Synopses & Reviews
Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture 166
Clifford Geertz17 Anthropology and the Analysis of Ideology 173
Talal Asad
18 Subjectivity and Cultural Critique 186
Sherry B. Ortner
Section 6 Language and Method 191
19 Structural Analysis in Linguistics and in Anthropology 192
Claude Lévi-Strauss
20 Ordinary Language and Human Action 204
Malcolm Crick
21 Language, Anthropology and Cognitive Science 210
Maurice Bloch
Section 7 Cognition, Psychology, and Neuroanthropology 221
22 Towards an Integration of Ethnography, History and the Cognitive Science of Religion 222
Harvey Whitehouse
23 Linguistic and Cultural Variables in the Psychology of Numeracy 226
Charles Stafford
24 Subjectivity 231
T. M. Luhrmann
25 Why the Behavioural Sciences Need the Concept of the Culture-Ready Brain 236
Charles Whitehead
Section 8 Bodies of Knowledges 245
26 Knowledge of the Body 246
Michael Jackson
27 The End of the Body? 260
Emily Martin
28 Hybridity: Hybrid Bodies of the Scientific Imaginary 276
Lesley Sharp
PART III 283
Section 9 Coherence and Contingency 285
29 Puritanism and the Spirit of Capitalism 286
Max Weber
30 Introduction to Europe and the People Without History 293
Eric R. Wolf
31 Introduction to Of Revelation and Revolution 308
Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff
32 Epochal Structures I: Reconstructing Historical Materialism 322
Donald L. Donham
33 Structures and the Habitus 332
Pierre Bourdieu
Section 10 Universalisms and Domain Terms 343
34 Body and Mind in Mind, Body and Mind in Body: Some Anthropological Interventions in a Long Conversation 344
Michael Lambek
35 So Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture? 357
Sherry B. Ortner
36 Global Anxieties: Concept-Metaphors and Pre-theoretical Commitments in Anthropology 363
Henrietta L. Moore
Section 11 Perspectives and Their Logics 377
37 The Rhetoric of Ethnographic Holism 378
Robert J. Thornton
38 Writing Against Culture 386
Lila Abu-Lughod
39 Cutting the Network 400
Marilyn Strathern
Section 12 Objectivity, Morality, and Truth 411
40 The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant Anthropology 412
Nancy Scheper-Hughes
41 Moral Models in Anthropology 419
Roy D’Andrade
42 Postmodernist Anthropology, Subjectivity, and Science: A Modernist Critique 429
Melford E. Spiro
43 Beyond Good and Evil? Questioning the Anthropological Discomfort with Morals 441
Didier Fassin
PART IV 445
Section 13 The Anthropology of Western Modes of Thought 447
44 The Invention of Women 448
Oyèrónké Oyìwùmí
45 Valorizing the Present: Orientalism, Postcoloniality and the Human Sciences 455
Vivek Dhareshwar
46 Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism 461
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro
Section 14 (Re)defining Objects of Inquiry 475
47 What Was Life? Answers from Three Limit Biologies 476
Stefan Helmreich
48 The Near and the Elsewhere 481
Marc Augé
49 Relativism 492
Bruno Latour
Section 15 Subjects, Objects, and Affect 501
50 How to Read the Future: The Yield Curve, Affect, and Financial Prediction 502
Caitlin Zaloom
51 Signs Are Not the Garb of Meaning: On the Social Analysis of Material Things 508
Webb Keane
52 Affective Spaces, Melancholic Objects: Ruination and the Production of Anthropological Knowledge 514
Yael Navaro-Yashin
Section 16 Imagining Methodologies and Meta-things 521
53 Beyond “Culture”: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference 522
Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson
54 What is at Stake – and is not – in the Idea and Practice of Multi-sited Ethnography 531
George E. Marcus
55 Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination 535
Arjun Appadurai
56 The End of Anthropology, Again: On the Future of an In/Discipline 547
John Comaroff
Section 17 Anthropologizing Ourselves 555
57 Participant Objectivation 556
Pierre Bourdieu
58 Anthropology of Anthropology? Further Reflections on Reflexivity 561
P. Steven Sangren
59 World Anthropologies: Cosmopolitics for a New Global Scenario in Anthropology 566
Gustavo Lins Ribeiro
60 Cultures of Expertise and the Management of Globalization: Toward the Re-functioning of Ethnography 571
Douglas R. Holmes and George E. Marcus
Index 576
Review
“This volume has few precedents and no rival. It is of singular breadth. The editors are at once discriminating and judicious in their selections: no playing favorites here. Their introductory essays are masterful--accessible enough that the uninitiated can engage them but also so well informed and argued that even the professional can learn from them. It offers a record of anthropological theory past and present and manages to point as well to possible theoretical futures. By illustration and by design, it offers an answer to the question that is as common as it is distressing: “Just what is anthropology, anyway?” It’s an indispensable pedagogical resource." -
James D. Faubion, Professor of Anthropology, Rice University, USA“A thoughtfully selected, persuasively organized and refreshingly original collection that illuminates the generative assumptions, debates and practices from which anthropological knowledge has been and continues to be produced.” – Mary Hancock, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
Synopsis
This second edition of the widely praised
Anthropology in Theory: Issues in Epistemology, features a variety of updates, revisions, and new readings in its comprehensive presentation of issues in the history of anthropological theory and epistemology over the past century.
