Book Description
This is an anthropological exploration of the existential and philosophical qualities of ambiguity as a generative force of political and socio-cultural transformation in contemporary human life trajectories.
Author : Mahnaz Alimardanian
Publisher :
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 19,21 MB
Release : 2024-05-28
Category :
ISBN : 9781526173843
This is an anthropological exploration of the existential and philosophical qualities of ambiguity as a generative force of political and socio-cultural transformation in contemporary human life trajectories.
Author : Čarna Brković
Publisher : Berghahn Books
Page : 208 pages
File Size : 31,30 MB
Release : 2017-07-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1785334158
Why do people turn to personal connections to get things done? Exploring the role of favors in social welfare systems in postwar, postsocialist Bosnia and Herzegovina, this volume provides a new theoretical angle on links between ambiguity and power. It demonstrates that favors were not an instrumental tactic of survival, nor a way to reproduce oneself as a moral person. Instead, favors enabled the insertion of personal compassion into the heart of the organization of welfare. Managing Ambiguity follows how neoliberal insistence on local community, flexibility, and self-responsibility was translated into clientelist modes of relating and back, and how this fostered a specific mode of power.
Author : Mahnaz Alimardanian
Publisher : Manchester University Press
Page : 366 pages
File Size : 35,29 MB
Release : 2024-05-28
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1526173832
This volume puts ambiguity and its generative power at the centre of analytical attention. Rather than being cast negatively as a source of confusion, bewilderment or as a dangerous portent, ambiguity is held as the source of the dynamic between knowledge and experience and of certainty amid uncertainty. It positions human life between the realms of mystery and mastery where ambiguity is understood as the experience and expression of life and part of navigating the human condition. In turn, the tension between the tradition in anthropology of examining cultural certitudes through ethnographic description and efforts to challenge dominant expressions of incertitude are explored. Each chapter presents ethnographic accounts of how people engage individually and collectively with the self, the other, human-made institutions and the more-than-human to navigate ambiguity in a world affected by viral contagion, climate change, economic instability, labour precarity and (geo)political tension.
Author : Th. C. W. Oudemans
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 300 pages
File Size : 31,42 MB
Release : 1987
Category : History
ISBN : 9789004084179
Author : Michael Lambek
Publisher : Berghahn Books
Page : 164 pages
File Size : 40,35 MB
Release : 2004
Category : Medical
ISBN : 9781571816740
Theories of illness and therapy since Freud have included the possibility that sufferers are complicit in their conditions. The studies in this volume explore the ways in which illness and therapy may be characterized as sites at which ironies of the human condition are produced, encountered, acknowledged – or discounted in favor of more literal readings. They ask what these sites can teach us about questions of human agency and about the broader importance of irony for theory. Encompassing a variety of perspectives, the contributors included in Illness and Irony apply theories of irony to a myriad of cultural contexts, ranging from Freud’s consulting room and the Lacanian clinics of Buenos Aires to fright illness in a Yemeni village and spirit possession on the island of Mayotte. An introductory chapter by Michael Lambek establishes a contextual viewpoint on irony, arising from the writings of Thomas Mann, Alexander Nehamas and others. Vincent Crapanzano concludes the volume by linking the contributions to current debates about irony in rhetoric, linguistics and comparative literature.
Author : Jens Kjaerulff
Publisher : Berghahn Books
Page : 295 pages
File Size : 19,60 MB
Release : 2015-03-01
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 1782386165
Approaching “work” as at heart a practice of exchange, this volume explores sociality in work environments marked by the kind of structural changes that have come to define contemporary “flexible” capitalism. It introduces anthropological exchange theory to a wider readership, and shows how the perspective offers new ways to enquire about the flexible capitalism’s social dimensions. The essays contribute to a trans-disciplinary scholarship on contemporary economic practice and change by documenting how, across diverse settings, “gift-like” socialities proliferate, and even sustain the intensified flexible commoditization that more commonly is touted as tearing social relations apart. By interrogating a keenly debated contemporary work regime through an approach to sociality rooted in a rich and distinct anthropological legacy, the volume also makes a novel contribution to the anthropological literature on work and on exchange.
Author : Donald N. Levine
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 258 pages
File Size : 39,17 MB
Release : 1988-06-15
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0226475565
The essays turn about a single theme, the loss of the capacity to deal constructively with ambiguity in the modern era. Levine offers a head-on critique of the modern compulsion to flee ambiguity. He centers his analysis on the question of what responses social scientists should adopt in the face of the inexorably ambiguous character of all natural languages. In the course of his argument, Levine presents a fresh reading of works by the classic figures of modern European and American social theory—Durkheim, Freud, Simmel and Weber, and Park, Parsons, and Merton.
Author : William C. Olsen
Publisher : Berghahn Books
Page : 322 pages
File Size : 26,35 MB
Release : 2019-05-03
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 1789202140
Anthropologists have expressed wariness about the concept of evil even in discussions of morality and ethics, in part because the concept carries its own cultural baggage and theological implications in Euro-American societies. Addressing the problem of evil as a distinctly human phenomenon and a category of ethnographic analysis, this volume shows the usefulness of engaging evil as a descriptor of empirical reality where concepts such as violence, criminality, and hatred fall short of capturing the darkest side of human existence.
Author : Michael Jackson
Publisher : Berghahn Books
Page : 252 pages
File Size : 40,74 MB
Release : 2005
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781845451226
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.
Author : Francois G Richard
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 333 pages
File Size : 12,50 MB
Release : 2016-07-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1315428997
The collective inquiries in this volume address ethnicity in ancient Africa as social fact and political artifact along numerous dimensions. Is ethnicity a useful analytic? What can archaeology say about the kinds of deeper time questions which scholars have asked of identities in Africa? Eleven authors engage with contemporary anthropological, historical and archaeological perspectives to examine how ideas of self-understanding, belonging, and difference in Africa were made and unmade. They examine how these intersect with other salient domains of social experience: states, landscapes, discourses, memory, technology, politics, and power. The various chapters cover broad geographic and temporal ground, following an arc across Senegal, Mali, Nigeria, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, and East Africa, spanning from prehistory to the colonial period.