Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary

Rabinow Paul Rabinow, Marcus George E. Marcus, Faubion James D. Faubion, Rees Tobias Rees

Description

In this compact volume two of anthropology's most influential theorists, Paul Rabinow and George E. Marcus, engage in a series of conversations about the past, present, and future of anthropological knowledge, pedagogy, and practice. James D. Faubion joins in several exchanges to facilitate and elaborate the dialogue, and Tobias Rees moderates the discussions and contributes an introduction and an afterword to the volume. Most of the conversations are focused on contemporary challenges to how anthropology understands its subject and how ethnographic research projects are designed and carried out. Rabinow and Marcus reflect on what remains distinctly anthropological about the study of contemporary events and processes, and they contemplate productive new directions for the field. The two converge in Marcus's emphasis on the need to redesign pedagogical practices for training anthropological researchers and in Rabinow's proposal of collaborative initiatives in which ethnographic research designs could be analyzed, experimented with, and transformed.Both Rabinow and Marcus participated in the milestone collection Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Published in 1986, Writing Culture catalyzed a reassessment of how ethnographers encountered, studied, and wrote about their subjects. In the opening conversations of Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary, Rabinow and Marcus take stock of anthropology's recent past by discussing the intellectual scene in which Writing Culture intervened, the book's contributions, and its conceptual limitations. Considering how the field has developed since the publication of that volume, they address topics including ethnography's self-reflexive turn, scholars' increased focus on questions of identity, the Public Culture project, science and technology studies, and the changing interests and goals of students. Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary allows readers to eavesdrop on lively conversations between anthropologists who have helped to shape their field's recent past and are deeply invested in its future.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Anthropology

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 10 novembre 2008
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822390060
• Langue: English

Extrait

Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary

a john hope franklin center book

DESIGNS

FOR AN

ANTHROPOLOGY

OF THE

CONTEMPORARY

duke university press Durham & London 2008

Paul Rabinow and George E. Marcus with James D. Faubion and Tobias Rees

© 2008 Duke University Press

All rights reserved.

Printed in the

United States of America

on acid-free paper¥

Designed by Jennifer Hill Typeset in c & c Galliard by Achorn International

Library of Congress

Cataloging-in-Publication

Data appear on the

last printed page of this book.

To MaryMurrell and her dedication to the past, the present, and the future of the book

CONTENTS

55

13

1

Introductionby Tobias Rees

Dialogue I :Anthropology in Motion

33

45

Dialogue II :AfterulCngtiriWerut

Dialogue III :Anthropology Today

Dialogue IV :The Anthropology of the Contemporary

73

Dialogue V :In Search of (New) Norms and Forms

105

93

Dialogue VI :Of Timing and Texts

Dialogue VII :Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary

115

Afterwordby Tobias Rees

123

135

Notes

Index

INTRODUCTIONTODAY, WHAT IS ANTHROPOLOGY? Tobias Rees

Only by laying bare and solving substantive problems have sciences been established and their methods developed. Purely epistemologi cal and methodological reflections have never played a crucial role in such developments. Such discussions can become important for the enterprise of science only when, as a result of considerable shifts of the viewpoints from which a datum becomes the object of analysis, the idea emerges that the new viewpoints also require a revision of thelogi calformsin which the enterprise has heretofore operated, and when, accordingly, uncertainty about the nature of one’s work arises. This situation is unambiguously the case at present.—Max Weber

he background of the dialogues that follow––and of the questions dis- T cussed in them––is my own curiosity, which arose in the mid-1990s, when I was an anthropology and philosophy student in Germany. In the Department of Anthropology in Tübingen we learned about and inten- sively studied the history of ethnography. Our professors provided us with a raw schema of that history, organized in the form of paradigmatic works in their chronological succession, and encouraged us to read the primary sources. And we did. In lectures, seminars, and reading groups we followed the various ways anthropology developed. The story we en- countered was—on the level of concepts and methods—full of ruptures. And yet it was—on the level of the theme around which it evolved—a