Based on the question about the anthropological in the thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein, this paper orders the forms of anthropological and ethnological readings that have been done to the philosophy that he developed after his return to Cambridge in 1929; drawing their limits and possibilities from the form of wittgensteinian writings.Given that, since the end of the 20th century until today the studies on the matter have increased, we will elucidate the differences that these readings have when presentinga (...) “wittgensteinian anthropology”; especially, from the epistemic differences between a descriptive reading and a theoretical reading. (shrink)

Ethics of Description: The Anthropological Dispositif and French Modern Travel Writing follows the development of a minor tradition in French literature where metropolitan authors traveling abroad demonstrate their awareness of the ethical conundrums of representing world peoples. During the colonial-modern era, currents of anthropological thought and representational practice are identifiable throughout society, and across literature, the arts, and the sciences. Collectively, they can be theorized as belonging to a dispositif, the anthropological dispositif. The modernization of anthropology (...) serves as an ambivalent interlocutor for the realizations of the writers studied in this book about the difficulties of describing cultural realities that lie largely outside their ken. Anthropology motivates new literary representational strategies that are, alternatively, in keeping with scientific mandates or operate against them. Forty images are analyzed alongside literary works. A postcolonial chapter shows how the ethical awareness of the colonial-modern authors studied have impacted minority self-representation in contemporary France. (shrink)

This paper explores Dilthey's "descriptive psychology "and its significance for the anthropology of consciousness. To do justice to the complexities of Dilthey's project a significant portion of the paper is devoted to an exposition of the basic tenets of his"descriptive psychology." Most notably, his views on"experience,""aconsciousness,""introspection,"and"objectified mind"are discussed before turning to examine his concept of the"acquired psychicnexus." After outlining these basic tenets the paper turns to explore how Dilthey's "descriptive psychology"can serve to shed light on current anthropological research on (...) the experience of pain. Finally, the paper concludes with a discussion of the contemporary relevance of Dilthey's project as it explores how his ideas may further inform current theoretical perspectives in anthropology about the relationship between consciousness, culture, and experience. (shrink)

This article argues that Ursula Le Guin’s science fiction is a form of ‘speculative anthropology’ that reconciles thick description and historicity. Like Clifford Geertz’s ethnographic writings, Le Guin’s science fiction utilises thick description to place the reader within unfamiliar social worlds rendered with extraordinary phenomenological fluency. At the same time, by incorporating social antagonisms, cultural contestation, and historical contingency, Le Guin never allows thick description to neutralise historicity. Rather, by combining the two and exploring their interplay, Le (...) Guin establishes a critical relation between her imagined worlds and the reader’s own historical moment. This enables her to both counter Fredric Jameson’s influential criticism of her work – the charge of ‘world reduction’ – and point to ungrasped utopian possibilities within the present. Le Guin’s speculative anthropology thus combines the strengths while overcoming some of the limitations of both Geertz’s thick-descriptive method and Jameson’s theory of the science fiction genre. (shrink)

Ever since Kant, the possibility of having objects of knowledge has been one of the most basic anthropological questions (“what can I know?”). For the logician, the linguist, or the semiologist who studies natural language, negation is one of these objects. However, as an operation and as a symbol, it has the paradoxical property of not being able to be objectivized in the discourse that treats it without being used in this construction. Of course, it is an entirely general (...) problem that it is not possible to have a “distant view” of symbolism without using a symbolism of some sort or another. Anthropology is essentially concerned with such objects. The descriptions of ethnologists are thus fertile ground for the epistemologist who believes, like Aristotle, that non-being is not and therefore that, even though in fact we speak only of things (otherwise, what good is speaking?) our discourse cannot be a copy of them. (shrink)

Combining anthropological descriptions with historical criticism, Cox situates the Zen arts within contemporary critical discourses.

