Browse

In this culmination of his search for anthropological concepts and practices appropriate to the twenty-first century, the author contends that to make sense of the contemporary, anthropologists must invent new forms of inquiry. He begins with an extended rumination on what he gained from two of his formative mentors: Michel Foucault and Clifford Geertz. Reflecting on their lives as teachers and thinkers, as well as human beings, the author poses questions about their critical limitations, unfulfilled hopes, and the lessons he learned from and with them. This spirit of collaboration animates this book, as the author assesses the last ten years of his career, largely spent engaging in a series of intensive experiments in collaborative research and often focused on cutting-edge work in synthetic biology. He candidly details the successes and failures of shifting his teaching practice away from individual projects, placing greater emphasis on participation over observation in research, and designing and using websites as a venue for collaboration. Analyzing these endeavors alongside his efforts to apply an anthropological lens to the natural sciences, the author lays the foundation for an ethically grounded anthropology ready and able to face the challenges of our contemporary world.

This book asks about the logical standards and forms that should guide ethical and experimental anthropology in the twenty-first century. The authors do so by taking up Max Weber’s notion of the “demands of the day.” Just as the demand of the day for anthropology decades ago consisted of thinking about fieldwork, today, they argue, the demand is to examine what happens after, how the experiences of fieldwork are gathered, curated, narrated, and ultimately made available for an anthropological practice that moves beyond mere ethnographic description. The authors draw on experiences from an innovative set of anthropological experiments that investigated how and whether the human and biological sciences could be brought into a mutually enriching relationship. Conceptualizing the anthropological and philosophic ramifications of these inquiries, they offer a bold challenge to contemporary anthropology to undertake a more rigorous examination of its own practices, blind spots, and capacities, in order to meet the demands of our day.

The book presents a highly original reflection on the status of an “anthropology of the contemporary”. Following on the same authors’ Demands of the Day, this new and convincing manuscript gives a coherent elaboration of the central arguments, movements and shifts from research rooted in the experience of the present to a contemporary one understood as an ethos. The book contains two highly original case studies which illustrate the relevance and richness of this approach. In Part 1, the authors undertake an erudite discussion of philosophical grounds and concepts necessary for an anthropology of the contemporary by way of an ongoing engagement with arguments established by Max Weber, John Dewey and Michel Foucault (e.g. his notion of ‘foyers d’expérience’), as well as with other authors (e.g. Kant, Blumenberg, Warburg, Geertz). Central to this engagement is the guiding idea of anthropological inquiry as ‘practice of form-giving’ linked to an ongoing attention to questions of ethics. The book considers inquiry--and its aftermath—where a near future is at stake, one, however, which is not (or only in part) determined by the past and the present. Part II consists of two case studies: one on the Rushdie Affair, the second one on ‘Gerhard Richter’s Pathos’. Based on different kinds of texts (interviews, letters, printed articles, anthropological research, etc.), they demonstrate the basic ideas of an exploration of the contemporary and its key challenge (for anthropology and contemporaries): how to conceptualize and give form to breakdowns of truth and conduct.

In How Lifeworlds Work, Michael Jackson seeks to reinvigorate the study of kinship and ritual by theorizing a society as a force field in which affective as well as cognitive elements are in tension, and constant adjustments are effected between subjective imperatives and shared needs. Drawing on forty years of ethnographic fieldwork in West Africa and elsewhere, Jackson draws on cybernetics, affect theory, and pragmatism to explore the subtle strategies and micropolitics of face-to-face relationships in both ritual and mundane settings, and the ways that individual passions subvert or serve the common weal.

Living in the Stone Age scrutinizes a stubborn colonial fantasy: one that has trapped the people of the troubled Indonesian territory of West Papua in the past. The book focuses on the experiences of a handful of Dutch officials tasked with establishing a post in the Wissel Lakes region of the highlands when the territory was still part of the Netherlands Indies. Two of these officials played a key role in the campaign to retain western New Guinea as a separate Dutch colony after the Indies gained independence; they saw the Stone Age Papuans as too primitive to rule themselves. The book explores how these officials relied on the hospitality and expertise of local people and how they used sympathy as a means of colonial state building. It examines the dreams of mastery and vulnerability that their dependence on technology inspired. In doing so, it advances a surprising argument: to account for the historical production of this fantasy, and the historical work it has done, we have to tell the story of colonialism as a tale that begins with weakness, not strength. The book ends with a reflection on the ethical and epistemological implications of cultural anthropologists’ own deployment of sympathy as a method. Living in the Stone Age uses a minor episode in colonial history to ask some big questions: on the origins of colonial ideology, the impassioned nature of colonial practices, and what it takes for cultural anthropologists to make claims about such things.

