Bøger i Methodology & History in Anthropology serien

A range of meaningful objects-exhibits of human remains or live people, fetishes, objects in a Catholic Museum, exotic photographs, commodities, and computers-demonstrate a subordinate modern consciousness about powerful objects and their 'life'. The Spirit of Matter discusses these objects that move people emotionally but whose existence is often denied by modern wishful thinking of 'mind over matter'. It traces this mindset back to Protestant Christian influences that were secularized in the course of modern and colonial history.

What is it to be human? What are our specifically human attributes, our capacities and liabilities? Such questions gave birth to anthropology as an Enlightenment science. This book argues that it is again appropriate to bring "e;the human"e; to the fore, to reclaim the singularity of the word as central to the anthropological endeavor, not on the basis of the substance of a human nature - "e;To be human is to act like this and react like this, to feel this and want this"e; - but in terms of species-wide capacities: capabilities for action and imagination, liabilities for suffering and cruelty. The contributors approach "e;the human"e; with an awareness of these complexities and particularities, rendering this volume unique in its ability to build on anthropology's ethnographic expertise.

Combining rich personal accounts from twelve veteran anthropologists with reflexive analyses of the state of anthropology today, this book is a treatise on theory and method offering fresh insights into the production of anthropological knowledge, from the creation of key concepts to major paradigm shifts. Particular focus is given to how 'peripheral perspectives' can help re-shape the discipline and the ways that anthropologists think about contemporary culture and society. From urban Maori communities in Aotearoa/New Zealand to the Highlands of Papua New Guinea, from Arnhem Land in Australia to the villages of Yorkshire, these accounts take us to the heart of the anthropological endeavour, decentring mainstream perspectives, and revealing the intimate relationships and processes that create anthropological knowledge.

Franz Baermann Steiner (1909-52) provided the vital link between the intellectual culture of central Europe and the Oxford Institute of Anthropology in its post-Second World War years. This book demonstrates his quiet influence within anthropology, which has extended from Mary Douglas to David Graeber, and how his remarkable poetry reflected profoundly on the slavery and murder of the Shoah, an event which he escaped from. Steiner's concerns including inter-disciplinarity, genre, refugees and exile, colonialism and violence, and the sources of European anthropology speak to contemporary concerns more directly now than at any time since his early death.

Explores the Durkheim School's ambitious critique of philosophical interpretations of the genesis and constitution of the categories of thought. With contributions from philosophy, sociology, anthropology, media studies, and sinology, this volume illustrates the interdisciplinarity and intellectual rigor of the "category project".

Mauss, successor of Emile Durkheim and one-time teacher of Claude Levi-Strauss, continues to inspire social scientists across various disciplines. Only selected texts of Mauss's work have been translated into English, but of these, some, i.e. "Essay on the Gift," have proved of key significance for the development of anthropology internationally.

Longstanding and resilient local ideas of property and practices of inheritance control the destinies of those living in Bearn, a region of south-west France in the foothills of the French Pyrenees. Based on extensive fieldwork and archival research that combines ethnography and intellectual history...

The work of Louis Dumont, who died in 1998, on India and modern individualism represented certain theoretical advances on the earlier structuralism of Claude Levi-Strauss. One such advance is Dumont's idea of hierarchical opposition, which he proposed as a truer representation of indigenous ideologies than Levi-Strauss's binary opposition.

Based on ethnography-driven regional comparison and a critical re-examination of classic monographs on some forty cultural groups, this volume makes the arresting claim that across equatorial Africa, the model of rule has been medicine - and not (as Europeans have long assumed) the colonizer's despotic administrator...

Inspired by existential thought, but using ethnographic methods, Jackson explores a variety of compelling topics, including 9/11, episodes from the war in Sierra Leone and its aftermath, the marginalization of indigenous Australians, the application of new technologies, mundane forms of ritualization, the magical use of language, the sociality of violence, the prose of suffering, and the discourse of human rights. Throughout this compelling work, Jackson demonstrates that existentialism, far from being a philosophy of individual being, enables us to explore issues of social existence and coexistence in new ways, and to theorise events as the sites of a dynamic interplay between the finite possibilities of the situations in which human beings find themselves and the capacities they yet possess for creating viable forms of social life.

Tim Ingold has raised many questions which are crucial for anthropology as a discipline, such as whether ethnography is central to the subject, and how imagination, reality and truth are joined in anthropological enterprises. His interventions have impacted anthropologists and scholars at large.

