Becoming - An Anthropological Approach to Understandings of the Person in Java

'Becoming - An Anthropological Approach to Understandings of the Person in Java' is an ethnographic monograph that examines the ways in which the peoples of a peri-urban locality in East Java, Indonesia conceive of the person, by looking at how their everyday practices relate to understandings of ethnicity, kinship, Islam and gender. The volume is also a thought experiment that aims to make a theoretical contribution to the discipline of anthropology by proposing the concept of the 'diaphoron' person and re-deploying the method of 'total ethnography'

Culture in Heritage On the Socio-Anthropological Notion of Culture in Current Heritage Discourses

The intellectual ‘heritage’ of social anthropology - universalism, cultural relativism and comparative method - is today strongly used as a tool-box by institutions and scholars from other fields. An anthropologically colored concept of culture is employed in UNESCO’s international legal frameworks, in the epistemological foundation and justification of the new academic subject heritage as well as for wider contextualizations of case studies on specific heritage items. While all of these discourses involve a marked universalistic notion of culture, the contribution of our paper is to show the different roles that the anthropological subject, culture, plays in each one of them. (Past; History; Sociology of time; Cultural Heritage; UNESCO

Advocating multi-disciplinarity in studying complex emergencies : the limitations of a psychological approach to understanding how young people cope with prolonged conflict in Gaza

The paper looks at the limitations and strengths of using the A-cope questionnaire for measuring strategies for coping with prolonged conflict by Palestinian young people in Gaza. The scale was administered to young people between the ages of 8 and 17. The results show some gender differences in coping strategies. However, some items on the subscales are not relevant for Muslim societies or societies in situations of prolonged conflict. The authors suggest that combining an anthropological contextual perspective and qualitative data with psychological instruments is an effective way of addressing the limitations of using a single quantitative method of assessment in non-Western complex social and cultural settings

Pragmatism, Perspectivism, Anthropology. A Consistent Triad

The paper defends the idea that Jamesian pragmatism, Nietzschean perspectivism, and philosophical anthropology represent a consistent triad, for the similarities and connections between the first two positions rest in their engagement with the anthropological question. As will be argued, a) pragmatism is concerned with anthropology and that it deals with a fundamental issue of Nietzsche’s late thought; b) the problem of the type of man (der Typus Mensch) is involved in Nietzsche’s questioning the value of truth, and perspectivism is an alternative view to Platonic and Christian metaphysics which arises from the same phenomenalist conception of knowledge defended by James ; c) Nietzsche’s interest in developing a philosophy that affirms the perspectival character of existence is primarily anthropological, and this is in fact the pragmatic criterion of validity that one can attribute to Nietzschean perspectivism

Anthropological Method and theory in a Study of Costume

The purpose of this dissertation is threefold, With the achieving of the third and major goal dependent upon the achieving of the first and second minor goals. First is the problem of deciding what methods will be useful in the original study to be undertaken later. Second is the application of these methods to the subject of the original study, namely, the changes in the form of garment parts of the costumes in the eighteenth century French court circles and upperclasses. Third id the problem of examining the sequences of costume forms so determined to see what these sequences imply for generalized anthropological theory

THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL CONSEQUENCES OF THE EVOLUTION OF EMPIRICISM

[The text examines methodological consequences of anti-metaphysical turn of British empiricism in the field of anthropology. I argue that this shift reinforces anthropology in its descriptive and interdisciplinary form, because destruction of metaphysically grounded subjectivity carried out in the course of evolution of empiricism provides epistemological legitimization of the idea of anthropological research as morally neutral and religiously indifferent procedure. In the final part of the article the difficulties caused by application of this new methodology are emphasized.

Creating a Dialogue: Bringing Anthropology to the University Campus

Traditional academic anthropology centers on fieldwork and the production of publications that contribute to a growing body of scholarship. In the past several decades, this collective knowledge has primarily circulated only within the discipline itself; in addition, the present day structure of academic anthropology has played a role in its isolation from other disciplines and the general public (Checker et al. 2010). This state of affairs is partially due to the expansion of the discipline in the 1960s, which made it financially possible to support many discipline-specific books, book series, and journals geared exclusively toward trained anthropologists rather than the lay public. This shift removed many anthropological arguments to an exclusive, professional-only realm resulting in decreased dialogue with audiences outside of the discipline (Borofsky 2011). But all is not lost. A growing field in the discipline, applied anthropology, branches away from this traditional academic model and is pushing the boundaries of what is considered anthropological research