, Fictionalizing Anthropology draws on an eclectic range of sources, including ancient Mesopotamian myth, Norse saga literature, Hesiod, Lucretius, Joyce, Artaud, and Lispector, as well as film, multimedia, and performance art, along with the concept of “fabulation” (the making of fictions capable of intervening in and transforming reality) developed in the writings of Bergson and Deleuze. Sharing with proponents of anthropology’s recent “ontological turn,” McLean insists that experiments with language and form are a performative means of exploring alternative possibilities of collective existence, new ways of being human and other than human, and that such experiments must therefore be indispensable to anthropology’s engagement with the contemporary world.
Download or read book The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Anthropology written by N. J. Enfield and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-09-11 with total page 910 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The field of linguistic anthropology looks at human uniqueness and diversity through the lens of language, our species' special combination of art and instinct. Human language both shapes, and is shaped by, our minds, societies, and cultural worlds. This state-of-the-field survey covers a wide range of topics, approaches and theories, such as the nature and function of language systems, the relationship between language and social interaction, and the place of language in the social life of communities. Promoting a broad vision of the subject, spanning a range of disciplines from linguistics to biology, from psychology to sociology and philosophy, this authoritative handbook is an essential reference guide for students and researchers working on language and culture across the social sciences.
Download or read book China in the World written by Jennifer Hubbert and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2019-03-31 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Confucius Institutes, the language and culture programs funded by the Chinese government, have been established in more than 1,500 schools worldwide since their debut in 2004. A centerpiece of China’s soft power policy, they represent an effort to smooth China’s path to superpower status by enhancing its global appeal. Yet Confucius Institutes have given rise to voluble and contentious public debate in host countries, where they have been both welcomed as a source of educational funding and feared as spy outposts, neocolonial incursions, and obstructions to academic freedom. China in the World turns an anthropological lens on this most visible, ubiquitous, and controversial globalization project in an effort to provide fresh insight into China’s shifting place in the world. Author Jennifer Hubbert takes the study of soft power policy into the classroom, offering an anthropological intervention into a subject that has been dominated by the methods and analyses of international relations and political science. She argues that concerns about Confucius Institutes reflect broader debates over globalization and modernity and ultimately about a changing global order. Examining the production of soft power policy in situ allows us to move beyond program intentions to see how Confucius Institutes are actually understood and experienced in day-to-day classroom interactions. By assessing the perspectives of participants and exploring the complex ways in which students, teachers, parents, and program administrators interpret the Confucius Institute curriculum, she highlights significant gaps between China’s soft power policy intentions and the effects of those policies in practice. China in the World brings original, long-term ethnographic research to bear on how representations of and knowledge about China are constructed, consumed, and articulated in encounters between China, the United States, and the Confucius Institute programs themselves. It moves a controversial topic beyond the realm of policy making to examine the mechanisms through which policy is implemented, engaged, and contested by a multitude of stakeholders and actors. It provides new insight into how policy actually works, showing that it takes more than financial wherewithal and official resolve to turn cultural presence into power.
Download or read book Everyday Forms of Whiteness written by Melanie E. L. Bush and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2011-01-16 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second edition of Melanie Bush's acclaimed Everyday Forms of Whiteness looks at the often-unseen ways racism impacts our lives. The author has interviewed and surveyed hundreds of college students and reveals that even though we talk as thoughwe live in a "post-racial" world after the election of Barack Obama, racism is still very much a factor in everyday life. The second edition incorporates new data and interviews to show how the everyday thinking of ordinary people contributes to the perpetuation of systemic racialized inequality. The book introduces key terms for the study for race and ethnicity, reveals the mechanisms that support the racial hierarchy in U.S. society, then outlines ways we can challenge long-standing patterns of racialinequality.
Download or read book Trees Knots and Outriggers written by Frederick H. Damon and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2016-10-01 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Trees, Knots and Outriggers (Kaynen Muyuw) is the culmination of twenty-five years of work by Frederick H. Damon and his attention to cultural adaptations to the environment in Melanesia. Damon details the intricacies of indigenous knowledge and practice in his sweeping synthesis of symbolic and structuralist anthropology with recent developments in historical ecology. This book is a long conversation between the author’s many Papua New Guinea informants, teachers and friends, and scientists in Australia, Europe and the United States, in which a spirit of adventure and discovery is palpable.
Download or read book Original Intentions written by Nick Pearce and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Believing that everything has a precedent, Chinese artists were never bashful about reproducing art, typically seeing less of a difference between the original work and reproductions. As a result, replication has often been considered a fundamental mode of production in Chinese art, with roots extending to antiquity. In turn, some collectors would knowingly brandish originals next to replicas while others completely rejected the idea of imitations as artworks. This book explores the controversial questions of faking, copying, and replicating Chinese painting, bronzes, ceramics, works on paper, and sculpture.
