The history of anthropology at Harvard is told through vignettes about the people, famous and obscure, who shaped the discipline at Harvard College and the Peabody Museum. The role of amateurs and private funders in the early growth of the field is highlighted, as is the participation of women and of students and scholars of diverse ethnicities.
From Bangladesh and Hong Kong to Iran and South Africa, film industries around the world are rapidly growing at a time when new digital technologies are fundamentally changing how films are made and viewed. Larger film industries like Bollywood and Nollywood aim to attain Hollywood's audience and profitability, while smaller, less commercial, and often state-funded enterprises support various cultural and political projects. The contributors to Anthropology, Film Industries, Modularity take an ethnographic and comparative approach to capturing the diversity and growth of global film industries. They outline how modularity—the specialized filmmaking tasks that collectively produce a film—operates as a key feature in every film industry, independent of local context. Whether they are examining the process of dubbing Hollywood films into Hindi, virtual reality filmmaking in South Africa, or on-location shooting in Yemen, the contributors' anthropological methodology brings into relief the universal practices and the local contingencies and deeper cultural realities of film production. Contributors. Steven C. Caton, Jessica Dickson, Kevin Dwyer, Tejaswini Ganti, Lotte Hoek, Amrita Ibrahim, Sylvia J. Martin, Ramyar D. Rossoukh
Who are computer hackers? What is free software? And what does the emergence of a community dedicated to the production of free and open source software--and to hacking as a technical, aesthetic, and moral project--reveal about the values of contemporary liberalism? Exploring the rise and political significance of the free and open source software (F/OSS) movement in the United States and Europe, Coding Freedom details the ethics behind hackers' devotion to F/OSS, the social codes that guide its production, and the political struggles through which hackers question the scope and direction of copyright and patent law. In telling the story of the F/OSS movement, the book unfolds a broader narrative involving computing, the politics of access, and intellectual property. E. Gabriella Coleman tracks the ways in which hackers collaborate and examines passionate manifestos, hacker humor, free software project governance, and festive hacker conferences. Looking at the ways that hackers sustain their productive freedom, Coleman shows that these activists, driven by a commitment to their work, reformulate key ideals including free speech, transparency, and meritocracy, and refuse restrictive intellectual protections. Coleman demonstrates how hacking, so often marginalized or misunderstood, sheds light on the continuing relevance of liberalism in online collaboration.
From Site to Sight is a foundational text for scholars and students of visual anthropology, illustrating the history, uses--and misuses--of photographic imagery in anthropology and archaeology. Long out of print, this classic publication is now available in an enhanced thirtieth anniversary edition with a new introductory essay by Ira Jacknis.
“An unabashedly honest ethnography . . . [from] a founder of ‘symbolic’ anthropology . . . reflections on his fieldwork over a period of . . . forty years. Brilliant.” (Kirkus Reviews) In looking back on four decades of anthropology in the field, Geertz has created a work that is a personal history as well as a retrospective reflection on developments in the human sciences amid political, social, and cultural changes in the world. An elegant summation of one of the most remarkable careers in anthropology, it is at the same time an eloquent statement of the purposes and possibilities of anthropology's interpretive powers. Through the prism of his fieldwork over forty years in two towns, Pare in Indonesia and Sefrou in Morocco, Geertz adopts various perspectives on anthropological research and analysis during the post-colonial period, the Cold War, and the emergence of the new states of Asia and Africa. Throughout, he clarifies his own position on a broad series of issues at once empirical, methodological, theoretical, and personal. The result is a truly original book, one that displays a particular way of practicing the human sciences and thus a particular—and particularly efficacious—view of what these sciences are, have been, and should become. “Geertz charts the transformation of cultural anthropology from a study of "primitive" people to a multidisciplinary investigation of a particular culture's symbolic systems, its interactions with the larger forces of history and modernization.” —Publishers Weekly “An elegant, almost meditative volume of reflections.” —The New Yorker “[An] engrossing story of a few key moments in American social science during the second half of the twentieth century as [Geetz] participated in them.” —New York Times Book Review
This first English translation of lectures Claude Lévi-Strauss delivered in Tokyo in 1986 synthesizes his ideas about structural anthropology, critiques his earlier writings on civilization, and assesses the dilemmas of cultural and moral relativism, including economic inequality, religious fundamentalism, and genetic and reproductive engineering.
In Culture, Adam Kuper pursues the concept of culture from the early-20th century debates about its adoption by American social science under the tutelage of Talcott Parsons. What follows is the story of how the idea fared within American anthropology.
This text addresses the central problem in anthropological theory of the late 1990s - the paradox that humans are both products of social discipline and creators of remarkable improvisation.
Where the Roads All End tells the remarkable story of an American family’s expeditions to the Kalahari Desert in the 1950s. Raytheon founder Laurence Marshall and his family recorded the lives of the last remaining hunter-gatherers, the so-called Bushmen, in what is now recognized as one of the most important anthropology ventures in Africa.
