Anthropology and Social Theory Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject
Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Sherry B. Ortner is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is author of New Jersey Dreaming: Capital, Culture, and the Class of '58, also published by Duke University Press; Life and Death on Mt. Everest: Sherpas and Himalayan Mountaineering; Making Gender: The Politics and Erotics of Culture; and High Religion: A Cultural and Political History of Sherpa Buddhism. She has received numerous awards, including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and the J. I. Staley Prize.
“An important and especially usable collection by one of the most influential essayists in anthropology, introduced by a lucid and original review of key concepts as they have been applied to the remarkable range of Sherry Ortner’s research achievements. Her response to recent challenges to the idea of culture is alone worth the price of the book.”-George Marcus, University of California, Irvine “At once challenging and admirably accessible, these essays trace the thinking of one of anthropology’s most notable practitioners as she-and her discipline-wrestles with key conundrums facing the late-modern social sciences.”-Jean Comaroff, University of Chicago “This is vintage Ortner. No one else writes anthropological theory so clear, so down-to-earth, or so accessible to non-anthropologists.”-William H. Sewell Jr., author of <i>Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation</i>
Some of the essays reflect explicitly on theoretical concerns: the relationship between agency and power, the problematic quality of ethnographic studies of resistance, and the possibility of producing an anthropology of subjectivity. Others are ethnographic studies that apply Ortner’s theoretical framework. In these, she investigates aspects of social class, looking at the relationship between race and middle-class identity in the United States, the often invisible nature of class as a cultural identity and as an analytical category in social inquiry, and the role that public culture and media play in the creation of the class anxieties of Generation X. Written with Ortner’s characteristic lucidity, these essays constitute a major statement about the future of social theory from one of the leading anthropologists of our time.
Chapter One: Reading America: Preliminary Notes on Class and Culture 19
Chapter Two: Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal 42
Chapter Three: Identities: The Hidden Life of Class 63
Chapter Four: Generation X: Anthropology in a Media-Saturated World 80
Chapter Five: Subjectivity and Cultural Critique 107
Chapter Six: Power and Projects: Reflections on Agency 129
Notes 155
References Cited 167
Index 181
Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Sherry B. Ortner is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is author of New Jersey Dreaming: Capital, Culture, and the Class of '58, also published by Duke University Press; Life and Death on Mt. Everest: Sherpas and Himalayan Mountaineering; Making Gender: The Politics and Erotics of Culture; and High Religion: A Cultural and Political History of Sherpa Buddhism. She has received numerous awards, including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and the J. I. Staley Prize.