Essays In Anthropology
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Essays in Anthropology
Author: Robert Spaemann
language: en
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Release Date: 2010-06-15
The question of the nature of humanity is one of the most complex of all philosophical and theological inquiries. Where might one look to find a decent answer to this question? Should we turn to an investigation of genetics and DNA for such answers? Should we look to the history of humanity's adaption and evolution? Should we look to humanity's cultural achievements and the form of its social life?In this intriguing and provocative collection of essays, philosopher Robert Spaemann reacts against what he calls "scientistic" anthropology and ventures to take up afresh the quaestio de homine, "the question of man." Spaemann contends that when it comes to the nagging question of what we truly are as human beings, understanding our chemical make-up or evolutionary past simply cannot give us the full picture. Instead, without doing away with the findings of modern evolutionary science, Spaemann offers successive treatments of human nature, human evolution, and human dignity, which paint a full and compelling picture of the meaning of human life. Crucial to any anthropology, he demonstrates, is our future as well as our past. And our relationship to God as well as to our next-door neighbor. All of these themes coalesce in a vital contribution to the question of what it means to be human.
Essays on the Anthropology of Reason
Author: Paul Rabinow
language: en
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Release Date: 2021-05-11
This collection of essays explains and encourages new reflection on Paul Rabinow's pioneering project to anthropologize the West. His goal is to exoticize the Western constitution of reality, emphasize those domains most taken for granted as universal, and show how their claims to truth are linked to particular social practices, hence becoming effective social forces. He has recently begun to focus on the core of Western rationality, in particular the practices of molecular biology as they apply to our understanding of human nature. This book moves in new directions by posing questions about how scientific practice can be understood in terms of ethics as well as in terms of power. The topics include how French socialist urban planning in the 1930s engineered the transition from city planning to life planning; how the discursive and nondiscursive practices of the Human Genome Project and biotechnology have refigured life, labor, and language; and how a debate over patenting cell lines and over the dignity of life required secular courts to invoke medieval notions of the sacred. Building on an ethnographic study of the invention of the polymerase chain reaction--which enables the rapid production of specific sequences of DNA in millions of copies Rabinow, in the final essay, reflects in dialogue with biochemist Tom White on the place of science in modernity, on science as a vocation, and on the differences between the human and natural sciences.
A Passion for Difference
Author: Henrietta L. Moore
language: en
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Release Date: 2013-05-13
In this new book Henrietta Moore examines the nature and limitations of the theoretical languages used by anthropologists and others to write about sex, gender and sexuality. Moore begins by discussing recent feminist debates on the body and the notion of the non-universal human subject. She then considers why anthropologists have contributed relatively little to these debates, and suggests that this has much to do with the history of anthropological thought with regard to the conceptualization of "persons" and "selves" cross-culturally. Moore develops a specific anthropological approach to feminist post-structuralist and psychoanalytic theory. In subsequent chapters Moore pursues a series of related themes including the links between gender, identity and violence; questions of gender and identity in the context of intra-household resource allocation; the construction of domestic space and its relationship to bodily practices and the internationalization of relations of difference; and the links between the gender of the anthropologist and the writing of anthropology. This volume demonstrates anthropology's contribution to current debates in feminist theory.