Ethnography in Unstable Places Everyday Lives in Contexts of Dramatic Political Change
Produktdetaljer
Biographical note
Carol J. Greenhouse is Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University.
Elizabeth Mertz is Associate Professor of Law and affiliated faculty in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is also Senior Research Fellow for the American Bar Foundation.
Kay B. Warren is Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University.
“<i>Ethnography in Unstable Places</i> is a profound exercise in ethnographic reflexivity. It seeks to consider new possibilities, new challenges, new horizons—at once conceptual, political, ethical—for an old anthropological method by taking it precisely where it was not designed to go: into everyday worlds radically transformed by hitherto unimagined<br />social conditions, unimaginable political circumstances, altered states, economies, subjectivities. Expansive in their scope, provocative in their theoretical implications, even poetic in their treatment of human lives, the essays in this volume show ‘where past has gone, where the future will come from’;the past and future, that is, of both anthropology and the worlds with which it concerns itself.”—John Comaroff, University of Chicago
“Beyond being topical, this groundbreaking collection represents precisely the kind of inquiry that contemporary anthropology should be dedicating itself to—one brave enough to abide, ethnographically and theoretically, in the interstices of knowledge-based and experiential models, in the gaps between individual and collective agency, in realms of historical and cultural contingency.”—Debbora Battaglia, Mount Holyoke College
Using grounded ethnographic detail to explore the challenges to the anthropological imagination that are posed by modern uncertainties, the contributors confront the ambiguities and paradoxes that exist across the spectrum of human cultures and geographies. The collection is framed by introductory and concluding chapters that highlight different dimensions of the book’s interrelated themes—agency and ethnographic reflexivity, identity and ethics, and the inseparability of political economy and interpretivism.
Ethnography in Unstable Places will interest students and specialists in social anthropology, sociology, political science, international relations, and cultural studies.
Contributors. Eve Darian-Smith, Howard J. De Nike, Elizabeth Faier, James M. Freeman, Robert T. Gordon, Carol J. Greenhouse, Nguyen Dinh Huu, Carroll McC. Lewin, Elizabeth Mertz, Philip C. Parnell, Nancy Ries, Judy Rosenthal, Kay B. Warren, Stacia E. Zabusky
Part One: Law against Culture
Ghettos in the Holocaust: The Improvisation of Social Order in a Culture of Terror / Carroll McC. Lewin
Unsettled Settlers: Internal Pacification and Vagrancy in Namibia / Robert J. Gordon
Judges without Courts: The Legal Culture of German Reunification / Howard J. De Nike
Part Two: Ethnographies of Agency in the Fissures of the State
Ethnography in/of Transnational Processes: Following Gyres in the Worlds of Big Science and European Integration / Stacia E. Zabusky
The Composite State: The Poor and the Nation in Manila / Phillip C. Parnell
Domestic Matters: Feminism and Activism Among Palestinian Women in Israel / Elizabeth Faier
“Best Interests” and the Repatriation of Vietnamese Unaccompanied Minors / James M. Freeman and Nguyen Dinh Huu
Part Three: Resistance and Remembrance
Beating the Bounds: Law, Identity, and Territory in the New Europe / Eve Darian-Smith
“Honest Bandits” and “Warped People”: Russian Narratives about Money, Corruption, and Moral Decay / Nancy Ries
Trance Against the State / Judy Rosenthal
Part Four: Conclusion
The Perfidy of Gaze and the Pain of Uncertainty: Anthropological Theory and the Search for Culture / Elizabeth Mertz
Toward in Anthropology of Fragments, Instabilities, and Incomplete Transitions / Kay B. Warren
Contributors
Works Cited
Index
Produktdetaljer
Biographical note
Carol J. Greenhouse is Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University.
Elizabeth Mertz is Associate Professor of Law and affiliated faculty in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is also Senior Research Fellow for the American Bar Foundation.
Kay B. Warren is Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University.