Reigniting a tradition of learning by experience, Search After Method is a plea for more lively forms of anthropology. The chapters relate the contributor's first experiences of working in the field and use their experiences to link their work to the discipline of Anthropology, along with other broader fieldwork questions.

Reigniting a tradition of learning by experience, Search After Method is a plea for more lively forms of anthropology. The chapters relate the contributor's first experiences of working in the field and use their experiences to link their work to the discipline of Anthropology, along with other broader fieldwork questions.

Exploring lived atheism in the South Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, this book offers a unique insight into India's rapidly transforming multi-religious society and develops an alternative to Eurocentric accounts of secularity...

A translation of Louis Dumont's lectures on kinship, which provide a comprehensive overview of descent theory and alliance theory for students. This work features these two theories of kinship which are associated with the British and French schools of social anthropology, as well as the theoretical tendencies of functionalism and structuralism.

Marcel Mauss (1872-1950), Durkheim's nephew, was a key figure among Durkheimians and helped to found the distinctive French tradition in the social sciences at the start of the 20th century. He dominated the teaching of social anthropology in Paris between the Wars, and his Essay on the Gift (1925) is a well established classic.

Starting from an ethnographic appraisal of the place of religious practices, and thereby returning to an approach more recently neglected, this book offers a detailed understanding of English everyday life. Three contemporary case studies disclose the complex patterns and compulsion of ordinary lives, including both moral and historical dimensions.

This is the first collection of Franz Steiner's keynote papers on comparative economics and the classification of labor,complemented by major unpublished texts on politics, civilization, and cultural criticism. This enables a complete re-evaluation of Steiner's thought.

Steiner's (1909-52) classic study Taboo and three other essays, on superstition, enslavement and the early Hebrew lineage system, and Chagga law and truth comprise the first of two volumes collecting the work of the Prague-born social and cultural anthropologist who ended his brief career at Oxford.

Through the concept of "e;social navigation,"e; this book sheds light on the mobilization of urban youth in West Africa. Social navigation offers a perspective on praxis in situations of conflict and turmoil. It provides insights into the interplay between objective structures and subjective agency, thus enabling us to make sense of the opportunistic, sometimes fatalistic and tactical ways in which young people struggle to expand the horizons of possibility in a world of conflict, turmoil and diminishing resources.

The significance that people grant to their affiliations as members of nations, religions, classes, races, ethnicities and genders is evidence of the vital need for a cosmopolitan project that originates in the figure of Anyone - the universal and yet individual human being. Cosmopolitanism offers an alternative to multiculturalism, a different vision of identity, belonging, solidarity and justice, that avoids the seemingly intractable character of identity politics: it identifies samenesses of the human condition that underlie the surface differences of history, culture and society, nation, ethnicity, religion, class, race and gender. This book argues for the importance of cosmopolitanism as a theory of human being, as a methodology for social science and as a moral and political program.

How should we tell the histories of academic disciplines? All too often, the political and institutional dimensions of knowledge production are lost beneath the intellectual debates. This book redresses the balance. Written in a narrative style and drawing on archival sources and oral histories, it depicts the complex pattern of personal and administrative relationships that shape scholarly worlds. Focusing on the field of social anthropology in twentieth-century Britain, this book describes individual, departmental and institutional rivalries over funding and influence. It examines the efforts of scholars such as Bronislaw Malinowski, Edward Evans-Pritchard and Max Gluckman to further their own visions for social anthropology. Did the future lie with the humanities or the social sciences, with addressing social problems or developing scholarly autonomy? This new history situates the discipline's rise within the post-war expansion of British universities and the challenges created by the end of Empire.

In the early 1980s, when the contributors to this volume completed their graduate training at Oxford, the conditions of practice in anthropology were undergoing profound change. Here self-ethnography is used to portray the contributors' anthropological trajectories, showing how analytical and academic engagements interacted creatively over time.

This volume's ethnographic analyses provide a theoretical frame through which to consider the production and reproduction of ignorance, non-knowledge, and secrecy.

Brings together different generations of Timor-Leste scholars into dialogue to reconsider a diversity of such critical topics as the incorporation of strangers, the meanings of colonial documents, the value of sacred heirlooms, or the remembering (and forgetting) of colonial violence.

Who do `we' anthropologists think `we' are? Drawing together reflections and ethnographic case studies, this volume explores how the anthropological `we' has been construed, transformed and deployed across history and the global anthropological landscape.

The interview creates a context of interaction with a particular authenticity to experience. Contributors explore how the interview is experienced as a particular kind of knowing within which personal, biographic, and social norms are explored and interrogated, providing direction and awareness for future encounters.