The Anthropological Turn

The Anthropological Turn
Author: Jacob Collins
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2020-04-24
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0812252160

A close look at post-1968 French thinkers Régis Debray, Emmanuel Todd, Marcel Gauchet, and Alain de Benoist In The Anthropological Turn, Jacob Collins traces the development of what he calls a tradition of "political anthropology" in France over the course of the 1970s. After the social revolution of the 1960s brought new attention to identities and groups that had previously been marginal in French society, the country entered a period of stagnation: the economy slowed, the political system deadlocked, and the ideologies of communism and Catholicism lost their appeal. In this time of political, cultural, and economic indeterminacy, political anthropology, as Collins defines it, offered social theorists grand narratives that could give greater definition to "the social" by anchoring its laws and histories in the deep and sometimes archaic past. Political anthropologists sought to answer the most basic of questions: what is politics and what constitutes a political community? Collins focuses on four influential, yet typically overlooked, French thinkers—Régis Debray, Emmanuel Todd, Marcel Gauchet, and Alain de Benoist —who, from Left to far Right, represent different political leanings in France. Through a close and comprehensive reading of their work, he explores how key issues of religion, identity, citizenship, and the state have been conceptualized and debated across a wide spectrum of opinion in contemporary France. Collins argues that the stakes have not changed since the 1970s and rival conceptions of the republic continue to vie for dominance. Political and cultural issues of the moment—the burkini, for example—become magnified and take on the character of an anthropological threat. In this respect, he shows how the anthropological turn, as it figures in the work of Debray, Todd, Gauchet, and Benoist, is a useful lens for viewing the political and social controversies that have shaped French history for the last forty years.

The Anthropological Turn

The Anthropological Turn
Author: Jacob Collins
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2020-04-24
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0812297024

A close look at post-1968 French thinkers Régis Debray, Emmanuel Todd, Marcel Gauchet, and Alain de Benoist In The Anthropological Turn, Jacob Collins traces the development of what he calls a tradition of "political anthropology" in France over the course of the 1970s. After the social revolution of the 1960s brought new attention to identities and groups that had previously been marginal in French society, the country entered a period of stagnation: the economy slowed, the political system deadlocked, and the ideologies of communism and Catholicism lost their appeal. In this time of political, cultural, and economic indeterminacy, political anthropology, as Collins defines it, offered social theorists grand narratives that could give greater definition to "the social" by anchoring its laws and histories in the deep and sometimes archaic past. Political anthropologists sought to answer the most basic of questions: what is politics and what constitutes a political community? Collins focuses on four influential, yet typically overlooked, French thinkers—Régis Debray, Emmanuel Todd, Marcel Gauchet, and Alain de Benoist —who, from Left to far Right, represent different political leanings in France. Through a close and comprehensive reading of their work, he explores how key issues of religion, identity, citizenship, and the state have been conceptualized and debated across a wide spectrum of opinion in contemporary France. Collins argues that the stakes have not changed since the 1970s and rival conceptions of the republic continue to vie for dominance. Political and cultural issues of the moment—the burkini, for example—become magnified and take on the character of an anthropological threat. In this respect, he shows how the anthropological turn, as it figures in the work of Debray, Todd, Gauchet, and Benoist, is a useful lens for viewing the political and social controversies that have shaped French history for the last forty years.

The Ontological Turn

The Ontological Turn
Author: Martin Holbraad
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 355
Release: 2017-03-23
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1107103886

This book provides the first systematic presentation of anthropology's 'ontological turn', placing it in the landscape of contemporary social theory.

Serendipity in Anthropological Research

Serendipity in Anthropological Research
Author: Haim Hazan
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2016-04-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317057074

Challenging the idea that fieldwork is the only way to gather data, and that standard methods are the sole route to fruitful analysis, Serendipity in Anthropological Research explores the role of fortune and happenstance in anthropology. It conceives of anthropological research as a lifelong nomadic journey of discovery in which the world yields an infinite number of unexplored issues and innumerable ways of studying them, each study producing its own questions and demanding its own methodologies. Drawing together the latest research from a team of senior scholars from around the world to reflect on the experience of research, Serendipity in Anthropological Research presents rich new case studies from Europe and the Middle East to examine both new and old questions in novel and enriching ways. An engaging examination of methodology and anthropological fieldwork, this book will appeal to all those concerned with writing ethnography.

