Culture: How to Make It Work in a World of Hybrids - Hardcover

Michael Agar

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1538118106 ISBN 13: 9781538118108

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2019

Synopsis

Culture: How to Make It Work in a World of Hybrids offers a compelling and original way to think about promoting connections across human differences in our global society. This book provides a fresh vision for the core anthropological concept of "culture," one attuned to our contemporary global society where people receive hybrid cultural influences from many places in many ways. Providing a stimulating look at one of the most basic topics in social science, it is written without academic jargon, is rich in humor, and is replete with provocative examples, making it accessible to undergraduate students in anthropology and other social sciences as well as to scholars and non-academic readers in fields where the fostering of intercultural (or, as this book argues, inter-hybrid) communications is vital. Michael Agar explores two meanings of culture: culture as a label for the beliefs and practices of a specific group, and culture as marking the boundary between modern humans and our ancestors together with the rest of the animal kingdom (although this book acknowledges that that boundary has changed to a slippery slope). By looking back at the emergence of language and culture, through a broad range of the social and natural sciences, those human universals that make connections across human differences possible-as well as those that constrain that ability-are identified. This book concludes with a discussion of social perspective taking as a promising approach toward the development of a shared "languaculture" by any group of diverse-hybrid-humans who need to work together to accomplish whatever task is at hand.

About this title

Review

Culture: How to Make It Work in a World of Hybrids is pure Mike: great writing, fact-filled and informative, thoughtful and thought-provoking, delightfully irreverent ... I only wish Mike was here so that I could say this to his face.--H. Russell Bernard, University of Florida, Director of the Institute of Social Science Research at the University of Arizona

About the Author

Michael Agar received his undergraduate degree from Stanford and his Ph.D. in linguistic anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley. An honorary Woodrow Wilson Fellow, NIH Career Award recipient, and former Fulbright Senior Specialist, he taught at several universities and worked at a number of research institutes over his lifetime. He was named professor emeritus of linguistics and anthropology at the University of Maryland in 1996. For the last decade, until his death in 2017, he worked independently as Ethknoworks, LLC, in Northern New Mexico.

About this edition

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1538118106
• ISBN 13: 9781538118108
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 160