Genealogies for the Present in Cultural Anthropology

Genealogies for the Present in Cultural Anthropology
Author: Bruce M. Knauft
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 402
Release: 2013-09-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1136661344

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In the wake of tensions between modern and postmodern sensibilities, what larger directions now emerge in cultural anthropology? In this major work, Bruce Knauft takes stock of important recent initiatives in cultural and critical theory. By combining critical reviews and ethnographic engagements with fresh readings of major figures and approaches, the work develops a larger vantage point for considering the dispersing influence of practice theories, postmodernism, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, modern/post-positive feminism, and multicultural criticisms.

Black Feminist Anthropology

Black Feminist Anthropology
Author: Irma McClaurin
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2001
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780813529264

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In the discipline's early days, anthropologists by definition were assumed to be white and male. Women and black scholars were relegated to the field's periphery. From this marginal place, white feminist anthropologists have successfully carved out an acknowledged intellectual space, identified as feminist anthropology. Unfortunately, the works of black and non-western feminist anthropologists are rarely cited, and they have yet to be respected as significant shapers of the direction and transformation of feminist anthropology. In this volume, Irma McClaurin has collected-for the first time-essays that explore the role and contributions of black feminist anthropologists. She has asked her contributors to disclose how their experiences as black women have influenced their anthropological practice in Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States, and how anthropology has influenced their development as black feminists. Every chapter is a unique journey that enables the reader to see how scholars are made. The writers present material from their own fieldwork to demonstrate how these experiences were shaped by their identities. Finally, each essay suggests how the author's field experiences have influenced the theoretical and methodological choices she has made throughout her career. Not since Diane Wolf's Feminist Dilemmas in the Field or Hortense Powdermaker's Stranger and Friend have we had such a breadth of women anthropologists discussing the critical (and personal) issues that emerge when doing ethnographic research.

Invisible Genealogies

Invisible Genealogies
Author: Regna Darnell
Publisher: Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 416
Release: 2001
Genre: Social Science
ISBN:

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This inaugural volume of the series deconstructs a "rhetoric of discontinuity" that characterizes contemporary anthropology in North America, with a view to illuminating the persistent effects of Americanist theory, method, and ethnography. Darnell (U. of Western Ontario) describes Americanism as a tradition related to the study of American Indians and associated with Franz Boas and his students. The approach dominated the discipline in North America until after World War II; it also embodies a way of working that US-trained anthropologists exported around the globe with the post-war proliferation of field sites. Though the tradition has become invisible in disciplinary memory, Darnell writes, it continues to be crucial in defining disciplinary identity. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

Invisible Genealogies

Invisible Genealogies
Author: Regna Darnell
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 412
Release: 2001-01-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780803219151

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Invisible Genealogies is a landmark reinterpretation of the history of anthropology in North America. During the past two decades, theorizing by many American anthropologists has called for an "experimental moment" grounded in explicit self-reflexive scholarship and experimentation with alternate forms of presentation. Such postmodern anthropology has effectively downplayed connections with past luminaries in the field, whose scholarship is perceived to be uncomfortably colonialist and nonreflexive. Ironically, as the American Anthropological Association nears its one hundredth anniversary and interest in the history of the discipline is at an all-time high, that history has been effectively presented as removed from and irrelevant to the new generation. Invisible Genealogies offers an alternative, compelling vision of the development of anthropology in North America, one that emphasizes continuity rather than discontinuity from legendary founder Franz Boas to the present. Regna Darnell identifies key interpretive assumptions and practices that have persisted, sometimes in modified form, since the groundbreaking work of A. L. Kroeber, Boas, Ruth Benedict, Edward Sapir, Elsie Clews Parsons, Paul Radin, Benjamin Lee Whorf, and A. Irving Hallowell during the founding decades of anthropology. Also highlighted are the Americanist roots of postmodern anthropology and the work of innovative recent scholars like Claude Lävi-Strauss and Clifford Geertz.

