Full Description
The social anthropologists represented in this volume share the view that, together, ethnography and theoretically informed comparison constitute a single, plausible enterprise, and they reject both the postmodernist criticism of ethnography as epistemologically problematic, and the opposing view that no theory could possibly do justice to the insights and complex descriptions of ethnography. In this volume, the first papers taken from the first conference of the newly-formed European Association of Social Anthropologists, the contributors discuss the various models at the disposal of the modern ethnographer. Their concerns range through structuralism, postmodernism and world systems theory, and the volume as a whole offers a lively account of the state of general theory in social anthropology today.
Contents
Introduction Part I Individuals and networks 1 Towards greater naturalism in conceptualizing societies 2 The global ecumene as a network of networks Part II Parts and wholes: the individual and society 3 Comparison, a universal for anthropology: from 're-presentation' to the comparison of hierarchies of values 4 Parts and wholes: refiguring relationships in a post-plural world Part III Models of society, the individual, and nature 5 Societies of nature and the nature of society 6 What goes without saying: the conceptualization of Zafimaniry society
