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Switch to: References
Citations of:
The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia
Univ of California Press (1988)
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This article has two objectives. In the first part, I present a critical overview of the extensive anthropological literature that may be deemed “phenomenological.” Following this critique, which is built up around a classification into four different varieties of phenomenological anthropology, I discuss the relationship between phenomenological anthropology and the ontological turn (OT). Contrary to received wisdom within the anthropological discipline, I suggest that OT has several things in common with the phenomenological project. For the same reason, I argue, it (...) |
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The alienation of body parts and their transformation into commodities raises questions about ownership, property rights, and about possible violation of the moral order. This article focuses on the `social life' of objects, including body parts, and the multiple meanings attached to them that are made visible in systems of exchange. The transformation of DNA obtained in blood samples into immortalized cell lines for use in the Human Genome Diversity Project is introduced as an illustration of contested commodification. The meanings (...) |
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Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is an effective treatment for the debilitating motor symptoms of Parkinson’s disease and other neurological disorders. However, clinicians and commentators have noted that DBS recipients have not necessarily experienced the improvements in quality of life that would be expected, due in large part to what have been described as the ‘psychosocial’ impacts of DBS. The premise of this paper is that, in order to realise the full potential of DBS and similar interventions, clinical services need to (...) |
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Robots equipped with artificial intelligence pose a huge challenge to traditional ontological differentiations between the spheres of the human and the non-human. Drawing mainly from neo-animistic and perspectivist approaches in anthropology and science and technology studies, the paper explores the potential of new forms of interconnectedness and rhizomatic entanglements between humans and a world transcending the boundaries between species and material spheres. We argue that intelligent robots meet virtually all criteria Western biology came up with to define ‘life’ and that (...) |
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This article aims at contributing to the contemporary reception of Heidegger’s thought in eco-philosophical perspective. Its point of departure is Heidegger’s claim, in his Bremen lectures and The Question Concerning Technology, that today the earth is submitted to permanent requisition and planned ordering, and that, having thus lost sight of its auto-poiesis, we are no longer capable of listening, tuning in, and singing back to what he calls in his course on Heraclitus the “song of the earth.” Accordingly, first we (...) |
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Artificially Intelligent robotic technologies increasingly reflect a language of interaction and relationship and this vocabulary is part and parcel of the meanings now attached to machines. No longer are they inert, but interconnected, responsive and engaging. As machines become more sophisticated, they are predicted to be a “direct object” of an interaction for a human, but what kinds of human would that give rise to? Before robots, animals played the role of the relational other, what can stories of feral children (...) |
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Contemporary debate suggests that the new genetics may be changing ideas about the body and what it is to be human. Specifically, there are notions that the new genetics seems to erode the ideas that underpin modernity, such as the figure of the integrated, discrete, conscious individual body-self. Holding these ideas against the practices of genetic medicine, however, this article suggests a quite different picture; one that does not erase, but helps to keep in play, some crucial tenets of humanism. (...) |
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This special issue examines the diverse realities created by the intersection of emerging technologies, new scientific knowledge, and the human being. It engages with two key questions: how is the human being shaped and constructed in new ways through advances in science and technology? and how might these new ways of imagining the subject shape present and future human rights law and practice? The papers examine a variety of scientific technologies—personalized medicine and organ transplant, mitochondrial DNA replacement, and scaffolds and (...) |
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In this ethnography of transnational commercial surrogacy In a small clinic In India, the narratives of two sets of womenInvolved In this new form of reproductive travel - the transnational clients and the surrogates themselves - are evaluated. How do these women negotiate the culturally anomalous nature of transnational surrogacy within the unusual setting of India? It Is demonstrated that while both sets of women downplay the economic aspect of surrogacy by drawing on predictable cultural tools like 'gift', 'sisterhood' and (...) |
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This article critically addresses recent anthropological and feminist efforts to theorize and analyse Muslim women's participation in and support for the Islamic revival in its various manifestations. Drawing on ethnographic material from research on young Muslims engaged in Islamic youth and student-organizations in Norway, I investigate some of the challenges that researching religious subjectivities and practices pose to feminist theory. In particular, I deal with how to understand women's religious piety in relation to questions of self, agency and resistance. Engaging (...) |
