Introduction Jan Abbink and Hans Vermeulen This volume consists of essays and studies by authors inspired by the work of Eric Wolf, a central figure in ...

This volume, written by a new generation of scholars engaged with contemporary global movements for social justice and peace, reflects their efforts in trying ...

Anthropology today seems to shy away from the big, comparative questions that ordinary people in many societies find compelling. Questions of Anthropology brings these issues back to the centre of anthropological concerns. Individual essays explore birth, death and sexuality, puzzles about the relationship between science and religion, questions about the nature of ritual, work, political leadership and genocide, and our personal fears and desires, from the quest to control the future and to find one's "true" identity to the fear of (...) being alone. Each essay starts with a question posed by individual ethnographic experience and then goes on to frame this question in a broader, comparative context. (shrink)

If the end of exoticism is one of the characteristics of our time, and if classical anthropology based its study of alterity on this exotic distance from the other, is anthropology still possible, and if so, to what end? The author uses these questions as a point of departure for a probing interrogation of ethnological practice, starting with Le;vi-Strauss. The author advocates an anthropology of 'proximity' in place of the usual anthropology of distance. He has studied such emblematic places of (...) Western modernity as the Parisian Metro, or such emblematic 'non-places' as airports, treating as valid anthropological objects phenomena that others might judge less 'pure' or 'significant' than systems of filiation or matrimonial alliance. He outlines an approach to anthropology that focuses on negotiating the social meanings we and others use in making sense of the world, and on the processes of identification that create the difference between same and other. (shrink)

"Die eigentliche Optik Paul Richard Blums sollte man akkurat als holistisch bezeichnen. Es handelt sich um ein verborgenes Streben nach Ganzheitlichkeit, das diesem Buch eine methodologische Einheit gibt. ... Ein Mensch zu sein nach dem Zeitalter der Renaissance und Moderne ... bedeutet die Aufgabe, sich in einer strukturellen und inhaltlichen Offenheit zu situieren, die die verschiedenen Antworten auf die Frage: Was heißt es, ein Mensch zu sein? in der paradoxen Einheit eines neuen Humanismus zusammenbringt. ... Genau wie die Philosophie des (...) 20. Jahrhunderts ... das Fragen selbst ins Zentrum des Denkens stellte, so versucht Blum, Peter Wust folgend, das Prinzip insecuritas als Herzstück seiner Philosophie zu definieren." Balázs Mezei (Budapest). (shrink)

The philosophical roots of Malinowski's functionalism are in the academic circles of Krakow, where three figures seem to have exerted a particularly strong influence: Pawlicki, Straszewski, and Heinrich. The predominant trend in philosophy at that time was empiriocriticism, as developed by Mach and Avenarius. Also important were F. A. Lange's interpretation of Marburg neo-Kantianism. It should be noted that the historical philosophy field was extremely broad and diverse. Functionalism, a philosophically open concept, cannot be subordinated to any one philosophical system, (...) although the "openness" of functionalism is not absolute but complemented by its "closedness" to certain other philosophies. Praxism pervades functionalist theory and even creates its foundation. Malinowski approach is entirely scientific, but functionalism is never just empirical. Malinowski realized that pure experience is as impossible as pure reasoning. (shrink)

Since the inception of their discipline, anthropologists have studied virtually every conceivable aspect of other peoples' morality - religion, social control, sin, virtue, evil, duty, purity and pollution. But what of the examination of anthropology itself, and of its agendas, epistemes, theories and praxes? Conceived as a response to Patrick Tierney's hugely inflammatory book Darkness in El Dorado , whose allegations of immoral and negligent anthropological research in South America caused a storm of protest and debate, the book combines theoretical (...) papers and case studies from eminent scholars including Steven Nugent, Marilyn Silverman and Veronica Strang. Showing how the topic of ethics goes to the heart of anthropology, it raises the controversial question of why - and for whom - the anthropological discipline functions. (shrink)

Highlights the central issues currently being debated within cultural anthropology, and documents the most original theoretical trends now affecting the field ...