Theory from the South

Theory from the South
Author: Jean Comaroff
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2015-11-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317250621

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As nation-states in the Northern Hemisphere experience economic crisis, political corruption and racial tension, it seems as though they might be 'evolving' into the kind of societies normally associated with the 'Global South'. Anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff draw on their long experience of living in Africa to address a range of familiar themes - democracy, national borders, labour and capital and multiculturalism. They consider how we might understand these issues by using theory developed in the Global South. Challenging our ideas about 'developed' and 'developing' nations, Theory from the South provides new insights into key problems of our time.

Theory in Social and Cultural Anthropology

Theory in Social and Cultural Anthropology
Author: R. Jon McGee
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Total Pages: 1053
Release: 2013-08-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1506307752

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Social and cultural anthropology and archaeology are rich subjects with deep connections in the social and physical sciences. Over the past 150 years, the subject matter and different theoretical perspectives have expanded so greatly that no single individual can command all of it. Consequently, both advanced students and professionals may be confronted with theoretical positions and names of theorists with whom they are only partially familiar, if they have heard of them at all. Students, in particular, are likely to turn to the web to find quick background information on theorists and theories. However, most web-based information is inaccurate and/or lacks depth. Students and professionals need a source to provide a quick overview of a particular theory and theorist with just the basics—the "who, what, where, how, and why," if you will. In response, SAGE Reference plans to publish the two-volume Theory in Social and Cultural Anthropology: An Encyclopedia. Features & Benefits: Two volumes containing approximately 335 signed entries provide users with the most authoritative and thorough reference resource available on anthropology theory, both in terms of breadth and depth of coverage. To ease navigation between and among related entries, a Reader's Guide groups entries thematically and each entry is followed by Cross-References. In the electronic version, the Reader's Guide combines with the Cross-References and a detailed Index to provide robust search-and-browse capabilities. An appendix with a Chronology of Anthropology Theory allows students to easily chart directions and trends in thought and theory from early times to the present. Suggestions for Further Reading at the end of each entry and a Master Bibliography at the end guide readers to sources for more detailed research and discussion.

Beyond Foucault: Excursions in Political Genealogy

Beyond Foucault: Excursions in Political Genealogy
Author: Michael Clifford
Publisher: MDPI
Total Pages: 141
Release: 2018-10-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3038972444

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This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue "Beyond Foucault: Excursions in Political Genealogy" that was published in Genealogy

Genealogies of Religion

Genealogies of Religion
Author: Talal Asad
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 346
Release: 1993-08-18
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0801895936

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In Geneologies of Religion, Talal Asad explores how religion as a historical category emerged in the West and has come to be applied as a universal concept. The idea that religion has undergone a radical change since the Christian Reformation—from totalitarian and socially repressive to private and relatively benign—is a familiar part of the story of secularization. It is often invokved to explain and justify the liberal politics and world view of modernity. And it leads to the view that "politicized religions" threaten both reason and liberty. Asad's essays explore and question all these assumptions. He argues that "religion" is a construction of European modernity, a construction that authorizes—for Westerners and non-Westerners alike—particular forms of "history making."

Exchanging the Past

Exchanging the Past
Author: Bruce M. Knauft
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2002-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0226446352

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Twenty years ago, the Gebusi of the lowland Papua New Guinea rainforest had one of the highest homicide rates in the world. Bruce M. Knauft found then that the killings stemmed from violent scapegoating of suspected sorcerers. But by the time he returned in 1998, homicide rates had plummeted, and Gebusi had largely disavowed vengeance against sorcerers in favor of modern schools, discos, markets, and Christianity. In this book, Knauft explores the Gebusi's encounter with modern institutions and highlights what their experience tells us more generally about the interaction between local peoples and global forces. As desire for material goods grew among Gebusi, Knauft shows that they became more accepting of and subordinated by Christian churches, community schools,and government officials in their attempt to benefit from them—a process Knauft terms "recessive agency." But the Gebusi also respond actively to modernity, creating new forms of feasting, performance, and music that meld traditional practices with Western ones, all of which Knauft documents in this fascinating study.

The Genealogical Science

The Genealogical Science
Author: Nadia Abu El-Haj
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2012-04-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 0226201406

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This volume analyses the scientific work and social implications of the flourishing field of genetic history. The author examines genetic history's working assumptions about culture and nature, identity and biology, and the individual and the collective.