Ethnography And The Historical Imagination

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Ethnography And The Historical Imagination

Author : John Comaroff,Jean Comaroff
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 301 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 2019-04-02
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780429719318

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Ethnography And The Historical Imagination by John Comaroff,Jean Comaroff Pdf

Over the years John and Jean Comaroff have broadened the study of culture and society with their reflections on power and meaning. In their work on Africa and colonialism they have explored some of the fundamental questions of social science, delving into the nature of history and human agency, culture and consciousness, ritual and representation. How are human differences constructed and institutionalized, transformed and (sometimes) effaced, empowered and (sometimes) resisted? How do local cultures articulate with global forms? How is the power of some people over others built, sustained, eroded, and negated? How does the social imagination take shape in novel yet collectively meaningful ways? Addressing these questions, the essays in this volume–several never before published–work toward an "imaginative sociology," demonstrating the techniques by which social science may capture the contexts that human beings construct and inhabit. In the introduction, the authors offer their most complete statement to date on the nature of historical anthropology. Standing apart from the traditional disciplines of social history and modernist social science, their work is dedicated to discovering how human worlds are made and signified, forgotten and remade.

Ethnography And The Historical Imagination

Author : John & Jean Comaroff
Publisher : Westview Press
Page : 352 pages
File Size : 41,8 Mb
Release : 1992-07-20
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0813313058

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Ethnography And The Historical Imagination by John & Jean Comaroff Pdf

Over the years John and Jean Comaroff have broadened the study of culture and society with their reflections on power and meaning. In their work on Africa and colonialism they have explored some of the fundamental questions of social science, delving into the nature of history and human agency, culture and consciousness, ritual and representation. How are human differences constructed and institutionalized, transformed and (sometimes) effaced, empowered and (sometimes) resisted? How do local cultures articulate with global forms? How is the power of some people over others built, sustained, eroded, and negated? How does the social imagination take shape in novel yet collectively meaningful ways?Addressing these questions, the essays in this volume—several never before published—work toward an “imaginative sociology,” demonstrating the techniques by which social science may capture the contexts that human beings construct and inhabit. In the introduction, the authors offer their most complete statement to date on the nature of historical anthropology. Standing apart from the traditional disciplines of social history and modernist social science, their work is dedicated to discovering how human worlds are made and signified, forgotten and remade.

The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences

Author : Terrence J. McDonald
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
Page : 432 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 1996
Category : History
ISBN : 0472066323

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The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences by Terrence J. McDonald Pdf

Eleven essays that probe the historical project in a wide range of disciplines

Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination

Author : Stephanie Porras
Publisher : Penn State Press
Page : 217 pages
File Size : 45,8 Mb
Release : 2018-04-26
Category : Art
ISBN : 9780271084572

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Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination by Stephanie Porras Pdf

The question of how to understand Bruegel’s art has cast the artist in various guises: as a moralizing satirist, comedic humanist, celebrator of vernacular traditions, and proto-ethnographer. Stephanie Porras reorients these apparently contradictory accounts, arguing that the debate about how to read Bruegel has obscured his pictures’ complex relation to time and history. Rather than viewing Bruegel’s art as simply illustrating the social realities of his day, Porras asserts that Bruegel was an artist deeply concerned with the past. In playing with the boundaries of the familiar and the foreign, history and the present, Bruegel’s images engaged with the fraught question of Netherlandish history in the years just prior to the Dutch Revolt, when imperial, religious, and national identities were increasingly drawn into tension. His pictorial style and his manipulation of traditional iconographies reveal the complex relations, unique to this moment, among classical antiquity, local history, and art history. An important reassessment of Renaissance attitudes toward history and of Renaissance humanism in the Low Countries, this volume traces the emergence of archaeological and anthropological practices in historical thinking, their intersections with artistic production, and the developing concept of local art history.

States of Imagination

Author : Thomas Blom Hansen,Finn Stepputat
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 433 pages
File Size : 51,7 Mb
Release : 2001-12-12
Category : History
ISBN : 9780822381273

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States of Imagination by Thomas Blom Hansen,Finn Stepputat Pdf

The state has recently been rediscovered as an object of inquiry by a broad range of scholars. Reflecting the new vitality of the field of political anthropology, States of Imagination draws together the best of this recent critical thinking to explore the postcolonial state. Contributors focus on a variety of locations from Guatemala, Pakistan, and Peru to India and Ecuador; they study what the state looks like to those seeing it from the vantage points of rural schools, police departments, small villages, and the inside of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Focusing on the micropolitics of everyday state-making, the contributors examine the mythologies, paradoxes, and inconsistencies of the state through ethnographies of diverse postcolonial practices. They show how the authority of the state is constantly challenged from the local as well as the global and how growing demands to confer rights and recognition to ever more citizens, organizations, and institutions reveal a persistent myth of the state as a source of social order and an embodiment of popular sovereignty. Demonstrating the indispensable value of ethnographic work on the practices and the symbols of the state, States of Imagination showcases a range of studies and methods to provide insight into the diverse forms of the postcolonial state as an arena of both political and cultural struggle. This collection will interest students and scholars of anthropology, cultural studies, sociology, political science, and history. Contributors. Lars Buur, Mitchell Dean, Akhil Gupta, Thomas Blom Hansen, Steffen Jensen, Aletta J. Norval, David Nugent, Sarah Radcliffe, Rachel Sieder, Finn Stepputat, Martijn van Beek, Oskar Verkaaik, Fiona Wilson

