The Ground Between: Anthropologists Engage Philosophy - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822357186 ISBN 13: 9780822357186

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2014

Synopsis

The guiding inspiration of this book is the attraction and distance that mark the relation between anthropology and philosophy. This theme is explored through encounters between individual anthropologists and particular regions of philosophy. Several of the most basic concepts of the discipline—including notions of ethics, politics, temporality, self and other, and the nature of human life—are products of a dialogue, both implicit and explicit, between anthropology and philosophy. These philosophical undercurrents in anthropology also speak to the question of what it is to experience our being in a world marked by radical difference and otherness. In The Ground Between, twelve leading anthropologists offer intimate reflections on the influence of particular philosophers on their way of seeing the world, and on what ethnography has taught them about philosophy. Ethnographies of the mundane and the everyday raise fundamental issues that the contributors grapple with in both their lives and their thinking. With directness and honesty, they relate particular philosophers to matters such as how to respond to the suffering of the other, how concepts arise in the give and take of everyday life, and how to be attuned to the world through the senses. Their essays challenge the idea that philosophy is solely the province of professional philosophers, and suggest that certain modalities of being in the world might be construed as ways of doing philosophy.

Contributors. Joćo Biehl, Steven C. Caton, Vincent Crapanzano, Veena Das, Didier Fassin, Michael M. J. Fischer, Ghassan Hage, Clara Han, Michael Jackson, Arthur Kleinman, Michael Puett, Bhrigupati Singh

About this title

Review:

"This is a perfect time to stage new encounters between philosophy and anthropology. These essays make a compelling case for doing so, exploring affinities and tensions across diverse modes of work rather than re-debating whether anthropology or philosophy should have primacy. More than that, at its best the writing awakens us again to the task of thinking. A fascinating set of explorations." Author: William E. Connolly, author of Source: The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism

From the Author:

Veena Das is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology at The Johns Hopkins University and author of Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary.

Michael D. Jackson is Distinguished Professor of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School.

Arthur Kleinman is the Esther and Sidney Rabb Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University.

Bhrigupati Singh is Assistant Professor of Anthropology Brown University and the author of Gods and Grains: Lives of Desire in Rural India.

About this edition

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0822357186
• ISBN 13: 9780822357186
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 360
• Editor: Das