Synopses & Reviews
Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture: Clifford Geertz.
Part II: Section 7: Meanings as Objects of Study.
22. Anthropology and the Analysis of Ideology: Talal Asad.
23. Anthropology as Interpretive Quest: Roger M. Keesing.
Section 8: Language and Method.
24. Structural Analysis in Linguistics and in Anthropology and The Structural Study of Myth: Claude Levi-Strauss.
25. Ordinary Language and Human Action: Malcolm Crick.
26. Language, Anthropology and Cognitive Science: Maurice Bloch.
Section 9: Thinking and Believing.
27. Introduction to Belief Language, and Experience: Rodney Needham.
28. The Antinomies: Stephen A. Tyler.
29. Anthropology and Psychology: Towards an Epidemiology of Representations: Dan Sperber.
Section 10: Bodies of Knowledges.
30. Knowledge of the Body: Michael Jackson.
31. The End of the Body?: Emily Martin.
32. The Body of the Condemned: Michel Foucault.
Part III: Section 11: Coherence and Contingency.
33. Puritanism and the Spirit of Capitalism: Max Weber.
34. Introduction to Europe and the People without History: Eric R. Wolf.
35. Introduction to Of Revelation and Revolution: Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff.
36. Epochal Structures I: Reconstructing historical materialism: Donald L. Donham.
37. Structures and the Habitus: Pierre Bourdieu.
38. Two Lectures: Michel Foucault.
Section 12: Universalisms and Domain Terms.
39. Body and Mind in Mind, Body and Mind in Body: Some Anthropological Interventions in a Long Conversation: Michael Lambek.
40. Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?: Sherry B. Ortner.
41. Global Anxieties: Henrietta L. Moore.
Section 13: Perspectives and their Logics.
42. The Rhetoric of Ethnographic Holism: Robert J. Thornton.
43. Writing Against Culture: Lila Abu-Lughod.
44. Cutting the Network: Marilyn Strathern.
Section 14: Objectivity, Morality and Truth.
45. The Objectivity of Knowledge in Social Science and Social Policy: Max Weber.
46. The Primacy of the Ethical: Nancy Scheper-Hughes.
47. Moral Models in Anthropology: Roy D'Andrade.
48. Postmodernist Anthropology, Subjectivity, and Science: A Modernist Critique: Melford E. Spiro.
Part IV: Section 15: The Anthropology of Western Modes of Thought.
49. Preface to The Invention of Women: Oyeronke Oyewumi.
50. Valorizing the Present: Orientalism, Postcoloniality, and the Human Sciences: Vivek Dhareshwar.
51. Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism: Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.
Section 16: (Re)defining Objects of Enquiry.
52. Culture, Genuine and Spurious: The Politics of Indianness in the Vaupes Colombia: Jean E. Jackson.
53. The Near and the Elsewhere: Marc Auge.
54. Relativism: Bruno Latour.
Section 17: Imagining Methodologies and Meta-things.
55. Beyond Culture: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference: Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson.
56. What is at Stake -- and is not -- in the Idea and Practice of Multi-sited Ethnography: George E. Marcus.
57. Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination: Arjun Appadurai.
Index
Review
“
Anthropology in Theory is a dazzling collection and Moore and Sanders have impeccable taste in theory. Their selection of readings---an exhibit of famous voices (from Boas to Bourdieu), visionary positions (from functionalism to poststructuralism) and clarion and root concepts (from cultural pattern to cultural hybridity)---is not only well-designed; the book is certain to be a boon to the practice of teaching anthropology in the new millennium.”
Richard A. Shweder, University of Chicago“This volume offers intellectual questions and debates by which anthropology has come to know itself as a discipline. The editors challenge us to recognize new forms of imagination emerging within and outside of anthropological practice. In this effort, they surpass themselves.” Debbora Battaglia, Mt. Holyoke College
"This book breaks fascinating ground in its breadth of coverage and depth of analysis. The editors have done an exemplary job of engaging the study of Anthropology from myriad angles in an attempt to show the student that mastery of this discipline takes a keen eye and a mind willing to go beyond surface debate into the core of each 'theory'."
The Electric Review
Synopsis
The 57 articles collected in this volume---together with the editors’ introduction---provide an overview of the key debates in anthropological theory over the past century.
