Anthropological Conversations

Talking Culture across Disciplines

By (author) Caroline B. Brettell Southern Methodist University

Publication date:

23 October 2014

Length of book:

232 pages

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Dimensions:

234x161mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9780759123823

Cultural anthropologists can be an intellectually adventurous crowd: open—even eager—to building bridges across disciplines in the name of understanding human behavior and the human experience more broadly. In this first-of-its-kind book, Caroline Brettell explores the cross-disciplinary conversations that have engaged cultural anthropologists both past and present.

Brettell highlights a handful of conversations between the discipline of anthropology on the one hand and history, geography, literature, biology, psychology and demography on the other. She also pinpoints how these exchanges address three enduring issues of anthropological concern: the temporal and the spatial dimensions of human experience; the scientific and the humanistic dimensions of the anthropological enterprise; and the individual and the group/population as units of analysis in research. Anthropological Conversations offers detailed accounts of particular ethnographic methodologies and findings (and the theoretical trends informing them) as a means of grasping the big-picture issues. Brettell clearly shows that, by engaging with other fields, cultural anthropologists have been able to think more deeply about what they mean by culture; through this book, she invites readers to continue the conversation.

Introduction: Anthropological Conversations across Disciplines
1—The Presence of the Past in Culture: Anthropology and History
Fieldwork in the Archives: Tackling the Methodology of History
The Presence of the Past: Anthropological History
The Presence of the Past: The Anthropology of History
Conclusion: The Presence of the Past: An Engaged Historical Anthropology
2—Space, Place, and Culture: Anthropology and Geography
Anthropology and Geography: Early Conversations
The Anthropology of Space and Place
Gendered Space and Feminist Geography
The New Anthropology of Landscape and the Environment
Conclusion: From the Etics of Region to the Emics of Space and Place
3—Writing Culture: Anthropology and Literature
Ethnography as Genre: Experimenting with Forms of Writing
The Literary Observer: Novelists with an Anthropological Eye
Conclusion: The Craft of Writing Anthropology
4—The Science in Culture: Anthropology and Biology
Biology and Culture in the Twentieth Century: From Boas to Sociobiology to Bioculturalism
New Directions in the Integration of Biology and Culture
Conclusion
5—The Individual and Culture: Anthropology and Psychology
Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and Neo-Freudianism: Seeds of Interaction, Seeds of Cross-Disciplinarity
Stress, Trauma, and Meaning-Centered Psychology Anthropology
Conclusion: A Cross-Cultural Psychology
6—Culture and Population: Anthropology and Demography
Bridging the Divide: Methods, Concepts, and Epistemology
The Problems Explored by Anthropological Demographers
Conclusion: Toward Convergence and Cross-Disciplinarity?
Notes
References
Index
About the Author

Brettell has made an extremely valuable contribution to the literatures on thinking anthropologically and across disciplines. Six chapters devoted to 'conversations' between anthropology and history, geography, literature, biology, psychology, and demographics give readers a survey of the various topics and approaches that have crossed those lines and key scholars involved in such projects. The writing is clear and accessible, suitable for all audiences, and the content includes both historical and contemporary examples. . . .The book will be useful for anthropological readers in a variety of contexts (e.g., methods, disciplinary history, general philosophy of the field) and also very useful for non-anthropologists to get a sense of and appreciation for ways that anthropological approaches and works might be relevant to their own fields and for encouraging further conversations across disciplinary lines. Summing Up: Highly recommended. For all general and academic audiences.