Modernity An Ethnographic Approach

Author : Daniel Miller
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 234 pages
File Size : 52,7 Mb
Release : 2020-08-19
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9781000323313

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Modernity - An Ethnographic Approach by Daniel Miller Pdf

From cultural studies, sociology, media studies, gender studies and elsewhere there have been a spate of books recently which have attempted to characterize the state of modernity. Many of these have also argued that what is required is an ethnographic work to determine how far these supposed trends actually apply to a given population. This book explicitly accepts this challenge and, in so doing, demonstrates the potential of modern anthropology studies. It starts by summarizing some debates on modernity and then argues that the Caribbean island of Trinidad is particularly apt for such a study given the origins of its population in slavery and indentured labour, both forms of extreme social rupture. The particular focus of this book is on mass consumption and the way goods and imported images such as soap opera have been used to express and develop a number of key contradictions of modernity. It will be of interest to anthropologists looking for a new potential for the discipline, as well as students in other fields who will be interested in the new contribution of anthropology to their debates.

Author : Daniel Miller
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 340 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 2020-08-19
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781000325102

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Modernity - An Ethnographic Approach by Daniel Miller Pdf

From cultural studies, sociology, media studies, gender studies and elsewhere there have been a spate of books recently which have attempted to characterize the state of modernity. Many of these have also argued that what is required is an ethnographic work to determine how far these supposed trends actually apply to a given population. This book explicitly accepts this challenge and, in so doing, demonstrates the potential of modern anthropology studies. It starts by summarizing some debates on modernity and then argues that the Caribbean island of Trinidad is particularly apt for such a study given the origins of its population in slavery and indentured labour, both forms of extreme social rupture. The particular focus of this book is on mass consumption and the way goods and imported images such as soap opera have been used to express and develop a number of key contradictions of modernity. It will be of interest to anthropologists looking for a new potential for the discipline, as well as students in other fields who will be interested in the new contribution of anthropology to their debates.

Author : Daniel Miller
Publisher : Bloomsbury Academic
Page : 360 pages
File Size : 52,7 Mb
Release : 1994-04-19
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : UOM:39015051785577

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Modernity - An Ethnographic Approach by Daniel Miller Pdf

It starts by summarizing some debates on modernity and then argues that the Carribean island of Trinidad is particularly apt for such a study, given the origins of its population in slavery and indentured labour, both forms of extreme social rupture, and the subsequent development of creolisation, the transnational family and economic dependency.

Author : D. Hodgson
Publisher : Springer
Page : 277 pages
File Size : 46,5 Mb
Release : 2016-04-30
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781137099440

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Gendered Modernities by D. Hodgson Pdf

Based on long-term ethnographic research, the book chapters explore the intersection of 'gender' and 'modernity' as they are mediated in the lives and subjectivities of diverse individuals and groups. How are the messages of modernity/tradition gendered? How are the material practices and cultural meanings of modernity shaped by local ideas of gender and 'progress'? Together these chapters demonstrate that the ideas of progress, rationality, order, and development encompassed by 'modernity' are profoundly gendered, whether conveyed by mass media images of consumption, agendas of nation-building, or legal discourse. Furthermore, the mutual inflections of gender and modernity are at once pervasively 'global,' occurring in different locales and ways; and deeply 'local,' shaping and shaped by the structures and experiences of culture, class, ethnicity, and nation.

Author : Joel S Kahn
Publisher : SAGE
Page : 180 pages
File Size : 51,7 Mb
Release : 2001-08-09
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0761966579

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Modernity and Exclusion by Joel S Kahn Pdf

This penetrating book re-examines `the project of modernity'. It seeks to oppose the abstract, idealized vision of modernity with an alternative `ethnographic' understanding. The book defends an approach to modernity that situates it as embedded in particular and historical contexts. It examines cases of `popular modernism' in the United States, Britain and colonial Malaysia, drawing out the specific cultural and religious assumptions underlying popular modernism and concludes that modernism is implicated in a diversity of forms of cultural and racial exclusion.

