George E. Marcus - Böcker

Doing Political Psychology prepares for the understanding of and research in the coming political psychology. While political psychology is a very old discipline, its roots can be easily found in ancient Greek scholars such as Plato and Aristotle, and their inquiries into what forms of politics suit the human condition, the discipline of political psychology is increasingly being shaped by the newest sciences such as neuroscience and by genetics and biology. This text is designed to prepare the students to understand the ancient questions raised by our elders, from Ancient Greece through the Enlightenment and to today. And, to see how the newer approaches enable us to escape static disputes by using new tools, conceptual, theoretical, and methodological to seek new answers. The pedagogy is very much based on the premise that learning and doing are linked. Doing enables learning.Topics covered include: politics and the human condition; the methodologies of political psychology such as experiments, surveys and the like, emotion, rationality, personality, conflict, and context, among others.

How was the Bush administration able to convince both Congress and the American public to support the plan to go to war against Iraq in spite of poorly supported claims about the danger Saddam Hussein posed? Conventional wisdom holds that, because neither party voiced strong opposition, the press in turn failed to adequately scrutinize the administration's arguments, and public opinion passively followed. Drawing on the most comprehensive survey of public reactions to the war, Stanley Feldman, Leonie Huddy, and George E. Marcus revisit this critical period and come back with a different story. Not only did the Bush administration's carefully orchestrated campaign fail to raise Republican support for the war, opposition by Democrats and political independents actually increased with exposure to the news. But how we get our news matters: People who read the newspaper were more likely to engage critically with what was coming out of Washington, especially when exposed to the sort of high-quality investigative journalism still being written at traditional newspapers-and in short supply across other forms of media.Making a case for the crucial role of a press that lives up to the best norms and practices of print journalism, the book lays bare what is at stake for the functioning of democracy-especially in times of crisis-as newspapers increasingly become an endangered species.

"Para-Sites", the penultimate volume in the Late Editions series, explores how social actors located within centres of power and privilege develop and express a critical consciousness of their own situations. Departing from the usual focus on ethnography and cultural analysis on the socially marginalized, these pieces probe subjects who are undeniably complicit with powerful institutional engines of contemporary change. In each case, the possibility of alternative thinking or practices is in complex relation to the subject's source of empowerment. These cases challenge the condition of cynicism that has been the favoured mode of characterizing the mind-set of intellectuals and professionals, comfortable in their lives of middle-class consumption and work. In their effort to establish para-sites of critical awareness parallel to the levels of political and economic power at which they function, these subjects suggest that those who lead ordinary lives of modest power and privilege might not be parasites in relation to the systems they serve, but may be creating unique and independent critical perspectives.

This is a collection of ten interviews explore how producers of documentary media - filmmakers, journalists, and artists - located in societies considered marginal to the high-tech global centres respond to local and international audiences in creating their works. Interviewees include: a South African playwright who is shaping a distinctive form of activist journalism; a New Guinean producer who manages several media careers; Polish and German filmmakers developing critical documentaries on compromised new orders; a Columbian artist who provides powerful representations of endemic violence in her society; and writers from Martinique and Argentina with varied careers in the arts, media, and politics who provide tragicomic accounts of the marginal situations of their societies.

This is a collection of ten interviews explore how producers of documentary media - filmmakers, journalists, and artists - located in societies considered marginal to the high-tech global centres respond to local and international audiences in creating their works. Interviewees include: a South African playwright who is shaping a distinctive form of activist journalism; a New Guinean producer who manages several media careers; Polish and German filmmakers developing critical documentaries on compromised new orders; a Columbian artist who provides powerful representations of endemic violence in her society; and writers from Martinique and Argentina with varied careers in the arts, media, and politics who provide tragicomic accounts of the marginal situations of their societies.

