Looking through Taiwan Hong, Keelung; Murray, Stephen O; Murray, Stephen
2005, 2005-12-01
eBook
Anthropologists have long sought to extricate their work from the policies and agendas of those who dominate—and often oppress—their native subjects. Looking through Taiwan is an ...uncompromising look at a troubling chapter in American anthropology that reveals what happens when anthropologists fail to make fundamental ethnic and political distinctions in their work. Keelung Hong and Stephen O. Murray examine how Taiwanese realities have been represented—and misrepresented—in American social science literature, especially anthropology, in the post–World War II period. They trace anthropologists’ complicity in the domination of a Taiwanese majority by a Chinese minority and in its obfuscation of social realities.   At the base of these distortions, the authors argue, were the mutual interests of the Republic of China’s military government and American social scientists in mischaracterizing Taiwan as representative of traditional Chinese culture. American anthropologists, eager to study China but denied access by its communist government, turned instead to fieldwork on the Republic of China’s society, which they incorrectly and disingenuously interpreted to reflect traditional Chinese society on the mainland. Anthropologists overlooked the cultural and historical differences between the island and the mainland and effectively legitimized the People’s Republic of China’s claim on Taiwan. Looking through Taiwan is a powerful critique of American anthropology and a valuable reminder of the political and ethical implications of social science research and writing.
The second woman to earn a PhD from Columbia University -- and the first from south of the Mason-Dixon Line to do so -- Kentucky native Katherine Jackson French broke boundaries. Her research ...kick-started a resurgence of Appalachian music that continues to this day, but French's collection of traditional Kentucky ballads, which should have been her crowning scholarly achievement, never saw print. Academic rivalries, gender prejudice, and broken promises set against a thirty-year feud known as the Ballad Wars denied French her place in history and left the field to northerner Olive Dame Campbell and English folklorist Cecil Sharp, setting Appalachian studies on a foundation marred by stereotypes and misconceptions.
Katherine Jackson French: Kentucky's Forgotten Ballad Collector tells the story of what might have been. Drawing on never-before-seen artifacts from French's granddaughter, Elizabeth DiSavino reclaims the life and legacy of this pivotal scholar by emphasizing the ways her work shaped and could reshape our conceptions about Appalachia. In contrast to the collection published by Campbell and Sharp, French's ballads elevate the status of women, give testimony to the complexity of balladry's ethnic roots and influences, and reveal more complex local dialects. Had French published her work in 1910, stereotypes about Appalachian ignorance, misogyny, and homogeneity may have diminished long ago. Included in this book is the first-ever publication of Katherine Jackson French'sEnglish-Scottish Ballads from the Hills of Kentucky.
Posthuman Prehistory Ingold, Tim
Nature and culture,
03/2021, Volume:
16, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
This article asks what part prehistory could play in establishing a posthumanist settlement, alternative to the humanism of the Enlightenment. We begin by showing how Enlightenment thinking split the ...concept of the human in two, into species and condition, establishing a point of origin where the history of civilization rises from its baseline in evolution. Drawing on the thinking of the thirteenth-century mystic, Ramon Llull, we present an alternative vision of human becoming according to which life carries on through a process of continuous birth, wherein even death and burial hold the promise of renewal. In prehistory, this vision is exemplified in the work of André Leroi-Gourhan, in his exploration of the relation between voice and hand, and of graphism as a precursor to writing. We conclude that the idea of graphism holds the key to a prehistory that not so much precedes as subtends the historic.
Azonto is a Ghanaian urban dance craze whose popularity is built through its global circulation. I trace its production and flow across studios, radio stations, dance floors, and digital platforms in ...Accra and among Ghanaians in London and New York. I argue that, as a technologically mediated style, Azonto is the embodiment of being Ghanaian in a mobile, digital world. This dance reveals both the potentials and the hazards of digital repetition and copying for self-recognition. Ghanaian musicians and fans creatively use the repetitive aspects of digital technologies, making this dance a style of symbolic appropriation that links Ghanaian youth both in Accra and abroad into a dispersed community of musical participation that valorizes mobility itself. The dance's sudden ubiquity, however, creates "digital fatigue," an uncertainty among participants about belonging in an era of digital replication that threatens to unmoor signs of recognition from the cultural registers that empower them in the first place.
