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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... [Chapter 8]). Parts of chapters 4, 9, and 10 have previously appeared, in slightly different form, in my book In Sierra Leone (University of Chicago Press, 2004). Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint these materials ...
... chapter in this book is centred on a 'critical event' (cf. Das 1995) that broaches this question of being as a relationship between the forces that act upon us and our capacity for bringing the new into being: incidents during the war ...
... chapter 6, however, the antinomian finds expression not only in formal events such as feasts and rituals, but in the interstices of everyday life, whenever we realise our practical and imaginative capacity to transform the events that ...
... chapter 3, where I explore reciprocity and the imaginary of social violence. Consider the case of Kinshasa, Zaire, for example. From the end of 1990 to May 1991 a series of lotteries, popular games of chance, and pyramidal money schemes ...
... chapters – so imparting to the written work something of the shape of lived events. This experience was repeated when my wife and I did fieldwork on Cape York. The rhythm of life with our Aboriginal hosts in the rainforest consisted in ...
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 |