An Anthropology of Things
Author: Ikuya Tokoro
Publisher:
Published: 2018
Total Pages: 424
ISBN-13: 9781925608984
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"First published in Japanese by by Kyoto Japanese Press in 2011 as Mono no jinruigaku"--Title page verso
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The Social Life of Things
Author: Arjun Appadurai
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 1988-01-29
Total Pages: 350
ISBN-13: 1107392977
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe meaning that people attribute to things necessarily derives from human transactions and motivations, particularly from how those things are used and circulated. The contributors to this volume examine how things are sold and traded in a variety of social and cultural settings, both present and past. Focusing on culturally defined aspects of exchange and socially regulated processes of circulation, the essays illuminate the ways in which people find value in things and things give value to social relations. By looking at things as if they lead social lives, the authors provide a new way to understand how value is externalized and sought after. Containing contributions from American and British social anthropologists and historians, the volume bridges the disciplines of social history, cultural anthropology, and economics, and marks a major step in our understanding of the cultural basis of economic life and the sociology of culture. It will appeal to anthropologists, social historians, economists, archaeologists, and historians of art.
An Anthropology of Nothing in Particular
Author: Martin Demant Frederiksen
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Published: 2018-08-31
Total Pages: 136
ISBN-13: 178535700X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThere have been claims that meaninglessness has become epidemic in the contemporary world. One perceived consequence of this is that people increasingly turn against both society and the political establishment with little concern for the content (or lack of content) that might follow. Most often, encounters with meaninglessness and nothingness are seen as troubling. "Meaning" is generally seen as being a cornerstone of the human condition, as that which we strive towards. This was famously explored by Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning in which he showed how even in the direst of situations individuals will often seek to find a purpose in life. But what, then, is at stake when groups of people negate this position? What exactly goes on inside this apparent turn towards nothing, in the engagement with meaninglessness? And what happens if we take the meaningless seriously as an empirical fact?
An Anthropology of Absence
Author: Mikkel Bille
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Published: 2010-03-24
Total Pages: 220
ISBN-13: 1441955291
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn studying material culture, anthropologists and archaeologists use meaningful physical objects from a culture to help understand the less tangible aspects of that culture, such as societal structure, rituals, and values. What happens when these objects are destroyed, by war, natural disaster, or other historical events? Through detailed explanations of eleven international case studies, the contributions reveal that the absence of objects can be just as telling as their presence, while the objects created to memorialize a loss also have important cultural implications. Covering everything from organ donation, to funerary rituals, to prisoners of war, The Archaeology of Absence is written at an important intersection of archaeological and anthropological study. Divided into three sections, this volume uses the "presence" of absence to compare cultural perceptions of: material qualities and created memory, the mind/body connection, temporality, and death. This rich text provides a strong theoretical framework for anthropologists and archaeologists studying material culture.
Things as They are
Author: Michael Jackson
Publisher:
Published: 1996-01-01
Total Pages: 278
ISBN-13: 9780253330369
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn this timely collection of essays, thirteen contemporary ethnographers demonstrate the importance of phenomenological and existential ideas for anthropology. In emphasizing the link between the empirical and the experiential, these ethnographers also explore the relationship between phenomenology and other theories of the lifeworld, such as existentialism, radical empiricism, and critical theory. Empiricism, and Anthropological Critique by Michael Jackson; Honor and Shame by Lila Abu-Lughod; Struggling Along by Robert Desjarlais; The Cosmology of Life Transmission by Ren Devisch; Reflections on a Cut Finger: Taboo in the Umeda Conception of the Self by Alfred Gell; Space and Sociality in a Dayak Longhouse by Christine Helliwell; In Defiance of Destiny: The Management of Time at a Cretan Funeral by Michael Herzfeld; Suffering and Its Professional Transformation: Toward an Ethnography of Interpersonal Experience by Arthur Kleinman and Joan Kleinman; Hand Drumming: An Essay in Practical Knowledge by Shawn Lindsay; On Dying and Suffering in Iqwaye Existence by Jadran Mimica; If Not the Words: Shared Practical Activity and Friendship in Fieldwork by Keith Ridler; and After the Field by Jim Wafer.
