Theory Groups and the Study of Language in North America PDF Download

Author: Paul A. Erickson
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442606614
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 574

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Book Description
In the latest edition of their popular overview text, Erickson and Murphy continue to provide a comprehensive, affordable, and accessible introduction to anthropological theory from antiquity to the present. A new section on twenty-first-century anthropological theory has been added, with more coverage given to postcolonialism, non-Western anthropology, and public anthropology. The book has also been redesigned to be more visually and pedagogically engaging. Used on its own, or paired with the companion volume Readings for a History of Anthropological Theory, Fourth Edition, this reader offers a flexible and highly useful resource for the undergraduate anthropology classroom. For additional resources, visit the "Teaching Theory" page at www.utpteachingculture.com.

Author: Stephen O. Murray
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027245568
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 615

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Book Description
Theory Groups in the Study of Language in North America provides a detailed social history of traditions and "revolutionary" challenges to traditions within North American linguistics, especially within 20th-century anthropological linguistics. After showing substantial differences between Bloomfield's and neo-Bloomfieldian theorizing, Murray shows that early transformational-generative work on syntax grew out of neo-Bloomfieldian structuralism, and was promoted by neo-Bloomfieldian gatekeepers, in particular longtime Language editor Bernard Bloch. The central case studies of the book contrast the (increasingly) "revolutionary rhetoric" of transformational-generative grammarians with rhetorics of continuity emitted by two linguistic anthropology groupings that began simultaneously with TGG in the late-1950s, the ethnography of communication and ethnoscience.

Author: E. L. Cerroni-Long
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN: 089789684X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Cultural anthropology is at a crossroads. Under the impact of postmodernist critiques, serious doubts have been raised about the scientific validity—indeed, the very viability—of the ethnographic enterprise. These doubts have been voiced most loudly in North America, where the field nonetheless still enjoys the broadest academic base, and attracts the largest number of practitioners. Over the last decade, a set of critical issues has increasingly engaged cultural anthropologists in heated debate. The first part of this volume includes a full-fledged discussion of these issues, offering suggestions for their constructive resolution. In spite of the disciplinary self-doubts engendered by postmodernism, the theory-building process in anthropology has not been abandoned. The second part of the volume presents a range of original theoretical statements by which American and Canadian anthropologists set the premises for disciplinary trends likely to shape anthropological practice for years to come. If, as it is prognosticated, the 21st century will see an explosion of interest in cultural anthropology, the models and ideas presented in this volume define the parameters of disciplinary expansion. North American cultural anthropology enters its second century on a wave of theoretical innovation and pragmatic translatability that may finally resolve the disciplinary contrast between analysis and application.

Author: Mark Moberg
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415699991
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
This text offers a fresh look at the history of anthropological theory. Anthropological ideas about human diversity have always been rooted in the socio-political conditions in which they arose, and exploring them in context helps students understand how and why they evolved, and how theory relates to life and society.

Author: Alan Barnard
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316101932
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
Anthropology is a discipline very conscious of its history, and Alan Barnard has written a clear, balanced and judicious textbook that surveys the historical contexts of the great debates and traces the genealogies of theories and schools of thought. It also considers the problems involved in assessing these theories. The book covers the precursors of anthropology; evolutionism in all its guises; diffusionism and culture area theories, functionalism and structural-functionalism; action-centred theories; processual and Marxist perspectives; the many faces of relativism, structuralism and post-structuralism; and recent interpretive and postmodernist viewpoints.

Author: Paolo Heywood
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1785337874
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
Queer activism and anthropology are both fundamentally concerned with the concept of difference. Yet they are so in fundamentally different ways. The Italian queer activists in this book value difference as something that must be produced, in opposition to the identity politics they find around them. Conversely, anthropologists find difference in the world around them, and seek to produce an identity between anthropological theory and the ethnographic material it elucidates. This book describes problems faced by an activist "politics of difference," and issues concerning the identity of anthropological reflection itself—connecting two conceptions of difference whilst simultaneously holding them apart.