The Postcolonial Turn

The Postcolonial Turn
Author: Francis B. Nyamnjoh
Publisher: African Books Collective
Total Pages: 468
Release: 2011
Genre: History
ISBN: 9956726656

This innovative book is a forward-looking reflection on mental decolonisation and the postcolonial turn in Africanist scholarship. As a whole, it provides five decennia-long lucid and empathetic research involvements by seasoned scholars who came to live, in local people's own ways, significant daily events experienced by communities, professional networks and local experts in various African contexts. The book covers materials drawn from Botswana, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, Nigeria, South Africa and Tanzania. Themes include the Whelan Research Academy, rap musicians, political leaders, wise men and women, healers, Sacred Spirit churches, diviners, bards and weavers who are deemed proficient in the classical African geometrical knowledge. As a tribute to late Archie Mafeje who showed real commitment to decolonise social sciences from western-centred modernist development theories, commentators of his work pinpoint how these theories sought to dismiss the active role played by African people in their quest for self-emancipation. One of the central questions addressed by the book concerns the role of an anthropologist and this issue is debated against the background of the academic lecture delivered by René Devisch when receiving an honorary doctoral degree at the University of Kinshasa. The lecture triggered critical but constructive comments from such seasoned experts as Valentin Mudimbe and Wim van Binsbergen. They excoriate anthropological knowledge on account that the anthropologist, notwithstanding his or her social and cognitive empathy and intense communication with the host community, too often fails to also question her own world and intellectual habitus from the standpoint of her hosts. Leading anthropologists carry further into great depth the bifocal anthropological endeavour focussing on local people's re-imagining and re-connecting the local and global. The book is of interest to a wide readership in the humanities, social sciences, philosophy and the history of the African continent and its relation with the North.

Cultural Turns

Cultural Turns
Author: Doris Bachmann-Medick
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 465
Release: 2016-01-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3110403072

The contemporary fields of the study of culture, the humanities and the social sciences are unfolding in a dynamic constellation of cultural turns. This book provides a comprehensive overview of these theoretically and methodologically groundbreaking reorientations. It discusses the value of the new focuses and their analytical categories for the work of a wide range of disciplines. In addition to chapters on the interpretive, performative, reflexive, postcolonial, translational, spatial and iconic turns, it discusses emerging directions of research. Drawing on a wealth of international research, this book maps central topics and approaches in the study of culture and thus provides systematic impetus for changed disciplinary and transdisciplinary research in the humanities and beyond – e.g., in the fields of sociology, economics and the study of religion. This work is the English translation by Adam Blauhut of an influential German book that has now been completely revised. It is a stimulating example of a cross-cultural translation between different theoretical cultures and also the first critical synthesis of cultural turns in the English-speaking world.

The Sorcerer's Burden

The Sorcerer's Burden
Author: Heather Pesanti
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2019
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9781942185604

The authors explore the complicated relationship between art and anthropologyas it has been probed in the work of contemporary artists.

The Anthropological Turn, Christian Humanism, and Vatican II

The Anthropological Turn, Christian Humanism, and Vatican II
Author: Dries Bosschaert
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2019
Genre: Christian humanism
ISBN: 9789042940277

Quid est autem homo? What is the human person? This question, raised in paragraph twelve of Gaudium et spes, was addressed by both bishops and theologians throughout the redaction process of the Second Vatican Council's Pastoral Constitution. This had been an open and contested question for many years before Vatican II was convened, and no definitive answer had been found by the time the council closed. This volume investigates how this question haunted theologians in the mid-twentieth century, and it focuses especially on Louvain theology. More particularly, its first chapter discusses the anthropological turn that occurred in twentieth-century theology and which was shaped by aspects of Christian humanism, the theology of history, theology of earthly realities, theology of society, and theology of the laity. The following four chapters sketch the intellectual itineraries of Albert Dondeyne, Gerard Philips, Gustave Thils, and Charles Moeller. These four Louvain theologians respectively developed a universal Christian humanism, an ecclesiology ad extra, an integrated Christian anthropology, and a humanism of the Beatitudes. The last three chapters analyze the reception of their thinking at the Second Vatican Council, focusing especially on the Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et spes. The text of Malines, a draft text written in 1963, is presented as a cornerstone of Louvain's contribution to this anthropological turn.

Critical Junctions

Critical Junctions
Author: Don Kalb
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2005
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781845450298

"A book about theory and method in the humanities and social sciences. It reacts to what has become known as the "cultural turn," a shift toward semiotics, discourse, and representations and away from other sorts of determinations that started in the early 1980s and that has dominated social thinking for a long string of years. The book is based in a reconsideration of the meeting of two disciplines that helped to launch the cultural turn: anthropology and history. Specifically, it criticizes the ideas of hermeneutics and "thick description" (Clifford Geertz) that have come to play a key role in the encounter of anthropology and history and then in the cultural turn. It led to the renewed cherishing of what Gupta and Ferguson have called paradigms of "peoples and places," saturated pictures of universes, both small and large, of meaning ina more of less frozen standstill-an intellectual precursor to the cultural xenophobia of our times. Against this, the present book embraces praxis and "critical junctions": the connections in space (in and out of a relations of power and dependency, and what Eric Wolf has called the "interstitial relations" between apparently separate institutional domains. In this way the book adds to the current revival of institutionally based "global ethnography," which studies "up and outward" (the journal of Ethnography is a good example)."--Preface