A Passage To Anthropology

The postmodernist critique of Objectivism, Realism and Essentialism has somewhat shattered the foundations of anthropology, seriously questioning the legitimacy of studying others. By confronting the critique and turning it into a vital part of the anthropological debate, A Passage to Anthropology provides a rigorous discussion of central theoretical problems in anthropology that will find a readership in the social sciences and the humanities. It makes the case for a renewed and invigorated scholarly anthropology with extensive reference to recent anthropological debates in Europe and the US, as well as to new developments in linguistic theory and, especially, newer American philosophy. Although the style of the work is mainly theoretical, the author illustrates the points by referring to her own fieldwork conducted in Iceland. A Passage to Anthropology will be of interest to students in anthropology, sociology and cultural studies.

This book provides a rigorous discussion of central theoretical problems in anthropology. It makes the case for a renewed and invigorated scholarly anthropology with extensive reference to recent anthropological debates in Europe and the United States.

Van Gennep was the first observer of human behaviour to note that the ritual ceremonies that accompany the landmarks of human life differ only in detail from one culture to another, and that they are in essence universal. Originally published in English in 1960. This edition reprints the paperback edition of 1977.

Today, much theory in the social sciences assumes that the acceptance of experience as inevitably unruly means that it is characterized by constant change and even by chaos. In such a world, we are told, the unordered qualities of daily living create so much uncertainty that identity itself becomes unstable. But this view, David Napier argues, begs a fundamental question: if contemporary life is as flexible and unstructured as, for example, postmodernists maintain, and we, in turn, are products of such a world, how might any of us order our thinking enough to recognize what is meaningful in life, let alone describe our experiences in ways that might have meaning for others? If we are truly the products of modernity, Napier says, we must either accept our inability to structure and shape our own sensations or, alternately, argue for some form of humanism that sees a struggling, existential self living unsettled within its unstructured environment. Were either circumstance universally the case, the world would, of course, be a rather different place; for there would be no shared literature called "postmodern," and there would be no one to dissect such experience for us: no authors with coherent identities, no theories that could be communicated, no books bought or read, no university departments dedicated to the industry of chaos. In short, there would be no ordered space for interpersonal understanding in such a world. This is the premise that informs The Righting of Passage. In this challenging book Napier offers a novel argument that accounts for diffuse and flexible notions of the self while also illustrating how a coherent, communicating self persists amid such apparent instability. This he does by arguing something entirely counterintuitive to both modernist and postmodernist positions—namely, that modernity's increasing separation of embodiment from meaning not only slows down human transformation but attenuates human growth by encouraging us to perceive risk as largely pathological. Today, the combined forces of stress management, depth psychology, therapeutic writing, dislocated meaning, and of institutional conformity work together to produce a reduction—not a proliferation—of change in human life.

A dozen papers reflect the newer perspective of studying historical patterns, wider regions, and global networks beyond traditional anthropological fieldwork. New wave scholars reflect on their field and desk experiences and may let the field come to them; e.g., an ethnomusicologist studies the fieldwork of others and observes non- Western performances in a British museum. Includes bandw photos of authors' studies and a substantial bibliography. The editors and contributors are from the U. of Oxford, where the social and cultural anthropology department held a 1997 seminar on the teaching of methods on which this volume is based. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

Combining theoretical papers and case studies from leading scholars, this book demonstrates how the topic of ethics goes to the heart of anthropology and raises the debatable question of why, and for whom, the anthropological discipline functions.