Anthropological Praxis

This book is a collection of original case studies describing anthropological knowledge successfully translated into action. It describes the targeted problem or issue, his or her role as an anthropologist, the specific anthropological skills or knowledge used, and the results of the work.

The book Profiles of Anthropological Praxis is something of a sequel to Anthropological Praxis: Translating Knowledge into Action, published in 1987 (Westview Press). As a casebook of anthropological projects, the new version shares a fascinating breadth of award-winning projects undertaken by applied anthropologists to address the needs of an array of stakeholders and situations. Each chapter will describe a problem and how a project attempted to address it with the following structure: Problem Overview, Project Description, Anthropologist’s Role and Impact, Outcomes, and the Anthropological Difference – that is, how the unique approaches of anthropology were effectively applied to address human problems.

The book Profiles of Anthropological Praxis is something of a sequel to Anthropological Praxis: Translating Knowledge into Action, published in 1987 (Westview Press). As a casebook of anthropological projects, the new version shares a fascinating breadth of award-winning projects undertaken by applied anthropologists to address the needs of an array of stakeholders and situations. Each chapter will describe a problem and how a project attempted to address it with the following structure: Problem Overview, Project Description, Anthropologist’s Role and Impact, Outcomes, and the Anthropological Difference – that is, how the unique approaches of anthropology were effectively applied to address human problems.

With fourteen articles written by well-known anthropologists, this book addresses the theme of representation in anthropology and explores the directions in which anthropology is moving following the debates of the 1980s.

Grounded in a conviction that anthropological knowledge implies critique and that engaging in anthropology is also ultimately an act of praxis, various contributors explore the ways in which the precepts of Marxism continue to illuminate and enhance our understanding of culture, economy, and politics. They focus on the question of epistemology to examine the process of anthropological intellectual production in different national settings and analyze the ways in which hierarchies of power and forms of state domination figure in the formation of subjectivities in different ethnographic contexts. The authors also reflect upon how class, gender, ethnicity, racialized forms of ethnicity, as well as regional and national identities, are configured through the relationships involved in making a living under late capitalism.

In the discipline's early days, anthropologists by definition were assumed to be white and male. Women and black scholars were relegated to the field's periphery. From this marginal place, white feminist anthropologists have successfully carved out an acknowledged intellectual space, identified as feminist anthropology. Unfortunately, the works of black and non-western feminist anthropologists are rarely cited, and they have yet to be respected as significant shapers of the direction and transformation of feminist anthropology. In this volume, Irma McClaurin has collected-for the first time-essays that explore the role and contributions of black feminist anthropologists. She has asked her contributors to disclose how their experiences as black women have influenced their anthropological practice in Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States, and how anthropology has influenced their development as black feminists. Every chapter is a unique journey that enables the reader to see how scholars are made. The writers present material from their own fieldwork to demonstrate how these experiences were shaped by their identities. Finally, each essay suggests how the author's field experiences have influenced the theoretical and methodological choices she has made throughout her career. Not since Diane Wolf's Feminist Dilemmas in the Field or Hortense Powdermaker's Stranger and Friend have we had such a breadth of women anthropologists discussing the critical (and personal) issues that emerge when doing ethnographic research.

In this major work, Zygmunt Bauman seeks to classify the meanings of culture. He distinguishes between culture as a concept, culture as a structure and culture as praxis and analyzes the different ways in which culture has been used in each of these settings. For Bauman, culture is a living, changing aspect of human interaction which must be understood and studied as a universal of human life. At the heart of his approach is the proposition that culture is inherently ambivalent. With a major new introduction to this new edition, this classic work emerges as a crucial link in the development of Bauman's thought. By his own admission, it was the first of his books to grope towards a new kind of social theory, in contrast to the fals

Pioneered by Max Gluckman to demonstrate the way in which social practice and structure together constitute and are themselves constituted by the situational flow of social life, the extended case method became diagnostic of the Manchester School of Social Anthropology. Anticipating practice theory, and implicitly politically charged, it was developed as a tool to bring into account what orthodox structural functionalism was ill-equipped to address, namely, problems such as change, conflict, deviance, and individual choice. Edited by two students of Gluckman, the volume comprises reprinted pieces by Gluckman and his colleague Clyde Mitchell, a Coda by Mitchell’s student, Bruce Kapferer, contributions by Gluckman’s students and/or friends and colleagues, including Ronnie Frankenberg, Kapferer, Evens, Handelman, and Sally Falk Moore, as well as a number of contributions from other practitioners of the extended case. Apart from the reprinted pieces by Gluckman and Mitchell, all the contributions have been written for this volume. These essays, historical, theoretical, and ethnographical, serve to highlight and critically examine the fundamental features of the extended-case method, in order to advance its substantial, continuing merits.