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How will we live in the future? Are we moving towards global homogeneity? Will the world succumb to the global spread of fast food and Hollywood movies? Or are there other possibilities? In this book, Samuel Collins argues not only for the importance of the future of culture, but also stresses its centrality in anthropological thought over the last century. Beginning with 19th-century anthropology and continuing today in the work of anthropologies of emergent sciences, anthropologists have not only used their knowledge of present cultural configurations to speculate on future culture but have also used their assumptions about the future of culture to understand the present.
The advent of social media offers anthropologists exciting opportunities to extend their research to communities in fresh ways. At the same time, these technological developments open up anthropological fieldwork to different hazards. Networked Anthropology explores the increasing appropriation of diverse media platforms and social media into anthropological research and teaching. The chapters consider the possibilities and challenges of multimedia, how network ecologies work, the ethical dilemmas involved, and how to use multimedia methodologies. The book combines theoretical insights with case studies, methodological sketches and pedagogical notes. Drawing on recent ethnographic work, the authors provide practical guidance in creative ways of doing networked anthropology. They point to the future of ethnography, both inside and outside the classroom, and consider ways in which networked anthropology might develop.
Anticipation -- Expectation -- Speculation -- Potentiality -- Hope -- Destiny.
The Routledge International Handbook of Ethnographic Film and Video is a state-of-the-art book which encompasses the breadth and depth of the field of ethnographic film and video-based research. With more and more researchers turning to film and video as a key element of their projects, and as research video production becomes more practical due to technological advances as well as the growing acceptance of video in everyday life, this critical book supports young researchers looking to develop the skills necessary to produce meaningful ethnographic films and videos, and serves as a comprehensive resource for social scientists looking to better understand and appreciate the unique ways in wh...
Not a textbook in the ordinary sense, this work offers a vision of how anthropology - a discipline that operates through intimate knowledge of local societies - can offer vastly increased understanding of society and culture even in this age of mass communication. In its examination of topics ranging as far afield as the mass media, environmental and development issues, kinship and suffering in transnational settings, the politics of both the nation-state and the local community, the arts, cosmologies of science as well as religion, and the relationship between social life and history, this book is not just about an academic discipline; it is about the theoretical as well as ethical commitments that have enabled anthropologists to play a leading role in the critique of racism and other forms of intolerance.
Work, Love, and Learning in Utopiabreathes new life into the age-old human preoccupation with how to create a happier society. With a fascinating mix of research from cross-cultural psychology, macro history, and evolutionary biology, the book gives new credibility to the advocacy of radical equality. The author, a psychological anthropologist, argues that the negative emotions of sadness, anger, and fear evolved in tandem with hierarchy, while happiness evolved separately and in connection to prosociality and compassion. The book covers a wide range of human concerns, from economics and education, to media and communication, to gender and sexuality. It breaks new boundaries with its scope, ...
This book theorizes the roles of optimism in anthropological thinking, research, writing, and practice. It sets out to explore optimism’s origins and implications, its conceptual and practical value, and its capacity to contribute to contemporary anthropological aims. In an era of extensive ecological disruption and social distress, this volume contemplates how an optimistic anthropology can energize the discipline while also contributing to bettering the lives, communities, and environments of those we study. It brings together scholars diverse in background, career stage, and theoretical approach in a collective attempt to comprehend the myriad intersections of anthropology and optimism....
Retracing the contours of a bitter controversy over the meaning of sacred architecture that flared up among some of the leading lights of the Carolingian renaissance, Collins explores how ninth-century authors articulated the relationship of form to function and ideal to reality in the ecclesiastical architecture of the Carolingian empire.
Trains, Culture and Mobility: Riding the Rails goes beyond textual representations of rail travel to engage an impressive range of political, sociological and urban theory. Taken together, these essays highlight the complexity of the modern experience of train mobility, and its salient relation to a number of cultural discourses. Incorporating traditionally marginal areas of cultural production such as graffiti, museums, architecture or even plunging into the social experience of travel inside the traincar itself, each essay constitutes an attempt to work from the act of riding the train toward questions of much larger significance. Crisscrossing cultures from the New World and Old, from East and West, these essays share a common preoccupation with the way in which trains and railway networks have mapped and re-mapped the contours of both cities and states in the modern period. Bringing together individual and large-scale social practices, this volume traces out the cultural implications of "Riding the Rails."
Since the modern period, the field of biblical studies has relied upon libraries, museums, and archives for its evidentiary and credentialing needs. Yet, absent in biblical scholarship is a thorough and critical examination of the instrumentality of the discipline’s master archives for elite power structures. Addressing this gap in biblical scholarship lies central to this book. Interrogated here is a premier repository or master archive of the discipline: the British Museum. Using an assemblage of critical theories from archival discourse to postcolonial studies, space theory to governmentality studies, the focal point of this book is at the intersections of the Museum’s rise to scientific prominence, the British Empire, and the conferring of scientific authority to modern biblical critics in the nineteenth century. Gregory L. Cuéllar initiates a season of historicization of the master archives of biblical studies and archival criticism.