Grasping the changing world
Subtitle: anthropological concepts in the postmodern era
By: edited by Václav Hubinger.
Contributors: Hubinger, Václav.
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1996
Place of publication: London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 129
Subjects: Anthropology
Description: Grasping the Changing World collects papers read at the second biennial EASA conference in Prague in 1992. The conference took place in an extraordinary 'postmodern' setting. With the fall of the communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe old certainties and time-honoured concepts had become obsolete; at the same time, anthropology too was in upheaval, and long-established patterns of thought seemed inadequate to grasp the rapidly changing realities.

These doubts and tensions are reflected in this collection. The first half of Grasping the Changing World focuses on ways of conceptualising, modelling and perceiving the present, while the second half reassesses the theoretical strength or otherwise of social anthropology as a modern social science. Combining methodological rigour and originality, this collection will make invaluable reading for all students of social anthropology, sociology and politics.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: The temporalities of tradition: reflections on a changing anthropology / Olivia Harris; title: The present: a bridge between the past and the future / Vaclav Hubinger; title: The 'Bogoras enigma': bounds of culture and formats of anthropologists / Igor Krupnik; title: The concept of culture between modernity and postmodernity / Carla Pasquinelli; title: Circumscribing the environment: sustainable development, ethnography and applied anthropology in southern Africa / Tim Quinlan; title: Anthropology and the contemporary construction of ethnicity in Indonesia and Britain / C.W. Watson.