Author: Dr Giuliana B Prato
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1409461181
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
With half of humanity already living in towns and cities and that proportion expected to increase in the coming decades, society - both Western and non-Western - is fast becoming urban and even mega-urban. As such, research in urban settings is evidently timely and of great importance. Anthropology in the City brings together a leading team of anthropologists to address the complex methodological and theoretical challenges posed by field-research in urban settings, clearly identifying the significance of the anthropological paradigm in urban research and its centrality both to mainstream academic debates and to society more broadly. With essays from experts on wide-ranging ethnographic research from fields as diverse as China, Europe, India, Latin and North America and South East Asia, this book demonstrates the contribution that empirically-based anthropological analysis can make to our understanding of our increasingly urban world.

Author: Jean Comaroff
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317250621
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
As nation-states in the Northern Hemisphere experience economic crisis, political corruption and racial tension, it seems as though they might be 'evolving' into the kind of societies normally associated with the 'Global South'. Anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff draw on their long experience of living in Africa to address a range of familiar themes - democracy, national borders, labour and capital and multiculturalism. They consider how we might understand these issues by using theory developed in the Global South. Challenging our ideas about 'developed' and 'developing' nations, Theory from the South provides new insights into key problems of our time.

Author: Regna Darnell
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496228731
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 497

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Book Description
In The History of Anthropology Regna Darnell offers a critical reexamination of the Americanist tradition centered around the figure of Franz Boas and the professionalization of anthropology as an academic discipline in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Focused on researchers often known as the Boasians, The History of Anthropology reveals the theoretical schools, institutions, and social networks of scholars and fieldworkers primarily interested in the anthropology and ethnography of North American Indigenous peoples. Darnell's fifty-year career entails seminal writings in the history of anthropology's four fields: cultural anthropology, ethnography, linguistics, and physical anthropology. Leading researchers, theorists, and fieldwork subjects include Edward Sapir, Daniel Brinton, Mary Haas, Franz Boas, Leonard Bloomfield, Benjamin Lee Whorf, Stanley Newman, and A. Irving Hallowell, as well as the professionalization of anthropology, the development of American folklore scholarship, theories of Indigenous languages, Southwest ethnographic research, Indigenous ceremonialism, text traditions, and anthropology's forays into contemporary public intellectual debates. The History of Anthropology is the essential volume for scholars, undergraduates, and graduate students to enter into the history of the Americanist tradition and its legacies, alternating historicism and presentism to contextualize anthropology's historical and contemporary relevance and legacies.

Author: David Kaplan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351531603
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1538

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Book Description
Anthropological theory has been much discussed in recent years, yet the crucial questions still remain--how can it be defined, how is it developed, how is it to be applied, and how can one confirm it? The editors of Anthropological Theory answer these questions by presenting essays relating to various aspects of anthropological theory. Their selections from widely scattered and often difficult-to-obtain sources present a comprehensive set of writings that describe the current position and issues involved in theory.The development of field work in anthropology generated a tremendous emphasis on empirical data and research. The plethora of information awaiting collection and the enthusiasm with which the field embraced it so immersed anthropologists that they were unable to relate this new information to the field as a whole. Manners and Kaplan believe that this lack of generalization had a profoundly negative effect upon the discipline. Therefore, they look closely into the relationship between field work and theory in an opening essay and go on to present material that demonstrates the value and the necessity of theory in anthropology. Essays by anthropologists and other social scientists deal with ""explanation,"" evolution, ecology, ideology, structuralism, and a number of other issues reflecting throughout the editors' conviction that anthropology is a science, the goal of which is to produce generalizations about sociocultural phenomena.The book provides necessary perspective for examining and evaluating the crucial intellectual concerns of modern anthropology and will therefore be important for the work of every anthropologist.