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How far have we come since anthropologists began to think about magic & religion?

Published on November 18, 2004 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, culture traditions, persons and theories, religion cosmology

Hugh Gusterson, associate professor of anthropology at MIT, Anthropology News (AAA) November

When anthropology was established as a discipline in the early 20th century the relationship between magic, science and religion was one of its central preoccupations. If anthropologists have backstaged these issues in recent decades, today they are more than ripe for revisiting and reworking.

If Malinowski and Evans-Pritchard were alive today, they would surely be intrigued to find that, while Americans often construe their global dominance in terms of their superior science and technology, they also have a president who lists Jesus as his favorite thinker and regards evangelicals as his most important voting bloc.

As an anthropologist of science I am increasingly struck by the way that magic and science, far from being opposites, are increasingly fused at the hip. Technology itself has an aura of infallibility that makes it an instrument of magic. The stakes are bigger and the interventions more expensive, but have we really traveled so far from the complex mixture of paranoia, logic and magic that characterized Evans-Pritchard’s Azande? >> continue

Hugh Gusterson, associate professor of anthropology at MIT, Anthropology News (AAA) November

Race and Early Modern Studies: The Power of an Illusion and Its Genesis

Published on November 16, 2004 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, books, persons and theories, Us and Them

RedNova reviews two books:

Women and Race in Early Modern Texts. By Joyce Green MacDonald. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ix + 188 pages.

English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama. By Mary Floyd- Wilson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. xii + 256 pages.

“The books reviewed share some noteworthy aspects. Both refuse to focus not only on people of color as raced, but instead analyze the significance of whiteness for cultural and gender identity, and for the development of Britain as a nation. In addition, both demonstrate that aspects of Africa and Africans were purposely forgotten in the early modern period to sustain the development of England as the leader in the slave-trade.”

>> continue

RedNova reviews two books:

Women and Race in Early Modern Texts. By Joyce Green MacDonald. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ix + 188 pages.

English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama. By Mary Floyd- Wilson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. xii…

Why you always get a present you don’t want – Social Sciences and Gift-Giving

Published on November 4, 2004 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, gift economy gift giving, persons and theories, Us and Them

The Daily Telegraph

Millions of pounds are wasted each year because few understand the secret language of giving Christmas gifts. Why do we go through with it? Because the Christmas present is about kinship and power; taste and insight; symbolism and values. Over the years, it has become a rich source of PhDs, projects and papers for anthropologists, ethologists and sociologists, not to mention a legion of psychologists.

Gift-giving in primitive human societies was seen by the French ethnographer Marcel Mauss as a way of forging bonds with strangers. Decades ago, the distinguished University of Chicago anthropologist Prof Marshall Sahlins noted that the closer the kinship between the donor and the recipient, the less emphasis was placed on reciprocity and the more on sentiment. >> continue

The Daily Telegraph

James Acheson the 2004 winner of American Anthropological Association’s award

Published on October 15, 2004 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, ecology nature, fieldwork / methods, Northern America, persons and theories

Eurek Alert

University of Maine anthropology and marine sciences professor James Acheson has been named the 2004 winner of the American Anthropological Association’s Kimball award for effecting change in public policy. Acheson will receive the Award at the association’s annual meeting in San Francisco in November.

“In the past few years, my primary contribution has been to use ‘rational choice theory’ to show under what conditions groups of people will and will not develop rules to conserve the resources on which their livelihood depends,” Acheson says. “This has led me into a far more theoretical realm – namely trying to understand the circumstances under which people develop rules in general.”

Acheson has studied the system of self governance in the Maine lobster industry and has chronicled the circumstances under which lobster fishermen developed informal rules and lobbied for formal laws to conserve the lobster stock. >> continue

READ ALSO
James Acheson: Capturing the Commons (University Press of New England)

Eurek Alert

University of Maine anthropology and marine sciences professor James Acheson has been named the 2004 winner of the American Anthropological Association's Kimball award for effecting change in public policy. Acheson will receive the Award at the association's annual meeting…

Jacques Derrida – Father of deconstruction dies

Published on October 10, 2004 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, persons and theories

The Guardian

Virtually every area of humanistic scholarship and artistic activity in the latter part of the 20th century felt the influence of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, who has died aged 74 from pancreatic cancer.

“Deconstruction”, the word he transformed from a rare French term to a common expression in many languages, became part of the vocabulary not only of philosophers and literary theorists but also of architects, theologians, artists, political theorists, educationists, music critics, filmmakers, lawyers and historians. Resistance to his thinking, too, was widespread and sometimes bitter, as it challenged academic norms and, sometimes, common sense. >> continue

SEE ALSO
More on Derrida in Wikipedia
Jacques Derrida Online (site navigation on the top)

The Guardian

"Deconstruction", the word he transformed from…