Social anthropology flourished in the 20th century but ethnographic methods and intensifying ‘creative destruction’ in the elaboration of theory have combined to deflect attention away from earlier concerns with long-term historical change. The ‘theft of history’ that took place within anthropology refers to this loss, which is not to be confused with healthy interdisciplinary borrowing. With the demise of the evolutionist paradigm and intensifying global connectivity, anthropologists have struggled to find a new balance between empirical ethnographic description, the interpretation (...) of other social worlds, and theoretical explanation. It is not so much that the canon has continued to change but that many practitioners no longer acknowledge any canon. The difficulties are illustrated with a critical discussion of the Anglophone anthropological literature in a field that is novel for the discipline: socialism and its aftermath. The work of Jack Goody has a surprising relevance here; more generally, Goody’s oeuvre shows how ethnographic excellence and intellectual originality can be harnessed together to serve a longue durée comparative historical anthropology. (shrink)

The ArgumentThis paper applies the approach developed by the congnitive sciences to a classical field of social anthropology—i.e., the analysis of represetations and behaviors relative to misfortune in “traditional” societies.The initial argument is that the conceptual division and the modes of description and explanation of anthropology suffer from serious weaknesses: these concepts cannot serve to understand empirical phenomena ; they rely on a confused and erroneous conception of the different domains involved and the causalities between them; and they use (...) simplistic hypotheses about the existence and causal status of the entities that usually form the ultima ratio of anthropological reasoning. These entities would directly “cause” other individual representations or behaviors. This simplification also affects the analysis of states of belief in these entities, to which individuals would supposedly “adhere”.I argue here that the cognitivist approach, within a “methodological individualism” framework, provides a more adequate description of phenomena observed in the field. This enables the various levels and domains to be more finely defined. The analysis of “typical” utterances and inferences in a “tranditional” society, the Senufo of the Ivory Coast, is here used to clarify these anthropological problems. Two levels can be distinguished: a priori representations, which are underdetermined, enabling them to occur within valid inferences; perception and/or action, which obeys different cognitive constraints. The existential status of unobservable entities appearing in causal inferences is not equivalent depending on whether they are determined as antecedent or consequent.This paper suggests a theory of interpretive processes and beliefs having flexible references, because they are incomplete and domain-specific. It allows a comparison with facts observed in Western societies. It is also in contrast to the ordinary conception of religious states of belief — i.e., these states would be purely psychological, states of “adherence,” collective, autonomous, obligatory, part of a systemized set of knowledge; collective notions would here logically precede individual representations. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to shed light on Kant’s anthropological theory of memory. I shall contrast physiological studies of memory against Kant’s own study. I suggest some ideas about the relation between memory and time, as long as memory has the power to store and reproduce the temporal configuration of our representations. Moreover, I deal with the problem of personal identity and I suggest that memory contributes to the possibility of this identity from a pragmatic point of (...) view. Finally, I hold that Kant’s pragmatic anthropology does not only provide a description of memory for the human being’s self-knowledge but also for the human being’s self-perfection. Thus, such description discloses not only what the human being is but also what this can become, insofar as it is capable of perfecting itself. (shrink)

What is a human being? The twentieth and twenty-first century tradition known as 'philosophical anthropology' has approached this question with unusual sophistication, experimentalism, and subtlety. Such innovations as Arnold Gehlen's description of humans as naturally 'deficient' beings in need of artificial institutions to survive; Max Scheler's concept of 'spirit' (Geist) as the physically and organically irreducible realm of persons and spiritual acts; and Helmuth Plessner's analysis of the way human embodiment transcends spatial locations and limitations ('ex-centric positionality') have inspired (...) generations of European intellectuals. This edited collection from an international network of scholars critically engages the philosophical anthropologies of Scheler, Plessner, Gehlen, Blumenberg, and others in unparalleled detail, showing their applicability to the themes of nature and naturalism, organic life, comparative primatology, cultural anthropology, paleoanthropology, the body, addiction, and death. The volume sets a new standard for Anglophone scholarship on this tradition and will be required reading for specialists in twentieth-century philosophy, history of the human sciences, history of the life sciences, and philosophies of human nature. (shrink)

Recent ethnographic studies of lived ethics, such as those of Leela Prasad and Saba Mahmood, present valuable opportunities for comparative religious ethics. This essay argues that developments in philosophical and religious ethics over the last three decades have supported a strong interest in thick descriptions of what it means to be human. This anthropological turn has thereby laid important groundwork for the encounter between these scholars and new ethnographic studies. Nonetheless, an encounter it is. Each side brings novel questions (...) to the other. The second part of the essay focuses on one of these questions: How, exactly, are these ethnographic studies to inform normative reflection on ethical questions? (shrink)

