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. |
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... myself has governed my career in anthropology. It also explains why I have always seen human existence as a struggle between contending forces and imperatives. At times this 'sheer and reeling need to be' (DeLillo PREFACE.
... existence is marked by ups (being high, feeling on top of things,) and downs (being blue, feeling down) – and often compared, in popular thought, to changes in the weather or market oscillations between profit and loss. Allusions are ...
... existence, yet obliged to assume responsibility for himself and his fellow human beings while creating some sense of the absurd situation in which he finds himself. Defined in this way, existentialism seems to offer nothing to ...
... existence – theorising this as a dynamic relationship between the human capacity for life, and the potentialities of any social environment for providing the wherewithal of life. Alluding to this interplay between social and spiritual ...
... existence is relational–a mode of being-in-the-world–it is continually at risk. This implies not only that our being is conditional on our interactions – bodily, linguistic, social and imaginary – with the world in which we live, but ...
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 |