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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... magical use of language in everyday life; episodes of violence and human rights violations; case studies of how people deal with their own suffering and the suffering of others; and finally the kinds of events in which the struggle for ...
... magical agencies, supernatural intercessories and miraculous transformations, attest to the vital role that wishful thinking and imaginary reworkings of everyday reality play in making everyday life endurable. Yet, as the perceived gap ...
... magical action and magical thought is a measure of a society's failure to provide a Preface xxiii.
... magical, metaphorical, anthropomorphic, practical and narrative. My aim is neither to rank these ways in which people act, speak and think, nor make special claims for any one (since all these modalities of thought and action may have ...
... magical action (1948), the physical body becomes the main instrument of these passions – a veritable focus of New Age notions of energy fields, amulets, charms, spells, channels and affective ties, relating to romantic love, religious ...
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 |