The study of religion by social anthropologists, as distinct from the classical philosophical approach of the Greeks and their medieval heirs, began in the late 19th century with Edward Tyler’s Primitive Culture (1871). Tyler’s approach was completely a priori in style in that it did not rest on systematic field work or empirical observation. The same approach characterized James Frazer’s famous book, The Golden Bough (1891). Baldwin Spencer, the founding father of Australian anthropology, was persuaded by Frazer to see the (...) sophisticated religious beliefs and rites of the Aboriginal groups he studied in central Australia as mere ‘magic’. By the 1960s, a new generation of anthropologists, influenced by Claude Lévi-Strauss and English thinkers like E. Evans Pritchard, had arrived on the scene. This new ‘turn’ in anthropology led a number of contemporary scholars to the radical position that Western anthropology itself is a socio-cultural phenomenon that can be investigated in a broadly anthropological way. To see what this involves, it is worthwhile examining a number of crucial misunderstandings of Australian Aboriginal beliefs and practices that have been the artefactual result of various anthropological approaches. (shrink)

In this book, Samuel Collins argues not only for the importance of the future of culture, but also stresses its centrality in anthropological thought over the ...

Psychological evidence suggests that laypeople understand the world around them in terms of intuitive ontologies which describe broad categories of objects in the world, such as ‘person’, ‘artefact’ and ‘animal’. However, because intuitive ontologies are the result of natural selection, they only need to be adaptive; this does not guarantee that the knowledge they provide is a genuine reflection of causal mechanisms in the world. As a result, science has parted ways with intuitive ontologies. Nevertheless, since the brain is evolved (...) to understand objects in the world according to these categories, we can expect that they continue to play a role in scientific understanding. Taking the case of human evolution, we explore relationships between intuitive ontological and scientific understanding. We show that intuitive ontologies not only shape intuitions on human evolution, but also guide the direction and topics of interest in its research programmes. Elucidating the relationships between intuitive ontologies and science may help us gain a clearer insight into scientific understanding. (shrink)

In this pathbreaking study, Micaela di Leonardo reveals the face of power within the mask of cultural difference. From the 1893 World's Fair to Body Shop advertisements, di Leonardo focuses on the intimate and shifting relations between popular portrayals of exotic Others and the practice of anthropology. In so doing, she casts new light on gender, race, and the public sphere in America's past and present. "An impressive work of scholarship that is mordantly witty, passionately argued, and takes no prisoners."--Lesley (...) Gill, News Politics "[Micaela] di Leonardo eloquently argues for the importance of empirical, interdisciplinary social science in addressing the tragedy that is urban America at the end of the century."--Jonathan Spencer, Times Literary Supplement "In her quirky new contribution to the American culture brawl, feminist anthropologist Micaela di Leonardo explains how anthropologists, 'technicians of the sacred,' have distorted American popular debate and social life."--Rachel Mattson, Voice Literary Supplement "At the end of di Leonardo's analyses one is struck by her rare combination of rigor and passion. Simply, [she] is a marvelous iconoclast."--Matthew T. McGuire, Boston Book Review. (shrink)

DO SOCIOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY STAND with the sciences or with the humanities? Most attempts to settle this question involve comparing these disciplines with the natural sciences on the one hand and with history on the other. If we take history as paradigmatic of the various forms of humanistic inquiry, we will certainly find many illuminating comparisons to be drawn between it and the social sciences, but history is not the only humanistic inquiry. In fact, there exists another whole realm of (...) the humanities that has been almost universally neglected as an area which might provide revealing comparisons with sociology and anthropology: that is aesthetic criticism. In the discussion which follows, I want to begin to remedy some of that neglect. (shrink)

This document presents a reconstruction of the arguments made in a paper by Marilyn Strathern. The paper is entitled 'An Awkward Relationship: the Case of Feminism and Anthropology'. In response to scholars who hoped that feminist research would produce a paradigm shift in social anthropology, Strathern argues that a revolution of this kind is impossible. In addition to reconstructing her arguments, I also identify objections to them.

Together the essays illuminate Fabianrs"s pluralist vision of an anthropology that always makes the other present by opening itself to conversational and ...

