Review of Khaled Furani, Redeeming anthropology: a theological critique of a modern science, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019, 224 pp (original) (raw)
Related papers
Anthropological Notebook, 2020
The present time is a witness to uncertainties and upheavals caused by the social and political tensions on the one hand, and the ecological crisis widespread across the globe, on the other. Whether it is a natural calamity or socioeconomic instabilities caused by the rise of repressive state agencies, anthropology as a discipline has responded to this phenomenon in its own ways. Seeing the human in relation to other terrestrial beings is a concern anthropology has raised since its inception. How does, then, anthropology carry on with this tradition of moral connection with other beings on the planet and what methodological promises does it make to comprehend the enterprise of humanity in contemporary times? Anand Pandian's, A Possible Anthropology is an ethnography gleaned through experiences of anthropologist ranging from canonical and marginal figures of ethnographic storytellers and contemporary scholars to the activists and artists engaged in the diverse field of inquiry.
Alternative Voices of Anthropology: Golden Jubilee Symposium published by Indian Anthropological Society, Kolkata, 2012
Alternative Voices of Anthropology is the print record of proceedings of an international symposium held in Kolkata during November 19-23, 2011, organized by the Indian Anthropological Society to commemorate its Golden Jubilee. The question has been raised in this volume about whether Global Anthropology should a merely continue the Euro-American theoretical trends or accommodate local and alternative voices. This article reproduces the valedictory address to discuss alternative Indian voices of Bankim Chandra Chatterji, Swami Vivekananda, Tagore, Ambedkar, Phule that provide correctives to the monovocality of Western anthropology. It also brings in examples of the ideas of the mutuality, co existential living, nature culture harmony from indigenous thought, all over the world. It looks for the solution in non Western anthropological thought for the current crisis of human civilization, afflicted by violence, climate change and unsustainable life styles, overtaking humanity and the earth planet.
The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant Anthropology
Current Anthropology, 1995
In bracketing certain "Western" Enlightenment truths we hold and defend as self-evident at home in order to engage theoreti cally a multiplicity of alternative truths encoded in our reified notion of culture, anthropologists may be "suspending the ethi• cal" in our dealings with the "other." Cultural relativism, read as moral relativism, is no longer appropriate to the world in which we live, and anthropology, if it is to be worth anything at all, must be ethically grounded. This paper is an attempt to imag ine what forms a politically committed and morally engaged an• thropology might take.
From the Editor of PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review
American Anthropologist, 2008
Anthropology and Humanism concerns the central question of the discipline: What is it to be human? As the journal's mission statement states, Anthropology and Humanism welcomes articles from all major fields of anthropology and by scholars in other social sciences and the humanities. It seeks to bring out the intricate and contradictory processes of life in other cultures-including those of the anthropologist. Whether working with life histories or demographics, disability studies or nutrition, and using even fiction and creative nonfiction, poetry, drama, and photo essays together with basic scientific writing, this journal strives to maintain a focus on the human actors themselves. Anthropology and Humanism publishes writing that delights, writing that outrages, writing that evokes the human condition in all its messiness, glory, and misery, and writing that reveals the blockages that are deleterious to our social and physical environment. The journal is thus able to promote cross-cultural understanding. We like to see anthropological writing, the communication of human activity, done in the way music is communicated: that is, in such a way that the medium itself, writing, is alive, instantly connecting with the reader, even saying the unsayable, just as music is alive. This ideal, of course, cannot subsume all of anthropology; nevertheless, anthropology may die if it has none of it. Through reading the pages of Anthropology and Humanism, anthropology's public as well as members of the discipline may empathetically reach, participate in, and experience many of the different levels and circumstances of human life that they would not otherwise encounter, because such writing corresponds to the way a human being is articulated. Humanistic writing does not come in the form of logical constructs. It has the capacity to show the very "heartbeats," as it were, of a society, and even how that heart beats. We point out that humanistic anthropology is neither novel writing nor journalism, though it may look like one or the other at times. A culture, an entire society, is the protagonist, not some individual romantic hero. The aim is therefore deeply serious: it is understanding.
Niezen_2017_The Anthropology by Organizations_pp 294-317 copy.pdf
This paper draws attention to the categories and norms of human belonging that are produced in global institutions. To a great extent, the discipline of anthropology has been superseded as the primary source of popular knowledge of human life. The conceptualization of humanity and its communities is accomplished in more publicly persuasive ways by global agencies, in part through their use of new media. The anthropology of global governance is instrumental and strategic, involving identification and categorization of beneficiary peoples, groups, and communities, including conceptions about the nature of their oppression and their distinct human qualities that make them proper subjects of the rights and benefits of global governance initiatives.
World: An anthropological examination (part 2)
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2014
This paper is the second of a two-part essay that aims to examine anthropologically the category "world. " The first part argued in favor of a single-world approach and for the unavoidable centrality of personhood in the human condition. In this second part of the essay, I address the metaphysical implications of the category "world" and relate them to the process of "worlding, " thus defending the continued heuristic value of the old anthropological category of worldview. I suggest that a consideration of the Ontological Proof of God's existence, developed by St. Anselm of Canterbury in the late eleventh century, helps us develop a comparative theory of personhood by showing how the experience of transcendence is inherent in personal ontogenesis. This paper is the second of a two-part essay that aims to examine anthropologically the category "world. " The first part (Pina-Cabral 2014a) argued in favor of a singleworld approach and for the centrality of personhood in the human condition. In it, I proposed that a position of minimalist realism best suits the ethnographic endeavor-the original and defining move of anthropology. In their descriptions of people's lived worlds, anthropologists are expected to clarify what beings there are for the people they study (their ontology) and how these beings interrelate meaningfully within a world (their metaphysics). The starting point of the discussion, therefore, is that metaphysical concerns are never absent from any ethnographic description that aims to "take seriously" the experiences described. 1
Syllabus for History of Anthropological Theory II (spring 2015)
This course will introduce and interrogate a variety of ideas that underlie and inform the work of anthropologists in recent decades. Contemporary anthropology draws both on its own disciplinary tradition and its voracious appetite for ideas from the fields of philosophy, history, sociology, and political science, and from the reflection that takes place in movements like feminism and anticolonialism, among other sources. Far more than in early periods, the shared reading list of anthropological scholars since the mid-twentieth century is interdisciplinary. We will use some of the course to address the late 20th century “crisis” in anthropology, when a combination of ethnographic subjects writing back to those who studied them, and postmodern critiques of scientific certainty threw the discipline into a self-questioning mood. This is an era of post-’s and of “turns,” moments in which critical masses (or critically located clusters) of anthropologists proposed (and continue to propose) new approaches to the work of describing human life. We will also devote a great deal of time to theories of power that emerged in the last fifty years, including feminist approaches, work by Foucault, retheorizations of Marx, and subaltern studies. We’ll take on theoretical approaches to the colonial order, performativity, materiality, practice, and the construction of knowledge. This course is intended to supply others’ ideas and trace their influence, but also to draw you and your mind into dialogue with these theorists and their claims. It’s a place for patient encounter with the complexity of what you read, and a place for urgent critique of what you find most troubling, and a place for patience again as you gestate your own perspective and assemble your ensemble of familiar theoretical tools. Being fully and thoughtfully present, intellectually and personally, in these discussions is vital to what we will all get out of the experience.