Towards an Anthropology of Data

2021-05-18
Towards an Anthropology of Data
Author: Rachel Douglas-Jones
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 180
Release: 2021-05-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9781119816768
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This volume presents a set of theoretically inventive pieces that engage with data across its many locations, from government databases to ecological field stations, from kitchen tables to concrete bunkers. Contributors demonstrate how thinking with data can be conceptually generative for anthropology, prompting us to reconsider our understanding of topics including bodies, persons, and the social itself Shows how 'big' data which may have once seemed limited to business or high tech, ethnographers are now finding data – and its attendant values and practices – in their field sites around the world Examines how data has motivated a sweep of dystopian visions, signaling the invasion of privacy, political manipulation, or shadowy data doubles Discusses how anthropologists have been cautious in taking data itself as an object of theoretical interest, even as the effects of data become manifest in our ethnographies By putting data in its place, the chapters collected here develop conceptual tools that will prove useful for anthropologists who find 'data' in their data

Anthropology in Norway: Directions, Locations, Relations

2021-11-15
Anthropology in Norway: Directions, Locations, Relations
Author: Synnøve K. N. Bendixsen
Publisher: Sean Kingston Publishing
Total Pages: 152
Release: 2021-11-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9781912385300
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Norway, it is claimed, has the most social anthropologists per capita of any country. Well connected and resourced, the discipline - standing apart from the British and American centres of anthropology - is well placed to offer critical reflection. In this book, an inclusive cast, from PhDs to professors, debate the complexities of anthropology as practised in Norway today and in the past. Norwegian anthropologists have long made public engagement a priority - whether Carl Lumholz collecting for museums from 1880; activists protesting with the Sámi in 1980; or in numerous recent contributions to international development. Contributors explore the challenges of remaining socially relevant, of working in an egalitarian society that de-emphasizes difference, and of changing relations to the state, in the context of a turn against multi-culturalism. It is perhaps above all a commitment to time-consuming, long-term fieldwork that provides a shared sense of identity for this admirably diverse discipline.

Mind and Spirit

2020-06-15
Mind and Spirit
Author: Tanya Marie Luhrmann
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2020-06-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9781119712886
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Does the way we think about our minds matter? Our judgements about what counts as thought are so intimate that we may not even realize that we make them. But we do – and the way we make them has consequences for our sense of the real. The Mind and Spirit project (presented in this volume) finds that the way people think about thinking, shapes the way they experience (what they take to be) gods and spirits Authors are a team of anthropologists and psychologists who worked together for two years across sites in the United States, Ghana, Thailand, China, and Vanuatu Argues that there are cultural differences in the way social worlds represent ‘the mind’ – we call these local theories of mind – and that these differences affect whether and how people, for instance, hear the voices of the dead or feel the presence of God Discusses how the ways people think about thought and interiority can alter human sensory experience itself

Wild Thought

2021-02-22
Wild Thought
Author: Claude Lévi-Strauss
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 380
Release: 2021-02-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 022641311X
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As the most influential anthropologist of his generation, Claude Lévi-Strauss left a profound mark on the development of twentieth-century thought. Through a mixture of insights gleaned from linguistics, sociology, and ethnology, Lévi-Strauss elaborated his theory of structural unity in culture and became the preeminent representative of structural anthropology. La Pensée sauvage, first published in French in 1962, was his crowning achievement. Ranging over philosophies, historical periods, and human societies, it challenged the prevailing assumption of the superiority of modern Western culture and sought to explain the unity of human intellection. Controversially titled The Savage Mind when it was first published in English in 1966, the original translation nevertheless sparked a fascination with Lévi-Strauss’s work among Anglophone readers. Wild Thought rekindles that spark with a fresh and accessible new translation. Including critical annotations for the contemporary reader, it restores the accuracy and integrity of the book that changed the course of intellectual life in the twentieth century, making it an indispensable addition to any philosophical or anthropological library.