What is it like to be a scientist at the end of the 20th century? How have shifts in power and in assumptions about knowledge affected scientific practice? Who are the people behind the new technologies, and how do they address the difficult moral and professional issues during a time of global change? This work explores these and other important questions at the approach of the next millennium. 24 contributors from a broad range of fields present the voices of the scientists themselves. Through interviews, conversations and memoirs the text presents: Lithuanian physicists who discuss science after Communism and their own fantasies about what Western science is; a Japanese-American woman struggling with her ambivalence over designing nuclear weapons; political activists in India who examine relations among science, environmental politics and government ideology in the aftermath of the Bhopal disaster; and many others, including biologists, physicians, corporate researchers and scientists working with virtual reality and other cutting-edge technologies.

What is it like to be a scientist at the end of the 20th century? How have shifts in power and in assumptions about knowledge affected scientific practice? Who are the people behind the new technologies, and how do they address the difficult moral and professional issues during a time of global change? This work explores these and other important questions at the approach of the next millennium. 24 contributors from a broad range of fields present the voices of the scientists themselves. Through interviews, conversations and memoirs the text presents: Lithuanian physicists who discuss science after Communism and their own fantasies about what Western science is; a Japanese-American woman struggling with her ambivalence over designing nuclear weapons; political activists in India who examine relations among science, environmental politics and government ideology in the aftermath of the Bhopal disaster; and many others, including biologists, physicians, corporate researchers and scientists working with virtual reality and other cutting-edge technologies.

Encompassing a range of disciplines - notably anthropology, politics, history, comparative literature, and philosophy - the annual publication "Late Editions" exposes unsettling dilemmas and unprecedented challenges facing cultural studies on the brink of the twenty-first century. Successive volumes appear annually until the year 2000, each engaging the predicaments of particular institutions, nations, and persons at this point of social, cultural, and political change. The project will test the limits of scholarly conventions by finding new ways to expose cultural formations emerging from the maturation or exhaustion of once-powerful ideas whose validity is now deeply in question. "Perilous States", the first volume of "Late Editions", presents conversations between American scholars, most of whom are anthropologists, and individuals situated amidst political and social upheaval with whom they share affinities.Primarily but not exclusively from Eastern Europe, the cast includes Russian writers, Hungarian scientists and academics, Armenian politicians, Siberian religious and medical leaders, a Gypsy leader, a Polish poet, a French politician, and a white South African musician who is a self-styled Zulu. Their voices unite around themes of democracy, market economy, individual rights, and the reawakened force of suppressed ethnic and racial identities. To obtain fresh perspectives on these cultural and social transformations, the volumes consist of in-depth conversations, relayed in essay form, between scholars and individuals in other cultures with whom they share affinities. This novel approach blends the immediacy of interviews, the objectivity of journalism, and the intellectual rigor of scholarship. The second volume published in the autumn of 1994 addresses issues of science and culture. Contributors to this volume are Marjorie Balzer, Sam Beck, David B. Coplan, Michael M.J. Fischer, Nia Georges, Bruce Grant, Douglas R. Holmes, Stella Grigorian, George E. Marcus, Kathryn Milun, Eleni Papagaroufali, Paul Rabinow and Julie Taylor.

Using cultural anthropology to analyze debates that reverberate throughout the human sciences, George E. Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer look closely at cultural anthropology's past accomplishments, its current predicaments, its future direction, and the insights it has to offer other fields of study. The result is a provocative work that is important for scholars interested in a critical approach to social science, art, literature, and history, as well as anthropology. This second edition considers new challenges to the field which have arisen since the book's original publication.

This is part of a series of annuals designed to probe cultural, institutional and geopolitical change as the 20th century closes. The books provide in-depth interviews with those closely involved with these changes. This volume focuses on the investment of corporations in the concept of culture, long considered the province of anthropologist or those involved in the humanistic disciplines. The idea of a "corporate culture" emerges, with its own organization, management policies, practices and ethos. The text examines this culture of corporations, looking at how it reflects self-contained communities or fragmented human existence in groups under conditions of postmodernity. Conversations with managers, financial and risk analysts and other participants in national and international organizations are used in an attempt to map the terrain of the present and navigate the uncertain future.

