Existential anthropology is an approach inspired by existential and phenomenological thought to further our understanding of the human condition. Its ethnographic methodology emphasizes embodied experience and focuses on what is at stake for people amid the contingencies, struggles, and uncertainties of everyday life. While anthropological research on religion abounds, there has been little systematic attention to the ways anthropology and religious studies might benefit from better consideration of one another or from the adoption of a shared existential perspective.

Between Life and Thought gathers leading anthropologists and religion scholars, including some of existential anthropology’s most recognized advocates and thoughtful critics. The collection opens with a comprehensive introduction to phenomenology and existentialism in anthropology and religious studies and concludes with an analysis of how existential anthropology might address the long-standing problem of constructivism and perennialism in religious studies. The chapters altogether present existential anthropology as an especially generative paradigm with which to rethink and remake both anthropology and the academic study of religion.

A timely and significant intervention across multiple areas of research, Between Life and Thought is an invaluable source for critically exploring the prospects, as well as the limits, of an anthropological approach to religion grounded in experiential ethnography and existential thought.

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Bringing together major scholars, Between Life and Thought explores the burgeoning subfield of existential anthropology as a truly humanistic social science, a space of convergence for anthropology, philosophy, and religious studies.
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Introduction: Religion, Phenomenological Anthropology, and the Existential Turn
Devaka Premawardhana

1. Existential Anthropology and Religious Studies: A Personal Account
Michael Jackson

2. Eye and Mind Revisited: The Work of Art in Ethnography
Paul Stoller

3. Blood, Flesh, and Emotions: An Anthropologist and Her Fieldwork in Meatpacking Plants
Kristy Nabhan-Warren

4. Recesses of the Ordinary: Michael Jackson’s Reinvention of Philosophical Anthropology
Tyler Roberts

5. Ruta Graveolens: Open and Closed Bodies in a Bahian Town
Mattijs van de Port

6. Destiny as a Relationship and a Theory
Samuli Schielke

7. Worlds Colliding? Transnational Religion in Phenomenological Perspective
Kim E. Knibbe

8. The Plain Sense of Things: Time, History, and the Dream
Aditya Malik

9. Boundary Situations: An Existential Account of Wounded Healing
Sónia Silva

10. Sartre’s Jews and Jackson’s Witches: What (Who) Is Real in Existential Anthropology?
Don Seeman

Afterword: "Not Ethnology but Ethnosophy!"
Michael Lambek

Contributor Biographies

Index

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Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9781487554750
Publisert
2024-04-05
Utgiver
Vendor
University of Toronto Press
Vekt
400 gr
Høyde
229 mm
Bredde
152 mm
Dybde
15 mm
Aldersnivå
U, P, 05, 06
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Heftet
Antall sider
277

Biografisk notat

Don Seeman is an associate professor in the Department of Religion and the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies at Emory University.

Devaka Premawardhana is an associate professor in the Department of Religion and current occupant of a Winship Distinguished Research chair at Emory University.