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It is tempting to interpret Marilyn Strathern as saying that the concept of nature is a social construction, because in her essay “No Nature, No Culture: the Hagen Case” she tells us that the Hagen people do not describe the world using this concept. However, I point out an obstacle to interpreting her in this way, an obstacle which leads me to reject this interpretation. Interpreting her in this way makes her inconsistent. The inconsistency is owing to a commitment that (...) |
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The paper goes beyond critique to read institutional approaches, specifically institutional logics of CSR in India and their management by Indian firms, from a post-colonial location, to explore decolonising possibilities. Drawing on post-colonial approach of catachrestic reading, it reads institutional logics of CSR literature to argue against a linear hierarchical travel of western CSR logic into India, which is then adapted/adopted/translated or decoupled, along with the secondary status this implies for India; and suggests that Indian and western CSR logics are (...) |
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Marcel Mauss’s discussion of the gift relies on a paradox: although gift-giving is the foundational act of building a society, in order for a gift to be circulated, society must be always-already presupposed so that the gift can reach and be recognized by its destination. This article focuses on how this paradox has been addressed in anthropological and philosophical studies of the gift, by reviewing work by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Maurice Godelier and Jacques Derrida. By illuminating each position through the lens (...) |
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Plessner not only formulates a theory of positionality here but also a principle of how to construct this theory with respect to empirical research, a principle he calls the “deduction of the categories of life”. This is described in the literature as “reflexive deduction”. With reference to Plessner’s methodology of theory construction I unfold a new understanding of his theory of the shared world. At present, there are two understandings of the shared world. The traditional understanding of the shared world (...) |
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In this paper I introduce the theory of gift giving as a possible means to reconcile the contradictions inherent in accountability measures of ‘faculty productivity’ in the American university. In this paper I sketch the theory of gift economies to show how, given the historical ideals that characterize the faculty‐student relationship, a theory of gift giving could help us better judge the labor of the faculty. I suggest that it is the relational character of teaching that frustrates accountability measures and (...) |
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This article contains critical reflections of a multidisciplinary research group studying the human and technological dynamics around some newly offered electronic services in a specific rural area of Finland. For their research, the group adopted ethnography. On facing the challenges of doing ethnographic research in a multidisciplinary setting, the group evolved its own breed of research practice based on multiple forms of triangulation. This implied the use of multiple data sources, methods, theories, and researchers, in different combinations. One of the (...) |
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Economics uses rational actor models, but what about anthropology? I present an interpretation of the influential anthropologist Marilyn Strathern according to which she engages in a kind of rational actor modelling, but a kind that is different from economic modelling. |
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This paper addresses the question of whether a general method is capable of accommodating the vast array of contexts in which art objects are studied. I propose a framework for such a general method, which is, however, limited to a specific research task: reconstructing the circumstances under which a culturally and/or temporally distant or “exotic” art object becomes interesting (or menacing) to look at. The proposed framework is applied to evaluate Anthony Forge’s essays on the visual art of the Abelam. (...) |
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I analyze how machi discourse and practice of gender and identity contribute to feminist debates about gendered indigenous Others, and the effects that Western notions of Self and Other and feminist rhetoric have on Mapuche women and machi: people who heal with herbal remedies and the help of spirits. Machi juggling of different worlds offers a particular understanding of the way identity and gender are constituted and of the relationship between Self and Other, theory and practice, subject and object, feminism (...) |
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Pierre Bourdieu’s social theory relies on concepts of four kinds of capital: economic, social, cultural, and symbolic. The anthropologist Pnina Werbner raises the issue of whether the concept of symbolic capital faces a paradox, because within some social groups one can only gain such capital by denying its value. There is a question of how best to clarify the paradox and I offer a clarification. |
