In Praise of Historical Anthropology

In Praise of Historical Anthropology PDF

Author: Alexandre Coello de la Rosa

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-01-24

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 1000038572

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In Praise of Historical Anthropology is based on a fundamental conviction: the study of society cannot be undertaken without considering the weight of history and separations between disciplines in academics need to be bridged for the benefit of knowledge. Anthropology cannot be limited to situating its object in its immediate context; rather its true subject of study is society as a historical problem. The book describes the complex attempts to transcend this separation, presenting perspectives, methodologies and direct applications for the study of power relations and systems of social classification, paying special attention to the reconstruction of colonial situations. Following the maxim expounded by John and Jean Comaroff, this book will help us understand that historical anthropology is not a matter of merging the two disciplines of anthropology and history, but rather considering societies in their historically situated dimension and applying the tools of the social and human sciences to the analysis. In this vein, the book reviews the complex attempts to bridge disciplinary separations and theoretical proposals coming from very different traditions. The text, consequently, opens up hegemonic perspectives to include 'other anthropologies.'

From the Margins

From the Margins PDF

Author: Brian Keith Axel

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2002-06-07

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 9780822328889

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DIVState-of-the-art volume by the major voices in historical anthropology./div

History and Theory in Anthropology

History and Theory in Anthropology PDF

Author: Alan Barnard

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2000-06-15

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 1316101932

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Anthropology is a discipline very conscious of its history, and Alan Barnard has written a clear, balanced and judicious textbook that surveys the historical contexts of the great debates and traces the genealogies of theories and schools of thought. It also considers the problems involved in assessing these theories. The book covers the precursors of anthropology; evolutionism in all its guises; diffusionism and culture area theories, functionalism and structural-functionalism; action-centred theories; processual and Marxist perspectives; the many faces of relativism, structuralism and post-structuralism; and recent interpretive and postmodernist viewpoints.

Culture Builders

Culture Builders PDF

Author: Jonas Frykman

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 1987

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 9780813512396

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"Explains brilliantly the structures and processes of middle-class culture in historical perspective."--Robert Nye, Rutgers University " This] illuminating study of the Swedish middle class around the turn of the century . . . is one welcome sign that bourgeois, too, are once again recognized as parts of society worth studying . . . to be understood rather than to be savaged. Culture Builders is a welcome sign of yet another development: the ease with which historical studies may be integrated with neighboring disciplines."--Journal of Modern History "The authors take an impressively broad intellectual perspective. . . . The everyday routines of bourgeoisie, peasantry, and working class are dramatically portrayed through a skillful weaving together of excerpts from ethnological archives, schoolbooks, memoirs, novels, and etiquette manuals . . . provides insight into the sociocultural complexities, conflicts, and contradictions that are ignored in widely held national stereotypes."--American Anthropologist "Unites historical and ethnological approaches so as to present a way of life that will be of interest not only to scholars of Scandinavia but to historians, sociologists, and everyone trying to describe and interpret the bourgeois Western culture during the nineteenth century."--Ethnos Jonas Frykman and Orvar Lofgren teach in the Department of European Ethnology at the University of Lund, Sweden.

Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing

Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing PDF

Author: Kelly Boyd

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-10-09

Total Pages: 864

ISBN-13: 113678764X

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The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing contains over 800 entries ranging from Lord Acton and Anna Comnena to Howard Zinn and from Herodotus to Simon Schama. Over 300 contributors from around the world have composed critical assessments of historians from the beginning of historical writing to the present day, including individuals from related disciplines like Jürgen Habermas and Clifford Geertz, whose theoretical contributions have informed historical debate. Additionally, the Encyclopedia includes some 200 essays treating the development of national, regional and topical historiographies, from the Ancient Near East to the history of sexuality. In addition to the Western tradition, it includes substantial assessments of African, Asian, and Latin American historians and debates on gender and subaltern studies.

Historical Anthropology of the Family

Historical Anthropology of the Family PDF

Author: Martine Segalen

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1986-11-28

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 9780521276702

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Over the past decade or so, the social scientific sociological analysis of the family has been obliged to reconsider its traditional view that industrialisation triggered a shift within society from the 'large family', which fulfilled all social functions from socialising the children to caring for the sick and the old, to the modern nuclear family, which was regarded solely as being the locus for emotional relationships. Historians have shown that in the past there was a variety of family structures within a range of varying demographic, economic and cultural frameworks, distinctive for each society. At the same time, the interaction between sociology and social anthropology has led to a clearer conceptual analysis of that vague, polysemic term 'family'; and notions of dwelling-place, descent, marriage, the relative roles of husband and wife and parent-child relations, as well as the more general relations between generations, have in a variety of past and present social contexts been taken apart and analysed. In this book, the author synthesises European and North American historical and social anthropological material on the family that shows the reversal of the frequently held view of the family as an institution in decline, showing it instead to be both dynamic and resistant.

