After ethnos
By: Tobias Rees
Contributors: Duke University Press
Published: 2018
Language: eng
Number of pages: 174
ISBN-13: 9781478000617; 9781478000808
Subjects: Anthropology; Ethnology; Philosophy
Description: For most of the twentieth century, anthropologists understood themselves as ethnographers. The art of anthropology was the fieldwork-based description of faraway others -- of how social structures secretly organized the living-together of a given society, of how a people had endowed the world surrounding them with cultural meaning. While the poetics and politics of anthropology have changed dramatically over the course of a century, the basic equation of anthropology with ethnography -- as well as the definition of the human as a social and cultural being -- has remained so evident that the possibility of questioning it occurred to hardly anyone. In this book, the author endeavors to decouple anthropology from ethnography -- and the human from society and culture -- and explores the manifold possibilities of practicing a question-based rather than an answer-based anthropology that emanates from this decoupling. What emerges from the author's provocations is a new understanding of anthropology as a philosophically and poetically inclined, fieldwork-based investigation of what it could mean to be human when the established concepts of the human on which anthropology has been built increasingly fail us.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: All of it; title: On anthropology (free from ethnos); title: Anthropology and philosophy (differently); title: Philosophy/philosophy; title: Thought/abstract, thought/concrete (the problem with modernism); title: Friction (the already thought and known); title: Of the human (after "the human"); title: Cataloguing; title: Anti-humanism; title: A disregard for theory; title: No ontology; title: On the field (itself); title: Difference(s) in time (assemblages); title: Not history; title: Epochal (no more); title: On the actual (rather than the emergent); title: The new/different (of movement / in terms of movement); title: Why and to what ends (philosophy, politics, poetry); title: Coda: a dictionary of (anthropological) common places; title: One last question.