Some kinds of utterances which have an indicative grammatical form seem, for different reasons, to be unable to say something true of the world. Logical contradictions are only the prime example of something the author baptizes impossible descriptions. So-called performative contradictions make up another kind, but there are at least two more such kinds: negating affirmations and performatives which cannot be explained within the philosophy of language. Only philosophical anthropology can explain their feature of "impossibleness," and a distinction between unreflective (...) and reflective consciousness is central to the explanation. Particularly important here is G. H. Mead's distinction between two aspects of the self: the "I" and the "me." Each of the four kinds of impossible descriptions distinguished has its own contrary opposite. These are, in turn, logical tautologies, performative tautologies, affirming negations, and omissive performatives. The last three types as types have not received the philosophical recognition that they deserve. All four fit a general characterization which is given as a definition of the concept of superfluous description. (shrink)

The ability to look at one's face in the mirror and the ability to find one's self in the mirror are two quite different things. The former is a natural capacity that humans share with other animals; the latter is an acquired skill that only humans can master. The craft of mirror-gazing,despite its relevance to daily life is barely understood. An Anthropological Guide to the Art and Philosophy of Mirror Gazing provides a metaphysical manual to understand it. The book (...) is written from a cross-disciplinary and object-based perspective. The role of the mirror as a technology of self-objectification is explored through various case studies of cultures such as the Buryats of Eastern Mongolia. By using various anthropological examples, Koukouti and Malafouris survey and reflect on the structures and experiences of consciousness that underpin the specular image and the different meanings of the self. By combining metaphor, comparison and estrangement - where what was thought of as natural is seen as deliberately caused and altered - this book weaves together ethnographic description and philosophical analysis with empirical examples and experimental studies that allow the reader to think about the world and their subjectivity a bit differently. (shrink)

Here is told about necessity to create new anthropological paradigm based on the ecological approach. The matter is a man in ecological world, and subjects are the phenomena of consciousness, deciding direction to this world. Ecological world differs from physical world. Ecological world is the ontological unity of person and natural world, and it is characterized with combination of all items, events, occurrence in each other. Person’s attitude to the ecological world determines with notion “ecological consciousness”, it describes person’s (...) structural attitude to the world and it has morally value character. The main description of ecological consciousness is its orientation to the ecological world. The methods of new anthropological paradigm are phenomenal and topological approaches, which help to create the complete ecological – anthropological picture of the world. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:694 BOOK REVIEWS Exercises in the Work of HUvB," Antonio Sicari writes on "Theology and Holiness," and Georges Chantraine writes on the relationship of "Exegesis and Contemplation." Missing from Henrici's account of Balthasar's philosophical presup· positions, as well as from the other contributions, are further sugges· tions for exploring possible relationships with some of the current con· cerns in North America like the hermeneutical debates or those surrounding other (...) methodological issues. Much work is still needed in this area, especially a more thorough encounter between the position of Balthasar and those of Karl Rahner, Bernard Lonergan, and Paul Ricoeur, to name but a few of the dominant figures in North American theological circles. Schindler's volume is highly to be praised as an invaluable introduction to the work of one of the giants of our century. Let us hope that more such studies will be forthcoming. Concordia University Montreal, Quebec CHRISTOPHE PoTWOROWSKI The Anthropological Character of Theology: Conditioning Theological Understanding. By DAVID A. PAILIN. New York: Cambridge Uni· versity Press, 1990. Pp. 300. $54.95 (cloth). That the discipline of theology is an activity of human beings whereby even in the most pronounced theologies of revelation the " creaturely form" of theology is acknowledged is not a matter of dispute. What is debated is the extent to which this Barthian rendering of the anthropological moment of theology " conditions " our theological understanding. It is in the interests of sorting this out that David Pailin, Reader in the Philosophy of Religion at the University of Manchester in England, devotes this volume. The result is a rather systematic study in which the author explores the various angles where one can register theology's human dimension-from basic theistic claims to doctrinal formulations-while simultaneously justifying the integrity of theological inquiry in philosophical perspective. Indeed, throughout, it is the hand of a philosopher of religion that is at work, synthesizing and categorizing the contemporary theological landscape and carving out the true subject matter of theology, namely, that which is "ontologically, valuatively and rationally ultimate" (p. 4). The book is best read with an eye to each of these poles. On the one hand, the ostensible project is to examine, evaluate, and clearly affirm the human character of the theological enterprise. Simply BOOK REVIEWS 695 acknowledging the theological identification of human being, ergo the theologian, as a creature addressed by the divine word is inadequate. Even if this should require the practitioner to engage in a " laborious movement from one partial human insight to another" (Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, I, 1, p. 14), it does not give due recognition to the formative influence exercised by the theologian's fallible and culturally specific situation in life. These include language, conceptual perspective, metaphysical commitments, social location, and religious experience. On the other hand, Pailin is mindful that attention to theology's anthropological character and his methodological accentuation of it is in danger of yielding to the reductionist charge that religion is a complex of human projection and anthropomorphic description. In response Pailin consistently argues the case for the justifiability of religious belief, theistic claims, and theological predication. In this respect his work is not only descriptive of what theologians are doing but it attempts a revisionary intervention in the realms of philosophical and systematic theology. Classical theistic renditions of the divine attributes are subjected to critical scrutiny, e.g., divine impassibility and its relationship to divine love, and traditional interpretations of Christian doctrines are relativized by their cultural context, e.g., Anselm's theory of atonement. His own constructive subtext betrays a clear preference for neo-classical process theology and its conceptualization of God's relationship to the world and history. The key issue that governs Pailin's view of the integrity and limits of theological understanding revolves around the relationship between formal and material predication. What we mean by God and what we say about God are inextricably bound up with our speculative efforts to understand the nature of ultimate reality. The theologian and the metaphysician are in pursuit of similar quests with the proviso that the farmer's judgments are ensconced within a religious perspective. This does not exempt theological judgments from being rationally... (shrink)