This book collects published and unpublished work over the last dozen years by one of today's most distinguished and provocative anthropologists. Johannes Fabian is widely known outside of his discipline because his work so often overcomes traditional scholarly boundaries to bring fresh insight to central topics in philosophy, history, and cultural studies. The first part of the book addresses questions of current critical concern. The second part extends the work of critique into the past by examining the beginning of modern (...) ethnography in the exploration of Central Africa during the late nineteenth century: the justification of a scientific attitude and the collecting of ethnographic objects. A final essay examines how the Congolese have returned the 'imperial gaze' of Belgium by the work of critical memory in popular history. The ten chapters are framed by two meditations on the relevance of theory and the irrelevance of the millennium. (shrink)

Globalization is often described as the spread of western culture to other parts of the world. How accurate is the depiction of "cultural" flow? In Counterworks , ten anthropologists examine the ways in which global processes have affected particular localities where they have carried out research. They challenge the validity of anthropological concepts of culture in the light of the pervasive connections which exist between local and global factors everywhere. Rather than assuming that the world is culturally diverse, this book (...) proposes that culture is itself a representation of the similarities and differences recognized between forms of social life. The authors address issues of globalization in terms of diverse histories and traditions of knowledge, which may include the construction of difference as cultural. In its attention to specific local situations, such as Bali, Cuba, Bolivia, Greece, Kenya and the Maoris in New Zealand, Counterworks argues that the apparent opposition between strong westernizing, global forces and weak concept of culture, which supposes cultures to be integrated and possessed of essential properties, need rethinking in a contemporary world where a marked sense of culture has become a wide-spread property of people's social knowledge. This book will have wide appeal to anthropologists, to students of comparative studies in history, religion and language, and to anyone interested in the phenomenon of postmodernism. (shrink)

Now, in Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice, path-breaking scholar Michael M. J. Fischer moves the discussion to a consideration of the ...

The Scenic Imagination argues that the uniquely human phenomenon of representation, as manifested in language, art, and ritual, is a scenic event focused on a central object designated by a sign. The originary hypothesis posits the necessity of conceiving the origin of the human as such an event. In traditional societies, the scenic imagination through which this scene of origin is conceived manifests itself in sacred creation narratives. Modern thought is defined by the independent use of the scenic imagination to (...) create anthropological models of the origin of human institutions, beginning with the social contract scene in Hobbes’s Leviathan that puts an end to the reciprocal violence of the state of nature. Eric Gans follows the work of the scenic imagination in selected writings of twenty thinkers including Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Durkheim, Boas, and Freud and concludes his book with a critical examination of contemporary writing on the origins of religion and language. In the process, he demonstrates that the originary hypothesis offers the most cohesive explanation of the origin and function of these fundamental institutions. (shrink)

Originary Thinking deals with generative anthropology, a radically new conception of human science founded on the hypothesis that humanity emerged in a communal event in which intraspecific violence was deferred by the production of a linguistic sign. The author pursues in the areas of religion, ethics, philosophy of language, theory of discourse, and aesthetics, the exploration begun in his The Origin of Language (1981) and continued in The End of Culture (1985) and Science and Faith (1990). The present volume adds (...) two significant new elements: (1) originary analysis-a methodology for rethinking the fundamental categories of the human in terms of the originary scene. On the basis of an originary model of aesthetic experience, the author presents an outline of Western aesthetic history from the classical era to the postmodern. The fundamental premise behind Originary Thinking is that the return to the specificity of a scene of origin is the necessary guarantee of openness in human science. (shrink)

