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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... relationship between circumstances over which we have little control – such as phylogenetic predispositions, our upbringing and our social history – and our capacity to live those circumstances in a variety of ways.1 Obviously, there is ...
... 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 worlds, the Igbo proverb notes, 'The world ...
... relationships to the everyday environments and events in which we find ourselves. It therefore bears a family resemblance to James Gibson's notion of 'affordances'6 and Sartre's notion of 'exigences'. According to Sartre – and his view ...
... relationship between a person's capacities and environmental conditions, resulting in 'the impossibility of making the given into the means to some kind of end worth living for – in perhaps having to abandon all other goals and values ...
... relationships in Bali. But is this all that was at stake for the actors involved? Were these events nothing more than ... relationship between personal 'reasons' and impersonal 'causes' in the constitution of events (see Davidson 1980) ...
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 |