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Political Anthropology as Method
This book explores considerations of method in the field of political anthropology, contending that this constitutes a distinct approach within the broader area of the human, social and political sciences. Faithful to the basic guiding ideas of anthropology, it nonetheless challenges and rejects the pretended stance of scientific neutrality and advances a position that engages with the notion of participation, recognising its value and arguing that participation is essential to the development of a proper social and political understanding. An outline of what political anthropology can offer by way of methods, this invitation to consider the development of methodological ideas beyond the presumed ‘scientific’ and ‘universalistic’ approaches that dominate in the social sciences will appeal to scholars of anthropology, sociology and politics with interests in questions of method and methodology.
Post-Truth Society
It is widely asserted that we are now living in a post-truth society. What that means, this book argues, is that the contemporary global world is thoroughly infested not only with trickster figures but an entire and operational trickster logic; or, that we now live in a Trickster Land – an argument advanced by the claim that in modernity liminality has become permanent; or that modern life is patently absurd. The first part of the book presents a series of ‘guides’ to this condition, in the form of key thinkers and writers who can help us understand and navigate our Trickster Land. Such guides include Hermann Broch, Lewis Hyde, Roberto Calasso, Michel Serres, Sándor Márai, Colin Thub...
From Anthropology to Social Theory
A rethinking of contemporary social theory that provides a vision about the modern world through key ideas developed by 'maverick' anthropologists.
Max Weber and Michel Foucault
Max Weber and Michael Foucault are among the most controversial and fascinating thinkers of our century. This book is the first to jointly analyse them in detail, and to make effective links between their lives and work; it coincides with a substantial resurgence of interest in their writings. The author's exciting interpretative approach reveals a new dimension in reading the work of Foucault and Weber; it will be invaluable to students and those researching in sociology and philosophy.
Permanent Liminality and Modernity
This book offers a comprehensive sociological study of the nature and dynamics of the modern world, through the use of a series of anthropological concepts, including the trickster, schismogenesis, imitation and liminality. Developing the view that with the theatre playing a central role, the modern world is conditioned as much by cultural processes as it is by economic, technological or scientific ones, the author contends the world is, to a considerable extent, theatrical - a phenomenon experienced as inauthenticity or a loss of direction and meaning. As such the novel is revealed as a means for studying our theatricalised reality, not simply because novels can be understood to be likening...
The Dissolution of Communist Power
The speed and seeming ease with which the communist systems of Eastern Europe collapsed raise interesting questions about the stability of the structure that held them in place. Agnes Horvath and Arpad Szakolczai attempt to explain the demise of communist power by analysing in detail the internal apparatus of the communist regime in Hungary shortly before these historic changes took place. The book is based on unique empirical material: the result of a sociological survey carried out in 1988 in the district level communist party committees of Budapest. Extensive interviewing and direct questionnaires to party workers revealed the extent of the interpenetration of communist power and society,...
A Friendship That Lasted a Lifetime
Scholarly correspondence can be as insightful as scholarly work itself, as it often documents the motivating forces of its writers’ intellectual ideas while illuminating their lives more clearly. The more complex the authors’ scholarly works and the more troubled the eras in which they lived, the more substantial, and potentially fascinating, their correspondence. This is especially true of the letters between Alfred Schutz (1899–1959) and Eric Voegelin (1901–1985). The scholars lived in incredibly dramatic times and produced profound, complex works that continue to confound academics. The communication between these two giants of the social sciences, as they sent their thoughts to o...
The Political Sociology and Anthropology of Evil: Tricksterology
This book offers a new approach to the problem of evil through an examination of the anthropological figure of the ‘trickster’. A lesser known and much more recent term than evil, the authors use the trickster to facilitate a greater understanding of the return of evil in the modern era. Instead of simply opposing ‘good’ and ‘evil’, the figure of the trickster is used to pursue the trajectories of similarities and quasi-similarities through imitation. After engaging with the trickster as presented in comparative anthropology and mythology, where it appears in tales and legends as a strange, erratic outsider, the authors seek to gain an inside perspective of trickster knowledge th...
Breaking Boundaries
Liminality has the potential to be a leading paradigm for understanding transformation in a globalizing world. As a fundamental human experience, liminality transmits cultural practices, codes, rituals, and meanings in situations that fall between defined structures and have uncertain outcomes. Based on case studies of some of the most important crises in history, society, and politics, this volume explores the methodological range and applicability of the concept to a variety of concrete social and political problems.
Max Weber and the Modern Problem of Discipline
Max Weber believed that discipline underpins modern rationalized society. For Weber, modern discipline is the quality that gives a population the capacity to coordinate action across vast expanses. But modern discipline also requires individuals to shape their very psychobiological being to fit the larger socioeconomic system, be it a military unit, factory, bureaucracy, or other unit of modern society. Max Weber and the Modern Problem of Discipline explores how Weber developed his ideas using examples from Ancient Egypt to the modern world and asks how his description of a habitus of discipline informs understanding of modernity not just in Europe but in places that continue to befuddle wel...
