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Outside France, French anthropology is conventionally seen as being dominated by grand theory produced by writers who have done little or no fieldwork themselves, and who may not even count as anthropologists in terms of the institutional structures of French academia.

Combining rich personal accounts from twelve veteran anthropologists with reflexive analyses of the state of anthropology today, this book is a treatise on theory and method offering fresh insights into the production of anthropological knowledge, from the creation of key concepts to major paradigm shifts. Particular focus is given to how 'peripheral perspectives' can help re-shape the discipline and the ways that anthropologists think about contemporary culture and society. From urban Maori communities in Aotearoa/New Zealand to the Highlands of Papua New Guinea, from Arnhem Land in Australia to the villages of Yorkshire, these accounts take us to the heart of the anthropological endeavour, decentring mainstream perspectives, and revealing the intimate relationships and processes that create anthropological knowledge.

Explores the Durkheim School's ambitious critique of philosophical interpretations of the genesis and constitution of the categories of thought. With contributions from philosophy, sociology, anthropology, media studies, and sinology, this volume illustrates the interdisciplinarity and intellectual rigor of the "category project".

Longstanding and resilient local ideas of property and practices of inheritance control the destinies of those living in Bearn, a region of south-west France in the foothills of the French Pyrenees. Based on extensive fieldwork and archival research that combines ethnography and intellectual history...

Based on ethnography-driven regional comparison and a critical re-examination of classic monographs on some forty cultural groups, this volume makes the arresting claim that across equatorial Africa, the model of rule has been medicine - and not (as Europeans have long assumed) the colonizer's despotic administrator...

The concept of "cultural transmission" is central to much contemporary anthropological theory, since successful human reproduction through social systems is essential for effective survival and for enhancing the adaptiveness of individual humans and local populations.

Inspired by existential thought, but using ethnographic methods, Jackson explores a variety of compelling topics, including 9/11, episodes from the war in Sierra Leone and its aftermath, the marginalization of indigenous Australians, the application of new technologies, mundane forms of ritualization, the magical use of language, the sociality of violence, the prose of suffering, and the discourse of human rights. Throughout this compelling work, Jackson demonstrates that existentialism, far from being a philosophy of individual being, enables us to explore issues of social existence and coexistence in new ways, and to theorise events as the sites of a dynamic interplay between the finite possibilities of the situations in which human beings find themselves and the capacities they yet possess for creating viable forms of social life.

Tim Ingold has raised many questions which are crucial for anthropology as a discipline, such as whether ethnography is central to the subject, and how imagination, reality and truth are joined in anthropological enterprises. His interventions have impacted anthropologists and scholars at large.

The tradition of intensive fieldwork by a single anthropologist in one area has been challenged by new emphasis on studying historical patterns, wider regions, and global networks. Some anthropologists have started their careers from the new vantage point, amidst a chorus of claims for innovative methodologies.

Through the concept of "e;social navigation,"e; this book sheds light on the mobilization of urban youth in West Africa. Social navigation offers a perspective on praxis in situations of conflict and turmoil. It provides insights into the interplay between objective structures and subjective agency, thus enabling us to make sense of the opportunistic, sometimes fatalistic and tactical ways in which young people struggle to expand the horizons of possibility in a world of conflict, turmoil and diminishing resources.

Reigniting a tradition of learning by experience, Search After Method is a plea for more lively forms of anthropology. The chapters relate the contributor's first experiences of working in the field and use their experiences to link their work to the discipline of Anthropology, along with other broader fieldwork questions.

Reigniting a tradition of learning by experience, Search After Method is a plea for more lively forms of anthropology. The chapters relate the contributor's first experiences of working in the field and use their experiences to link their work to the discipline of Anthropology, along with other broader fieldwork questions.

The interview creates a context of interaction with a particular authenticity to experience. Contributors explore how the interview is experienced as a particular kind of knowing within which personal, biographic, and social norms are explored and interrogated, providing direction and awareness for future encounters.

A dialogue between theory and ethnography, the book shows how Durkheimian sociology has become a mainstay of social thought and theory, pointing to multiple ways in which Durkheim's great work on religion remains relevant to thinking about culture.

Steiner's (1909-52) classic study Taboo and three other essays, on superstition, enslavement and the early Hebrew lineage system, and Chagga law and truth comprise the first of two volumes collecting the work of the Prague-born social and cultural anthropologist who ended his brief career at Oxford.

