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In 2016, Edith Turner passed away. She left behind an intellectual
legacy that, together with her husband, Victor Turner, transformed
modern anthropology. This edited collection focuses on Victor and
Edith Turner's significant theoretical contributions, including
their work on communitas, liminality, pilgrimage, friendship,
fieldwork, self-reflection, affective culture, religion, spirits,
and faith. This collection includes retrospectives on the personal
lives of Edith and Victor, as provided by their son; a close look
at Edith's work on last rites, for which she studied and
contemplated her own demise; an examination of Edith's faith and
belief system in light of her personal research interests; and
contemporary applications of the Turners's theories in relation to
modern social processes. Contributors touch on a variety of topics,
including current political upheavals and inversions, the values of
friendship and bonding, the importance of music as affective
culture, jazz as a pilgrimage, and deeper theoretical issues
surrounding the concept of liminality. This work illustrates the
Turners' enduring theoretical and affective contributions and
emphasizes the great importance they placed on studying and
understanding what it means to be human. We continue to learn from
their example.
This important new work by Roy Wagner is about the autonomy of
symbols and their role in creating culture. Its argument,
anticipated in the author's previous book, "The Invention of
Culture," is at once symbolic, philosophical, and evolutionary:
meaning is a form of perception to which human beings are
physically and mentally adapted. Using examples from his many years
of research among the Daribi people of New Guinea as well as from
Western culture, Wagner approaches the question of the creation of
meaning by examining the nonreferential qualities of symbols--such
as their aesthetic and formal properties--that enable symbols to
stand for themselves.
In anthropology, a field that is known for its critical edge and
intellectual agility, few books manage to maintain both historical
value and contemporary relevance. Roy Wagner's The Invention of
Culture, originally published in 1981, is one. Wagner breaks new
ground by arguing that culture arises from the dialectic between
the individual and the social world. Rooting his analysis in the
relationship between invention and convention, innovation and
control, meaning and context, he builds a theory that insists on
the importance of creativity, placing people-as-inventors at the
heart of the process that creates culture. In an elegant twist, he
shows that those very processes ultimately produce the discipline
of anthropology itself. This new edition, with a foreword by Tim
Ingold, puts the book in context of current debates and makes an
unimpeachable case for its status as a classic in the field.
This book is the first to collect the most influential essays and
lectures of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. Published in a wide variety
of venues, and often difficult to find, the pieces are brought
together here for the first time in a one major volume, which
includes his momentous 1998 Cambridge University Lectures,
"Cosmological Perspectivism in Amazonia and Elsewhere." Rounded out
with new English translations of a number of previously unpublished
works, the resulting book is a wide-ranging portrait of one of the
towering figures of contemporary thought - philosopher,
anthropologist, ethnographer, ethnologist, and more. With a new
afterword by Roy Wagner elucidating Viveiros de Castro's work,
influence, and legacy, The Relative Native will be required
reading, further cementing Viveiros de Castro's position at the
center of contemporary anthropological inquiry.
In line with the emerging field of philosophy of mathematical
practice, this book pushes the philosophy of mathematics away from
questions about the reality and truth of mathematical entities and
statements and toward a focus on what mathematicians actually
do--and how that evolves and changes over time. How do new
mathematical entities come to be? What internal, natural,
cognitive, and social constraints shape mathematical cultures? How
do mathematical signs form and reform their meanings? How can we
model the cognitive processes at play in mathematical evolution?
And how does mathematics tie together ideas, reality, and
applications? Roi Wagner uniquely combines philosophical,
historical, and cognitive studies to paint a fully rounded image of
mathematics not as an absolute ideal but as a human endeavor that
takes shape in specific social and institutional contexts. The book
builds on ancient, medieval, and modern case studies to confront
philosophical reconstructions and cutting-edge cognitive theories.
It focuses on the contingent semiotic and interpretive dimensions
of mathematical practice, rather than on mathematics' claim to
universal or fundamental truths, in order to explore not only what
mathematics is, but also what it could be. Along the way, Wagner
challenges conventional views that mathematical signs represent
fixed, ideal entities; that mathematical cognition is a rigid
transfer of inferences between formal domains; and that
mathematics' exceptional consensus is due to the subject's
underlying reality. The result is a revisionist account of
mathematical philosophy that will interest mathematicians,
philosophers, and historians of science alike.
Professor Wagner's study of Barok social and ritual life pays
special attention to the men's-house feasting cycle. The kaba. or
culminating death feast" of that cycle, is invoked by the word
"asiwinarong," which symbolizes the leadership succession on which
Barok claims to ethical integrity and precedence rest Originally
published in 1986. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest
print-on-demand technology to again make available previously
out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton
University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of
these important books while presenting them in durable paperback
and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is
to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in
the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press
since its founding in 1905.
Professor Wagner's study of Barok social and ritual life pays
special attention to the men's-house feasting cycle. The kaba. or
culminating death feast" of that cycle, is invoked by the word
"asiwinarong," which symbolizes the leadership succession on which
Barok claims to ethical integrity and precedence rest
Originally published in 1986.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand
technology to again make available previously out-of-print books
from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press.
These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these
important books while presenting them in durable paperback
editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly
increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the
thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since
its founding in 1905.
