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Foreign Bodies
In five wide-ranging essays, A. David Napier explores the ways in which the foreign becomes literally and metaphorically embodied as a part of cultural identity rather than being seen as something outside it. Pre-classical Greece, Baroque Italy, and Western postmodernism are among the artistic domains Napier considers, while the symbolic terrain ranges from Balinese cosmography to body symbolism in biomedicine.
The Righting of Passage
Today, much theory in the social sciences assumes that the acceptance of experience as inevitably unruly means that it is characterized by constant change and even by chaos. In such a world, we are told, the unordered qualities of daily living create so much uncertainty that identity itself becomes unstable. But this view, David Napier argues, begs a fundamental question: if contemporary life is as flexible and unstructured as, for example, postmodernists maintain, and we, in turn, are products of such a world, how might any of us order our thinking enough to recognize what is meaningful in life, let alone describe our experiences in ways that might have meaning for others? If we are truly t...
The Age of Immunology
In this fascinating and inventive work, A. David Napier argues that the central assumption of immunology—that we survive through the recognition and elimination of non-self—has become a defining concept of the modern age. Tracing this immunological understanding of self and other through an incredibly diverse array of venues, from medical research to legal and military strategies and the electronic revolution, Napier shows how this defensive way of looking at the world not only destroys diversity but also eliminates the possibility of truly engaging difference, thereby impoverishing our culture and foreclosing tremendous opportunities for personal growth. To illustrate these destructive ...
Masks, Transformation, and Paradox
Masks are found world-wide in connection with seasonal festivals, rites of passage, and curative ceremonies. They provide a means of investigating the paradoxical problems that appearances pose in the experience of transitional states. In this far-reaching work, A. David Napier studies mask iconography and the role played by masks in the realization of change. The masks of preclassical Greece¯in particular those of the Satyr and the Gorgon¯provide his starting point. A comparison of Greek to Eastern and especially Indian models follows, and the book concludes with an examination of the interpretation of Hindu ideas in Bali that demonstrates the importance of ambivalence in mask iconography.
Making Things Better
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Making Things Better
Napier demonstrates how non-Western exchange practices and beliefs can redress the ills of contemporary economic systems in which our relationship to material things transforms animate elements of social life into inanimate commodities. Such processes separate objects from domains of deep meaning and release individuals from the moral relationships on which feelings of attachment, community responsibility, and a sense of place depend.
Biosocial Worlds
Biosocial Worlds presents state-of-the-art contributions to anthropological reflections on the porous boundaries between human and non-human life – biosocial worlds. Based on changing understandings of biology and the social, it explores what it means to be human in these worlds. Growing separation of scientific disciplines for more than a century has maintained a separation of the ‘natural’ and the ‘social’ that has created a space for projections between the two. Such projections carry a directional causality and so constitute powerful means to establish discursive authority. While arguing against the separation of the biological and the social in the study of human and non-human...
Napier
This account of Napier cars - Britain's first internationally successful racing cars - describes the men who built and competed in them and the engines later used to achieve a number of land speed records. The book draws from sources such as Napier factory records and the notebooks of Edwardian drivers. It also includes information on: how racing cyclist S.F. Edge bought a Panhard and asked Montague Napier to modify it; how Napier built cars which Edge marketed through racing; the company's racing activities from 1896 to 1914, including victory in the 1902 Gordon Bennett Trophy, Britain's first international racing success; how during World War One Napier built aero engines, including the Lion engine which went into production in 1918; the successes for aero-engined cars using the Edwardian Napier chassis at Brooklands; the racing and record-breaking of the Napier Lion-engined cars from 1927 to 1947; and John Cobb's 1939 land speed record of 403 mph at Utah, in the USA - the first car to exceed 400mph, a record which remained unbeaten until 1963.