This is part of a series of annuals designed to probe cultural, institutional and geopolitical change as the 20th century closes. The books provide in-depth interviews with those closely involved with these changes. This volume focuses on the investment of corporations in the concept of culture, long considered the province of anthropologist or those involved in the humanistic disciplines. The idea of a "corporate culture" emerges, with its own organization, management policies, practices and ethos. The text examines this culture of corporations, looking at how it reflects self-contained communities or fragmented human existence in groups under conditions of postmodernity. Conversations with managers, financial and risk analysts and other participants in national and international organizations are used in an attempt to map the terrain of the present and navigate the uncertain future.

Like the McCarthy era of the 1950s, there is a strong current of paranoid social thought at the end of the 20th century. Conspiracy theories abound, not only in extremist ideologies and groups, but in commerce, science, and economics-arenas where a paranoid style is least expected. A curiosity about paranoia at its most reasonable is at the root of this volume. Some pieces develop conversations that reveal the post-Cold War situations of countries such as Italy, Russia, Slovenia, and the United States where conspiratorial explanations of national dramas seem to make sense. Other pieces tackle paranoia as a style of debate in such diverse realms as science, psychotherapy, and popular entertainment, where conspiracy theories emerge as a compelling way to address the inadequacies of rational expertise and organization in the face of immense changes that undermine them.

Although the rational choice approach toward political behavior has been severely criticized, its adherents claim that competing models have failed to offer a more scientific model of political decisionmaking. This measured but provocative book offers precisely that: an alternative way of understanding political behavior based on cognitive research.The authors draw on research in neuroscience, physiology, and experimental psychology to conceptualize habit and reason as two mental states that interact in a delicate, highly functional balance controlled by emotion. Applying this approach to more than fifteen years of election results, they shed light on a wide range of political behavior, including party identification, symbolic politics, and negative campaigning.Remarkably accessible, Affective Intelligence and Political Judgment urges social scientists to move beyond the idealistic notion of the purely rational citizen to form a more complete, realistic model that includes the emotional side of human judgment.

Although the rational choice approach toward political behavior has been severely criticized, its adherents claim that competing models have failed to offer a more scientific model of political decisionmaking. This measured but provocative book offers precisely that: an alternative way of understanding political behavior based on cognitive research.The authors draw on research in neuroscience, physiology, and experimental psychology to conceptualize habit and reason as two mental states that interact in a delicate, highly functional balance controlled by emotion. Applying this approach to more than fifteen years of election results, they shed light on a wide range of political behavior, including party identification, symbolic politics, and negative campaigning.Remarkably accessible, Affective Intelligence and Political Judgment urges social scientists to move beyond the idealistic notion of the purely rational citizen to form a more complete, realistic model that includes the emotional side of human judgment.

Passion and emotion run deep in politics, but researchers have only recently begun to study how they influence our political thinking. Contending that the long-standing neglect of such feelings has left unfortunate gaps in our understanding of political behavior, "The Affect Effect" fills the void by providing a comprehensive overview of current research on emotion in politics and where it is likely to lead. In sixteen seamlessly integrated essays, thirty top scholars approach this topic from a broad array of angles that address four major themes. The first section outlines the philosophical and neuroscientific foundations of emotion in politics, while the second focuses on how emotions function within and among individuals. The final two sections branch out to explore how politics work at the societal level and suggest the next steps in modeling, research, and political activity itself. Opening up new paths of inquiry in an exciting new field, this volume will appeal not only to scholars of American politics and political behavior, but also to anyone interested in political psychology and sociology.

This path-breaking book reconceptualizes our understanding of political tolerance as well as of its foundations. Previous studies, the authors contend, overemphasized the role of education in explaining the presence of tolerance, while giving insufficient weight to personality and ideological factors. With an innovative methodology for measuring levels of tolerance more accurately, the authors are able to explain why particular groups are targeted and why tolerance is an inherently political concept. Far from abating, the degree of intolerance in America today is probably as great as it ever was; it is the targets of intolerance that have changed.

