Why America's Top Pundits Are Wrong
Subtitle: Anthropologists Talk Back (California Series in Public Anthropology)
Contributors: Catherine Besteman (Editor); Hugh Gusterson (Editor)
Edition: 1 edition
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: January 17, 2005
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 282
ISBN-13: 9780520243552
Subjects: Social & cultural anthropology; Social Science; Communication in anthropology; Archaeology / Anthropology; Political aspects; Sociology; The Americas; Ethnic Studies - General; Americas (North Central South West Indies); Anthropology - General; Media Studies; Social Science / Anthropology / General; Communication; Communication and society; Mass media and anthropology
First sentence: This book confronts some of the most controversial and divisive issues of the day.
Description: This absorbing collection of essays subjects such popular commentators as Thomas Friedman, Samuel Huntington, Robert Kaplan, and Dinesh D'Souza to cold, hard scrutiny and finds that their writing is often misleadingly simplistic, culturally ill-informed, and politically dangerous. Mixing critical reflection with insights from their own fieldwork, twelve distinguished anthropologists respond by offering fresh perspectives on globalization, ethnic violence, social justice, and the biological roots of behavior. They take on such topics as the collapse of Yugoslavia, the consumer practices of the American poor, American foreign policy in the Balkans, and contemporary debates over race, welfare, and violence against women. In the clear, vigorous prose of the pundits themselves, these contributors reveal the hollowness of what often passes as prevailing wisdom and passionately demonstrate the need for a humanistically complex and democratic understanding of the contemporary world.