Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany
Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany

Author: Andi Zimmerman

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2010-02-15

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 0226983463

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With the rise of imperialism, the centuries-old European tradition of humanist scholarship as the key to understanding the world was jeopardized. Nowhere was this more true than in nineteenth-century Germany. It was there, Andrew Zimmerman argues, that the battle lines of today's "culture wars" were first drawn when anthropology challenged humanism as a basis for human scientific knowledge. Drawing on sources ranging from scientific papers and government correspondence to photographs, pamphlets, and police reports of "freak shows," Zimmerman demonstrates how German imperialism opened the door to antihumanism. As Germans interacted more frequently with peoples and objects from far-flung cultures, they were forced to reevaluate not just those peoples, but also the construction of German identity itself. Anthropologists successfully argued that their discipline addressed these issues more productively—and more accessibly—than humanistic studies. Scholars of anthropology, European and intellectual history, museum studies, the history of science, popular culture, and colonial studies will welcome this book.

Anthropology and Radical Humanism
Anthropology and Radical Humanism

Author: Jack Glazier

Publisher: MSU Press

Published: 2020-03-01

Total Pages: 349

ISBN-13: 1628953861

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Paul Radin, famed ethnographer of the Winnebago, joined Fisk University in the late 1920s. During his three-year appointment, he and graduate student Andrew Polk Watson collected autobiographies and religious conversion narratives from elderly African Americans. Their texts represent the first systematic record of slavery as told by former slaves. That innovative, subject-centered research complemented like-minded scholarship by African American historians reacting against the disparaging portrayals of black people by white historians. Radin’s manuscript focusing on this research was never published. Utilizing the Fisk archives, the unpublished manuscript, and other archival and published sources, Anthropology and Radical Humanism revisits the Radin-Watson collection and allied research at Fisk. Radin regarded each narrative as the unimpeachable self-representation of a unique, thoughtful individual, precisely the perspective marking his earlier Winnebago work. As a radical humanist within Boasian anthropology, Radin was an outspoken critic of racial explanations of human affairs then pervading not only popular thinking but also historical and sociological scholarship. His research among African Americans and Native Americans thus places him in the vanguard of the anti-racist scholarship marking American anthropology. Anthropology and Radical Humanism sets Paul Radin’s findings within the broader context of his discipline, African American culture, and his career-defining work among the Winnebago.

Existential Anthropology
Existential Anthropology

Author: Michael Jackson

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 9781845451226

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Inspired by existential thought, but using ethnographic methods, Jackson explores a variety of compelling topics, including 9/11, episodes from the war in Sierra Leone and its aftermath, the marginalization of indigenous Australians, the application of new technologies, mundane forms of ritualization, the magical use of language, the sociality of violence, the prose of suffering, and the discourse of human rights. Throughout this compelling work, Jackson demonstrates that existentialism, far from being a philosophy of individual being, enables us to explore issues of social existence and coexistence in new ways, and to theorise events as the sites of a dynamic interplay between the finite possibilities of the situations in which human beings find themselves and the capacities they yet possess for creating viable forms of social life.

Prayers for the People
Prayers for the People

Author: Rebecca Louise Carter

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2019-07-05

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 022663583X

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“Grieve well and you grow stronger.” Anthropologist Rebecca Louise Carter heard this wisdom over and over while living in post-Katrina New Orleans, where everyday violence disproportionately affects Black communities. What does it mean to grieve well? How does mourning strengthen survivors in the face of ongoing threats to Black life? Inspired by ministers and guided by grieving mothers who hold birthday parties for their deceased sons, Prayers for the People traces the emergence of a powerful new African American religious ideal at the intersection of urban life, death, and social and spiritual change. Carter frames this sensitive ethnography within the complex history of structural violence in America—from the legacies of slavery to free but unequal citizenship, from mass incarceration and overpolicing to social abandonment and the unequal distribution of goods and services. And yet Carter offers a vision of restorative kinship by which communities of faith work against the denial of Black personhood as well as the violent severing of social and familial bonds. A timely directive for human relations during a contentious time in America’s history, Prayers for the People is also a hopeful vision of what an inclusive, nonviolent, and just urban society could be.

Posthumanism
Posthumanism

Author: Alan Smart

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2017-04-26

Total Pages: 132

ISBN-13: 1442636440

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Designed to explain posthumanism to those outside of academia, this brief and accessible book makes an original argument about anthropology's legacy as a study of "more than human." Smart and Smart return to the holism of classic ethnographies where cattle, pigs, yams, and sorcerers were central to the lives that were narrated by anthropologists, but they extend the discussion to include contemporary issues like microbiomes, the Anthropocene, and nano-machines, which take holism beyond locally bounded spaces. They outline what a holism without boundaries could look like, and what anthropology could offer to the knowledge of more-than-human nature in the past, present, and future.

Light in Dark Times
Light in Dark Times

Author: Alisse Waterston

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2020-10-01

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13: 1487539134

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What will become of us in these trying times? How will we pass the time that we have on earth? In gorgeously rendered graphic form, Light in Dark Times invites readers to consider these questions by exploring the political catastrophes and moral disasters of the past and present, revealing issues that beg to be studied, understood, confronted, and resisted. A profound work of anthropology and art, this book is for anyone yearning to understand the darkness and hoping to hold onto the light. It is a powerful story of encounters with writers, philosophers, activists, and anthropologists whose words are as meaningful today as they were during the times in which they were written. This book is at once a lament over the darkness of our times, an affirmation of the value of knowledge and introspection, and a consideration of truth, lies, and the dangers of the trivial. In a time when many of us struggle with the feeling that we cannot do enough to change the course of the future, this book is a call to action, asking us to envision and create an alternative world from the one in which we now live. Light in Dark Times is beautiful to look at and to hold – an exquisite work of art that is lively, informative, enlightening, deeply moving, and inspiring.

Ethnography after Humanism
Ethnography after Humanism

Author: Lindsay Hamilton

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-06-19

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 113753933X

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This book argues that qualitative methods, ethnography included, have tended to focus on the human at the cost of understanding humans and animals in relation, and that ethnography should evolve to account for the relationships between humans and other species. Intellectual recognition of this has arrived within the field of human-animal studies and in the philosophical development of posthumanism but there are few practical guidelines for research. Taking this problem as a starting point, the authors draw on a wide array of examples from visual methods, ethnodrama, poetry and movement studies to consider the political, philosophical and practical consequences of posthuman methods. They outline the possibilities for creative new forms of ethnography that eschew simplistic binaries between humans and animals. Ethnography after Humanism suggests how researchers could conduct different forms of fieldwork and writing to include animals more fruitfully and will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including human-animal studies, sociology, criminology, animal geography, anthropology, social theory and natural resources.

How to Think Like an Anthropologist
How to Think Like an Anthropologist

Author: Matthew Engelke

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2019-06-18

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 0691193134

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"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.