Description
Book SynopsisThe award-winning anthropologist Sherry B. Ortner draws on her longstanding interest in theories of cultural practice to rethink key concepts of culture, agency, and subjectivity.
Trade Review“An important and especially usable collection by one of the most influential essayists in anthropology, introduced by a lucid and original review of key concepts as they have been applied to the remarkable range of Sherry Ortner’s research achievements. Her response to recent challenges to the idea of culture is alone worth the price of the book.”—George Marcus, University of California, Irvine
“At once challenging and admirably accessible, these essays trace the thinking of one of anthropology’s most notable practitioners as she—and her discipline—wrestles with key conundrums facing the late-modern social sciences.”—Jean Comaroff, University of Chicago
“This is vintage Ortner. No one else writes anthropological theory so clear, so down-to-earth, or so accessible to non-anthropologists.”—William H. Sewell Jr., author of
Logics of History: Social Theory and Social TransformationTable of ContentsIntroduction: Updating Practice Theory 1
Chapter One: Reading America: Preliminary Notes on Class and Culture 19
Chapter Two: Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal 42
Chapter Three: Identities: The Hidden Life of Class 63
Chapter Four: Generation X: Anthropology in a Media-Saturated World 80
Chapter Five: Subjectivity and Cultural Critique 107
Chapter Six: Power and Projects: Reflections on Agency 129
Notes 155
References Cited 167
Index 181
