Full Description
For most of the twentieth century, anthropologists understood themselves as ethnographers. The art of anthropology was the fieldwork-based description of faraway others-of how social structures secretly organized the living-together of a given society, of how a people had endowed the world surrounding them with cultural meaning. While the poetics and politics of anthropology have changed dramatically over the course of a century, the basic equation of anthropology with ethnography-as well as the definition of the human as a social and cultural being-has remained so evident that the possibility of questioning it occurred to hardly anyone. In After Ethnos Tobias Rees endeavors to decouple anthropology from ethnography-and the human from society and culture-and explores the manifold possibilities of practicing a question-based rather than an answer-based anthropology that emanates from this decoupling. What emerges from Rees's provocations is a new understanding of anthropology as a philosophically and poetically inclined, fieldwork-based investigation of what it could mean to be human when the established concepts of the human on which anthropology has been built increasingly fail us.
Contents
what if . . . ix
acknowledgments xi
introduction. all of it 1
1. on anthropology (free from ethnos) 7
anthropology and philosophy (differently) 17
philosophy/Philosophy 25
thought/abstract, thought/concrete (the problem with modernism) 28
escaping (the already thought and known) 32
2. "of" the human (after "the human") 34
cataloguing 45
antihumanism 49
a disregard for theory 52
no ontology 55
3. on fieldwork (itself) 70
assemblages (or how to study difference in time?) 84
not history 93
epochal (no more) 95
4. on the actual (rather than the emergent) 97
the new/different (of movement/in terms of movement) 108
why and to what end ends (philosophy, politics, poetry) 110
5. coda (a dictionary of anthropological common places) 113
one last question 118
notes 121
bibliography 151
index 169