The Culture of Invention in the Americas takes the theoretical
contribution of one of anthropology's most radical thinkers, Roy
Wagner, as a basis for conceptual improvisation. It uses Wagner's
most synthetic and complex insights - developed in Melanesia and
captured in the title of his most famous book, The Invention of
Culture - as a springboard for an exploration of other
anthropological and societal imaginaries. What do the inherent
reflexivity, recursiveness and limits of all and any peoples'
anthropologies render for us to write and think about, and live
within? Who is doing anthropology about whom? Which are the best
ways to convey our partial grasp of these conundrums: theory,
poetry, jokes? No claim is made to resolve what should not be seen
as a problem. Instead, inspired by Roy Wagner's study and use of
metaphor, this book explores analogical variations of these
riddles. The chapters bring together ethnographic regions rarely
investigated together: indigenous peoples of Mexico and Lowland
South America; and Afro-American peoples of Brazil and Cuba. The
`partial connections' highlighted by the authors' analytic
conjunctions - Ifa divination practices and Yanomami shamanism,
Ki~sedje (Amazonia) and Huichol (Mexico) anthropology of Whites,
and Meso-American and Afro-American practices of sacrifice - show
the inspirational potential of such rapprochements. As the first
book to acknowledge the full range of Wagner's anthropological
contributions, and an initial joint exploration of Native American
and Afro-American ethnographies, this experimental work honours
Wagner's vision of a multiplicity of peoples' anthropologies
through and of each other. It concludes with a remarkable dialogue
created by Roy Wagner's responses to each author's work. We don't
have to imagine what Wagner might have made of this inspired
collection: his concluding commentary on each of these
extraordinary chapters is in effect a collection in itself. The
sparks they together ignite make this an editorial and publishing
triumph. Professor Dame Marilyn Strathern, University of Cambridge
If Roy Wagner famously `invented' culture, the contributors to this
volume `counter-invent' Wagner, at once engaging comprehensively
and didactically with his thought, and exteriorizing it onto novel
conceptual and geographical territories. A book from `tomorrow's
yesterday' (Wagner), The Culture of Invention in the Americas
anticipates for us the anthropology to come - playful,
experimental, and deeply ethnographic. Alberto Corsin Jimenez,
Spanish National Research Council
Coyote Anthropology shatters anthropology’s vaunted theories of
practice and offers a radical and comprehensive alternative for the
new century. Building on his seminal contributions to symbolic
analysis, Roy Wagner repositions anthropology at the heart of the
creation of meaning—in terms of what anthropology perceives, how
it goes about representing its subjects, and how it understands and
legitimizes itself. Of particular concern is that meaning is
comprehended and created through a complex and continually
unfolding process predicated on what is not there—the unspoken,
the unheard, the unknown—as much as on what is there. Such
powerful absences, described by Wagner as “anti-twins,” are
crucial for the invention of cultures and any discipline that
proposes to study them. As revealed through conversations
between Wagner and Coyote, Wagner's anti-twin, a coyote
anthropology should be as much concerned with absence as with
presence if it is to depict accurately the dynamic and creative
worlds of others. Furthermore, Wagner suggests that anthropologists
not only be aware of what informs and conditions their discipline
but also understand the range of necessary exclusions that permit
anthropology to do what it does. Sly and enticing, probing and
startling, Coyote Anthropology beckons anthropologists to draw
closer to the center of all things, known and unknown.
In contrast to western notions of the soul as the essence or most
native part of a human being, the Tzeltal-speaking Indians of
Chiapas, Mexico, regard the soul first and foremost as an Other.
Made up of beings that personify the antithesis of their native
selves-animals such as hummingbirds or jaguars, atmospheric
phenomena like lightning bolts or rainbows, or spirits of European
appearance such as Catholic priests or evangelical
musicians-Tzeltal souls represent the maximum expression of that
which is alien. And because their souls enfold that which is
outside and Other, the Tzeltal contain within themselves the
history of their relationship with Europeans from the beginning of
the Spanish conquest to the present time. Thus, to understand the
Indian self opens a window into the Tzeltal conception of culture
and community, their notions of identity and alterity, and their
interpretation of interethnic relations and types of historical
memory. In this pathfinding ethnography, which was originally
published in Spanish in 1996 as Ch'ulel: una etnografia de las
almas tzeltales and is now extensively rewritten and amplified in
English, Pedro Pitarch offers a new understanding of indigenous
concepts of the soul, personhood, and historical memory in highland
Chiapas. Exploring numerous aspects of indigenous culture and
history-medicine and shamanism, geography and cosmology, and
politics and kinship among them-he engages in a radical rethinking
of classic issues in Mesoamerican anthropology, such as ethnicity
and alterity, community and tradition, and change and permanence.
"Roy Wagner is a one-of-a-kind anthropologist whose books provide
intense intellectual stimulation. His way of connecting the world
of New Guinea to the world of anthropology is unique and, well,
mind-blowing. . . . He writes books that you actually want to and
will read more than once."--Steven Feld, author of "Sound and
Sentiment"
"Wagner asks, daringly, what it would be like to imagine one of
the most significant of human activities, the activity of
description or representation, as a self-scaling phenomenon. . . .
One begins to glimpse a genuine 'alternative
anthropology.'"--Marilyn Strathern, author of "The Gender of the
Gift"
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