Download or read book Ethnopragmatics written by Cliff Goddard and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011-04-20 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The studies in this volume show how speech practices can be understood from a culture-internal perspective, in terms of values, norms and beliefs of the speech communities concerned. Focusing on examples from many different cultural locations, the contributing authors ask not only: 'What is distinctive about these particular ways of speaking?', but also: 'Why - from their own point of view - do the people concerned speak in these particular ways? What sense does it make to them?'. The ethnopragmatic approach stands in opposition to the culture-external universalist pragmatics represented by neo-Gricean pragmatics and politeness theory. Using "cultural scripts" and semantic explications - techniques developed over 20 years work in cross-cultural semantics by Anna Wierzbicka and colleagues - the authors examine a wide range of phenomena, including: speech acts, terms of address, phraseological patterns, jocular irony, facial expressions, interactional routines, discourse particles, expressive derivation, and emotionality. The authors and languages are: Anna Wierzbicka (English), Cliff Goddard (Australian English), Jock Wong (Singapore English), Zhengdao Ye (Chinese), Catherine Travis (Colombian Spanish), Rie Hasada (Japanese) and Felix Ameka (Ewe). Taken together, these studies demonstrate both the profound "cultural shaping" of speech practices, and the power and subtlety of new methods and techniques of a semantically grounded ethnopragmatics. The book will appeal not only to linguists and anthropologists, but to all scholars and students with an interest in language, communication and culture.
Download or read book Asceticism and Anthropology in Irenaeus and Clement written by John Behr and published by Oxford Early Christian Studies. This book was released on 2000 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Asceticism and Anthropology in Irenaeus and Clement examines the ways in which Irenaeus and Clement understood what it means to be human. By exploring these writings from within their own theological perspectives, John Behr also offers a theological critique of the prevailing approach to the asceticism of Late Antiquity. Writing before monasticism became the dominant paradigm of Christian asceticism, Irenaeus and Clement afford fascinating glimpses of alternative approaches. For Irenaeus, asceticism is the expression of man living the life of God in all dimensions of the body, that which is most characteristically human and in the image of God. Human existence as a physical being includes sexuality as a permanent part of the framework within which males and females grow towards God. In contrast, Clement depicts asceticism as man's attempt at a godlike life to protect the rational element, that which is distinctively human and in the image of God, from any possible disturbance and threat, or from the vulnerability of dependency, especially of a physical or sexual nature. Here human sexuality is strictly limited by the finality of procreation and abandoned in the resurrection. By paying careful attention to these two writers, Behr offers challenging material for the continuing task of understanding ourselves as human beings.
Download or read book The Cambridge Handbook of Sociolinguistics written by Rajend Mesthrie and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-06 with total page 598 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most comprehensive overview available, this Handbook is an essential guide to sociolinguistics today. Reflecting the breadth of research in the field, it surveys a range of topics and approaches in the study of language variation and use in society. As well as linguistic perspectives, the handbook includes insights from anthropology, social psychology, the study of discourse and power, conversation analysis, theories of style and styling, language contact and applied sociolinguistics. Language practices seem to have reached new levels since the communications revolution of the late twentieth century. At the same time face-to-face communication is still the main force of language identity, even if social and peer networks of the traditional face-to-face nature are facing stiff competition of the Facebook-to-Facebook sort. The most authoritative guide to the state of the field, this handbook shows that sociolinguistics provides us with the best tools for understanding our unfolding evolution as social beings.
Download or read book Language and Revolutionary Magic in the Orinoco Delta written by Juan Luis Rodriguez and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-10-15 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the ways in which the development of linguistic practices helped expand national politics in remote, rural areas of Venezuela, Language and Revolutionary Magic in the Orinoco Delta situates language as a mediating force in the creation of the 'magical state'. Focusing on the Waraos speakers of the Orinoco Delta, this book explores center–periphery dynamics in Venezuela through an innovative linguistic anthropological lens. Using a semiotic framework informed by concepts of 'transduction' and 'translation', this book combines ethnographic and historical evidence to analyze the ideological mediation and linguistic practices involved in managing a multi-ethnic citizenry in Venezuela. Juan Luis Rodriguez shows how indigenous populations participate in the formation and contestation of state power through daily practices and the use of different speech genres, emphasising the performative and semiotic work required to produce revolutionary subjects. Establishing the centrality of language and semiosis in the constitution of authority and political power, this book moves away from seeing revolution in solely economic or ideological terms. Through the collision between Warao and Spanish, it highlights how language ideologies can exclude or integrate indigenous populations in the public sphere and how they were transformed by Hugo Chavez' revolutionary government to promote loyalty to the regime.