In the theory of the early state it was fundamentally new and important from a methodological point of view to define the early state as a separate stage of evolution essentially different from the following stage, the one of the full-grown or mature state. ‘To reach the early state level is one thing, to develop into a full-blown, or mature state is quite another’ (Claessen and Skalník 1978b: 22). At the same time they (as well as a number of other (...) authors) indicated quite soundly that not all early states were able to become and actually became mature ones (see e.g., Claessen and Skalník 1978a; Claessen and van de Velde 1987b; Shifferd 1987). Thus there was formed exactly an evolutionary sequence of statehood in the form of a two-stage scheme: the early state – the mature state. And that explained a lot in the mechanisms and directions of the political evolution. However, the former of these two stages of the evolution of statehood (the early state) has been studied rather thoroughly, whereas the latter (the mature state) has not become the subject of a similarly close examination. Unfortunately, the analysis of the mature state has been little advanced in those several contributions to the subsequent volumes of the Early State project (further referred to as Project) where the subject was touched upon. In the present paper after a brief analysis of the Project participants' views on the mature state I will present my own approach to the distinction of the stages of the evolution of statehood which to my mind develops and supplements Claessen – Skalník's ideas on the subject. However, this has made it necessary to suggest new formulations of the main characteristics of each stage of the evolution of the state. (shrink)

Finally, this volume offers a self-reflective look at the social and political location of anthropologists in relation to the questions of culture, power, and ...

The postmodern critique of Objectivism, Realism and Essentialism has somewhat shattered the foundations of anthropology, seriously questioning the legitimacy of studying others. By confronting the critique and turning it into a vital part of the anthropological debate, A Passage To Anthropology provides a rigorous discussion of central theoretical problems in anthropology that will find a readership in the social sciences and the humanities. It makes the case for a renewed and invigorated scholarly anthropology with extensive reference to recent anthropological debates (...) in Europe and the US, as well as to new developments in linguistic theory and, especially, newer American philosophy. Although the style of the work is mainly theoretical, the author illustrates the points by referring to her own fieldwork conducted in Iceland. A Passage to Anthropology will be of interest to students in anthropology, sociology and cultural studies. (shrink)

Using Greek ethnography as a mirror for an ethnography of anthropology itself, this book reveals the ways in which the discipline of anthropology is ensnared in the same political and social symbolism as its object of study. The author pushes the comparative goals of anthropology beyond the traditional separation of tribal object from detached scientific observer, and offers the discipline a critical source of reflexive insight based on empirical ethnography rather than on ideological speculation alone.

INTRODUCTION 'Anthropology' does not have quite the same meaning in Germany as it has in English-speaking countries. As the word is used in the latter ...

In this work Tim Ingold provides a persuasive new approach to the theory behind our perception of the world around us. The core of the argument is that where we refer to cultural variation we should be instead be talking about variation in skill. Neither genetically innate or culturally acquired, skills are incorporated into the human organism through practice and training in an environment.They are as much biological as cultural.

I show how archaeologists have two problems. The construction of scenarios accounting for the raw data of Archaeology, the material remains of the past, and the explanation of pre-history. Within Archaeology, there has been an ongoing debate about how to constrain speculation within both of these archaeological projects, and archaeologists have consistently looked to biological mechanisms for constraints. I demonstrate the problems of using biology, either as an analogy for cultural processes or through direct application of biological principles to material (...) remains. This is done through setting out the requirements of a Darwinian Archaeology, and then measuring various approaches against these requirements. This approach leads to the conclusion that archaeologist's explanations of the past must include within their formulations an account of human cognitive capacities within their explanatory framework. The limits of our understanding of the human past will be the limits of our understanding of Homo sapiens. (shrink)

Bringing together ethnographic exposition with philosophical concepts and arguments and effectively transcending subdisciplinary boundaries between cultural and ...

In this innovative introduction, Robert Layton reviews the ideas that have inspired anthropologists in their studies of societies around the world. An Introduction to Theory in Anthropology provides a clear and concise analysis of the theories, and traces the way in which they have been translated into anthropological debates. The opening chapter sets out the classical theoretical issues formulated by Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx and Durkheim. Successive chapters discuss Functionalism, Structuralism, Interactionist theories, and Marxist anthropology, while the final chapters address the (...) competing paradigms of Socioecology and Postmodernism. Using detailed case studies, Professor Layton illustrates the way in which various theoretical perspectives have shaped competing, or complementary, accounts of specific human societies. (shrink)