- Provides the most comprehensive selection of readings and insightful overview of anthropological theory available
- Identifies crucial conceptual signposts and new theoretical directions for the discipline
- Discusses broader debates in the social sciences: debates about society and culture; structure and agency; identities and technologies; subjectivities and translocality; and meta-theory, ontology and epistemology
Synopsis
The 57 articles collected in this volume---together with the editors' introduction---provide an overview of the key debates in anthropological theory over the past century.
Synopsis
The 57 articles collected in
Anthropology in Theory: Issues in Epistemology, together with the editors’ introduction, provide the most comprehensive selection of readings and insightful overview available of anthropological theory and epistemology over the past century.
Anthropology in Theory identifies crucial conceptual signposts for the continued resurgence of the discipline and new theoretical directions. Moreover, it demonstrates both the vitality and value of anthropological theorizing within the discipline, as well as how such anthropological projects are fundamentally reconfiguring broader debates in the social sciences: debates about society and culture; structure and agency; identities and technologies; subjectivities and translocality; meta-theory, ontology and epistemology; language and meaning; subjectivity and objectivity; and localities and globalities.
About the Author
Henrietta L. Moore is Professor of Social Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her publications include:
Space, Text and Gender (Cambridge, 1986; Guilford, 1996),
Feminism and Anthropology (Polity, 1988),
A Passion for Difference (Polity, 1994),
Cutting Down Trees: Gender, Nutrition and Change in the Northern Province of Zambia, 1890-1990 (with Megan Vaughan; James Currey, 1994),
The Future of Anthropological Knowledge (1996),
Anthropological Theory Today (Polity, 1999),
Those Who Play with Fire: Gender, Fertility and Transformation in East and Southern Africa (with Todd Sanders and B. Kaare, 1999),
Magical Interpretations, Material Realities: Modernity, Witchcraft and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa (with Todd Sanders, 2001), and
The Subject of Anthropology: Essays on Lacan and Lévi-Strauss (Polity, 2005).
Todd Sanders is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. His publications include: Those Who Play with Fire: Gender, Fertility and Transformation in East and Southern Africa (with H. L. Moore and B. Kaare, 1999), Magical Interpretations, Material Realities: Modernity, Witchcraft and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa (with H. L. Moore, 2001), and Transparency and Conspiracy: Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World Order (with Harry West, 2003).
Table of Contents
Notes on the Editors.
General Introduction: Henrietta L. Moore and Todd Sanders.
Acknowledgments.
Anthropology and Epistemology: Henrietta L. Moore and Todd Sanders.
Part I: Section 1: Culture and Behavior.
1. The Aims of Anthropological Research: Franz Boas.
2. The Concept of Culture in Science: A. L. Kroeber.
3. Problems and Methods of Approach: Gregory Bateson.
4. Rules for the Explanation of Social Facts: Emile Durkheim.
Section 2: Society and Social Patterns.
5. The Limitations of the Comparative Method of Anthropology: Franz Boas.
6. Anthropology and Sociology: Edward Sapir.
7. The Individual and the Patterns of Culture: Ruth Benedict.
Section 3: Function and Environment.
8. The Group and the Individual in Functional Analysis: Bronislaw Malinowski.
9. The Concept and Method of Cultural Ecology: Julian H. Steward.
10. Energy and the Evolution of Culture: Leslie A. White.
Section 4: Structure and System.
11. On Social Structure: A. R. Radcliffe-Brown.
12. Introduction to Political Systems of Highland Burma: E. R. Leach.
13. Social Structure: Claude Levi-Strauss.
Section 5: Methods and Objects.
14. Understanding and Explanation in Social Anthropology: J. H. M. Beattie.
15. Anthropological Data and Social Reality: Ladislav Holy and Milan Stuchlik.
16. Objectification Objectified: Pierre Bourdieu.
Section 6: Biology and Ontogeny.
17. Becoming Persons: Consciousness and Sociality in Human Evolution: Tim Ingold.
18. Customs and Cultures in Animals and Humans: Kathleen R. Gibson.
19. Introduction to Mind, Materiality and History: Christina Toren.
20. The Development of Meaning: Ontogeny and Culture: A. F. Robertson.
21. Thick