Search results for ""Author Amy Jacobs""
Stanford University Press A Sense for the Other: The Timeliness and Relevance of Anthropology
If the end of exoticism is one of the characteristics of our time, and if classical anthropology based its study of alterity on this exotic distance from the other, is anthropology still possible, and if so, to what end? The author uses these questions as a point of departure for a probing interrogation of ethnological practice, starting with Lévi-Strauss. For several years, the author has advocated an anthropology of “proximity” in place of the usual anthropology of distance. He has studied such emblematic places of Western modernity as the Parisian Metro, or such emblematic “non-places” as airports or freeways, treating as valid anthropological objects phenomena that others might judge less “pure” or “significant” than systems of filiation or matrimonial alliance. The proper place of the ethnographer, he argues, is sufficiently distanced to comprehend a system as a system, yet participatory enough to live it as an individual. How can one best arrive at such a place? This book answers by outlining an approach to anthropology that focuses on negotiating the social meanings we and others use in making sense of the world, and on the processes of identification that create the difference between same and other. Why trace a line of demarcation between societies thought to warrant and require anthropological observation and others (namely, our own) thought to demand a different type of study? Once anthropology, through its study of rites, takes social meaning as its principal object, the necessity for a “generalized anthropology” that includes the entire planet seems obvious, especially in view of the rapid proliferation of new networks of communication and the integration of individuals into those networks.
£18.99
Stanford University Press Civil Society and Fanaticism: Conjoined Histories
Luther and Calvin applied the term fanatic to those who sought to destroy civil society in order to establish the Kingdom of God, the "false prophets" and their followers who, early on in the Reformation, began smashing images in churches and rebelling against princes. Civil Society and Fanaticism is organized around this seminal moment of religious and political iconoclasm, an outburst of hatred against mediations and representation. The author shows that civil society and fanaticism have been consistently present as conjoined notions in Western political thought since the sixteenth century, underlining the link between two principles that are constitutive of that thought: dualism—between the City of God and the earthly city, between civil society and the state—and the validity of representation. In what is both a study of the evolution of the two interrelated concepts and a critique of critiques of representation, the author draws upon an impressive range of works, including texts by Aristotle and Baudelaire, the medieval theology of Giles of Rome and the humanist thought of the Reformer Philipp Melanchthon, the political philosophies of Spinoza, Leibniz, and Rousseau, Kant's reflections on the sublime, and Marx's critique of Hegel. At the same time, he discusses a varied group of fanatics or people stigmatized as such: the first Anabaptists, the Shiite sect of the Assassins, the French Protestant Camisards, the Bolsheviks. An original analysis of Lenin's political theory and practice sheds new light on the antagonism between totalitarianism and the law-governed state identified with civil society. The author's approach is multidisciplinary, proceeding at different moments from lexicographical, sociological, psychoanalytic, and philosophical methods and analysis. The book also makes vivid use of iconology by reproducing and interpreting a series of works by Albrecht Dürer, whose art and theory of representation, it is argued, were opposed to the destruction not only of images but of civil society.
£32.40
