Practicing Ethnography in a Globalizing World

An Anthropological Odyssey

By (author) June C. Nash

Not available to order

Publication date:

28 December 2006

Length of book:

304 pages

Publisher

AltaMira Press

ISBN-13: 9780759113992

In this book distinguished anthropologist June Nash demonstrates how ethnography can illuminate a wide array of global problems. She describes encounters with an urban U.S. community undergoing de-industrialization, with Mandalay rice cultivators accommodating to post-World War II independence through animistic pratices, with Mayans mobilizing for autonomy, and with Andean peasants and miners confronting the International Monetary Fund. Havin worked in a great variety of cultural settings around the world, Nash challenges us to expand our anthropological horizons and to think about local problems in a global manner.

4 Part I: Paradigms and Postures 5 When Isms Become Wasms: Paradigms Lost and Regained 6 The Notion of the Limited Good and the Specter of the Unlimited Good 7 Women in Between: Globalization and the New Enlightenment 8 Part II: Reflections in the Ethnographic Mirror 9 Multiple Perspectives on Burmese Buddhism and Nat Worship 10 Part III: Engagement in Social Movements Today 11 Social Movements in Global Circuits 12 Part IV: The Hobbesian World of Terror and Violence 13 The Export of Militarization: Counterinsurgency Warfare in the Periphery 14 At Home with the Military-Industrial Complex 15 The Limits of Naivete in Anthropological Fieldwork: The 1954 U.S. Instigated Coup in Guatemala 15 Interpreting Social Movements: Bolivian Resistance to Economic Conditions Imposed by the IMF

Practicing Anthropology in a Globalized Worldoffers students of anthropology and globalization a unique tour of the intellectual and political development of one of the most inspiring contemporary cultural anthropologists while also providing a world tour of social and cultural movements that have staked out interconnected terrains of resistance to U.S. Empire-building, global capital, and political and cultural forces of homogenization. Through in-depth essays that bring to life the contradictory politics of cultural and political economy in a transnational world, June Nash provides her readers with an insightful comparative collection that adds depth and breadth to the ethnography of globalization through time...