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The cognitive, psychological and sociological mechanisms underpinning complex social relationships among small groups are a part of our primate heritage. However, among human groups, relationships persist over much greater temporal and spatial scales, often in the physical absence of one or other of the individuals themselves. This chapter examines how such individual face-to-face social interactions were ‘scaled up’ during human evolution to the regional and global networks characteristic of modern societies. One recent suggestion has been that a radical change in (...) |
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This article explores nationalist interpretations of blood donation activity, examining how some Indians read integrative messages into the practical procedures through which blood is donated and distributed. The first post-Independence Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, proclaimed the need for `national integration' as a bulwark against a myriad of linguistic, caste and ethnic agitations that threatened to disrupt the unity of the newly formed nation-state. This article shows that a striking manifestation of the Nehruvian ideology of national integration possesses a (...) |
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In 1998 I asked my friend Tjiniman, who is a stone-age hunter, to give us his non-western perspective on ‘Tucson III’ (Murinbata&Whitehead, 1998).Most people thought I just made Tjiniman up and the whole thing was intended as a joke, and he has spent the last two years worrying about this. Since then he has gained a modest BSc in Social Anthropology, though in my view the examiners failed to appreciate some of his less obvious insights, and he deserved a higher (...) |
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Hegemonic masculinity is a concept that has been of central concern in gender research on different masculinities. However, with the exception of the pioneering work of Wajcman, it has not been widely discussed in relation to studies of science and technology. In this article, which mainly draws on anthropological fieldwork among car and motor mechanics in Penang, Malaysia, a certain form of hegemonic masculinity, based on an intimate embodied interaction with machines, is being discussed. Such a masculinity is furthermore founded (...) |
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This essay explores the cultural and political processes which shape human worldviews. I examine the functions, mechanisms, and consequences of cultural distortions of perception, and the evolution of the western scientific worldview from its ancient animistic roots. From the evidence reviewed here I infer that collective deceptions are endemic in human culture, that physicalism is a collective deception and that the 'hard problem' of consciousness, defined in physicalist terms, is a false problem. |
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Traditional Chinese Medicine is often considered an “experiential medicine.” As such, it is seen as in need of conceptual elevation by scientific experiments and theorization, which actualize and undermine scientized forms of TCM. This essay argues that the predicaments of TCM are thoroughly modern and must be understood within the “Modern Constitution” in which the production and proliferation of asymmetries are both constitutive of and obscured by modern knowledge production. This essay dislodges these asymmetries through transdisciplinary engagements with TCM. This (...) |
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The debate concerning ontology is heating up in the social sciences. How is this impacting anthropology and archaeology? What contributions can these disciplines make? Following a session at the 2010 Theoretical Archaeology Group conference at Brown University (“‘Worlds Otherwise’: Archaeology, Theory, and Ontological Difference,” convened by Ben Alberti and Yvonne Marshall), a group of archaeologists and anthropologists have continued to discuss the merits, possibilities, and problems of an ontologically oriented approach. The current paper is a portion of this larger conversation— (...) |
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Theories of reciprocity have been surprisingly gender-blind. We develop a gendered account of reciprocity using qualitative data from Russia. We focus on gifts of unpaid task assistance, where gender differences are particularly visible. In our data, women’s gifts of labor involve greater time and effort than men’s, but women report nonreciprocation, while men do not. Paradoxically, the most onerous gifts are those least likely to be reciprocated. We show how this puzzling finding relates to the gendering of reciprocity. We define (...) |
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Ascent: Philosophy and Paradise Lost, by ZamirTzachi. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. 216. |
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The work critically addresses the construction of a political theory of public things by Bonnie Honig. To this end, the origins of this theory are traced conceived as a response to the crisis of democratic sovereignty in the face of the dissolving effects of the emerging cosmopolitan universe and the thriving decline of the public sphere. Secondly, its roots are inserted in the complex theoretical scenario that has caused the posthumanist turn in the social sciences, placing its contribution in the (...) |
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BROOKS J and RAFFERTY AM. Nursing Inquiry 2010; 17: 142–150Education and role conflict in the health visitor profession, 1918–39Health visiting was the public health profession in the UK, which arose during the Victorian period to support and supervise the mothers of the nation. The health visitor was expected to teach the new mothers hygiene, infant feeding and diet, help them in the home when necessary and then report back to the Medical Officer for Health. Her role therefore was multifaceted and (...) |
