Fictionalizing Anthropology

Encounters and Fabulations at the Edges of the Human

AvStuart J. McLean

Häftad, Engelska, 2017

298 kr

Beställningsvara. Skickas inom 5-8 vardagar. Fri frakt över 249 kr.

Fler format och utgåvor

Inbunden

1 230 kr

Beskrivning

What might become of anthropology if it were to suspend its sometime claims to be a social science? What if it were to turn instead to exploring its affinities with art and literature as a mode of engaged creative practice carried forward in a world heterogeneously composed of humans and other than humans? Stuart McLean claims that anthropology stands to learn most from art and literature not as evidenceto support explanations based on an appeal to social context or history but as modes of engagement with the materiality of expressive media-including language-that always retain the capacity to disrupt or exceed the human projects enacted through them. At once comparative in scope and ethnographically informed, Fictionalizing Anthropology draws on an eclectic range of sources, including ancient Mesopotamian myth, Norse saga literature, Hesiod, Lucretius, Joyce, Artaud, and Lispector, as well as film, multimedia, and performance art, along with the concept of fabulation(the making of fictions capable of intervening in and transforming reality) developed in the writings of Bergson and Deleuze. Sharing with proponents of anthropologys recent ontological turn,McLean insists that experiments with language and form are a performative means of exploring alternative possibilities of collective existence, new ways of being human and other than human, and that such experiments must therefore be indispensable to anthropologys engagement with the contemporary world.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:2017-11-22
Mått:140 x 216 x 38 mm
Vikt:442 g
Format:Häftad
Språk:Engelska
Antal sidor:336
Förlag:University of Minnesota Press
ISBN:9781517902728

Utforska kategorier

Antropologi inom Samhälle och politik

Mer om författaren

Stuart McLean is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Minnesota. He is author of The Event and Its Terrors: Ireland, Famine, Modernity and coeditor of Crumpled Paper Boat: Experiments in Ethnographic Writing.

Recensioner i media

"In Stuart McLean’s brave and beautiful book, the question is how do we live now. But here, living is a social-aesthetic-political-material fabulation of virtualities, events, and singularities. Context and history are not givens but modes of engagement, expressive media exceed human intentions, and anthropology carries forward the worlding of alternatives."-Kathleen C. Stewart, author of Ordinary Affects"Fictionalizing Anthropology productively and creatively extends, expands, revitalizes, and modifies a very old and long abandoned anthropological tradition: comparison. Stuart McLean creates a vibrant theoretical framework to rethink representation in literary and anthropological theory."-Eduardo Kohn, McGill University"Fictionalizing Anthropology asks us to jump into the void and apprehend the puzzling, unlimited repository of philosophical concepts given by the universe, individuated itself through myths, metaphors, performance art, bodily fluids, Inuit spirits and cunning trickery." -European Association of Social Anthropologists

Innehållsförteckning

ContentsProloguePart I. Anthropology: A Fabulatory Art1. An Encounter in the Mist2. Talabot3. Fake4. Anthropologies and Fictions5. Knud Rasmussen6. The Voice of the Thunder7. Metaphor and/or Metamorphosis8. “They Aren’t Symbols-They’re Real”Part II. In Between9. Liminality: An Old Story?10. The Dead Have Never Been Modern11. The God Who Comes12. Between the Times13. Anthropology ≠ Ethnography14. Fabulatory ComparativismPart III. Gyro Nights: Inhuman Culture/Inhuman Nature15. Islands before and after History16. Papay Gyro Nights17. The Time of the Ancestors?18. In the Beginning Were the Giants19. Tiamaterialism20. Blubberbomb21. A Globe of Fire22. NighttimeAfterword: Anthropology Is Art Is FrogAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex