Anthropology Theoretical Practice in Culture and Society [Paperback]

Not a textbook in the ordinary sense, this work offers a vision of how anthropology - a discipline that operates through intimate knowledge of local societies - can offer vastly increased understanding of society and culture even in this age of mass communication. In its examination of topics ranging as far afield as the mass media, environmental and development issues, kinship and suffering in transnational settings, the politics of both the nation-state and the local community, the arts, cosmologies of science as well as religion, and the relationship between social life and history, this book is not just about an academic discipline; it is about the theoretical as well as ethical commitments that have enabled anthropologists to play a leading role in the critique of racism and other forms of intolerance.Foreword.

Preface.

1. Orientations: Anthropology as a Practice of Theory.

2. Epistemologies.

3. Histories.

4. Economies.

5. Politics.

6. Borders/Nodes/Groupings.

7. Developmentalisms.

8. Environmentalisms.

9. Cosmologies.

10. Sufferings and Disciplines.

11. Senses.

12. Displays of Order.

13. Aesthetics.

14. Media.

Bibliography.

Index.

A wonderful book.... Anthropology breaks ground in every generation. This sparkling survey does not tell you where anthropology has come from, it is a book about where anthropology has got to now, and where it is going. A splendid publishing event.
--Mary Douglas, University College London

An intriguing and unusual book! This is at once a collective and an individual work. Herzfeld is a fencing master supreme; in drawing the works of colleagues close to himself, he also parries and lÓ/