Emergent forms of life and the anthropological voice / Michael M.J. Fischer.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Fischer, Michael M. J., 1946-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Anthropology--Philosophy.

Anthropology.

Anthropological ethics.

Visual anthropology.

Intercultural communication.

Communication in anthropology.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (491 pages) : illustrations

Place of Publication:

Durham : Duke University Press, 2003.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Anthropology as Cultural Critique helped redefine cultural anthropology in the 1980s. Now, with Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice, pathbreaking scholar Michael M. J. Fischer moves the discussion to a consideration of the groundwork laid in the 1990s for engagements with the fast-changing worlds of technoscience, telemedia saturation, and the reconstruction of societies after massive trauma. Fischer argues that new methodologies and conceptual tools are necessitated by the fact that cultures of every kind are becoming more complex and differentiated at the same time that globalization and modernization are bringing them into exponentially increased interaction. Anthropology, Fischer explains, now operates in a series of third spaces well beyond the nineteenth- and twentieth-century dualisms of us/them, primitive/civilized, East/West, or North/South. He contends that more useful paradigms - such as informatics, multidimensional scaling, autoimmunity, and visual literacy beyond the frame—derive from the contemporary sciences and media technologies. A vigorous advocate of the anthropological voice and method, Fischer emphasizes the ethical dimension of cultural anthropology. Ethnography, he suggests, is uniquely situated to gather and convey observations fundamental to the creation of new social institutions for an evolving civil society. In Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice Fischer considers a dazzling array of subjects - among them Iranian and Polish cinema, cyberspace, autobiographical and fictional narrative, and genomic biotechnologies - and, in the process, demonstrates a cultural anthropology for a highly networked world. He lays the groundwork for a renewed and powerful twenty-first-century anthropology characterized by a continued insistence on empirical fieldwork, engagements with other disciplines, and dialogue with interlocutors around the globe.

Contents:

Deep play and social responsibility in Vienna

Emergent forms of life: anthropologies of late or post modernities

Filmic judgment and cultural critique: Iranian cinema in a teletechnological world

Cultural critique with a hammer, a gouge, and a woodblock: art and medicine in the age of social re-traumatization

Ethnographic critique and technoscientific narratives: the old mole, ethical plateaus, and the governance of emergent biosocial polities

Autobiographical voices (1,2,3) and mosaic memory: ethnicity, religion, science

Post-avant-garde tasks of Polish film: ethnographic Odklamane

Worlding cyberspace: towards a critical ethnography in space, time, and theory

Calling the futures: delay call forwarding

In the science zone: the Yanomami and the fight for representation.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references (pages [427]-461) and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780822332381

0822332388

9780822384953

0822384957

OCLC:

893681516