Suchergebnisse

"What is it that makes a person blush when about to speak in front of a crowd? What makes children immerse themselves in digging in dirt for hours? And how can an entire room suddenly feel restless and warm at the imminence of a yet unknown occurrence? The anthropology of intensity studies the manner in which humans encounter the continuous and gradable features of phenomena in social life and attempt to evaluate or convert them into discrete dimensions. Focusing on the last twenty years of life in a Mayan village in the cloud forests of Guatemala, this book provides a natural history of intensity in exceedingly tense times, through a careful analysis of ethnographic and linguistic evidence. It uses intensity as a way to reframe the discipline of Anthropology in the age of the Anthropocene, and rethinks classic work in the formal linguistic tradition from a culture-specific and context-sensitive stance"--

"In this slim volume, anthropologist Paul Kockelman showcases, reworks, and extends some of the core resources anthropologists and like-minded scholars have developed for thinking about value. Rather than theorize value head on, he offers a careful interpretation of a Mayan text about an offering to a god that lamentably goes awry. Kockelman analyzes the text, its telling, and the conditions of possibility for its original publication. Starting with a relatively simple definition of value--that which stands at the intersection of what signs stand for and what agents strive for--he unfolds, explicates, and experiments with its variations. Contrary to widespread claims in and around the discipline, Kockelman argues that it is not so-called relations, but rather relations between relations, that are at the heart of the interpretive endeavor."--Page 4 of printed paper wrapper

In The Chicken and the Quetzal Paul Kockelman tells the cultural history of a village in Guatemala's highland cloud forests and its relation to conservation movements and eco-tourism to create a theoretical framework for understanding the entanglement of values as they are created, interpreted, and reconfigured

"Based on fieldwork carried out in a Mayan village in Guatemala, this book examines local understanding of mind through the lens of language and culture. It focuses on a variety of grammatical structures and discursive practices through which mental states are encoded and social relations are expressed: inalienable possessions, such as body parts and kinship terms; interjections, such as, 'ouch' and 'yuck'; complement-taking predicates, such as 'believe' and 'desire'; and grammatical categories, such as mood, status, and evidentiality. More generally, it develops a theoretical framework through which both community-specific and human-general features of mind may be contrasted and compared. It will be of interest to researchers and students working within the disciplines of anthropology, linguistics, psychology, and philosophy."--Jacket

Rather than asking how two use‐values can have the same exchange‐value, this article asks how two distinct entities can have the same use‐value. Among the Q'eqchi'‐Maya, substitution (eeqaj) refers to activities as disparate as house‐building, civil‐religious elections, vengeance, loans, illness cures, adultery, and namesakes. Such practices involve the exchange of one entity for another entity, insofar as these entities have shared properties, and insofar as they hold a role in a necessary position. Substitution is interpreted as social processes whereby substances get utilized, unitized, and numericalized, and this local articulation of use‐value is theorized in terms of labour‐power and personhood.

'Distributed Agency' presents an interdisciplinary inroad into the latest thinking about the distributed nature of agency: what it's like, what are its conditions of possibility, and what are its consequences. The chapters are written by a wide range of scholars, from anthropology, biology, cognitive science, linguistics, philosophy, psychology, geography, law, economics, and sociology