Existential Anthropology: Events, Exigencies, and EffectsInspired 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. |
From inside the book
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... 213) – but as an empty and oppressive lack of a future, mixed with a vague longing for the past. This is the time of the refugee camp, of alienated youth, the unemployed, of Noah despairing of his prospects in xxii Preface.
... camps, and has no means of armed resistance, has recourse to a heroic self-annilihation in which he gains, however fugitively, the kind of existence (personal status, recognition and honour) he could not possess in life (2003: 131–132) ...
... camp during a thunderstorm, Meyer Fortes poignant study of a Tallensi women coping with destiny, and Clifford Geertz's recounting of a Balinese cock fight.15Yet, two of these examples (Turner and Geertz) prove, on closer inspection, to ...
... camp, eyes averted, saying nothing, until contact is invited (von Sturmer 1981). But in urban Australia this avoidance behaviour also springs from bitter experience of racial abuse (Aboriginals are 'uncivilised' myals, who belong in the ...
... camping ground was, for these people, a camp in name only. It wasn't just because there were no shade trees and no firewood; it was because this was, as Liddy said a little later as we drove away, a 'kardiya (whitefella) place'. That ...
Contents
1 | |
15 | |
Chapter 3 VIOLENCE AND INTERSUBJECTIVE REASON | 35 |
AN ESSAY ON ANARCHY | 53 |
Chapter 5 WHATS IN A NAME? AN ESSAY ON THE POWER OF WORDS | 75 |
Chapter 6 MUNDANE RITUAL | 93 |
Chapter 7 BIOTECHNOLOGY AND THE CRITIQUE OF GLOBALISATION | 111 |
Chapter 8 FAMILIAR AND FOREIGN BODIES | 127 |
Chapter 9 THE PROSE OF SUFFERING | 143 |
Chapter 10 WHOSE HUMAN RIGHTS? | 159 |
Chapter 11 EXISTENTIAL IMPERATIVES | 181 |
BIBLIOGRAPHY | 195 |
INDEX | 211 |
Other editions - View all
The Body of the Queen: Gender and Rule in the Courtly World from the 15th to ... Regina Schulte No preview available - 2005 |