After Ethnos

After Ethnos
Author: Tobias Rees
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 179
Release: 2018-10-25
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 147800228X

For most of the twentieth century, anthropologists understood themselves as ethnographers. The art of anthropology was the fieldwork-based description of faraway others—of how social structures secretly organized the living-together of a given society, of how a people had endowed the world surrounding them with cultural meaning. While the poetics and politics of anthropology have changed dramatically over the course of a century, the basic equation of anthropology with ethnography—as well as the definition of the human as a social and cultural being—has remained so evident that the possibility of questioning it occurred to hardly anyone. In After Ethnos Tobias Rees endeavors to decouple anthropology from ethnography—and the human from society and culture—and explores the manifold possibilities of practicing a question-based rather than an answer-based anthropology that emanates from this decoupling. What emerges from Rees's provocations is a new understanding of anthropology as a philosophically and poetically inclined, fieldwork-based investigation of what it could mean to be human when the established concepts of the human on which anthropology has been built increasingly fail us.

Ethnicity, Nationalism and Conflict in and After the Soviet Union

Ethnicity, Nationalism and Conflict in and After the Soviet Union
Author: Valery Tishkov
Publisher: SAGE
Total Pages: 356
Release: 1997
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780761951858

Valery Tishkov is a well-known Russian historian and anthropologist, and former Minister of Nationalities in Yeltsin's government. This book draws on his inside knowledge of major events and extensive primary research. Tishkov argues that ethnicity has a multifaceted role: it is the most accessible basis for political mobilization; a means of controlling power and resources in a transforming society; and therapy for the great trauma suffered by individuals and groups under previous regimes. This complexity helps explain the contradictory nature and outcomes of public ethnic policies based on a doctrine of ethno-nationalism.

Science in the Forest, Science in the Past

Science in the Forest, Science in the Past
Author: Willard McCarty
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2022-03-29
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1000566455

Science in the Forest, Science in the Past: Further Interdisciplinary Explorations comprises of papers from the second of two workshops involving a group of scholars united in the conviction that the great diversity of knowledge claims and practices for which we have evidence must be taken seriously in their own terms rather than by the yardstick of Western modernity. Bringing to bear social anthropology, history and philosophy of science, computer science, classics and sinology among other fields, they argue that the use of such dismissive labels as ‘magic’, ‘superstition’ and the ‘irrational’ masks rather than solves the problem and reject counsels of despair which assume or argue that radically alien beliefs are strictly unintelligible to outsiders and can be understood only from within the system in question. At the same time, they accept that how to proceed to a better understanding of the data in question poses a formidable challenge. Key problems identified in the inaugural workshop, whose proceedings were published in HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory (2019) and in HAU Books (2020), provided the basis for asking how obvious pitfalls might be avoided and a new or revised framework within which to pursue these problems proposed. The chapters in this book were originally published in Interdisciplinary Science Reviews.

The Gumilev Mystique

The Gumilev Mystique
Author: Mark Bassin
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2016-02-04
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1501703390

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the legacy of the historian, ethnographer, and geographer Lev Nikolaevich Gumilev (1912–1992) has attracted extraordinary interest in Russia and beyond. The son of two of modern Russia’s greatest poets, Nikolai Gumilev and Anna Akhmatova, Gumilev spent thirteen years in Stalinist prison camps, and after his release in 1956 remained officially outcast and professionally shunned. Out of the tumult of perestroika, however, his writings began to attract attention and he himself became a well-known and popular figure. Despite his highly controversial (and often contradictory) views about the meaning of Russian history, the nature of ethnicity, and the dynamics of interethnic relations, Gumilev now enjoys a degree of admiration and adulation matched by few if any other public intellectual figures in the former Soviet Union. He is freely compared to Albert Einstein and Karl Marx, and his works today sell millions of copies and have been adopted as official textbooks in Russian high schools. Universities and mountain peaks alike are named in his honor, and a statue of him adorns a prominent thoroughfare in a major city. Leading politicians, President Vladimir Putin very much included, are unstinting in their deep appreciation for his legacy, and one of the most important foreign-policy projects of the Russian government today is clearly inspired by his particular vision of how the Eurasian peoples formed a historical community. In The Gumilev Mystique, Mark Bassin presents an analysis of this remarkable phenomenon. He investigates the complex structure of Gumilev’s theories, revealing how they reflected and helped shape a variety of academic as well as political and social discourses in the USSR, and he traces how his authority has grown yet greater across the former Soviet Union. The themes he highlights while untangling Gumilev’s complicated web of influence are critical to understanding the political, intellectual, and ethno-national dynamics of Russian society from the age of Stalin to the present day.

