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Why We Play
Play is one of humanity's straightforward yet deceitful ideas: though the notion is unanimously agreed upon to be universal, used for man and animal alike, nothing defines what all its manifestations share, from childish playtime to on stage drama, from sporting events to market speculation. Within the author's anthropological field of work (Mongolia and Siberia), playing holds a core position: national holidays are called "Games," echoing in that way the circus games in Ancient Rome and today's Olympics. These games convey ethical values and local identity. Roberte Hamayon bases her analysis of the playing spectrum on their scrutiny. Starting from fighting and dancing, encompassing learning, interaction, emotion and strategy, this study heads towards luck and belief as well as the ambiguity of the relation to fiction and reality. It closes by indicating two features of play: its margin and its metaphorical structure. Ultimately revealing its consistency and coherence, the author displays play as a modality of action of its own. "Playing is no 'doing' in the ordinary sense" once wrote Johan Huizinga. Isn't playing doing something else, elswhere and otherwise ?
The Meaning of Money in China and the United States
Emily Martin’s Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures, The meaning of money in China and the United States, inaugurates the Hau-Morgan Lectures Initiative with the University of Rochester. Martin’s lectures—hitherto unedited—are an instant classic, not only for scholars of China and the United States, but for those working in the history and anthropology of money. As relevant and timely now as it was twenty-eight years ago, this lecture series highlights the vicissitudes of money beyond tired theoretical divides between global political economy and local symbolic relativism. In a time when economic forecasts show that China will soon pass the US as the world’s leading economic power, Martin’s lectures could not be more germane, more insightful, and more poised for an ethnographic critique of the economic present.
Mistrust
Trust occupies a unique place in contemporary discourse. Seen as both necessary and good, it is variously depicted as enhancing the social fabric, lowering crime rates, increasing happiness, and generating prosperity. It allows for complex political systems, permits human communication, underpins financial instruments and economic institutions, and holds society itself together. There is scant space within this vision for a nuanced discussion of mistrust. With few exceptions, it is treated as little more than a corrosive absence. This monograph, instead, proposes an ethnographic and conceptual exploration of mistrust as a legitimate epistemological stance in its own right. It examines the impact of mistrust on practices of conversation and communication, friendship and society, as well as politics and cooperation, and suggests that suspicion, doubt, and uncertainty can also ground ways of organizing human society and cooperating with others.
Hau Kiou Choaan
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Hau Pei Jen
Hau Pei Jen is an accomplished Chinese watercolor artist. Art historians and critics in China called him inspirational and credit him with providing a new direction for Chinese art. In 1984 people lined up in rain to see his exhibit in Beijing. His subsequent exhibits in China including the 2008 Beijing, Nanjing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen multi-city show garnered him critical acclaims. A 2009 Silicon Valley exhibit caused great excitement among art collectors. In order to understand the magic of Hau's art and why it is so well received by scholars, critics, collectors, and general public alike, Holding traces the use of color in Chinese art and the historical development of splash ink-and-color...
Values of Happiness
How people conceive of happiness reveals much about who they are and the values they hold dear. Drawing on ethnographic insights from diverse field sites around the world, this book offers a unique window onto the ways in which people grapple with fundamental questions about how to live and what it means to be human. Developing a distinctly anthropological approach concerned less with gauging how happy people are than with how happiness figures as an idea, mood, and motive in everyday life, the book explores how people strive to live well within challenging or even hostile circumstances. The contributors explore how happiness intersects with dominant social values as well as an array of aims...
From Hospitality to Grace
The Pitt-Rivers Omnibus brings together the definitive essays and lectures of the influential social anthropologist Julian A. Pitt-Rivers, a corpus of work that has, until now, remained scattered, untranslated, and unedited. Illuminating the themes and topics that he engaged throughout his life--including hospitality, grace, the symbolic economy of reciprocity, kinship, the paradoxes of friendship, ritual logics, the anthropology of dress, and more--this omnibus brings his reflections to new life. Holding Pitt-Rivers's diversity of subjects and ethnographic foci in the same gaze, this book reveals a theoretical unity that ran through his work and highlights his iconic wit and brilliance. Striking at the heart of anthropological theory, the pieces here explore the relationship between the mental and the material, between what is thought and what is done. Classic, definitive, and yet still extraordinarily relevant for contemporary anthropology, Pitt-Rivers's lifetime contribution will provide a new generation of anthropologists with an invaluable resource for reflection on both ethnographic and theoretical issues.
Science in the Forest, Science in the Past
Science in the Forest, Science in the Past: Further Interdisciplinary Explorations comprises of papers from the second of two workshops involving a group of scholars united in the conviction that the great diversity of knowledge claims and practices for which we have evidence must be taken seriously in their own terms rather than by the yardstick of Western modernity. Bringing to bear social anthropology, history and philosophy of science, computer science, classics and sinology among other fields, they argue that the use of such dismissive labels as ‘magic’, ‘superstition’ and the ‘irrational’ masks rather than solves the problem and reject counsels of despair which assume or ar...
The Chimera Principle
Using philosophical and ethnographic theory, presents new approaches to ritual and memory, relating them to visual and sound images as acts of communication.
Acting for Others
For the Ankave of Papua New Guinea, men, unlike women, do not reach adulthood and become fathers simply by growing up and reproducing. What fathers--and by extension, men--actually are is a result of a series of relational transformations, operated in and by rituals in which men and women both perform complementary actions in separate spaces. Acting for Others is a tour de force in Melanesian ethnography, gender studies, and theories of ritual. Based on years of fieldwork conducted by the author and her husband and co-ethnographer, this book's "double view" of the Ankave ritual cycle--from women in the village and from the men in the forest--is novel, provocative, and one of the most incisiv...