Culture and Anomie

Author : Christopher Herbert
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 384 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 1991-10-18
Category : History
ISBN : 0226327388

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Culture and Anomie by Christopher Herbert Pdf

Few ideas are as important and pervasive in the discourse of the twentieth century as the idea of culture. Yet culture, Christopher Herbert contends, is an idea laden from its inception with ambiguity and contradiction. In Culture and Anomie, Christopher Herbert conducts an inquiry into the historical emergence of the modern idea of culture that is at the same time an extended critical analysis of the perplexities and suppressed associations underlying our own exploitation of this term. Making wide reference to twentieth-century anthropologists from Malinowski and Benedict to Evans-Pritchard, Geertz, and Lévi-Strauss as well as to nineteenth-century social theorists like Tylor, Spencer, Mill, and Arnold, Herbert stresses the philosophically dubious, unstable character that has clung to the "culture" idea and embarrassed its exponents even as it was developing into a central principle of interpretation. In a series of detailed studies ranging from political economy to missionary ethnography, Mayhew, and Trollope's fiction, Herbert then focuses on the intellectual and historical circumstances that gave to "culture" the appearance of a secure category of scientific analysis despite its apparent logical incoherence. What he describes is an intimate relationship between the idea of culture and its antithesis, the myth or fantasy of a state of boundless human desire—a conception that binds into a single tradition of thought such seemingly incompatible writers as John Wesley, who called this state original sin, and Durkheim, who gave it its technical name in sociology: anomie. Methodologically provocative and rich in unorthodox conclusions, Culture and Anomie will be of interest not only to specialists in nineteenth-century literature and intellectual history, but also to readers across the wide range of fields in which the concept of culture plays a determining role.

Portrait of a Greek Imagination

Author : Michael Herzfeld
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 348 pages
File Size : 54,7 Mb
Release : 1997
Category : Art
ISBN : 0226329100

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Portrait of a Greek Imagination by Michael Herzfeld Pdf

Anthropologist Michael Herzfeld first met Greek novelist Andreas Nenedakis in the courtyard of a public library. Their enduring friendship prompted Herzfeld to reconsider both the contours of fiction and the nature of anthropology. Part biography and part ethnography, PORTRAIT OF A GREEK IMAGINATION is Herzfeld's contextualization of Nenedakis's life, as it was both lived and fictionalized. 10 photos.

Imagining Difference

Author : Leslie Robertson
Publisher : UBC Press
Page : 352 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2005
Category : History
ISBN : 0774810939

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Imagining Difference by Leslie Robertson Pdf

Imagining Difference is an ethnography about historical and contemporary ideas of human difference expressed by residents of Fernie, BC -- a coal-mining town transforming into an international ski resort. Focusing on diverse experiences of people from the European diaspora, Robertson analyzes expressions of difference from the multiple locations of age, ethnicity, gender, class, and religion. Her starting point is a popular local legend about an indigenous curse cast on the valley and its residents in the nineteenth century. Successive interpretations of the story reveal a complicated landscape of memory and silence, mapping out official and contested histories, social and scientific theories as well as the edicts of political discourse. Cursing becomes a metaphor for discursive power resonating in political, popular, and cultural contexts, transmitting ideas of difference across generations and geographies. Stories are powerful imaginative resources in the contexts of colonialism, war, immigration, labour strife, natural disaster, treaty-making, and globalization.This study suggests that while criteria may shift, ideas of "race" and "foreignness," expressions of regionalism, and class and religious identity remain fixed in the social imagination. The author draws from folklore, media imagery, historical records, and interviews; field notes and verbatim accounts provide readers with a sense of the ethnographic process. While situated historically and socially in Fernie, BC, this work will appeal to those in anthropology, women’s studies, Native studies, and history, as well as to regional readers and anyone interested in life in resource towns in North America.

From the Margins

Author : Brian Keith Axel
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 336 pages
File Size : 52,7 Mb
Release : 2002-06-07
Category : History
ISBN : 0822328887

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From the Margins by Brian Keith Axel Pdf

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

Nationalism and the Genealogical Imagination

Author : Andrew Shryock
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 374 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 2023-07-28
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780520916388

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Nationalism and the Genealogical Imagination by Andrew Shryock Pdf

This book explores the transition from oral to written history now taking place in tribal Jordan, a transition that reveals the many ways in which modernity, literate historicity, and national identity are developing in the contemporary Middle East. As traditional Bedouin storytellers and literate historians lead him through a world of hidden documents, contested photographs, and meticulously reconstructed pedigrees, Andrew Shryock describes how he becomes enmeshed in historical debates, ranging from the local to the national level. The world the Bedouin inhabit is rich in oral tradition and historical argument, in subtle reflections on the nature of truth and its relationship to poetics, textuality, and power. Skillfully blending anthropology and history, Shryock discusses the substance of tribal history through the eyes of its creators—those who sustain an older tradition of authoritative oral history and those who have experimented with the first written accounts. His focus throughout is on the development of a "genealogical nationalism" as well as on the tensions that arise between tribe and state. Rich in both personal revelation and cultural implications, this book poses a provocative challenge to traditional assumptions about the way history is written.