- Provides a comprehensive selection of 60 readings and an insightful overview of the evolution of anthropological theory
- Revised and updated to reflect an on-going strength and diversity of the discipline in recent years, with new readings pointing to innovative directions in the development of anthropological research
- Identifies crucial concepts that reflect the practice of engaging with theory, particular ways of thinking, analyzing and reflecting that are unique to anthropology
- Includes excerpts of seminal anthropological works, key classic and contemporary debates in the discipline, and cutting-edge new theorizing
- Reveals broader debates in the social sciences, including the relationship between society and culture; language and cultural meanings; structure and agency; identities and technologies; subjectivities and trans-locality; and meta-theory, ontology and epistemology
Synopsis
The first edition of
Anthropology in Theory: Issues in Epistemology garnered widespread praise for its comprehensive presentation of issues relating to the history of anthropological theory and epistemology over the past century. The new edition includes a variety of revisions and updates to reflect an on-going resurgence of the discipline, and features several new readings that point to innovative theoretical directions in the development of anthropological theory in recent years.
While tracing the course of anthropological theory, readings cover a broad range of topics that include excerpts and central concepts of seminal anthropological works, key classic and contemporary debates in the discipline, and cutting-edge new theorizing. Also revealed are the ways anthropological projects continue to shape broader debates in the social sciences—everything from society and culture, structure and agency, identities and technologies, subjectivities and trans-locality to meta-theory, ontology, and epistemology. At once enlightening and accessible, Anthropology in Theory: Issues in Epistemology, 2nd Edition, offers invaluable insights into the theoretical assumptions underlying the development of modern cultural anthropology.
About the Author
Henrietta L. Moore is the William Wyse Chair of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Her most recent book is
Still Life: Hopes, Desires and Satisfactions (2011).
Todd Sanders is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, and has worked in Africa for two decades. His books include Those Who Play with Fire: Gender, Fertility and Transformation in East and Southern Africa (2004) and Beyond Bodies: Rainmaking and Sense Making in Tanzania (2008).
Table of Contents
PART ISection 1. Culture and Behaviour
1. The aims of anthropological research. In Race, Language and Culture
Franz Boas
2. The concept of culture in science. In The Nature of Culture.
Alfred Kroeber
3. Naven: a survey of the problems suggested by a composite picture of the culture of a New Guinea tribe drawn from three points of view
Bateson, Gregory
4. The individual and the pattern of culture. From Patterns of Culture.
Ruth
Section 2. Structure and System
5. The Rules of sociological method
E. Durkheim
6. On social structure. In Structure and Function in Primitive Society.
Radcliffe-Brown
7. Introduction. From Political Systems of Highland Burma.
E. R. Leach
8. Social structure. In Anthropology Today.
C. Levi-Strauss
Section 3. Function and Environment
9. The group, and the individual in functional analysis. American Journal of Sociology.
Malinowski
10. The concept and method of cultural ecology. In Theory of Culture Change.
Julian Steward
11. Energy and the evolution of culture. The Science of Culture.
Leslie White
12. Ecology, cultural and non-cultural. In Introduction to Cultural Anthropology.
A. Vayda and R. Rappaport
Section 4. Methods and Objects
13. Understanding and explanation in social anthropology. In The British Journal of Sociology.
J. H. M. Beattie
14. Anthropological data and social reality. In Actions, norms and representations.
Holy Ladislav and Stuchlik Milan
15. Objectification objectified. In The logic of practice.
Pierre Bourdieu
PART II
Section 5. Meanings as Objects of Study
16. Thick description: toward an interpretive theory of culture. In The interpretation of cultures.
Clifford Geertz
17. Anthropology and the analysis of ideology. Man.
Talal Asad
18. Subjectivity and cultural critique. Anthropological Theory.
S. Ortner
Section 6. Language and Method
19. Structural analysis in linguistics and in anthropology. In Structural Anthropology.
C. Levi-Strauss
20. Ordinary language and human action. In Explorations in Language and Meaning.
M. Crick
21. Language, anthropology and cognitive science. Man.
M. Bloch
Section 7. Cognition, Psychology and Neuroanthropology
22. Towards an integration of ethnography, history, and the cognitive science of religion. In Religion, Anthropology and Cognitive Science.
