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Social and Cultural Anthropology: the Key Concepts is an easy to use A-Z guide to the central concepts that students are likely to encounter in this field.Now fully updated, this third edition includes entries on:Material CultureEnvironmentHuman RightsHybridityAlterityCosmopolitanismEthnographyApplied AnthropologyGenderCyberneticsWith full cross-referencing and revised further reading to point students towards the latest writings in Social and Cultural Anthropology, this is a superb reference resource for anyone studying or teaching in this area

Introduction -- Intent and structure -- What are the meanings of cosmopolitanism, past, present and future? -- Is Anyone a feature of everyday social life and exchange, a real presence? -- How is the individuality of Anyone to be accommodated by an objective science and acknowledged by a democratic society? Afterword: Jewish cosmopolitanism.

What is it to be human? What are our specifically human attributes, our capacities and liabilities? Such questions gave birth to anthropology as an Enlightenment science. This book argues that it is again appropriate to bring "the human" to the fore, to reclaim the singularity of the word as central to the anthropological endeavor, not on the basis of the substance of a human nature - "To be human is to act like this and react like this, to feel this and want this" - but in terms of species-wide capacities: capabilities for action and imagination, liabilities for suffering and cruelty. The con

pt. 1. Introduction -- pt. 2. Nationalism, constestation and the performance of tradition -- pt. 3. Strategies of modernity : heritage, leisure, dissociation -- pt. 4. The appropriation of discourse -- pt. 5. Methodologies and ethnomethodologies -- pt. 6. The making (and unmaking) of community : ethnicity, religiosity, locality -- pt. 7. Epilogue.

Transcendent Individual argues for a reappraisal of the place of the individual in anthropolgical theory and ethnographic writing. A wealth of voices illustrate and inform the text, showing ways in which individuals creatively 'write', narrate and animate cultural and social life. This is an anthropology imbued with a liberal morality which is willing to make value judgements over and against culture in favour of individuality.Rapport draws widely on ethnographic and theoretic materials bringing into the debate a range of voices, among them Nietzsche, Wilde, George Steiner, Richard Rorty, John

AbstractFor Emmanuel Levinas, to study human nature is to 'liberate human beings from the categories adapted uniquely for things'. This, paradoxically, is to occupy a standpoint where the human 'no longer offers itself to our powers': to go beyond the category‐thinking of cultural construction and to put what one consciously supposes – Self, Society, Culture, Nature – into question. The 'liberation' of human nature is an unconscious process that does not have the structure of intentionality but rather the character of inspiration. Examining the possible accommodation of a Levinasian philosophy within anthropology, this article pays particular attention to the human 'density of being' that, for Levinas, accompanies any individual life. It is impossible for Ego to know the Other, Levinas insists – subjectivity is 'secret', identity is 'invisible' – but otherness can nevertheless 'inspire' recognition and respect through its physical proximity. The article argues that a 'cosmopolitan' anthropology devoted to discerning the nature of a universal humanity might practise an artistry sufficient to identify the outline of that invisibility: the silhouette even if not the substance. Here are the traces of otherness that are evident, willy‐nilly, when the densities of being of individual human lives impact upon one another in social milieux.

Thomas Hylland Eriksen argues in his incisive and fair-minded insight to "what is European about European anthropology" by advocating its cosmopolitanism. Anthropology that is cosmopolitan might go beyond hierarchies of language, country and institution, he urges; might provide the friction between different traditions that sparks a global intellectual exchange; and might bring global insights to bear, comparatively, on local issues of political economy. In this way Eriksen makes interesting links between "European anthropology" as an idea or concept and "European anthropology" as a set of ethnographic studies: I read him as saying that by virtue of the empirical facts that anthropological research in European settings has unearthed, we can now imagine a way of practising anthropology that is "cosmopolitan" – as amplified above. I would invest equally in a cosmopolitan anthropology, and would like to explore further what in the nature of cosmopolitanism as a concept enables it to have its intellectual and its moral power. ; Publisher PDF ; Peer reviewed

I am grateful (once more) for the attention Don Gardner has paid to my work, in particular to arguments pertaining to individuality and its relation to the aspirations of the social sciences. Let me begin with overlaps he sees between us: (a) prevailing images of what anthropology needed to be, historically (in order to be an adequate science) have led to too great an emphasis on developing taxonomies of cultural variation, along with the generalising and essentialising descriptions this entailed; (b) some of social science's taken-for-granted vocabulary (such as 'role' or 'status') hampers our understanding of the nature of human agents and the springs of that agency; (c) questions of will and freedom, choice and moral responsibility are subtle and important; engaging with these is a necessary step for strengthening the social sciences, which cannot escape their philosophical roots. Notwithstanding, Gardner would take me to task for my understanding of causation, for not adopting a reasonable view on the hoary issue of 'free will' and for not taking account of post-genecentric accounts of human-evolutionary process.