Imagining the Post-Apartheid State

Author : John T. Friedman
Publisher : Berghahn Books
Page : 324 pages
File Size : 49,5 Mb
Release : 2011-07-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780857450913

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Imagining the Post-Apartheid State by John T. Friedman Pdf

In northwest Namibia, people’s political imagination offers a powerful insight into the post-apartheid state. Based on extensive anthropological fieldwork, this book focuses on the former South African apartheid regime and the present democratic government; it compares the perceptions and practices of state and customary forms of judicial administration, reflects upon the historical trajectory of a chieftaincy dispute in relation to the rooting of state power and examines everyday forms of belonging in the independent Namibian State. By elucidating the State through a focus on the social, historical and cultural processes that help constitute it, this study helps chart new territory for anthropology, and it contributes an ethnographic perspective to a wider set of interdisciplinary debates on the State and state processes.

Frontiers of Historical Imagination

Author : Kerwin Lee Klein
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 391 pages
File Size : 52,5 Mb
Release : 2023-11-10
Category : History
ISBN : 9780520924185

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Frontiers of Historical Imagination by Kerwin Lee Klein Pdf

The American frontier, a potent symbol since Europeans first stepped ashore on North America, serves as the touchstone for Kerwin Klein's analysis of the narrating of history. Klein explores the traditions through which historians, philosophers, anthropologists, and literary critics have understood the story of America's origin and the way those understandings have shaped and been shaped by changing conceptions of history. The American West was once the frontier space where migrating Europe collided with Native America, where the historical civilizations of the Old World met the nonhistorical wilds of the New. It was not only the cultural combat zone where American democracy was forged but also the ragged edge of History itself, where historical and nonhistorical defied and defined each other. Klein maintains that the idea of a collision between people with and without history still dominates public memory. But the collision, he believes, resounds even more powerfully in the historical imagination, which creates conflicts between narration and knowledge and carries them into the language used to describe the American frontier. In Klein's words, "We remain obscurely entangled in philosophies of history we no longer profess, and the very idea of 'America' balances on history's shifting frontiers."

Ethnicity, Inc.

Author : John L. Comaroff,Jean Comaroff
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 250 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2009-09-15
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780226114736

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Ethnicity, Inc. by John L. Comaroff,Jean Comaroff Pdf

In Ethnicity, Inc. anthropologists John L. and Jean Comaroff analyze a new moment in the history of human identity: its rampant commodification. Through a wide-ranging exploration of the changing relationship between culture and the market, they address a pressing question: Wherein lies the future of ethnicity? Their account begins in South Africa, with the incorporation of an ethno-business in venture capital by a group of traditional African chiefs. But their horizons are global: Native American casinos; Scotland’s efforts to brand itself; a Zulu ethno-theme park named Shakaland; a world religion declared to be intellectual property; a chiefdom made into a global business by means of its platinum holdings; San “Bushmen” with patent rights potentially worth millions of dollars; nations acting as commercial enterprises; and the rapid growth of marketing firms that target specific ethnic populations are just some of the diverse examples that fall under the Comaroffs’ incisive scrutiny. These phenomena range from the disturbing through the intriguing to the absurd. Through them, the Comaroffs trace the contradictory effects of neoliberalism as it transforms identities and social being across the globe. Ethnicity, Inc. is a penetrating account of the ways in which ethnic populations are remaking themselves in the image of the corporation—while corporations coopt ethnic practices to open up new markets and regimes of consumption. Intellectually rigorous but leavened with wit, this is a powerful, highly original portrayal of a new world being born in a tectonic collision of culture, capitalism, and identity.

Geography and Ethnography

Author : Kurt A. Raaflaub,Richard J. A. Talbert
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 376 pages
File Size : 53,9 Mb
Release : 2009-12-17
Category : History
ISBN : 1444315668

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Geography and Ethnography by Kurt A. Raaflaub,Richard J. A. Talbert Pdf

This fascinating volume brings together leading specialists, whohave analyzed the thoughts and records documenting the worldviewsof a wide range of pre-modern societies. Presents evidence from across the ages; from antiquity throughto the Age of Discovery Provides cross-cultural comparison of ancient societies aroundthe globe, from the Chinese to the Incas and Aztecs, from theGreeks and Romans to the peoples of ancient India Explores newly discovered medieval Islamic materials

The Camera as Historian

Author : Elizabeth Edwards
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 346 pages
File Size : 49,8 Mb
Release : 2012-04-11
Category : Art
ISBN : 9780822351047

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The Camera as Historian by Elizabeth Edwards Pdf

"In the camera as historian, the groundbreaking historical and visual anthropologist Elizabeth Edwards works with an archive of neraly 55,000 photographs taken by 1,000 photographers, mostly unknown until now." -- Inside cover.