The History of Anthropology

The History of Anthropology PDF

Author: Regna Darnell

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2021-10

Total Pages: 497

ISBN-13: 1496228731

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In The History of Anthropology Regna Darnell offers a critical reexamination of the Americanist tradition centered around the figure of Franz Boas and the professionalization of anthropology as an academic discipline in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Focused on researchers often known as the Boasians, The History of Anthropology reveals the theoretical schools, institutions, and social networks of scholars and fieldworkers primarily interested in the anthropology and ethnography of North American Indigenous peoples. Darnell's fifty-year career entails seminal writings in the history of anthropology's four fields: cultural anthropology, ethnography, linguistics, and physical anthropology. Leading researchers, theorists, and fieldwork subjects include Edward Sapir, Daniel Brinton, Mary Haas, Franz Boas, Leonard Bloomfield, Benjamin Lee Whorf, Stanley Newman, and A. Irving Hallowell, as well as the professionalization of anthropology, the development of American folklore scholarship, theories of Indigenous languages, Southwest ethnographic research, Indigenous ceremonialism, text traditions, and anthropology's forays into contemporary public intellectual debates. The History of Anthropology is the essential volume for scholars, undergraduates, and graduate students to enter into the history of the Americanist tradition and its legacies, alternating historicism and presentism to contextualize anthropology's historical and contemporary relevance and legacies.

A Social History of Anthropology in the United States

A Social History of Anthropology in the United States PDF

Author: Thomas C. Patterson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-05-12

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1000183564

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In part due to the recent Yanomami controversy, which has rocked anthropology to its very core, there is renewed interest in the discipline's history and intellectual roots, especially amongst anthropologists themselves. The cutting edge of anthropological research today is a product of earlier questions and answers, previous ambitions, preoccupations and adventures, stretching back one hundred years or more. This book is the first comprehensive history of American anthropology. Crucially, Patterson relates the development of anthropology in the United States to wider historical currents in society. American anthropologists over the years have worked through shifting social and economic conditions, changes in institutional organization, developing class structures, world politics, and conflicts both at home and abroad. How has anthropology been linked to colonial, commercial and territorial expansion in the States? How have the changing forms of race, power, ethnic identity and politics shaped the questions anthropologists ask, both past and present? Anthropology as a discipline has always developed in a close relationship with other social sciences, but this relationship has rarely been scrutinized. This book details and explains the complex interplay of forces and conditions that have made anthropology in America what it is today. Furthermore, it explores how anthropologists themselves have contributed and propagated powerful images and ideas about the different cultures and societies that make up our world. This book will be essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the roots and reasons behind American anthropology at the turn of the twenty-first century. Intellectual historians, social scientists, and anyone intrigued by the growth and development of institutional politics and practices should read this book.

Critical Junctions

Critical Junctions PDF

Author: Don Kalb

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 9781845450298

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"A book about theory and method in the humanities and social sciences. It reacts to what has become known as the "cultural turn," a shift toward semiotics, discourse, and representations and away from other sorts of determinations that started in the early 1980s and that has dominated social thinking for a long string of years. The book is based in a reconsideration of the meeting of two disciplines that helped to launch the cultural turn: anthropology and history. Specifically, it criticizes the ideas of hermeneutics and "thick description" (Clifford Geertz) that have come to play a key role in the encounter of anthropology and history and then in the cultural turn. It led to the renewed cherishing of what Gupta and Ferguson have called paradigms of "peoples and places," saturated pictures of universes, both small and large, of meaning ina more of less frozen standstill-an intellectual precursor to the cultural xenophobia of our times. Against this, the present book embraces praxis and "critical junctions": the connections in space (in and out of a relations of power and dependency, and what Eric Wolf has called the "interstitial relations" between apparently separate institutional domains. In this way the book adds to the current revival of institutionally based "global ethnography," which studies "up and outward" (the journal of Ethnography is a good example)."--Preface

Evidence, Ethos and Experiment

Evidence, Ethos and Experiment PDF

Author: P. Wenzel Geissler

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2011-09-30

Total Pages: 508

ISBN-13: 085745093X

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Medical research has been central to biomedicine in Africa for over a century, and Africa, along with other tropical areas, has been crucial to the development of medical science. At present, study populations in Africa participate in an increasing number of medical research projects and clinical trials, run by both public institutions and private companies. Global debates about the politics and ethics of this research are growing and local concerns are prompting calls for social studies of the "trial communities" produced by this scientific work. Drawing on rich, ethnographic and historiographic material, this volume represents the emergent field of anthropological inquiry that links Africanist ethnography to recent concerns with science, the state, and the culture of late capitalism in Africa.