Latinos in America

Latinos in America
Author: Jorge J. E. Gracia
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2008-04-30
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0470695749

A first-of-its-kind book that seriously and profoundly examines what it means philosophically to be Latino and where Latinos fit in American society. Offers a fresh perspective and clearer understanding of Latin American thought and culture, rejecting answers based on stereotypes and fear Takes an interdisciplinary approach to the philosophical, social, and political elements of Hispanic/Latino identity, touching upon anthropology, history, cultural studies and sociology, as well as philosophy Written by Jorge J. E. Gracia, one of the most influential thinkers of Hispanic/Latino descent

Surviving Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality

Surviving Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality
Author: Jorge J. E. Gracia
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2005
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780742550179

Surviving Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality is the first book of philosophy that explores race, ethnicity, and nationality together and attempts to present a systematic and unified theory about them with particular emphasis on the metaphysical and epistemological issues that these phenomena raise.

Philosophers on Race

Philosophers on Race
Author: Julie K. Ward
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2008-04-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0470752041

Philosophers on Race adds a new dimension to current research on race theory by examining the historical roots of the concept in the works of major Western philosophers.

The Jewish People in Classical Antiquity

The Jewish People in Classical Antiquity
Author: John Haralson Hayes
Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 1998-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780664257279

John Hayes and Sara Mandell provide a clear exposition of Jewish history from 333 BCE to 135 CE. This volume focuses on the Judean-Jerusalem community from a historical rather than ideological or theological perspective. With the inclusion of charts, maps, and ancient texts, the authors have constructed a fascinating account that is indispensable for the study of this crucial period.

Anthropogenic Rivers

Anthropogenic Rivers
Author: Jerome Whitington
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 163
Release: 2019-01-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1501730932

In the 2000s, Laos was treated as a model country for the efficacy of privatized, "sustainable" hydropower projects as viable options for World Bank-led development. By viewing hydropower as a process that creates ecologically uncertain environments, Jerome Whitington reveals how new forms of managerial care have emerged in the context of a privatized dam project successfully targeted by transnational activists. Based on ethnographic work inside the hydropower company, as well as with Laotians affected by the dam, he investigates how managers, technicians and consultants grapple with unfamiliar environmental obligations through new infrastructural configurations, locally-inscribed ethical practices, and forms of flexible experimentation informed by American management theory. Far from the authoritative expertise that characterized classical modernist hydropower, sustainable development in Laos has been characterized by a shift from the risk politics of the 1990s to an ontological politics in which the institutional conditions of infrastructure investment are pervasively undermined by sophisticated ‘hactivism.’ Whitington demonstrates how late industrial environments are infused with uncertainty inherent in the anthropogenic ecologies themselves. Whereas ‘anthropogenic’ usually describes human-induced environmental change, it can also show how new capacities for being human are generated when people live in ecologies shot through with uncertainty. Implementing what Foucault called a "historical ontology of ourselves," Anthropogenic Rivers formulates a new materialist critique of the dirty ecologies of late industrialism by pinpointing the opportunistic, ambitious and speculative ontology of capitalist natures.

The Anthropologist as Curator

The Anthropologist as Curator
Author: Roger Sansi
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2020-05-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000185435

Why do contemporary art curators define their work as ethnography? How can curation illuminate the practice of contemporary anthropology? Does anthropology risk disappearing as a specific discipline within the general model of the curatorial? The Anthropologist as Curator collects together the research of international scholars working at the intersection of anthropology and contemporary art in order to explore these questions. The essays in the book challenge what it means to do ethnographic work, as well as the very definition of the discipline of anthropology in confrontation with the model of the curatorial. The contributors examine these ideas from a variety of angles, and the book includes perspectives from anthropologists who have set up their own exhibitions; those who have conducted fieldwork on the arts, including participatory practices, digital images and sound; and contributors who are currently working in a curatorial capacity at a museum.With case studies from the USA, Canada, Germany, Brazil, Mexico, India and Japan, the book represents an international perspective and is relevant to students and scholars of anthropology, contemporary art, museum studies, curatorial studies and heritage studies.