This book offers a re-examination of the evidence about citizens' capacity for self-governance and what it means for the future of democratic politics, from both empirical and normative perspectives. Are ordinary citizens capable of governing themselves? For more than three decades, social scientists have accumulated evidence of the undemocratic propensities of many ordinary citizens. This has caused some to worry about the stability of existing democratic institutions, while others argue that the institutions themselves are the problem: politics needs to be democratized further, giving citizens more opportunities to practice democratic politics and acquire democratic values. The thirty-three contributors to this volume enter this debate with new evidence on citizens' capacity for deliberative politics. They argue that previous methods of investigation significantly underestimate people's ability to govern themselves, and that the prospects for democracy are better than conventional wisdom suggests. Realization of these prospects will depend on citizens grasping the interplay of emotions and reason in political life, creating new opportunities for citizen deliberation, and reinvigorating the institutions of representative government. Theories of democracy in turn will have to accommodate this changing reality as citizens show themselves to be self-determining in their political activities.

This book challenges the conventional wisdom that improving democratic politics requires keeping emotion out of it. Marcus advances the provocative claim that the tradition in democratic theory of treating emotion and reason as hostile opposites is misguided and leads contemporary theorists to misdiagnose the current state of American democracy. Instead of viewing the presence of emotion in politics as a failure of rationality and therefore as a failure of citizenship, Marcus argues, democratic theorists need to understand that emotions are in fact a prerequisite for the exercise of reason and thus essential for rational democratic deliberation and political judgment. Attempts to purge emotion from public life not only are destined to fail, but ultimately would rob democracies of a key source of revitalization and change. Drawing on recent research in neuroscience, Marcus shows how emotion functions generally and what role it plays in politics. In contrast to the traditional view of emotion as a form of agitation associated with belief, neuroscience reveals it to be generated by brain systems that operate largely outside of awareness. Two of these systems, "disposition" and "surveillance," are especially important in enabling emotions to produce habits, which often serve a positive function in democratic societies. But anxiety, also a preconscious emotion, is crucial to democratic politics as well because it can inhibit or disable habits and thus clear a space for the conscious use of reason and deliberation. If we acknowledge how emotion facilitates reason and is "cooperatively entangled" with it, Marcus concludes, then we should recognize sentimental citizens as the only citizens really capable of exercising political judgment and of putting their decisions into action.

Ethnography by Design, unlike many investigations into how ethnography can be done, focuses on the benefits of sustained collaboration across projects to ethnographic enquiry, and the possibilities of experimental co-design as part of field research. The book translates specifically scenic design practices, which include processes like speculation, materialization, and iteration, and applies them to ethnographic inquiry, emphasizing both the value of design studio processes and "designed" field encounters. The authors make it clear that design studio practices allow ethnographers to ask and develop very different questions within their own and others' research and thus, design also offers a framework for shaping the conditions of encounter in ways that make anthropological suppositions tangible and visually apparent. Written by two anthropologists and a designer, and based on their experience of their collective endeavours during three projects, Luke Cantarella, Christine Hegel, and George E. Marcus examine their works as a way to continue a broader inquiry into what the practice of ethnography can be in the twenty-first century, and how any project distinctively moves beyond standard perspectives through its crafted modes of participation and engagement.

The essays in this collection signal a new relationship between anthropology and the study of art. The authors explore the boundaries and affinities between art, anthropology, representation, and culture, casting a critical, ethnographic light on the art worlds of the contemporary West and their 'traffic' in non-Western objects. Starting from the premise that the traditional anthropology of art has been developed within categories and practices of Western art worlds themselves, this volume develops a new framework for understanding how western art - its avant-gardes, scholars, commentators, and collectors - have appropriated anthropological subjects like the 'primitive' and the 'exotic other'. The success of Australian Aboriginal acrylic paintings in the New York art world prompts Fred Myers to explore the circulation of indigenous art in the international market. Steven Feld looks at the contemporary world beat music scene and the commodification of remote music cultures. Carol Vance takes on the contentious struggles over art, censorship, obscenity, and the National Endowment for the Arts in the United States.George Marcus looks at the meaning of new, oppositional artwork in the context of the institutionalization of the avant-garde and postmodernism more generally. In contrast to a previous anthropology of art concerned with representing non-Western objects to Western audiences, this volume uncovers the practices and processes that drive the Western art world itself.

