Anthropology and Social Theory

Anthropology and Social Theory
Author: Sherry B. Ortner
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2006-11-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780822338642

The award-winning anthropologist Sherry B. Ortner draws on her longstanding interest in theories of cultural practice to rethink key concepts of culture, agency, and subjectivity.

Death of the Father

Death of the Father
Author: John Borneman
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2004
Genre: Authority
ISBN: 9781571811110

'Death of the Father' is a comparative examination of the crises in symbolic identification and national traumas that have resulted from the defeat and/or implosion of regimes in Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and Communist Eastern Europe.

Anthropology and Law

Anthropology and Law
Author: Mark Goodale
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 429
Release: 2017-05-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1479836850

An introduction to the anthropology of law that explores the connections between law, politics, and technology From legal responsibility for genocide to rectifying past injuries to indigenous people, the anthropology of law addresses some of the crucial ethical issues of our day. Over the past twenty-five years, anthropologists have studied how new forms of law have reshaped important questions of citizenship, biotechnology, and rights movements, among many others. Meanwhile, the rise of international law and transitional justice has posed new ethical and intellectual challenges to anthropologists. Anthropology and Law provides a comprehensive overview of the anthropology of law in the post-Cold War era. Mark Goodale introduces the central problems of the field and builds on the legacy of its intellectual history, while a foreword by Sally Engle Merry highlights the challenges of using the law to seek justice on an international scale. The book’s chapters cover a range of intersecting areas including language and law, history, regulation, indigenous rights, and gender. For a complete understanding of the consequential ways in which anthropologists have studied, interacted with, and critiqued, the ways and means of law, Anthropology and Law is required reading.

The Anthropology of Power

The Anthropology of Power
Author: Angela Cheater
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2003-12-16
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1134650485

This book uses ethnographic analysis to examine the issues surrounding power and empowerment. It presents material drawn from across the world to explore how traditionally disempowered groups gain influence in multicultural settings.

How to Think Like an Anthropologist

How to Think Like an Anthropologist
Author: Matthew Engelke
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2019-06-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0691193134

"What is anthropology? What can it tell us about the world? Why, in short, does it matter? For well over a century, cultural anthropologists have circled the globe, from Papua New Guinea to suburban England and from China to California, uncovering surprising facts and insights about how humans organize their lives and articulate their values. In the process, anthropology has done more than any other discipline to reveal what culture means--and why it matters. By weaving together examples and theories from around the world, Matthew Engelke provides a lively, accessible, and at times irreverent introduction to anthropology, covering a wide range of classic and contemporary approaches, subjects, and practitioners. Presenting a set of memorable cases, he encourages readers to think deeply about some of the key concepts with which anthropology tries to make sense of the world--from culture and nature to authority and blood. Along the way, he shows why anthropology matters: not only because it helps us understand other cultures and points of view but also because, in the process, it reveals something about ourselves and our own cultures, too." --Cover.

Policy Worlds

Policy Worlds
Author: Cris Shore
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2011-04-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0857451170

There are few areas of society today that remain outside the ambit of policy processes, and likewise policy making has progressively reached into the structure and fabric of everyday life. An instrument of modern government, policy and its processes provide an analytical window into systems of governance themselves, opening up ways to study power and the construction of regimes of truth. This volume argues that policies are not simply coercive, constraining or confined to static texts; rather, they are productive, continually contested and able to create new social and semantic spaces and new sets of relations. Anthropologists do not stand outside or above systems of governance but are themselves subject to the rhetoric and rationalities of policy. The analyses of policy worlds presented by the contributors to this volume open up new possibilities for understanding systems of knowledge and power and the positioning of academics within them.

Political Anthropology

Political Anthropology
Author: Donald V Kurtz
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2018-02-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0429966814

The field of political anthropology is complicated by a breadth and depth of interests that include every kind of ethnographically and historically represented political community, and nearly every kind of recorded political practice, behavior, and organization. To make sense of this array of information, political anthropologists examine political topics and issues in the context of research paradigms that include structural-functionalism, pro-cessualism, political economy, political evolution, and, arguably, post-modernism. In Political Anthropology, Donald V. Kurtz examines how anthropologists think about politics, political organizations, and problems fundamental to political anthropology. He explores the ideas with which they address universal political concerns, the paradigms that direct political research by anthropologists, and political topics of special interest.

The Anthropology of Power

The Anthropology of Power
Author: Angela Cheater
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2003-12-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1134650477

An edited collection which examines the theoretical issues surrounding power, and particularly empowerment, which uses ethnographic analysis as its basis. It takes material from the Middle East, Canada, Columbia, Australasia and various parts of Europe and Africa. It looks particularly at the extent to which traditionally disempowered groups gain influence in postcolonial or multicultural settings, and at how power relates to economic development, gender and environmentalism.

The Mana of Mass Society

The Mana of Mass Society
Author: William Mazzarella
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2017-10-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 022643639X

We often invoke the “magic” of mass media to describe seductive advertising or charismatic politicians. In The Mana of Mass Society, William Mazzarella asks what happens to social theory if we take that idea seriously. How would it change our understanding of publicity, propaganda, love, and power? Mazzarella reconsiders the concept of “mana,” which served in early anthropology as a troubled bridge between “primitive” ritual and the fascination of mass media. Thinking about mana, Mazzarella shows, means rethinking some of our most fundamental questions: What powers authority? What in us responds to it? Is the mana that animates an Aboriginal ritual the same as the mana that energizes a revolutionary crowd, a consumer public, or an art encounter? At the intersection of anthropology and critical theory, The Mana of Mass Society brings recent conversations around affect, sovereignty, and emergence into creative contact with classic debates on religion, charisma, ideology, and aesthetics.

Pathways of Power

Pathways of Power
Author: Eric R. Wolf
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 486
Release: 2001-01-03
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0520223349

This collection of essays was devised by the author to study how anthropology brought the study of complex societies and world systems in to its purview.