How should we tell the histories of academic disciplines? All too often, the political and institutional dimensions of knowledge production are lost beneath the intellectual debates. This book redresses the balance. Written in a narrative style and drawing on archival sources and oral histories, it depicts the complex pattern of personal and administrative relationships that shape scholarly worlds. Focusing on the field of social anthropology in twentieth-century Britain, this book describes individual, departmental and institutional rivalries over funding and influence. It examines the efforts of scholars such as Bronislaw Malinowski, Edward Evans-Pritchard and Max Gluckman to further their own visions for social anthropology. Did the future lie with the humanities or the social sciences, with addressing social problems or developing scholarly autonomy? This new history situates the discipline's rise within the post-war expansion of British universities and the challenges created by the end of Empire.

Studying how people become religious, this volume offers a perspective for the study of religion, one that examines the works of transmission and innovation through the prism of learning. It argues that religious culture is socially and dynamically constructed by agents who are not mere passive recipients but engaged in active learning processes.

A translation of Louis Dumont's lectures on kinship, which provide a comprehensive overview of descent theory and alliance theory for students. This work features these two theories of kinship which are associated with the British and French schools of social anthropology, as well as the theoretical tendencies of functionalism and structuralism.

The work of Louis Dumont, who died in 1998, on India and modern individualism represented certain theoretical advances on the earlier structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss. One such advance is Dumont''s idea of hierarchical opposition, which he proposed as a truer representation of indigenous ideologies than Lévi-Strauss''s binary opposition. In this book the author argues that, although structuralism is often thought to have gone out of fashion, Dumont''s greater concern with praxis and agency makes his own version of structuralism more contemporary. The work of his followers and fellow travelers, as well as his own, indicates that hierarchical opposition is capable of taking structuralism in new and more realistic directions, reminding us that it has never been the preserve of Lévi-Strauss alone.

What is it to be human? What are our specifically human attributes, our capacities and liabilities? Such questions gave birth to anthropology as an Enlightenment science. This book argues that it is again appropriate to bring the humanA" to the fore, to reclaim the singularity of the word as central to the anthropological endeavor...

The significance that people grant to their affiliations as members of nations, religions, classes, races, ethnicities and genders is evidence of the vital need for a cosmopolitan project that originates in the figure of Anyone - the universal and yet individual human being. Cosmopolitanism offers an alternative to multiculturalism, a different vision of identity, belonging, solidarity and justice, that avoids the seemingly intractable character of identity politics: it identifies samenesses of the human condition that underlie the surface differences of history, culture and society, nation, ethnicity, religion, class, race and gender. This book argues for the importance of cosmopolitanism as a theory of human being, as a methodology for social science and as a moral and political program.

Bringing some of the most prominent social and cultural anthropologists into discussion around the work of Maurice Godelier, this volume explores and revisits some of the most complex practices and structures social scientists have had to elucidate.

Written in honor of prominent anthropologist Richard B Lee who is concerned with understanding and acting upon issues of indigenous rights, the impact of colonialism and post colonial state formation on local communities and cultures. This book defines persistent problems that deeply affect the majority of the world's cultures.

Written in honor of prominent anthropologist Richard B Lee who is concerned with understanding and acting upon issues of indigenous rights, the impact of colonialism and post colonial state formation on local communities and cultures. This book defines persistent problems that deeply affect the majority of the world's cultures.

Given the broad reach of anthropology as the science of humankind, there are times when the subject fragments into specialisms and times when there is rapprochement. Rather than just seeing them as reactions to each other, it is perhaps better to say that both tendencies co-exist and that it is very much a matter of perspective...

Marcel Mauss (1872-1950), Durkheim's nephew, was a key figure among Durkheimians and helped to found the distinctive French tradition in the social sciences at the start of the 20th century. He dominated the teaching of social anthropology in Paris between the Wars, and his Essay on the Gift (1925) is a well established classic.

Addresses the challenges that holistic anthropology presents. This book explores topics such as the social understanding, interpretation and appropriation of new biological technologies, which increasingly penetrate most aspects of physical life, including reproduction, food, biomedicine, health, but also physical performance and art.

Starting from an ethnographic appraisal of the place of religious practices, and thereby returning to an approach more recently neglected, this book offers a detailed understanding of English everyday life. Three contemporary case studies disclose the complex patterns and compulsion of ordinary lives, including both moral and historical dimensions.