This seminal collection of essays critiquing ethnography as literature is augmented with a new foreword by Kim Fortun, exploring the ways in which Writing Culture has changed the face of ethnography over the last 25 years.

With Malice toward Some: How People Make Civil Liberties Judgments addresses an issue integral to democratic societies: how people faced with a complex variety of considerations decide whether or not to tolerate extremist groups. Relying on several survey-experiments, Marcus, Sullivan, Theiss-Morse, and Wood identify and compare the impact on decision making of contemporary information, long-standing predispositions, and enduring values and beliefs. Citizens react most strongly to information about a group's violations of behavioral norms and information about the implications for democracy of the group's actions. The authors conclude that democratic citizens should have a strong baseline of tolerance yet be attentive to and thoughtful about current information.

With Malice toward Some: How People Make Civil Liberties Judgments addresses an issue integral to democratic societies: how people faced with a complex variety of considerations decide whether or not to tolerate extremist groups. Relying on several survey-experiments, Marcus, Sullivan, Theiss-Morse, and Wood identify and compare the impact on decision making of contemporary information, long-standing predispositions, and enduring values and beliefs. Citizens react most strongly to information about a group's violations of behavioral norms and information about the implications for democracy of the group's actions. The authors conclude that democratic citizens should have a strong baseline of tolerance yet be attentive to and thoughtful about current information.

In the 1980s, George Marcus spearheaded a major critique of cultural anthropology, expressed most clearly in the landmark book Writing Culture, which he coedited with James Clifford. Ethnography through Thick and Thin updates and advances that critique for the late 1990s. Marcus presents a series of penetrating and provocative essays on the changes that continue to sweep across anthropology. He examines, in particular, how the discipline's central practice of ethnography has been changed by "multi-sited" approaches to anthropology and how new research patterns are transforming anthropologists' careers. Marcus rejects the view, often expressed, that these changes are undermining anthropology. The combination of traditional ethnography with scholarly experimentation, he argues, will only make the discipline more lively and diverse. The book is divided into three main parts. In the first, Marcus shows how ethnographers' tradition of defining fieldwork in terms of peoples and places is now being challenged by the need to study culture by exploring connections, parallels, and contrasts among a variety of often seemingly incommensurate sites.The second part illustrates this emergent multi-sited condition of research by reflecting it in some of Marcus's own past research on Tongan elites and dynastic American fortunes. In the final section, which includes the previously unpublished essay "Sticking with Ethnography through Thick and Thin," Marcus examines the evolving professional culture of anthropology and the predicaments of its new scholars. He shows how students have increasingly been drawn to the field as much by such powerful interdisciplinary movements as feminism, postcolonial studies, and cultural studies as by anthropology's own traditions. He also considers the impact of demographic changes within the discipline--in particular the fact that anthropologists are no longer almost exclusively Euro-Americans studying non-Euro-Americans. These changes raise new issues about the identities of anthropologists in relation to those they study, and indeed, about what is to define standards of ethnographic scholarship.Filled with keen and highly illuminating observations, Ethnography through Thick and Thin will stimulate fresh debate about the past, present, and future of a discipline undergoing profound transformations.

Distinguished anthropologist George Marcus and his co-author Fernando Mascarenhas engage in a new experiment in anthropological writing. Ocasi

Distinguished anthropologist George Marcus and his co-author Fernando Mascarenhas engage in a new experiment in anthropological writing. Ocasião reveals the key relationship between anthropologist and subject through the letters and commentaries exchanged between Marcus and Mascarenhas, Marques of Fronteira and Alorna in Portugal. The authors discuss the persistence and survival of the contemporary Portuguese nobility, who serve as witnesses to important transitions in modern Portuguese history. The epistolary form is the medium of this innovative ethnography, and will stimulate a new critique of ethnographic genres, originating in the work of James Clifford and Marcus in Writing Culture. This new book will appeal to readers concerned with anthropological methods and fieldwork; the anthropology of elites, and a diverse European and American community of scholars interested in Portuguese culture.

