C. Jason Throop – författare

Toward an Anthropology of the Will is the first book that systematically explores volition from an ethnographically informed anthropological point of view. While philosophers have for centuries puzzled over the degree to which individuals are "free" to choose how to act in the world, anthropologists have either assumed that the will is a stable, constant fact of the human condition or simply ignored it. Although they are usually quite comfortable discussing the relationship between culture and cognition or culture and emotion, anthropologists have not yet focused on how culture and volition are interconnected. The contributors to this book draw upon their unique insights and research experience to address fundamental questions, including: What forms does the will take in culture? How is willing experienced? How does it relate to emotion and cognition? What does imagination have to do with willing? What is the connection between morality, virtue, and willing? Exploring such questions, the book moves beyond old debates about "freedom" and "determinacy" to demonstrate how a richly nuanced anthropological approach to the cultural experience of willing can help shape theories of social action in the human sciences.

Toward an Anthropology of the Will is the first book that systematically explores volition from an ethnographically informed anthropological point of view. While philosophers have for centuries puzzled over the degree to which individuals are "free" to choose how to act in the world, anthropologists have either assumed that the will is a stable, constant fact of the human condition or simply ignored it. Although they are usually quite comfortable discussing the relationship between culture and cognition or culture and emotion, anthropologists have not yet focused on how culture and volition are interconnected. The contributors to this book draw upon their unique insights and research experience to address fundamental questions, including: What forms does the will take in culture? How is willing experienced? How does it relate to emotion and cognition? What does imagination have to do with willing? What is the connection between morality, virtue, and willing? Exploring such questions, the book moves beyond old debates about "freedom" and "determinacy" to demonstrate how a richly nuanced anthropological approach to the cultural experience of willing can help shape theories of social action in the human sciences.

Exploring the role of empathy in a variety of Pacific societies, this book is at the forefront of the latest anthropological research on empathy. It presents distinct articulations of many assumptions of contemporary philosophical, neurobiological, and social scientific treatments of the topic. The variations described in this book do not necessarily preclude the possibility of shared existential, biological, and social influences that give empathy a distinctly human cast, but they do provide an important ethnographic lens through which to examine the possibilities and limits of empathy in any given community of practice.

On Human Concern puts anthropology into conversation with phenomenology in order to trace the complex pathways by which forms of human concern prove central to our existence. Drawing on over two decades of ethnographic engagement with Yapese communities in Micronesia, intermingled with reflections on life as a migrant of Canadian settler colonial heritage in the United States, the book examines a range of worldly situations that disclose differing modalities of concern: from experiences of loss and mourning, to bodily decline and illness, to despair in the face a once looming Covid-19 pandemic, to climate change and the specter of ecological collapse.Cross-cutting these distinctive situations is a core dimension of human concern: its ethical and moral entailments. That we are responsive to the worldly situations that we find ourselves living through, and that we are concerned about how we and others are coming along in the world, speaks to the kinds of beings that we are: beings who are ethically attuned to the conditions that in turn condition us. Collectively, the chapters produce a phenomenological anthropological analysis of the variegated ways that historically situated individuals and communities are responsively attuned to the worldly conditions that shape their possibilities for being.C. Jason Throop is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Suffering and Sentiment: Exploring the Vicissitudes of Experience and Pain in Yap (California, 2010), coeditor, with Keith M. Murphy, of Toward an Anthropology of the Will (Stanford, 2010), and coeditor, with Douglas Hollan, of The Anthropology of Empathy: Exploring the Lives of Others in Pacific Societies (Berghahn Press, 2004).