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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... everyday life, whenever we realise our practical and imaginative capacity to transform the events that befall us into scenarios of our own choosing. Accordingly, the new and the antinomian imply what I have called an 'existential ...
... which inequality and distinction are determined 'horizontally' –in the prejudices, snobberies and discriminatory gestures with which people stigmatise, ostracise and denigrate others in their everyday lives, xxiv Preface.
... everyday lives, thus reinforcing the boundaries that separate those who are deemed to have little worth from those who are extolled and idealised. When any society – family, community or nation–offers no hope, provides no care, and ...
... everyday life from an existential point of view – as a series of situations whose challenges and implications always ramify beyond the sociocultural (cf. Malkki 1997: 87). Our interest is both in the ways an event gradually or ...
... every day. After an earthquake in northern Algeria in May 2003, that left more than 1000 dead, a survivor, Mohammed Khalfallah, declared 'If it's not terrorism, it's floods, if it's not floods, it's 16 Existential Anthropology.
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 |