Author : Marion Lundy Dobbert
Publisher : Greenwood
Page : 426 pages
File Size : 51,6 Mb
Release : 1982
Category : Social Science
ISBN : UOM:39015046843119

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Ethnographic Research by Marion Lundy Dobbert Pdf

Author : Alberto Arce,Norman Long
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 264 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 2003-12-16
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781134628421

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Anthropology, Development and Modernities by Alberto Arce,Norman Long Pdf

While the diffusion of modernity and the spread of development schemes may bring prosperity, optimism and opportunity for some, for others it has brought poverty, a deterioration in quality of life and has given rise to violence. This collection brings an anthropological perspective to bear on understanding the diverse modernities we face in the contemporary world. It provides a critical review of interpretations of development and modernity, supported by rigorous case studies from regions as diverse as Guatemala, Sri Lanka, West Africa and contemporary Europe. Together, the chapters in this volume demonstrate the crucial importance of looking to ethnography for guidance in shaping development policies. Ethnography can show how people's own agency transforms, recasts and complicates the modernities they experience. The contributors argue that explanations of change framed in terms of the dominantdiscourses and institutions of modernity are inadequate, and that we give closer attention to discourses, images, beliefs and practices that run counter to these yet play a part in shaping them and giving them meaning. Anthropology, Development and Modernities deals with the realities of people's everyday lives and dilemmas. It is essential reading for students and scholars in anthropology, sociology and development studies. It should also be read by all those actively involved in development work.

Author : Timothy Jenkins
Publisher : Berghahn Books
Page : 276 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 1999
Category : Religion
ISBN : 1571817697

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Religion in English Everyday Life by Timothy Jenkins Pdf

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 - the life of a country church, an annual procession by the churches in a Bristol suburb, a range of linked "spiritualist" beliefs - disclose the complex patterns and compulsion of ordinary lives, including both moral and historical dimensions: the distribution of reputation and conflict, and the continuities of place and identity. At the same time, the approach revises previous accounts of English social life by giving a nuanced description of the construction of local lives in interaction with their wider setting. It demonstrates the creation of local particularity under an outside gaze, showing how actors create and cope with the forces of "modernity." In addition to the original ethnographic descriptions, the book also contributes to the history and theory of the study of complex societies.

Author : Michael Burawoy
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 368 pages
File Size : 44,7 Mb
Release : 1991-11-18
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0520073223

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Ethnography Unbound by Michael Burawoy Pdf

"Establishes a new landmark in the study of everyday life in the modern metropolis. This book brilliantly integrates systematic theory and participant observation data. Forms of domination and resistance are poignantly captured in different social settings, and admirably related to economic and political forces. The volume will do more to enhance ethnographic research than any previous study in sociology."—William Julius Wilson, University of Chicago "What is unleashed in Ethnography Unbound is the theoretical and critical potential of exemplary urban fieldwork and pedagogy. This book by Michael Burawoy and his talented students sets an inspirational standard to emulate in the classroom and in the 'field'."—Judith Stacey, author of Brave New Families "Bravo! A book that explodes the barriers that prevent us from seeing, simultaneously, both the social world and our role in its making. The dichotomies of teacher/student, researcher/researched, and theory/data are subjected to a penetrating and refreshing scrutiny in this unique project."—Rick Fantasia, author of Cultures of Solidarity "Burawoy and his colleagues have rediscovered the ancient truth that participant observation is well-suited to understanding the larger society as well as microsocial life. Moreover, they have made that rediscovery superbly. The essays are of high quality and I hope that the book will increase yet further the current interest in participant observation and ethnography."—Herbert J. Gans, author of People, Plans and Policies

Author : Daniel Miller
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2003-12-16
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781134840946

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Worlds Apart: Modernity Through the Prism of the Local by Daniel Miller Pdf

Worlds Apart is concerned with one of the new futures of anthropology, namely the advances in technologies which r eate an imagination of new global and local forms. It also analyses studies of the consumption of these forms and attempts to go beyond the assumptions that consumption either localises or fails to effect global forms and images. Several of the chapters are written by anthropologists who have specialised in material culture studies and who examine the new forms, especially television and mass commodities, as well as some new uses of older forms, such as the body. The book also considers the ways in which people are increasingly not the primary creators of these images but have become secondary consumers.

Author : George E. Marcus
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 287 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 1998-12-13
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780691002538

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Ethnography Through Thick and Thin by George E. Marcus Pdf

In the 1980s, George Marcus spearheaded a major critique of cultural anthropology, expressed most clearly in the landmark book Writing Culture, which he coedited with James Clifford. Ethnography through Thick and Thin updates and advances that critique for the late 1990s. Marcus presents a series of penetrating and provocative essays on the changes that continue to sweep across anthropology. He examines, in particular, how the discipline's central practice of ethnography has been changed by "multi-sited" approaches to anthropology and how new research patterns are transforming anthropologists' careers. Marcus rejects the view, often expressed, that these changes are undermining anthropology. The combination of traditional ethnography with scholarly experimentation, he argues, will only make the discipline more lively and diverse. The book is divided into three main parts. In the first, Marcus shows how ethnographers' tradition of defining fieldwork in terms of peoples and places is now being challenged by the need to study culture by exploring connections, parallels, and contrasts among a variety of often seemingly incommensurate sites. The second part illustrates this emergent multi-sited condition of research by reflecting it in some of Marcus's own past research on Tongan elites and dynastic American fortunes. In the final section, which includes the previously unpublished essay "Sticking with Ethnography through Thick and Thin," Marcus examines the evolving professional culture of anthropology and the predicaments of its new scholars. He shows how students have increasingly been drawn to the field as much by such powerful interdisciplinary movements as feminism, postcolonial studies, and cultural studies as by anthropology's own traditions. He also considers the impact of demographic changes within the discipline--in particular the fact that anthropologists are no longer almost exclusively Euro-Americans studying non-Euro-Americans. These changes raise new issues about the identities of anthropologists in relation to those they study, and indeed, about what is to define standards of ethnographic scholarship. Filled with keen and highly illuminating observations, Ethnography through Thick and Thin will stimulate fresh debate about the past, present, and future of a discipline undergoing profound transformations.

