Synopses & Reviews
Under what conditions is anthropology possible today, when a crisis of social meaning - a crisis that makes it more difficult to conceive and manage our relation to the other - makes the need for anthropology appear more clearly than ever before? Positioned in opposition not only to political theories of universalization and uniformization, but also to 'postmodernist' versions of anthropological theories of multiplicity and relativism, the author argues that social anthropology, through its self-critical tradition, is fully capable of adapting to the accelerated change that is continuously recomposing relations between universalism and particularisms. It is for social anthropology to select, analyze, and understand the new modes of sociality and the new spaces in which these new recompositions manifest themselves.
Synopsis
Argues that social anthropology can adapt to the new tension between universalism and particularism.
Synopsis
The author argues that social anthropology is fully capable of adapting to the accelerated change that is continuously recomposing relations between universalism and particularisms. It is for social anthropology to select, analyze, and understand the new modes of sociality and the new spaces in which these new recompositions manifest themselves.
Synopsis
Under what conditions is anthropology possible today, when a crisis of social meaninga crisis that makes it more difficult to conceive and manage our relation to the othermakes the need for anthropology appear more clearly than ever before? This book sets forth at least the beginning of an answer to this question.
About the Author
Marc Augé is President of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. Among his dozen books is A Sense for the Other: The Timeliness and Relevance of Anthropology (Stanford, 1998).
Table of Contents
Preface; 1. Anthropology's historical space, history's anthropological time; 2. 'Concencus' and 'postmodernity' put to the test of contemporaneity; 3. Toward contemporaneity; 4. Two types of ritual and their corresponding myths: political as ritual; 5. New worlds; Afterword; Notes.