Schneider on Schneider : the conversion of the Jews and other anthropological stories / David M. Schneider as told to Richard Handler ; edited, transcribed, and with an introduction by Richard Handler.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Schneider, David Murray, 1918-

Contributor:

Handler, Richard, 1950-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Schneider, David Murray, 1918-.

Schneider, David Murray.

Anthropologists--United States--Biography.

Anthropologists.

Kinship--United States.

Kinship.

United States--Social life and customs.

United States.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (263 p.)

Place of Publication:

Durham, N.C. : Duke University Press, 1995.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

To listen to David M. Schneider is to hear the voice of American anthropology. To listen at length is to hear much of the discipline’s history, from the realities of postwar practice and theory to Schneider’s own influence on the development of symbolic and interpretive anthropology in the 1970s and 1980s. Schneider on Schneider offers readers this rare opportunity, and with it an engrossing introduction into a world of intellectual rigor, personal charm, and wit.In this work, based on conversations with Richard Handler, Schneider tells the story of his days devoted to anthropology—as a student of Clyde Kluckhohn and Talcott Parsons and as a writer and teacher whose work on kinship and culture theory revolutionized the discipline. With a master’s sense of the telling anecdote, he describes his education at Cornell, Yale, and Harvard, his fieldwork on the Micronesian island of Yap and among the Mescalero Apache, and his years teaching at the London School of Economics, Berkeley, and the University of Chicago. Musing on the current state and the future of anthropology, Schneider’s cast of characters reads like a who’s who of postwar social science. His reflections on anthropological field research and academic politics address some of the most pressing ethical and epistemological issues facing scholars today, while yielding tales of unexpected amusement.With its humor and irony, its wealth of information and searching questions about the state of anthropology, Schneider on Schneider not only provides an important resource for the history of twentieth-century social science, but also brings to life the entertaining voice of an engaging storyteller.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Editor's acknowledgments

Introduction: the origin of the dog

One: the work of the gods in Tikopia, or, a career in anthropology

Two: youth

Three: Addy

Four: surveying the army

Five: an education in anthropology

Six: fieldwork on yap

Seven: from Harvard to England

Eight: Mescalero Apache: the romance and politics of fieldwork

Nine: from Berkeley to Chicago

Ten: studying kinship

Afterword

Notes

Writings of David m. Schneider

Index

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

"Writings of David M. Schneider": pages [231]-236.

Includes bibliographical references (pages [225]-230) and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

0-8223-1691-9

0-8223-9795-1

OCLC:

889887746