Kajsa Ekholm Friedman and Jonathan Friedman's The Anthropology of Global Systems (AGS) is a robust, ambitious, and timely undertaking in macrotheoretical and macrohistorical anthropology. I show ...that, more than 30 years ago, its political-economic underpinnings anticipated the key mechanisms of financialization, so important for debates on the current financial crisis. By revisiting the "transition from feudalism to capitalism" debate with new insights from diplomatic history, I work out a Marxian critique of the Friedmans' Weberian concept of capital, which is insufficiently relational and therefore not sufficiently alert to the politics of class. Attention to these relational politics adds an important measure of what I call "structured contingency," and indeed agency, to temporal process, which in the AGS tends to become overly teleological. Building on my critique, I also draw attention to the absence of the possibility of "collective rationality" in the Friedmans' grid of modern subject positions.
Hunting the gatherers O'Hanlon, Michael; Welsch, Robert L
2000., 20010130, 2001, 2001-01-30, Volume:
6
eBook
Between the 1870s and the 1930s competing European powers carved out and consolidated colonies in Melanesia, the most culturally diverse region of the world. As part of this process, great ...assemblages of ethnographic artefacts were made by a range of collectors whose diversity is captured in this volume. The contributors to this tightly-integrated volume take these collectors, and the collecting institutions, as the departure point for accounts that look back at the artefact-producing societies and their interaction with the collectors, but also forward to the fate of the collections in metropolitan museums, as the artefacts have been variously exhibited, neglected, re-conceived as indigenous heritage, or repatriated. In doing this, the contributors raise issues of current interest in anthropology, Pacific history, art history, museology, and material culture.
Histories of Anthropology Annual presents diverse perspectives on the discipline’s history within a global context, with a goal of increasing awareness and use of historical approaches in ...teaching, learning, and conducting anthropology. The series includes critical, comparative, analytical, and narrative studies involving all aspects and subfields of anthropology. Volume 13, Disruptive Voices and the Singularity of Histories , explores the interplay of identities and scholarship through the history of anthropology, with a special section examining fieldwork predecessors and indigenous communities in Native North America. Individual contributions explore the complexity of women’s history, indigenous history, national traditions, and oral histories to juxtapose what we understand of the past with its present continuities. These contributions include Sharon Lindenburger’s examination of Franz Boas and his navigation with Jewish identity, Kathy M’Closkey’s documentation of Navajo weavers and their struggles with cultural identities and economic resources and demands, and Mindy Morgan’s use of the text of Ruth Underhill’s O’odham study to capture the voices of three generations of women ethnographers. Because this work bridges anthropology and history, a richer and more varied view of the past emerges through the meticulous narratives of anthropologists and their unique fieldwork, ultimately providing competing points of access to social dynamics. This volume examines events at both macro and micro levels, documenting the impact large-scale historical events have had on particular individuals and challenging the uniqueness of a single interpretation of “the same facts.”      
Are political, ethical, philosophical, literary, and artistic polemics more violent today than a century of two ago? We can leave this question to historians. What is the case, after all, is that ...since the end of the Second World War they become more so every year in Western countries, countries that are in principle moderate. The reign of the media and an omnipresent Internet clearly have a lot to do with this. The logarithmic increase in channels of expression, access to which is now open to everyone without any restriction or regulation, the instantaneousness of exchanges that opens the floodwaters to the spontaneous expression of feelings without giving a moment's reflection, the acceleration of time that only leaves people wanting more, the resulting obligation to present any idea or information as briefly as possible - with the Tweet being the incarnation par excellence of this norm - all of this contributes to the reduction of public debate to the circulation of "sound bites." These sound bites are meant to connect directly with a target audience through a simple formula designed to impress on all that mediated existence is everything; that there is nothing outside of sound bites. In other words, no visibility. Every day Donald Trump is the living example of this principle. Any sentiment, however complex, must be able to be condensed into a sound bite-or, better, into the 15 minutes of a TedX. Under the reign of the sound bite, ideas no longer appear as moments in a constructed and coherent discourse, but as simple discursive parcels which, in a few words, take the place of the entire discourse itself. Thus, we are no longer obligated to read an article that has just been published-we need only retain the sound bite that summarizes it.
