Nigel Rapport

Joanna Overing

This text offers an introduction to social and cultural anthropology, and defines and discusses its central terms with clarity.

The Key Concepts

Social and Cultural Anthropology

Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophical work on ‘the Other’ offers a challenge to the discipline of anthropology that claims knowledge of the human. For Levinas, the ‘secrecy’ of subjectivity – a fundamental facet of the human condition – demands an ethics of ignorance and not-knowing; the mystery of otherness is only to be approached through ‘inspiration’. Can anthropology meet a Levinasian challenge if it would define itself as a science as well as a humanistic documentation of social life? This book endeavours to take Levinasian and anthropological precepts equally seriously and offers a radical conclusion.

Emmanuel Levinas and Anthropological Science

‘I am Here’, Abraham Said

Theodore M. Porter

Kalpana Ram

Tord Larsen

Michael Blim

"Modes of objectification-different ways of producing and quantifying entities through categories and classes-are part of the cultural infrastructure of any society and any epoch. But we are now in an era that displays a passion for objectification and quantification unparalleled since the beginning of statistics. This volume identifies the most prominent contemporary forms of objectification: in the arts, medicine, finance, identity management, the rhetoric of science as well as the everyday. Different chapters show how these modes of objectification, measurement, and standardization shape the main dimensions of social life: meaning and representation, morality, and notions of thinghood and personhood. Moreover, quantification, measurement, and standardization are not simply ways of organizing pre-given entities. Rather, they are performative and generative technologies which create institutional objects, give rise to forms of objectivity and carry with them a range of normativities. Hence, the chapters also elaborate on the enduring link between forms of objectification and ritualism. At times, objectification is accomplished and fortified by ritualization. But ritual may also help disrupt the objectified, quantified world which meets resistance in the encounter with the actual fuzziness, flux, and capaciousness of reality. While the volume highlights the growing objectification and standardization of social life on the one hand, on the other it describes resistance to this trend"--

On the Limits and Effects of Ritually Fixing and Measuring Life

Objectification and Standardization

Huon Wardle

Albert Piette

This volume is the first handbook to explore existentialism as epistemology and method. Transdisciplinary in scope, it considers the nature of human subjectivity and how human experience ought to be studied, examining the connections that exist between the individual’s imagining of the world and their everyday practice within it. With attention to the question of whether humans are ultimately alone in their self-knowledge or whether what they know of themselves is constructed in common with others, it enables the reader to recognize core questions that frame the methods and orientation of an existential inquiry. In addition to historical exposition, it offers a variety of chapters from around the world that explore the diverse global spaces for, and different types of, existential focus and discussion, thus questioning the view that the existential "problem" may be singularly a matter for the post-enlightenment West. The fullest and most comprehensive survey to date of what human beings can and should make of themselves, The Routledge International Handbook of Existential Human Science will appeal to scholars across the humanities and social sciences with interests in anthropology, sociology, philosophy, and research methods.

The Routledge International Handbook of Existential Human Science

Trevor A. Hart

Paul Gifford

David Archard

2000 Years and Beyond brings together some of the most eminent thinkers of our time - specialists in philosophy, theology, anthropology and cultural theory. In a horizon-scanning work, they look backwards and forwards to explore what links us to the matrix of the Judaeo-Christian tradition from which Western cultural identity has evolved. Their plural reflections raise searching questions about how we move from past to future - and about who 'we' are. What do the catastrophes of the twentieth century signify for hopes of progress? Can post - Enlightment humanism and its notion of human nature survive without faith? If the 'numinous magic global capitalism' is our own giant shadow cast abroad, does that shadow offer hope enough of a communal future? Has the modern, secularized West now outgrown its originating faith matrix? Often controversial and sometimes visionary, these seven new essays ask: how do we tell - and rewrite - the story of the Common Era? Introduced by Paul Gifford, and discussed in a lively dialogic conclusion, they add their distinctive voices to a debate of profound and urgent topicality.

Faith, Identity and the 'Commmon Era'

2000 Years and Beyond

A fascinating, highly readable anthropological account of the way the inhabitants of a small English village come to conceive of the world--how they imagine there is such a thing as "society" and such a thing as an "individual." Contrary to the expectations engendered by theory, social life appears as chaotic, multiple, and contradictory--a muddling through, facilitated by the ambiguous relationship between the formal appearance of behaviors and the actuality of their personal interpretation. Distributed by Columbia U. Press. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Diverse World-views in an English Village

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.

The Cosmopolitan Subject of Anthropology

Anyone

In a time of intellectual uncertainty, the question of how we know what we do about human lives becomes ever more pressing. The essays collated in this volume argue that anthropology can be used to acknowledge, explore and interpret divergence and ideological conflict over human meaning. Using questions raised as part of the Enlightenment movement, this volume is structured around some of the key themes the Enlightenment fostered, including human nature, time, Earth and the Cosmos, beauty, order, harmony and design, moral sentiments, and the query of whether wealthy nations make for healthy publics. The volume focuses in particular on how 'moral sentiment' offered a guiding idea in Enlightenment thought. The idea of 'moral sentiment' is central to the essays' grappling with the ethical anxieties of contemporary anthropology. The essays therefore trace historical connections and fissures and focus on Adam Smith's attempts toward an understanding of what would later be called 'modernity'. With an afterword from Marilyn Strathern, this volume will be a strong addition to the Association of Social Anthropologists conference proceedings.

Moral Social Relations Then and Today

An Anthropology of the Enlightenment

Social and Cultural Anthropology: The Key Concepts is the ideal introduction to this discipline, defining and discussing the central terms of the subject with clarity and authority.

Social and Cultural Anthropology: The Key Concepts

What kind of a resource - ethnographic, theoretic and methodological - does literature represent to anthropology?