The Taste of Ethnographic Things
Author: Paul Stoller
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2010-11-24
Total Pages: 199
ISBN-13: 0812203143
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAnthropologists who have lost their senses write ethnographies that are often disconnected from the worlds they seek to portray. For most anthropologists, Stoller contends, tasteless theories are more important than the savory sauces of ethnographic life. That they have lost the smells, sounds, and tastes of the places they study is unfortunate for them, for their subjects, and for the discipline itself. The Taste of Ethnographic Things describes how, through long-term participation in the lives of the Songhay of Niger, Stoller eventually came to his senses. Taken together, the separate chapters speak to two important and integrated issues. The first is methodological—all the chapters demonstrate the rewards of long-term study of a culture. The second issue is how he became truer to the Songhay through increased sensual awareness.
How Forests Think
Author: Eduardo Kohn
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 2013-08-10
Total Pages: 288
ISBN-13: 0520276108
DOWNLOAD EBOOKCan forests think? Do dogs dream? In this astonishing book, Eduardo Kohn challenges the very foundations of anthropology, calling into question our central assumptions about what it means to be humanÑand thus distinct from all other life forms. Based on four years of fieldwork among the Runa of EcuadorÕs Upper Amazon, Eduardo Kohn draws on his rich ethnography to explore how Amazonians interact with the many creatures that inhabit one of the worldÕs most complex ecosystems. Whether or not we recognize it, our anthropological tools hinge on those capacities that make us distinctly human. However, when we turn our ethnographic attention to how we relate to other kinds of beings, these tools (which have the effect of divorcing us from the rest of the world) break down. How Forests Think seizes on this breakdown as an opportunity. Avoiding reductionistic solutions, and without losing sight of how our lives and those of others are caught up in the moral webs we humans spin, this book skillfully fashions new kinds of conceptual tools from the strange and unexpected properties of the living world itself. In this groundbreaking work, Kohn takes anthropology in a new and exciting directionÐone that offers a more capacious way to think about the world we share with other kinds of beings.
The Resonance of Unseen Things
Author: Susan Lepselter
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Published: 2016-03-03
Total Pages: 193
ISBN-13: 0472052942
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAn interdisciplinary study of how conspiracy theories and stories persist and resonate among different Americans
Law, Anthropology, and the Constitution of the Social
Author: Alain Pottage
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2004-06-24
Total Pages: 324
ISBN-13: 9780521539456
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis collection of interdisciplinary essays explores how persons and things - the central elements of the social - are fabricated by legal rituals and institutions. The contributors, legal and anthropological theorists alike, focus on a set of specific institutional and ethnographic contexts, and some unexpected and thought-provoking analogies emerge from this intellectual encounter between law and anthropology. For example, contemporary anxieties about the legal status of the biotechnological body seem to resonate with the questions addressed by ancient Roman law in its treatment of dead bodies. The analogy between copyright and the transmission of intangible designs in Melanesia suddenly makes western images of authorship seem quite unfamiliar. A comparison between law and laboratory science presents the production of legal artefacts in new light. These studies are of particular relevance at a time when law, faced with the inventiveness of biotechnology, finds it increasingly difficult to draw the line between persons and things.
Stuff
Author: Daniel Miller
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Published: 2013-04-25
Total Pages: 149
ISBN-13: 0745654967
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThings make us just as much as we make things. And yet, unlike the study of languages or places, there is no discipline devoted to the study of material things. This book shows why it is time to acknowledge and confront this neglect and how much we can learn from focusing our attention on stuff. The book opens with a critique of the concept of superficiality as applied to clothing. It presents the theories that are required to understand the way we are created by material as well as social relations. It takes us inside the very private worlds of our home possessions and our processes of accommodating. It considers issues of materiality in relation to the media, as well as the implications of such an approach in relation, for example, to poverty. Finally, the book considers objects which we use to define what it is to be alive and how we use objects to cope with death. Based on more than thirty years of research in the Caribbean, India, London and elsewhere, Stuff is nothing less than a manifesto for the study of material culture and a new way of looking at the objects that surround us and make up so much of our social and personal life.