Over the past two decades anthropologists have been challenged to rethink the nature of ethnographic research, the meaning of fieldwork, and the role of ethnographers. Ethnographic fieldwork has cultural, social, and political ramifications that have been much discussed and acted upon, but the training of ethnographers still follows a very traditional pattern; this volume engages and takes its point of departure in the experiences of ethnographers-in-the-making that encourage alternative models for professional training in fieldwork and its intellectual contexts.The work done by contributors to Fieldwork Is Not What It Used to Be articulates, at the strategic point of career-making research, features of this transformation in progress. Setting aside traditional anxieties about ethnographic authority, the authors revisit fieldwork with fresh initiative. In search of better understandings of the contemporary research process itself, they assess the current terms of the engagement of fieldworkers with their subjects, address the constructive, open-ended forms by which the conclusions of fieldwork might take shape, and offer an accurate and useful description of what it means to become—and to be—an anthropologist today.Contributors: Lisa Breglia, George Mason University; Jae A. Chung, Aalen University; James D. Faubion, Rice University; Michael M. J. Fischer, MIT; Kim Fortun, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Jennifer A. Hamilton, Hampshire College; Christopher M. Kelty, UCLA; George E. Marcus, University of California, Irvine; Nahal Naficy, Rice University; Kristin Peterson, University of California, Irvine; Deepa S. Reddy, University of Houston-Clear Lake

Over the past two decades anthropologists have been challenged to rethink the nature of ethnographic research, the meaning of fieldwork, and the role of ethnographers. Ethnographic fieldwork has cultural, social, and political ramifications that have been much discussed and acted upon, but the training of ethnographers still follows a very traditional pattern; this volume engages and takes its point of departure in the experiences of ethnographers-in-the-making that encourage alternative models for professional training in fieldwork and its intellectual contexts.The work done by contributors to Fieldwork Is Not What It Used to Be articulates, at the strategic point of career-making research, features of this transformation in progress. Setting aside traditional anxieties about ethnographic authority, the authors revisit fieldwork with fresh initiative. In search of better understandings of the contemporary research process itself, they assess the current terms of the engagement of fieldworkers with their subjects, address the constructive, open-ended forms by which the conclusions of fieldwork might take shape, and offer an accurate and useful description of what it means to become—and to be—an anthropologist today.Contributors: Lisa Breglia, George Mason University; Jae A. Chung, Aalen University; James D. Faubion, Rice University; Michael M. J. Fischer, MIT; Kim Fortun, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Jennifer A. Hamilton, Hampshire College; Christopher M. Kelty, UCLA; George E. Marcus, University of California, Irvine; Nahal Naficy, Rice University; Kristin Peterson, University of California, Irvine; Deepa S. Reddy, University of Houston-Clear Lake

During its first six years (1986–1991), the journal Cultural Anthropology provided a unique forum for registering the lively traffic between anthropology and the emergent arena of cultural studies. The nineteen essays collected in Rereading Cultural Anthropology, all of which originally appeared in the journal, capture the range of approaches, internal critiques, and new questions that have characterized the study of anthropology in the 1980s, and which set the agenda for the present.Drawing together work by both younger and well-established scholars, this volume reveals various influences in the remaking of traditions of ethnographic work in anthropology; feminist studies, poststructuralism, cultural critiques, and disciplinary challenges to established boundaries between the social sciences and humanities. Moving from critiques of anthropological representation and practices to modes of political awareness and experiments in writing, this collection offers systematic access to what is now understood to be a fundamental shift (still ongoing) in anthropology toward engagement with the broader interdisciplinary stream of cultural studies.Contributors. Arjun Appadurai, Keith H. Basso, David B. Coplan, Vincent Crapanzano, Faye Ginsburg, George E. Marcus, Enrique Mayer, Fred Meyers, Alcida R. Ramos, John Russell, Orin Starn, Kathleen Stewart, Melford E. Spiro, Ted Swedenburg, Michael Taussig, Julie Taylor, Robert Thornton, Stephen A. Tyler, Geoffrey M. White