Since its founding in the nineteenth century, social anthropology has been seen as the study of exotic peoples in faraway places. But today more and more anthropologists are dedicating themselves not just to observing but to understanding and helping solve social problems wherever they occur--in international aid organizations, British TV studios, American hospitals, or racist enclaves in Eastern Europe, for example. In Exotic No More , an initiative of the Royal Anthropological Institute, some of today's most respected anthropologists demonstrate, in (...) clear, unpretentious prose, the tremendous contributions that anthropology can make to contemporary society. They cover issues ranging from fundamentalism to forced migration, child labor to crack dealing, human rights to hunger, ethnicity to environmentalism, intellectual property rights to international capitalisms. But Exotic No More is more than a litany of gloom and doom the essays also explore topics usually associated with leisure or "high" culture, including the media, visual arts, tourism, and music. Each author uses specific examples from their fieldwork to illustrate their discussions, and 62 photographs enliven the text. Throughout the book, the contributors highlight anthropology's commitment to taking people seriously on their own terms, paying close attention to what they are saying and doing, and trying to understand how they see the world and why. Sometimes this bottom-up perspective makes the strange familiar, but it can also make the familiar strange, exposing the cultural basis of seemingly "natural" behaviors and challenging us to rethink some of our most cherished ideas--about gender, "free" markets, "race," and "refugees," among many others. Contributors: William O. Beeman Philippe Bourgois John Chernoff E. Valentine Daniel Alex de Waal Judith Ennew James Fairhead Sarah Franklin Michael Gilsenan Faye Ginsburg Alma Gottlieb Christopher Hann Faye V. Harrison Richard Jenkins Melissa Leach Margaret Lock Jeremy MacClancy Jonathan Mazower Ellen Messer A. David Napier Nancy Scheper-Hughes Jane Schneider Parker Shipton Christopher B. Steiner. (shrink)

All rights reserved no part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to...

This volume collects, for the first time, her writings on the future of humanity and how humans can shape that future through purposeful action.

Embedding Ethics questions why ethics have been divorced from scientific expertise. Invoking different disciplinary practices from biological, archaeological, cultural, and linguistic anthropology, contributors show how ethics should be resituated at the heart of, rather than exterior to, scientific activity. Positioning the researcher as a negotiator of significant truths rather than an adjudicator of a priori precepts enables contributors to relocate ethics in new sets of social and scientific relationships triggered by recent globalization processes--from new forms of intellectual and cultural ownership (...) to accountability in governance, and the very ways in which people are studied. Case studies from ethnographic research, museum display, archaeological fieldwork and professional monitoring illustrate both best practice and potential pitfalls. (shrink)

Naked Science is about contested domains and includes different science cultures: physics, molecular biology, primatology, immunology, ecology, medical environmental, mathematical and navigational domains. While the volume rests on the assumption that science is not autonomous, the book is distinguished by its global perspective. Examining knowledge systems within a planetary frame forces thinking about boundaries that silence or affect knowledge-building. Consideration of ethnoscience and technoscience research within a common framework is overdue for raising questions about deeply held beliefs and assumptions we (...) all carry about scientific knowledge. We need a perspective on how to regard different science traditions because public controversies should not be about a glorified science or a despicable science. Contributors are: Ward Goodenough, Eloisa and Brent Berlin, Colin Scott, Jean Lave, Emily Martin, Troy Duster, Hugh Gusterson, Charles Schwartz, Joan Fujimura, Sharon Traweek, Estellie Smith, Ellen Bielawaski, David Jacobon, Charles Ziegler, Pamela Asquith. (shrink)

The idea of culture has been subject to critical debate in anthropology during the past decade as the result of a shift in emphasis from the bounded local culture to transnational cultural flows. But at the very same time that cultural mobility is being emphasized by anthropologists, the people they study are recasting culture as a place of belonging as they construct local identities. Siting Culture argues that it is only through rich ethnographic studies that anthropologists may explore the significance (...) of place in the global space of relations which mold the lives of people throughout the world. By examining the concept of culture through case studies from Europe, Africa, Oceania, Latin America and the Caribbean, it probes the methodological and theoretical implications of the divergent scholarly and popular concepts of culture. (shrink)

Represents the first volume to consider the modern role of holism as a central anthropological concern across a wide range of anthropological traditions ...