Anthropology, Literature, and the Writing of E.M. Forster

The Prose and the Passion

Morten Nielsen

How do anthropologists write their texts? What is the nature of creativity in the discipline of anthropology? This book follows anthropologists into spaces where words, ideas and arguments take shape and explores the steps in a creative process. In a unique examination of how texts come to be composed, the editors bring together a distinguished group of anthropologists who offer valuable insight into their writing habits. These reflexive glimpses into personal creativity reveal not only the processes by which theory and ethnography come, in particular cases, to be represented on the page but also supply examples that students may follow or adapt.

How Anthropological Texts Are Written

The Composition of Anthropology

Transcendent Individual argues for a reappraisal of the place of the individual in anthropolgical theory and ethnographic writing. A wealth of voices illustrate and inform the text, showing ways in which individuals creatively 'write', narrate and animate cultural and social life. This is an anthropology imbued with a liberal morality which is willing to make value judgements over and against culture in favour of individuality. Rapport draws widely on ethnographic and theoretic materials bringing into the debate a range of voices, among them Nietzsche, Wilde, George Steiner, Richard Rorty, John Berger and Anthony Cohen. In doing so he approaches individuality in terms of a range of issues: biological integrity, consciousness, agency, democracy, discourse, globalism, knowledge and play.

Essays Toward a Literary and Liberal Anthropology

Transcendent Individual

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 human" to the fore, to reclaim the singularity of the word as central to the anthropological endeavor, not on the basis of the substance of a human nature - "To be human is to act like this and react like this, to feel this and want this" - but in terms of species-wide capacities: capabilities for action and imagination, liabilities for suffering and cruelty. The contributors approach "the human" with an awareness of these complexities and particularities, rendering this volume unique in its ability to build on anthropology's ethnographic expertise.

Transcending Discourse and Classification

Human Nature as Capacity

The anthropology of Britain is hotly debated. What does it mean to live in Britain and to be 'British', and is an anthropology of Britain even a legitimate undertaking? British Subjects presents a forthright voice in this debate. Key anthropological concerns such as community, rationality, aesthetics, the body, power, work and leisure, nationalism and transnationalism are found reflected in the lives of a wide range of British 'subjects'--from farmers to dancers, children to retired miners, new-agers to entrepreneurs. In disputing traditional claims that anthropology 'at home' and 'of one's own' is misconceived, unnecessary or unperceptive, this book clearly establishes that an anthropology of Britain can set excellent standards of subtle ethnography and complex analysis. Providing a nuanced appreciation of the intricacies of British society, this book shows how the anthropological study of Britain can offer an enlightening paradigm for the study of individual lives.

An Anthropology of Britain

British Subjects

Focusing on the lives and works of eminent figures such as Levi and Nietzsche, anthropologist Nigel Rappaport shows how we can avoid the structures of ideology and institution through the formulation of 'life projects'.

An Alternative Anthropology of Power

I Am Dynamite

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 human" to the fore, to reclaim the singularity of the word as central to the anthropological endeavor, not on the basis of the substance of a human nature – "To be human is to act like this and react like this, to feel this and want this" – but in terms of species-wide capacities: capabilities for action and imagination, liabilities for suffering and cruelty. The contributors approach "the human" with an awareness of these complexities and particularities, rendering this volume unique in its ability to build on anthropology's ethnographic expertise.

In this ground-breaking book, a theory of ’distortion’ - of the way in which the processes of human life are subject to interference, diversion and transformation - is developed by way of the art of one of Britain’s greatest twentieth-century painters and that art’s public reception. Devoted to his native village of Cookham-on-Thames, Stanley Spencer painted not only landscapes and portraits with loving detail but also the ’memory-feelings’ which he felt were a ’sacred’ part of his consciousness. Yet Spencer was also a controversial public figure, with some taking the view that his visionary paintings were ugly distortions of human life, even marks of an immoral nature. Examining how Spencer lived his vision, how he painted it and wrote it, and also how his attempts to communicate that vision were received by his contemporaries and have continued to be interpreted since his death, the author posits distortion as key: an intrinsic aspect both of human creation and of human interaction. What we intend to make, to say, to do and have done, often mutates in the process of being expressed or put into effect: we live amid distortion. Love - the affective appreciation of one another - is then a means by which we accommodate distortion and its consequences in our lives. An illustration, through Stanley Spencer’s story, of significant aspects of a human condition, this book will appeal across disciplines, including to art historians and students of Spencer’s work, as well as to scholars of anthropology with interests in creativity, perception and interpretation.

An Anthropological Reading of the Art and Life of Stanley Spencer

Distortion and Love

Distortion occurs between the intentions of actions and their outcomes. It can also occur between thoughts and actions; between words and how they are interpreted; between a statement of law and its enactment; between a vision and its artistic representation; and between a cultural tradition or habitus and its animation in contemporary contexts. Escaping the bounds of relationality, of structuration and of systemics, distortion is a form of complex connectedness that has seldom been addressed in the social sciences as a phenomenon in its own right. This volume argues for the key importance of distortion as a concept in the social sciences, and attempts to refine it as a concept. Each chapter examines distortion in the context of an ethnographic case study, examining how its conceptualization can further comprehension of a particular ethnographic situation. It is contended that distortion is an account of the emergent or revolutionary nature of human life, an emergence that can be attached to particular antecedent conditions in a processual or temporal way yet is a transformation of the essential nature of those conditions. Coming to terms with distortion adds significantly to the social-scientific appreciation of human activity and creativity, of conscious experience, of the nature of social interaction and exchange, and of the complexity of social milieu. Distortion should be essential reading on advanced undergraduate and postgraduate modules on social theory, contemporary issues and methodologies, communication, sociality, materiality, and intersectionality.

Nigel Rapport

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