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En este ensayo respondemos a la pregunta: ¿Qué posibilidades, obstáculos y tensiones ofrece “el don de dar vida” a la producción de la mujer como persona en México?, para ello analizamos una expresión común y de uso popular en México: “el don de dar vida”. Identificamos que la expresión tiene similitudes, aunque también diferencias con “el don” del que habló Marcel Mauss. Una de las diferencias es que actualmente la expresión “el don de dar vida” se usa en las culturas (...) |
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Primarily a thought experiment, this essay explores how cinematic cyborgs and anthropological approaches to personhood and subjectivity might be theorized together. The 1980s and 1990s showed considerable investment by media producers, and strong reception by audiences and culture critics, to science fiction (SF) film and television franchises that brought new attention to the imagined cyborg subject in the popular imagination of the time. Outside of Hollywood, this same period was marked by biomedical and technological advancements that raised profound implications for (...) |
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This paper discusses basic critical realism within the context of economic anthropology and develops an approach to studying material relations between people. A diachronic form of analysis, following the work of Bhaskar and Archer, is described as a practical means of analysing property rights. This new approach emphasises epistemic relativism and ontological realism in order to compare disparate forms of human interaction across cultures. The aim of doing this is to develop a philosophical framework that allows for the comparison of (...) |
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This response to Barbara Herrnstein Smith's article, “The Chimera of Relativism: A Tragicomedy,” presents some thoughts on how the debates about “relativism” upon which Smith comments could be refigured in the light of this symposium's theme of “comparative relativism.” If the notion of relativism can be rendered relative unto itself, as the notion of a “comparative” relativism would seem to suggest, then how might one understand its “position” within the kinds of debates in which Smith's paper, by way of commentary, (...) |
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There has been much recent debate about women's rights and their relation to human rights. Debates about domestic violence in Vanuatu are situated in this global frame but also in a regional and historical context dominated by the relation between kastom (tradition) and Christianity. This article depicts the dynamics of a conference on Violence and the Family in Vanuatu held in Port Vila in 1994, in terms of the competing claims of universal human rights and cultural relativism. The allegedly western (...) |
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Archaeology takes up material fragments from distant and recent pasts to create narratives of personal and collective identity. It is, therefore, a powerful voice shaping our current and future social worlds. Feminist theory has to date made little reference to archaeology and its projects, in part because archaeologists have primarily chosen to work with normative forms of gender theory rather than forge new theory informed by archaeological insights. This paper argues that archaeology has considerably more potential for feminist theorizing than (...) |
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This article outlines an approach to a critical cosmopolitan social theory derived from the thought of the Japanese philosopher, Watsuji Tetsurō. In order to develop this, his thought is positioned against the works of the British sociologist, Gerard Delanty, and the Argentinian semiotician, Walter Mignolo. This will be done through the concepts of space, time and the imagination. From their respective intellectual positions these other two have attempted to develop an approach to social theory that cannot be reduced to the (...) |
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This article presents a discussion about using one’s body – in its several occurrences, forms and meanings – for sex, affection and money transactions, within and beyond the scope of prostitution. It results from research carried out with young women involved in prostitution in two Brazilian north-eastern towns. The women’s views, conceptualisations and experiences reveal a prolific construction of discursive differentiation categories, which are linked to a set of moralities within local/regional economies and within notions of family. Through the women’s (...) |
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S’il fallait résumer en un mot l’importance de la contribution du présent ouvrage aux débats sur le genre , c’est celui de «désessentialisation» qui viendrait à l’esprit: tout comme il n’y a pas «la» femme, tout comme il n’y a pas «la» race, il n’y a pas «la» religion. Comme d’autres, le terrain de la religion est un terrain en tension, travaillé par des mouvements théologiques mais aussi idéologiques, sociaux et politiques; de même, la religion n’est pas autarcique par rapport (...) |
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In this article, the author argues that feminist anthropology as a field of study should pose questions about how differential power is constituted as gender differences. Addressing these questions calls for an approach to the study of gender and power that articulates the relationship between structure and agency. Such an approach is one that analyzes the practice of gender over time from intersubjective, political perspectives. Last, the author argues that feminist anthropology is a justice claim, which demands an ethic of (...) |
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