Anthropology is a complex, wide-ranging, and ever-changing field. This clear, coherent, and well-crafted book is a revised version of a very successful text first published in 1986, designed to supplement standard textbooks and monographs. It covers the central concepts, distinctive methodologies, and philosophical as well as practical issues of cultural anthropology, and it is accessible to the anthropological novice, and of value to the professional. The updated version covers current issues in cultural anthropology, and includes topics such as globalization, gender, (...) post-modernism and public issues, and reflects changes in perspective and language. (shrink)

This book brings key authors in anthropology together to debate and transgress anthropological expectations.

This book argues that it is again appropriate to bring "the human" to the fore, to reclaim the singularity of the word as central to the anthropological ...

Anne Warfield Rawls argues that, although Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of Religion is the crowning achievement of his sociological accomplishments, it has been consistently misunderstood. Rather than a work on primitive religion or the sociology of knowledge, Rawls asserts that Durkheim's analysis represents an attempt to establish a unique epistemological basis for the study of sociology and moral relations. Based on detailed analysis of the primary text, this book will be an important and original contribution to contemporary debates on social (...) theory and philosophy. (shrink)

Can a planetary anthropology cope with both the "provincial cosmopolitanism" of alternative anthropologies and the "metropolitan provincialism" of hegemonic schools? How might the resulting "world anthropologies" challenge the current panorama in which certain allegedly national anthropological traditions have more paradigmatic weight--and hence more power--than others? Critically examining the international dissemination of anthropology within and across national power fields, contributors address these questions and many others.

This controversial book is an impassioned African response to the racial stereotyping of African people and people of African descent by prominent white scholars. It highlights how the media contributes to the growth of racist ideas, particularly in reporting current events in Africa, and demonstrates how some of America’s most revered intellectuals cloak racist ideologies in ostensibly egalitarian discourses. The author seeks to rewrite the image of 'race' in order to show the damage racism can cause serious scholarship.

The cognitive revolution in psychology was a significant advance in our thinking about the mind. Philosophers and social scientists have looked to the cognitive sciences with the hope that the social world will yield to similar explanatory strategies. Dan Sperber has argued for a programme that would conceptualize the entire domain of anthropological theory in cognitive terms. Sperber's 'epidemiology' specifically excludes interpretive, structuralist and functionalist theories. This essay evaluates Sperber's epidemiological approach to anthropological theory. It argues that as a programme (...) for anthropological theorizing, Sperber's epidemiology could not be empirically grounded. Cognitive explanations depend on prior interpretations. While interpretation is a kind of theorizing, it cannot be assimilated to cognitive explanation. The essay concludes by sketching an explanatory coherence framework in which ethnographic interpretation and cognitive explanation are seen as parts of a unified body of anthropological theorizing. (shrink)

: At the turn of the twentieth century, comparative studies of human culture (ethnology) gave way to studies of the details of individual societies (ethnography). While many writers have noticed a political sub-text to this paradigm shift, they have regarded political interests as extrinsic to the change. The central historical issue is why anthropologists stopped asking global, comparative questions and started asking local questions about features of particular societies. The change in questions cannot be explained by empirical factors alone, and (...) following Jarvie, this essay argues that political factors motivate the change. Jarvie's understanding of the role played by egalitarian politics is criticized, and the essay develops a new model of how political or moral values can become constitutive of scientific inquiry. On the erotetic view of explanation, whether one proposition explains another depends on the choice of contrast class and relevance criterion. Since political or moral values can motivate these choices, explanation can depend on non-epistemic values. The essay argues that the comparative questions of nineteenth-century ethnology presupposed that Europeans were superior to other races. It closes by arguing that Fanz Boas recognized the political values implicit in nineteenth-century ethnology and rejected its questions on those grounds. (shrink)

This unique book applies concepts from the field of anthropology to clinical settings to result in a powerful and dynamic model/theory of clinical anthropology.

