Suchergebnisse

Existing histories of the concept of identity are too narrowly conceived and neglect the methods of lexical semantics and Begriffsgeschichte. Rather than focusing on Erik Erikson, this paper analyzes occurrences of 'identity' and equivalent expressions in over 700 texts published in English, German, and French since 1700. In the first phase of the study, all occurrences of 'identity' in the sample, including all senses in which the word is used, are analyzed to determine when semantic innovations occurred and how they spread. The focus in the second phase is on other expressions (e.g., 'character') that correspond roughly to selected senses of 'identity', insofar as they co-occur in texts with the same adjectives and verbs and fulfill a comparable semantic function. Finally, it can be shown that these other expressions were replaced by 'identity' in the late twentieth century. Three key senses of the word emerge from the fundamental meaning of 'sameness': personal identity, since about 1700; collective identity (of a category or group of people), since the early 1800s; and social-psychological identity (of the individual), since the 1940s. Beginning in about 1840, Americanist ethnologists played a key role in formulating the concept of collective identity.

Blood and Nation: The European Aesthetics of Race. Uli Linke. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. 332 pp.German Bodies: Race and Representation after Hitler. Uli Linke. New York: Routledge, 1999. 274 pp.

In the shadow of the Historikerstreit over the meaning of the Nazi era, West German historians are conducting a less highly publicized but similarly politicized debate about the role of ethnography in social history. The following analysis of local club life, based on ethnographic and archival research in Boppard on the Rhine, is offered as a contribution to and comment on this debate from the viewpoint of interpretive cultural anthropology. I contend that "local knowledge"—to employ the phrase by Clifford Geertz—is indispensable to broader historical syntheses, though for different reasons than have been suggested by either critics or advocates of cultural anthropology among West German historians.

Dealing with the dynamics of identification and conflict, this book uses theoretical orientations ranging from political ecology to rational choice theory, interpretive approaches, Marxism and multiscalar analysis. Case studies set in Africa, Europe and Central Asia are grouped in three sections devoted to pastoralism, identity and migration. What connects all of these anthropological explorations is a close focus on processes of identification and conflict at the level of particular actors in relation to the behaviour of large aggregates of people and to systemic conditions

In what ways did Europeans interact with the diversity of people they encountered on other continents in the context of colonial expansion, and with the peasant or ethnic 'Other' at home? How did anthropologists and ethnologists make sense of the mosaic of people and societies during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when their disciplines were progressively being established in academia? By assessing the diversity of European intellectual histories within sociocultural anthropology, this volume aims to sketch its intellectual and institutional portrait. It will be a useful reading for the students of anthropology, ethnology, history and philosophy of science, research and science policy makers

As an important contribution to debates on property theory and the role of law in creating, disputing, defining and refining property rights, this volume provides new theoretical material on property systems, as well as new empirically grounded case studies of the dynamics of property transformations. The property claimants discussed in these papers represent a diverse range of actors, including post-socialist states and their citizens, those receiving restitution for past property losses in Africa, Southeast Asia and in eastern Europe, collectives, corporate and individual actors. The volume thus provides a comprehensive anthropological analysis not only of property structures and ideologies, but also of property (and its politics) in action