Understanding Cultures: Perspectives in Anthropology and Social Theory

Understanding Cultures confronts the major theoretical issues involved in cross–cultural interpretation. The book introduces students to rationality among the ancestors of anthropology before proceeding to a wide–ranging evaluation of the Anglo–American rationality debates. At issue is the opposition between scientific models of understanding human action and those models that emphasize human action as symbolic and meaningful, thus privileging an interpretive framework. This long–awaited second edition includes a new chapter on globalism and cultural diaspora that challenges conventional notions of bounded culture and bounded self and has important implications for refiguring the rationality debates, fieldwork, and cross–cultural interpretations more generally.

Spis treści:
Acknowledgements.
1. Introduction.
2. Anthropological Ancestors and Interpretation Theory: Boas, Malinowski, and Evans–Pritchard.
3. Peter Winch and Ordinary Language Philosophy.
4. The Neo–Popperians and the Logic of One Science: I.C. Jarvie and Robin Horton.
5. Ordinary Language Philosophy in Question: Steven Lukes and Alasdair MacIntyre.
6. Beyond Explanation and Understanding: The Hermeneutics of Hans–Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur.
7. Hermeneutics and Critical Anthropology: The Synthesis of Practical and Critical Reason.
8. Modernism and Postmodernism in Anthropology.
9. Bounded Cultures – Bounded Selves: The Challenge of Cultural Diasporas.
Notes.
Bibliography.
Index.

Nota biograficzna:
Robert C. Ulin is Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Professor of Anthropology at Rochester Institute of Technology, and an international expert in theory and the anthropology of work. He is the author of numerous books and articles on social theory and the anthropology of Europe, including Vintages and Traditions (1996).

Okładka tylna:
Understanding Cultures confronts the major theoretical issues involved in cross–cultural interpretation. The book introduces students to rationality among the ancestors of anthropology before proceeding to a wide–ranging evaluation of the Anglo–American rationality debates. At issue is the opposition between scientific models of understanding human action and those models that emphasize human action as symbolic and meaningful, thus privileging an interpretive framework. This long–awaited second edition includes a new chapter on globalism and cultural diaspora that challenges conventional notions of bounded culture and bounded self and has important implications for refiguring the rationality debates, fieldwork, and cross–cultural interpretations more generally.