In 2000, the world of anthropology was rocked by a high-profile debate over the fieldwork performed by two prominent anthropologists, Napoleon Chagnon and James V. Neel, among the Yanamamo tribe of South America. The controversy was fueled by the publication of Patrick Tierney's incendiary Darkness in El Dorado which accused Chagnon of not only misinterpreting but actually inciting some of the violence he perceived among these "fierce people". Tierney also pointed the finger at Neel as the unwitting agent of a (...) deadly measles outbreak. Attracting a firestorm of attention, Tierney's book went straight to the heart of anthropology's most pressing questions: What are the right ways to study a tribal people? How can scientists avoid unduly influencing those among whom they live? What guidelines should govern the interactions - economic, social, medical, and sexual - between a scientist in the field and the people being studied? This volume represents anthropology's thoughtful, measured reply to the issues raised by this heated controversy. Placing the dispute within the context of ongoing debates over the ethics of biomedical research among human populations, the contributors to this volume discuss how the interaction between investigators and their subjects can most sensibly be governed. They consider the responsibility of the media in disseminating anti-scientific and pseudo-scientific views, and how scientists might best educate journalists to enable them to effectively educate others. In the wake of what was widely construed as a major scientific scandal, this landmark volume lays out in detail the principles and ground rules of anthropological and scientific fieldwork. (shrink)

There has been a long tradition of characterizing man as the animal that talks. However, the remarkable ability of using pictures also only belongs to human beings, after all we know empirically so far. Are there conceptual reasons for that coincidence? The paper is dedicated to a philosophical programme of “concept-genetic” considerations dealing in particular with the dependencies between those two abilities: The conceptual relation between the competence to use assertive language and the faculty of employing pictures must be conceived (...) of as being much closer than usually expected. Indeed we conclude, there cannot be creatures with only one of them. (shrink)

There is a long tradition of characterizing man as the talking animal. However, the remarkable ability of using pictures also belongs to human beings, after all we know empirically so far. Are there conceptual reasons for that coincidence? Such a question belongs to the general science of language (linguistics) and philosophy of language just as well as to general visualistics (image science) - a discipline just emancipating itself from art history. We here take the visualistics point of view. A first (...) recapitulation of the two abilities to use words or pictures lists several similarities and distinctions. A well-known disparity between pictures and words in the relation to perception can be determined by differences in the modes of usage during the corresponding sign acts. Furthermore, there are distinct ways for splitting up the pictorial or verbal sign acts into figure and ground. Such a structural comparison can only clarify conceptual relations; it cannot explain that the conceptual structure ought to be like that, in contrast to concept-genetic considerations. Correspondingly the discussion is extended to a concept-genetic sketch of the abilities to use language or pictures. This shifts the focus of attention to the concept of sortal objects and the concept of contexts of behavior. They allow us to analyze more precisely the relation between the two abilities in question, in particular as something depending on the function of context building, which enables human beings to communicatively access contexts apart from the actual situation of behavior. We finally gain arguments that characterize that relation as one of mutual dependency, and even lead to an understanding of the concept of inner images - or rather: a concept of imagination. (shrink)

Through an examination of such disciplinary keywords, and their silences, as the West, modernity, globalization, the state, culture, and the field, this book aims to explore the future of anthropology in the 21st century, by examining its past, its origins, and its conditions of possibility alongside the history of the North Atlantic world and the production of the West. In this significant book, Michel-Rolph Trouillot challenges contemporary anthropologists to question dominant narratives of globalization and to radically rethink the utility of (...) the concept of culture, the emphasis upon fieldwork as the central methodology of the discipline, and the relationship between anthropologists and the people whom they study. (shrink)

This volume concerns philosophical issues that arise from the practice of anthropology and sociology. The essays cover a wide range of issues, including traditional questions in the philosophy of social science as well as those specific to these disciplines. Authors attend to the historical development of the current debates and set the stage for future work. · Comprehensive survey of philosophical issues in anthropology and sociology · Historical discussion of important debates · Applications to current research in anthropology and sociology.