Publication
Against Relationalism and the Tyranny of Context: Anthropological Ideas and the Volume of Being
Présentation
Catherine Beaugrand
This book deals with anthropological ideas, which it confronts with what seems to be a difficulty in anthropology: the human being, each singular human being, taken in themselves. Following this line of reading, the authors take us from Benedict to Radcliffe-Brown or Strathern. They focus particularly on contemporary theories of ecological, psychological, phenomenological and existential anthropology. It is this last direction that the authors wish to emphasise, devoting a final chapter to what would be an anthropology of the human being. Radically critical of the relationalism and the tyranny of context in anthropological theories, this book combining text and drawings is a necessary document for researchers and students, as well as for all those interested in understanding the singularity of each being. Perhaps, after this book, readers will no longer consider anthropology in the same manner…
Sommaire
Foreword
Chapter 1 – Understanding culturesCulturalismAnthropology and psychology
‘Local theories’: a reversal?
Chapter 2 – The tenacity of social relationsSociological themes
The subjectivity argument and portraits
What about ethnography?
Chapter 3 – Being, existents, existenceDid you say “existent and existence”?
Anthropology and phenomenology
Anthropology and cognition
Life, lifeworlds and the individual
Chapter 4 – But what is an individual singularity?From institutional anthropology to absolute anthropology
Extraction, volume of being and ligatures
Points of conclusion
References
Index