Author : Saurabh Dube
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 192 pages
File Size : 45,9 Mb
Release : 2017
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 1526105136

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Subjects of Modernity by Saurabh Dube Pdf

This book thinks through modernity and its representations by exploring critical considerations of time and space. Drawing on anthropology, history and social theory, it investigates the oppositions and enchantments, the contradictions and contentions, and the identities and ambivalences spawned under modernity. Crucially, it understands these antinomies not as errors, but as constitutive elements of modern worlds. The book questions routine portrayals of homogeneous time and antinomian blueprints of cultural space, while acknowledging the production of time and space by social subjects. Instead of assuming a straightforward, singular trajectory for the phenomena, it views modernity as involving checkered, contingent and contended processes of meaning and power, which have found heterogeneous historical elaborations over the past five centuries. Bringing together past and present, theory and narrative, it sows the historical, ethnographic and methodological deep into its critical procedures, offering an innovative understanding of cultural identities and imaginatively exploring the relationship between history and anthropology.

Author : Jonathan Xavier Inda
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 51,8 Mb
Release : 2008-04-15
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781405153027

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Anthropologies of Modernity by Jonathan Xavier Inda Pdf

This book brings together a range of anthropological writings that are inspired by the French philosopher Michel Foucault and examine Foucault’s contribution to current theories of modernity. Treats modernity as an ethnographic object by focusing on its concrete manifestations. Tackles issues of broad interest: from colonialism and globalization to war, genetics, and AIDS. Draws on work from North and South America, Europe, Africa, and South and Southeast Asia. Contributors include James Ferguson, Akhil Gupta, Aihwa Ong, Paul Rabinow, and Rayna Rapp.

Author : Marc Manganaro
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 350 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 2014-07-14
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781400861415

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Modernist Anthropology by Marc Manganaro Pdf

Recent insights into the nature of representation and power relations have signaled an important shift in perspective on anthropology: from a fieldwork-based "science" of culture to an interpretive activity bound to the discursive and ideological process called "text-making." This collection of essays reflects the ongoing cross-fertilization between literary criticism and anthropology. Focusing on texts written or influenced by anthropologists between 1900 and 1945, the work relates current perspectives on anthropology's discursive nature to the literary period known as "Modernism.". The essays, each demonstrating anthropology's profound influence on this important cultural movement, are organized according to discourse type: from the comparativist text of Frazer, to the ethnographies of Boas, Benedict, Mead, and Hurston, and on to the surrealist experiments of the College de Sociologie. Meanwhile the book's orientation shifts from essays that approach anthropology from the vantage points of literariness and textual power to those that contemplate what bearing the junction of cultural theory and anthropology can have upon present and future social institutions. In addition to the editor, contributors include Vincent Crapanzano, Deborah Gordon, Richard Handler, Arnold Krupat, Francesco Loriggio, Michele Richman, Marty Roth, Marilyn Strathern, Robert Sullivan, John B. Vickery, and Steven Webster. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Author : David Picard
Publisher : Berghahn Books
Page : 206 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 2011-09-30
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780857452023

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Tourism, Magic and Modernity by David Picard Pdf

Drawing from extended fieldwork in La Réunion, in the Indian Ocean, the author suggests an innovative re-reading of different concepts of magic that emerge in the global cultural economics of tourism. Following the making and unmaking of the tropical island tourism destination of La Réunion, he demonstrates how destinations are transformed into magical pleasure gardens in which human life is cultivated for tourist consumption. Like a gardener would cultivate flowers, local development policy, nature conservation, and museum initiatives dramatise local social life so as to evoke modernist paradigms of time, beauty and nature. Islanders who live in this 'human garden' are thus placed in the ambivalent role of 'human flowers', embodying ideas of authenticity and biblical innocence, but also of history and social life in perpetual creolisation.