Mary Douglas Fardon, Richard
1999, 20020104, 2002, 2002-01-04
eBook
This is the first full length account of the life and ideas of Mary Douglas, the British social anthropologist whose publications span the second half of the twentieth century. Richard Fardon covers ...Douglas' family background, and the pervasive influence of her catholic faith on her writings before providing an analysis of two of her most influential works; Purity and Danger (1966) and Natural Symbols (1970). The final section deals with Douglas' more controversial writings in the fields of economics, consumption, religion and risk analysis in contemporary societies. Throughout, Fardon highlights the centrality of Douglas' role in the history of anthropology and the discipline's struggle to achieve relevance to contemporary, western societies.
R. H. Mathews (1841-1918) was an Australian-born surveyor and self-taught anthropologist. From 1893 until his death in 1918, he made it his mission to record all 'new and interesting facts' about ...Aboriginal Australia. His legacy is an outstanding record of Aboriginal culture in the Federation period.
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.
L’ethnologue jésuite Germain Lemieux (1914-2008) refait le chemin qui l’a mené de sa Gaspésie natale, contrée maritime, au pays des mines de Sudbury. À travers son témoignage, recueilli par l’auteur ...pour la radio en 1995 et livré sur le ton de la confidence, l’octogénaire soupèse les aléas d’une carrière entreprise un demi-siècle plus tôt. Il balise son récit d’éléments inédits, notamment sur ses origines et sa formation, qui éclairent les dessous de l’oeuvre et révèlent les traits de sa personnalité. Volontaire, il a su tracer sa voie et développer une expertise originale en dépit de moyens limités et des contraintes de son état. Ce document à l’allure intime constitue une source féconde, autant pour la compréhension de l’Ontario français et de son histoire au XXe siècle que pour l’institution du patrimoine oral que l’ethnologie a incarnée presque seul avant les années 1980. En faisant le bilan de son activité incomparable, Germain Lemieux y mêle un peu de son testament intellectuel.
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.
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.
Robert Lachmann's letters to Henry George Farmer provide insightful glimpses into his life and the successive research projects he undertook concerning Arab urban music from North Africa and later ...Arab and Jewish music traditions in Palestine.
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.