Harvey Whitehouse
23. Linguistic and cultural variables in the psychology of numeracy. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
Charles Stafford
24. Subjectivity. Anthropological Theory.
Tanyia Luhrmann
25. Why the behavioural sciences need the concept of the culture-ready brain. Anthropological Theory.
Charles Whitehead
Section 8. Bodies of Knowledges
26. Knowledge of the body. Man.
Michael Jackson
27. The end of the body? American Ethnologist.
E. Martin
28. Hybrid Bodies of the Scientific Imaginary. In Companion to the Anthropology of the Body and Embodiment.
Lesley Sharp
PART III
Section 9. Coherence and Contingency
29. Puritanism and the spirit of Capitalism.
Max Weber
30. Introduction. Europe and the People Without History.
Eric Wolf
31. Of Revelation and Revolution.
J. Comaroff and J. Comaroff
32. Epochal structures I. reconstructing historical materialism. In History, power and ideology: central issues in Marxist anthropology.
Donald Donham
33. Structures and the habitus. In Outline of a Theory of Practice.
Pierre Bourdieu
Section 10. Universalisms and Domain Terms
34. Body and mind in mind, body and mind in body: some anthropological interventions in a long conversation. In Bodies and persons: comparative perspectives from Africa and Melanesia.
M. Lambek
35. So, is female to male and nature is to culture? In The politics and erotics of culture.
S. B. Ortner
36. Global anxieties. Anthropological Theory.
H. L. Moore
Section 11. Perspectives and their Logics
37. The rhetoric of ethnographic holism. Cultural Anthropology.
R. Thornton
38. Writing against culture. In Recapturing Anthropology.
L. Abu-Lughod
39. Cutting the network. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
M. Strathern
Section 12. Objectivity, Morality and Truth
40. The primacy of the ethical. Current Anthropology.
N. Scheper-Hughes
41. Moral models in anthropology. Current Anthropology.
R. D'Andrade
42. Postmodernist anthropology, subjectivity, and science: a modernist critique. Comparative Studies in Society and History.
M. E. Spiro
43. Beyond good and evil? Anthropological Theory.
D. Fassin
PART IV
Section 13. The Anthropology of Western Modes of Thought
44. The invention of women: making an African sense of western gender discourses.
O. Oyewumi
45. Valorizing the present: Orientalism, postcoloniality and the human sciences. Cultural Dynamics.
V. Dhareshwar
46. Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
E. Viveiros de Castro
Section 14. (Re)defining Objects of Enquiry
47. What was life? Answers from three limit biologies. Critical Inquiry.
Stefan Helmreich
48. The near and the elsewhere. In Non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity.
Marc Augé
49. Relativism. In We Have Never Been Modern.
Bruno Latour
Section 15. Subjects, Objects and Affect
50. How to read the future: the yield curve, affect, and financial prediction. Public Culture.
Caitlin Zaloom
51. Signs are not the garb of meaning. In Materiality.
Web Keane
52. Affective spaces, melancholic objects: ruination and the production of anthropological knowledge. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
Navaro-Yashin
Section 16. Imagining Methodologies and Meta-things
53. Beyond 'culture': space, identity, and the politics of difference. Cultural Anthropology.
A. Gupta & J. Ferguson
54. What is at stake - and is not - in the idea and practice of multi-sited ethnography. Canberra Anthropology.
G. E. Marcus
55. Grassroots globalization and the research imagination. Public Culture.
A. Appadurai
56. The end of anthropology, again: on the future on an in/discipline. American Anthropologist.
John Comaroff
Section 17. Anthropologising Ourselves
57. Participant objectification. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 9.
Bourdieu
58. Anthropology of anthropology? Further reflections on reflexivity. Anthropology Today.
S. Sangren
59. World anthropologies: cosmopolitics for a new global scenario in anthropology. Critique of Anthropology.
G. Ribeiro
60. Cultures of expertise and the management of globalization: toward the re-functioning of ethnography. In Global Assemblages.
Douglas Holmes and George E. Marcus