This collection begins its rich analytical investigation by describing how people Australian Aborigines, New Zealand Maori, Japanese, and Africans first learn the figured worlds of their own culture, made up of sensations, affirmations and ...

Philosophy and anthropology have many, but largely unexplored, links and interrelationships. Historically, they have informed each other in subtle ways. This volume of original essays explores and enhances this relationship through anthropological engagement with philosophy and vice versa, the nature, sources and history of philosophical anthropology, phenomenology, and the practical, methodological and theoretical implications of a dialogue between the two subjects. ‘Philosophy and Anthropology: Border Crossings and Transformations’ seeks to enrich both the humanities and the social sciences through its informative (...) and stimulating essays. (shrink)

The chapter addresses the crucial question of whether in fact sociology actually answers the questions that it purports to and suggests that in much of its present form the subject is still trapped in a framework of Eurocentric and Cartesian assumptions that would be greatly modified and deepened by considering alternative ways of conceptualizing the social world. The chapter attempts to offer exactly such a fresh viewpoint by investigating alternative sources of sociological insight, including those that might arise from Buddhism, (...) significant thinkers left outside the canon of mainstream sociology, ecology and feminism. The notion of “deep sociology” has obvious analogies with “deep ecology”, and the chapter argues that by exploring that analogy new forms of sociology and social theory can be conceived that open up basic existential questions which, while in some sense implied in conventional sociology, need to be foregrounded. While these include the crucial issue of ecology, they also include such topics as death, love, illness and the body. The chapter provides a sketch of potential new forms of social analysis, which, while it does not deny the concept of the ‘social’, attempts to recast it in creative ways. (shrink)

One of the most persistent dualisms that have bedeviled thought and analysis for a very long time has been that of the material and the spiritual. One of the many effects of this has been to assign economics to the realm of the material, and of course religion to the realm of the spiritual. But in fact, the slightest acquaintance with economics shows that it is the social science that most enshrines values. Seen in this light, conventional neo-classical or neo-liberal (...) economics is a profound and immensely damaging form of false consciousness. This chapter strives to transform this by cultivating dialogues with spiritual pragmatism and economics of solidarity. (shrink)

Intense debates have taken place in Japan about the country's role in the post-war world system and the question of whether Japan has achieved the modernity that makes it a member of and player in that system. These debates, however, have largely centred on a discourse of uniqueness, defined in cultural (and culturalist) terms. This domination of a single interpretative framework has suppressed alternative analyses of Japanese modernity. Some of the most significant of these alternative voices take the central question (...) to be one not of culture, but of ethics. Some significant Japanese social theorists, including Maruyama Masao, a discussion of whose ideas forms the core of this paper, have argued that Japan has either not achieved true modernity or has only achieved a distorted version of it (and has certainly not attained to postmodernity), because as a civilization it has never evolved subjectivity understood as the appearance of the morally autonomous individual. Such ideas resonate interestingly with the ideas of some prominent western theorists of postmodernity and its ethics, especially with the work of Zygmunt Bauman. The debate between Bauman's characterization of `postmodern ethics' and Japan poses fresh ways of rethinking Japanese modernity and puts new questions to western Japanology. (shrink)