This Companionoffers an unprecedented overview of anthropology’s unique contribution to the study of politics. Explores the key concepts and issues of our time - from AIDS, globalization, ...displacement, and militarization, to identity politics and beyond Each chapter reflects on concepts and issues that have shaped the anthropology of politics and concludes with thoughts on and challenges for the way ahead Anthropology’s distinctive genre, ethnography, lies at the heart of this volume
This expanded second edition carries forward the initial insights into the biological and existential significances of animation by taking contemporary research findings in cognitive science and ...philosophy and in neuroscience into critical and constructive account. It first takes affectivity as its focal point, elucidating it within both an enactive and qualitative affective-kinetic dynamic. It follows through with a thoroughgoing interdisciplinary inquiry into movement from three perspectives: mind, brain, and the conceptually reciprocal realities of receptivity and responsivity as set forth in phenomenology and evolutionary biology, respectively. It ends with a substantive afterword on kinesthesia, pointing up the incontrovertible significance of the faculty to cognition and affectivity. Series A
Praise for the First Edition: `Essential to any collection of work on the body, health and illness, or social theory' - Choice `Sophisticated . and acutely perceptive of the importance of the complex ...dialectic between social institutions, culture and biological conditions' - Times Higher Education Supplement `Chris Shilling has done us all a splendid service in bringing together and illustrating the tremendous diversity and richness of sociological thinking on the topic of human embodiment and its implications' - Sociological Review This updated edition of the bestselling text retains all the strengths of the first edition. Chris Shilling: provides a critical survey of the field; demonstrates how developments in diet, sexuality, reproductive technology, genetic engineering and sports science have made the body a site for social alternatives and individual choices; and elucidates the practical uses of theory in striking and accessible ways. In addition, new, original material: explores the latest feminist, phenomenological and action-oriented approaches to the body; examines the latest work on `body projects' and the relationship between the body and self-identity; and outlines a compelling theoretical framework that provides a radical basis for the consolidation of body studies.
This important collection addresses recent developments in the teaching, studying and presentation of race across many disciplines, including sociology, politics, social geography, cultural studies ...and philosophy.Drawing on the latest research in all these areas, the authors provide a comprehensive account of key controversies and debates and pinpoint new directions in research and scholarship that are likely to shape the study of race and ethnicity well into the next century.
This book is a collection of the selected proceedings of the 4th International Conference Human Being in Contemporary Philosophical Conceptions, which was held under the patronage of UNESCO at ...Volgograd State University (Russia) on May 2831, 2007. In the letter to the organizers, Mr. Koïchiro Matsuura wrote: I should like to congratulate you on this important initiative to promote philosophical reflection, which is one of the central objectives of UNESCOs Intersectoral Strategy on Philos.
Is migration really so constructive that, as Ralph Emerson (1909) once wrote, in the context of the New World, "asylum of all nations . . . will construct a new race, a new religion, a new state, a ...new . . . smelting-pot"? (WK 2012)This noble lie--the "melting pot" in the 20th century--can be contrasted with an opposing noble lie of the "salad bowl" in the 21st century, when those in multiculturalism like Tariq Modood (2007) argue nowadays that multiculturalism "is most timely and necessary, and . . . we need more not less." (WK 2012a)Contrary to these opposing noble lies (and other views as will be discussed in the book), migration, in relation to both the Same and the Others, is neither possible or impossible, nor desirable or undesirable, to the extent that the respective ideologues on different sides would like us to believe.Surely, this exposure of the opposing noble lies about migration does not mean that the specific field of study on migration is a waste of time, or that those interdisciplinary fields (related to the study of migration) like animal migration, gene migration, diaspora politics, culural assimlation, human trafficking, urbanization, brain drain, tourism, ethnic cleansing, environmental migration, globalization, religious persecution, national identity, gentrification, fifth column, migration art, xenophobia, space colonization, multiculturalism, and so on are worthless. Needless to say, neither of these extreme views is reasonable.Instead, this book offers an alternative, better way to understand the future of migration, especially in the dialectic context of the Same and the Others--while learning from different approaches in the literature but without favoring any one of them or integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with each other. More specifically, this book offers a new theory (that is, the theory
of the cyclical progression of migration) to go beyond the existing approaches in a novel way.If successful, this seminal project is to fundamentally change the way that we think about migration in relation to Sameness, Otherness, and identity, from the combined perspectives of the mind, nature, society, and culture, with enormous implications for the human future and what the author originally called its "post-human" fate.
How can we hold both public and personal worlds in the eye of a unified theory of meaning? What ethnographic and theoretical possibilities do we create in the balance?Anthropology Through a Double ...Lensoffers a theoretical framework encompassing both of these domains-a "double lens." Daniel Touro Linger argues that the literary turn in anthropology, which treats culture as text, has been a wrong turn. Cultural analysis of the interpretive or discursive variety, which focuses on public symbols, has difficulty seeing-much less dealing convincingly with-actual persons. While emphasizing the importance of social environments, Linger insists on equal sensitivity to the experiential immediacies of human lives. He develops a sustained critique of interpretive and discursive trends in contemporary anthropology, which have too strongly emphasized social determinism and public symbols while too readily dismissing psychological and biographical realities.Anthropology Through a Double Lensdemonstrates the power of an alternative dual perspective through a blend of critical essays and ethnographic studies drawn from the author's field research in São Luís, a northeastern Brazilian state capital, and Toyota City, a Japanese factory town. To span the gap between the public and the personal, Linger provides a set of analytical tools that include the ideas of an arena of meaning, systems of systems, bridging theory, singular lives, and reflective consciousness. The tools open theoretical and ethnographic horizons for exploring the process of meaning-making, the force of symbolism and rhetoric, the politics of representation, and the propagation and formation of identities. Linger uses these tools to focus on key issues in current theoretical and philosophical debates across a host of disciplines, including anthropology, psychology, history, and the other human sciences..
'Gender' is used to classify humans and to explain their behaviour in predominantly social rather than biological terms. But how useful is the concept of gender in social analysis? To what degree ...does gender relate to sex? How does gender feature in shifts in familial structures and demography? How should gender be conceived in terms of contemporary inequality and injustice, and what is gender's function in the design and pursuit of political objectives? In this volume a collection of international experts from the fields of political philosophy, political theory, sociology, economics, law, psychoanalysis and evolutionary psychology scrutinize the conceptual effectiveness of gender both as a mode of analysis and as a basis for envisioning the transformation of society. Each contributor considers how gender might be conceived in contemporary terms, offering a variety of (often conflicting) interpretations of the concept's usefulness for the future.
Inspired by the Rhetoric Culture Project, this volume focuses on the use of imagery, narrative, and cultural schemes to deal with predicaments that arise during the course of life. The contributors ...explore how people muster their resources to understand and deal with emergencies such as illness, displacement, or genocide. In dealing with such circumstances, people can develop new rhetorical forms and, in the process, establish new cultural resources for succeeding generations. Several of the contributions show how rhetorical cultural forms can themselves create emergencies. The contributors bring expertise from a variety of disciplines, including anthropology and communications studies, underlining the volume's wider relevance as a reflection on the human condition.