For centuries, humans have excelled at mimicking nature in order to exploit it. Now, with the existential threat of global climate change on the horizon, the ever-provocative Michael Taussig asks what function a newly invigorated mimetic faculty might exert along with such change. Mastery of Non-Mastery in the Age of Meltdown is not solely a reflection on our condition but also a theoretical effort to reckon with the impulses that have fed our relentless ambition for dominance over nature. Taussig seeks to move us away from the manipulation of nature and reorient us to different metaphors and sources of inspiration to develop a new ethical stance toward the world. His ultimate goal is to undo his readers’ sense of control and engender what he calls “mastery of non-mastery.” This unique book developed out of Taussig’s work with peasant agriculture and his artistic practice, which brings performance art together with aspects of ritual. Through immersive meditations on Walter Benjamin, D. H. Lawrence, Emerson, Bataille, and Proust, Taussig grapples with the possibility of collapse and with the responsibility we bear for it.

Methods that Matter is an invitation to explore the benefits of mixed methods. This collection of original essays by leading social scientists illustrates ways of doing work that crosses methodological silos and can inform policy on real world problems. Mixed methods research, if used by individual or collaborating researchers, enables the collection of generalizable and contextualized data simultaneously. Is it worth the effort it takes to go past the methodological comfort zones of particular disciplines? The authors in this book answer with a resounding “Yes!” In their engagingly written chapters, they demonstrate that mixed methods is more than worth the effort—it can lead to more interesting findings than either qualitative or quantitative methodologies alone. This collection ultimately creates a platform for scholarly conversations across disciplines that expand scientific and encourage future interdisciplinary collaborations to answer the real world questions of tomorrow.

As the image of anthropologists exploring exotic locales and filling in blanks on the map has faded, the idea that cultural anthropology has much to say about the contemporary world has likewise diminished. In an increasingly smaller world, how can anthropology help us to tackle the concerns of a global society? This book argues that the traditional tool of the cultural anthropologist—ethnography—can still function as an intellectually exciting way to understand our interconnected, yet mysterious worlds. It describes the changing nature of ethnography as anthropologists use it to analyze places closer to home. The book maintains that a conversational style of ethnography can help us look beyond our assumptions and gain new insight into arenas of contemporary life such as corporations, financial institutions, science, the military, and religion. It is a friendly challenge to anthropologists to shed light on the present and join broader streams of intellectual life. And for those outside the discipline, its vision of ethnography opens up the prospect of understanding our own world in much greater depth.

This book examines the ways in which modern Europeans came to understand themselves as such, in comparison to other peoples who were either not modern (in particular to ancient Geeks and Romans) or not European, including American “savages” and Asian “despots”. By the nineteenth century these terms were arranged as a timeline charting the progress from savagery to “Oriental” despotism to ancient and finally modern Europeans. However, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, the values associated with these terms was far less fixed, and the superiority of modern Europeans was far less self-evident. Accounts of others, sometimes imaginary but sometimes based on real encounters, entered into different, often conflicting, discourses critical of European institutions in the domains of religion, politics, and economy. The French Wars of Religion constituted the impetus for such considerations in the sixteenth century. In the seventeenth century, Jesuit accounts of attempts to convert non-Europeans were central to formulating the terms of such conceptualizations. In the French Enlightenment, accounts of various categories of others figured centrally in debates about natural religion, liberty and political authority, and the social effects of private property. At the end of the eighteenth century, these considerations were synthesized by British thinkers on one hand, contested by German thinkers, particularly Herder, on the other. The book as a whole is a contribution to the history of European ideas about others.

One of the major questions in cultural psychology is how to take diversity seriously while also acknowledging our shared humanity. This collection addresses this question by engaging with the complex issues that underpin the interconnections between culture and the human mind. The contributors to Universalism without Uniformity make two fundamental claims: first, that as humans we are motivated to find meaning in everything around us; and, second, that the cultural worlds we live in are constituted by our involvement in them. Therefore, we exist as human beings specifically because we interpret and make sense of the events and experiences of our lives—and we do so using the meanings and resources we draw from the cultural worlds that we have created through our thoughts and actions. They argue that what is universal about humans are the abstract potentialities of the human mind—the ability to think and act, to feel and desire, to possess norms and values, to have purpose and goals, and to envision the social and natural worlds. At the same time, these very basic human traits are emergent, realizing their full potential only within the context of the symbolic and behavioral traditions of a community. They conclude that there are few, if any, “deep” or “hard-wired” mental structures, and certainly none that are immune to the surrounding sociocultural context, or that function apart from it. Offering empirically-driven research that takes psychological diversity seriously, Universalism without Uniformity breaks new ground in the interdisciplinary study of culture and mind.