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.
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.
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.”      
ABSTRACT
David Schneider is widely regarded as one of the great anthropologists of our times. This article questions this opinion. First it shows that his fieldwork on the Micronesian island of Yap ...evidences ethnographic insensitivity, particularly on the matter of an alleged ignorance of physiological paternity, thus calling into question his supposed concern with getting at native understandings. The alleged ignorance forms the ethnographic basis for his later critique of established kinship studies. This, plus his ignorance of lexical marking, invalidates the critique. Even worse is his study of American kinship and its related theory of culture, both consisting mostly of top‐of‐the‐head impressions unrelated to specific operations.
The partibility of pigs and the circulation of their parts—from snout to tail, as the popular culinary phrase puts it—are routinely celebrated in communities committed to eating "local." In this ...article, I explore how different kinds of totalities are configured in the practices of such "locavore" actors with respect to pigs and pork. Approaches as varied as Sausseurean structuralism, functionalist sociology, and actor network theory characterize their objects of inquiry as totalities constituted by relationships among component parts. So too the totalities in relationships forged via pigs become (mis)aligned with the totality of pigs as embodied, complex organisms. Such wholes from parts reveal the overdetermination (or fetishization) of the "connections" (between farmers and consumers, chefs and diners, humans and animals) extolled by "local food" actors.
All research is experiential, whether this is the experience of reading in the library or observing in the field. Autoethnographers take experience into narratives and are themselves key participants ...in their research, and often also its subject. For autoethnographers the idea of research as a neutral process is abandoned in favour of a self-reflective form that explores the researcher's perspective on the subject in question. Autoethnography inevitably negotiates the relationship between the stories we want to tell and the histories we have lived through; between the necessary fictions of publication/presentation and the real world experiences we draw upon. This article questions whether we can ever tell our experiences truthfully. This article questions what it might mean to write oneself into research findings and narrative reports, and it asks what happens when one's self goes further and becomes the research. It offers perspectives and provocations which are informed but not bound by autoethnography's extant body of thought and readers are invited on a brief journey through self-writing as it relates to the vagaries of memory and the illusion of truth. Keywords: Autoethnography, Self-Deception, Self-Reflection, Experiential Research, Memory
An invitation to laughter Khuri, Fuad I; Khuri, Sonia Jalbout; Antoun, Richard
2007., 2008, 2007
eBook
For the late Fuad I. Khuri, a distinguished career as an anthropologist began not because of typical concerns like accessibility, money, or status, but because the very idea of an occupation that ...baffled his countrymen made them—and him—laugh. “When I tell them that ‘anthropology’ is my profession . . . they think I am either speaking a strange language or referring to a new medicine.” This profound appreciation for humor, especially in the contradictions inherent in the study of cultures, is a distinctive theme of An Invitation to Laughter, Khuri’s astute memoir of life as an anthropologist in the Middle East. A Christian Lebanese, Khuri offers up in this unusual autobiography both an insider’s and an outsider’s perspective on life in Lebanon, elsewhere in the Middle East, and in West Africa. Khuri entertains and informs with clever insights into such issues as the mentality of Arabs toward women, eating habits of the Arab world, the impact of Islam on West Africa, and the extravagant lifestyles of wealthy Arabs, and even offers a vision for a type of democracy that could succeed in the Middle East. In his life and work, as these astonishing essays make evident, Khuri demonstrated how the discipline of anthropology continues to make a difference in bridging dangerous divides.
What are the relationships between the self and fieldwork? How do personal, emotional and identity issues impact upon working in the field? This book argues that ethnographers, and others involved in ...fieldwork, should be aware of how fieldwork research and ethnographic writing construct, reproduce and implicate selves, relationships and personal identities. All too often research methods texts remain relatively silent about the ways in which fieldwork affects us and we affect the field. The book attempts to synthesize accounts of the personal experience of ethnography. In doing so, the author makes sense of the process of fieldwork research as a set of practical, intellectual and emotional accomplishments. The book is.
An overview of trends in Russian academic ethnology over the past three decades is provided. This is an analysis of the state of the discipline from the inside, from the point of view of the author, ...who has been at the center of the scientific and public life of the country for all these years and who, as the director of the RAS Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, influenced academic strategy and institutional changes. This is also a view on Russian national ethnology in the context of epistemological shifts and disciplinary changes that have taken place in world sociocultural anthropology and ethnology. The main provisions of this article concern intradisciplinary inertia and the difficult revision of the Soviet legacy; the restrictive impact of dominant public practices on the choice of metatheoretical constructs such as social constructivism in culturally complex societies; the influence of the ideology and practice of ethno-nationalism on the scientific community and the resultant “postcolonial” or aboriginal anthropology; and the combination of ethnographic tradition and new directions in the search for cultural similarities as the antithesis to the traditional obsession with establishing differences. The article analyzes the nation-building project based on a multiethnic civil nation as one of the prospects for the anthropological vision of Russia and the place of scientists in this project. The author evaluates the post-Soviet period as one of the most fruitful in the history of Russian ethnology in terms of the formation of new trends, thematic repertoire, and geography of research.
