Metaphysical Community: The Interplay of the Senses and the Intellect - Softcover

Urban, Greg

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0292785291 ISBN 13: 9780292785298

Publisher: University of Texas Press, 1996

Synopsis

Winner, Senior Book Prize, American Ethnological Society

Starting with the post-structuralist idea that truth systems are lodged in discourse, and that discourse varies from society to society, Greg Urban seeks to discover the nature and extent of that variation. His journey to an Amerindian society in which dreams are more prominent than everyday aspects of the sensible world leads him to radically reformulate one of the main problematics of Western thought: the relationship between our sensations of the world and the understandings we form of them.

Metaphysical Community proposes that this dichotomy comes from the interplay between two sides of discourse-its intelligible side as a carrier of meanings, and its sensible side as thing-in-the-world that must be replicated. This insight leads to the heart of the book-the exploration of the uneasy tension that binds experience and understanding, phenomena and noumena.

Urban challenges basic assumptions that underlie social and cultural anthropology and much of the social sciences and humanities. His provocative insights will be of interest to all those concerned with anthropology, cultural studies, literary criticism, the sociology and politics of culture, and philosophy.

About this title

About the Author

Greg Urban is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and author of A Discourse-Centered Approach to Culture: Native South American Myths and Rituals.

From the Back Cover

The Interplay of the senses and the intellect. 'The only ethnographic work on a small scale society by a linguistic anthropologist which is accessible to scholars in other disciplines. . . A major and distinct voice on how language and culture work together.'

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0292785291
• ISBN 13: 9780292785298
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304