Description
Book SynopsisA leading anthropological theorist investigates how emerging knowledge formations in molecular biology, environmental studies, computer science, and bioengineering are transforming some of anthropologys key concepts.
Trade Review“This intellectually wide-ranging and spirited book poses the question of what kind of anthropology might be required to deal most effectively with emergent human experience. . . . Fischer has written a book for our times that
will provoke much thinking.” - Melinda Hinkson,
Anthropological Forum“
Anthropological Futures is both a review of core questions and scholarship and a risk-taking, future-oriented mapping of the knots of culture, nature, person, body, and science. It is a wide-ranging conversation conducted with serious erudition and originality, replete with ideas for work to come.”—
Donna Haraway, University of California, Santa Cruz
“As always, Michael M. J. Fischer provides deeply grounded yet very experimental and future-oriented ideas about cultural anthropology, and cultural analysis more generally. This book is a fabulous resource.”—
Kim Fortun, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
“This intellectually wide-ranging and spirited book poses the question of what kind of anthropology might be required to deal most effectively with emergent human experience. . . . Fischer has written a book for our times that will provoke much thinking.” -- Melinda Hinkson * Anthropological Forum *
Table of ContentsPrologue ix
1. Culture and Cultural Analysis as Experimental Systems 1
2. Four Cultural Genealogies (or Haplotype Genealogical Tests) for a Recombinant Anthropology of Science and Technology 51
3. Emergent Forms of (Un)Natural Life 114
4. Body Marks (Bestial/Natural/Divine): An Essay on the Social and Biotechnical Imaginaries, 1920-2008, and Bodies to Come 159
5. Personhood and Measuring the Figure of Old Age: The Geoid as Transitional Object 197
6. Ask Not What Man Is But What We May Expect of Him 215
Conclusions and Way Ahead: Cosmopolitanism, Cosmopolitics, and Anthropological Futures 235
Epilogue: Postings from Anthropologies to Come 244
Notes 273
References 331
Index 379
