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We have all found ourselves involuntarily addressing inanimate objects as though they were human. For a fleeting instant, we act as though our cars and computers can hear us. In situations like ritual or play, objects acquire a range of human characteristics, such as perception, thought, action, or speech. Puppets, dolls, and ritual statuettes cease to be merely addressees and begin to address us--we see life in them. How might we describe the kind of thought that gives life to the artifact, making it memorable as well as effective, in daily life, play, or ritual action? Following The Chimera Principle, in this collection of essays Carlo Severi explores the kind of shared imagination where inanimate artifacts, from non-Western masks and ritual statuettes to paintings and sculptures in our own tradition, can be perceived as living beings. This nuanced inquiry into the works of memory and shared imagination is a proposal for a new anthropology of thought.
Emery develops the concept of an "anthropological imagination" - that is, the conjunction of anthropology and fiction in twentieth-century Latin American literature. Emery also gives consideration to documentary and testimonial writings.
Foreword / by Cynthia McKinney -- Introduction: Careening toward extinction -- We're all in this together -- Dismantling white supremacy -- Climate justice versus the anthropocene -- Humanity on the move : justice and migration -- Dismantling the ivory tower.
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In a new reading of Immanuel Kant’s work, this book interrogates his notions of the imagination and anthropology, identifying these – rather than the problem of reason – as the two central pivoting orientations of his work. Such an approach allows a more complex understanding of his critical-philosophical program to emerge, which includes his accounts of reason, politics and freedom as well as subjectivity and intersubjectivity, or sociabilities. Examining Kant’s theorisation of the complexity of our phenomenological existence, the author explores his transcendental move that includes reason and understanding whilst emphasising the importance of the faculty of the imagination to undergird both, before moving to consider Kant’s pluralised, transcendental notion of freedom. This outstanding book will appeal to scholars with interests in philosophy, politics, anthropology and sociology, working on questions of imagination, reason, subjectivities and human freedom.
Using philosophical and ethnographic theory, presents new approaches to ritual and memory, relating them to visual and sound images as acts of communication.
We began as savages, and savagery has served us well—it got us where we are. But how do our tribal impulses, still in place and in play, fit in the highly complex, civilized world we inhabit today? This question, raised by thinkers from Freud to Lévi-Strauss, is fully explored in this book by the acclaimed anthropologist Robin Fox. It takes up what he sees as the main—and urgent—task of evolutionary science: not so much to explain what we do, as to explain what we do at our peril. Ranging from incest and arranged marriage to poetry and myth to human rights and pop icons, Fox sets out to show how a variety of human behaviors reveal traces of their tribal roots, and how this evolutionary past limits our capacity for action. Among the questions he raises: How real is our notion of time? Is there a human “right” to vengeance? Are we democratic by nature? Are cultural studies and fascism cousins under the skin? Is evolutionary history coming to an end—or just getting more interesting? In his famously informative and entertaining fashion, drawing links from Volkswagens to Bartók to Woody Guthrie, from Swinburne to Seinfeld, Fox traces our ongoing struggle to maintain open societies in the face of profoundly tribal human needs—needs which, paradoxically, hold the key to our survival.
Despite the wide interest in material culture, art, and aesthetics, few studies have considered them in light of the importance of the social imagination - the complex ways in which we conceptualize our social surroundings. This collection engages the “material turn” in the arts, humanities, and social sciences through a range of original contributions on creativity in diverse global and contemporary social settings. The authors engage with everyday objects, art, rituals, and ethnographic exhibitions to analyze the relationship between material culture and the social imagination. What results is a better understanding of how the material embodies and influences our idea of the social world.
In this innovative volume, anthropologists turn their attention to a topic that has rarely figured as a focus of concerted investigation and yet which can be described as an intrinsic aspect of all human knowing and part of all processes by which human beings process information about themselves, their identities, their environments and their relations: the imagination. How do anthropologists use imagination in coming to know their research subjects? How might they, and how should they, use their imagination? And how do research subjects themselves understand, describe, justify and limit their use of the imagination? Presenting a range of case studies from a variety of locations including the UK, US, Africa, East Asia and South America, this collection offers a comparative exploration of how imagination has been conceptualized and understood in a range of analytical traditions, with regard to issues of both methodology and ethnomethodology. With emphasis not on abstraction but on imagination as activity, technique and subject situated in the middle of lives, Reflections on Imagination sheds new light on imagination as a universal capacity and practice - something to which human beings attend whenever they make sense of their environments and situate their life-projects in these environments - the means by which worlds come to be.
"Produced by members of the Centre for Imaginative Ethnography, this collection introduces the idea of an imaginative and creative approach to anthropological inquiry, one that is collaborative, open-ended, embodied, affective, and experimental. Rather than structuring the book around traditional methods like interviewing, participant observation, and documentary research, the authors organize their thoughts around different methodologies--sensing, walking, writing, performing, and recording. As well, innovative, practical exercises are included that allow ethnographers to not just 'talk the talk', but also 'walk the walk' so they can deepen, complicate, and extend ethnographic inquiry. A list of additional resources at the end of each chapter provide rich support for those who want to pursue more imaginative and creative methodologies."--