What is existential anthropology, and how would you define it? What has been gained by using existential perspectives in your fieldwork and writing? Editors Michael Jackson and Albert Piette each invited anthropologists on both sides of the Atlantic to address these questions and explore how various approaches to the human condition might be brought together on the levels of method and of theory. Both editors also bring their own perspective: while Jackson has drawn on phenomenology, deploying the concepts of intersubjectivity, (...) lifeworld, experience, existential mobility, and event, Piette has drawn on Heidegger's Dasein-analysis, and developed a phenomenographical method for the observation and description of human beings in their singularity and ever-changing situations. (shrink)

No detailed description available for "The Politics of Anthropology".

"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. (shrink)

Many philosophers have claimed that intentional ascription is not possible if alien peoples are truly radically different from ourselves. At the same time, many anthropologists have claimed that the people they study think very differently from the way that we do. I claim that it is possible for both the anthropologists and the philosophers to be right. Giving intentional descriptions is problematic for people unlike ourselves, but anthropologists can, and do give good descriptions of alien mental states using descriptions not (...) unlike those given in certain formulations of cognitive psychology. (shrink)

The purpose of the article is the analysis of the causes of the systemic crisis that hit modern civilization through the description of its main structures, identifying the relationship between its elements, assessments of their heuristic potential. This will open up opportunities for finding ways to resolve this crisis, new directions of civilizational development. Theoretical basis of the research are the systems analysis, socio-philosophical and philosophical-anthropological approaches as well as the analysis of scientific developments in the field of (...) global studies. Originality lies in the fact that this article is the first to show the connection between the main structural elements of human civilization as a system. Change in one of the parameters leads to a change in all the others, together with a change in civilization as a whole. Conclusions. The reason for the deep crisis that hit modern civilization is its imbalance as a system. The most important elements of this system are population size, resources and technology, and the core is consciousness in its individual and collective forms. The perception, processing, and use of information, which is a defining civilizational resource, as well as the stability of the entire system depend on the state of consciousness. Consciousness, based on old, obsolete principles and stereotypes, is unable to cope with the most acute challenges of time. New consciousness, since it is formed, will mark the transition to a new theoretical picture of the world and a model of human behavior, in which people will act, driven by proven knowledge, and not willfulness and prejudice. The idea of forming a productive information environment where the ideas of constructiveness and creative work will dominate rather than consumerism and destruction, as is the case at present, must become the categorical imperative of the new consciousness. (shrink)

Anthropology is a disciplined inquiry into the conditions and potentials of human life. Generations of theorists, however, have expunged life from their accounts, treating it as the mere output of patterns, codes, structures or systems variously defined as genetic or cultural, natural or social. Building on his classic work The Perception of the Environment, Tim Ingold sets out to restore life to where it should belong, at the heart of anthropological concern. Being Alive ranges over such themes as the (...) vitality of materials, what it means to make things, the perception and formation of the ground, the mingling of earth and sky in the weather-world, the experiences of light, sound and feeling, the role of storytelling in the integration of knowledge, and the potential of drawing to unite observation and description. Our humanity, Ingold argues, does not come ready-made but is continually fashioned in our movements along ways of life. Starting from the idea of life as a process of wayfaring, Ingold presents a radically new understanding of movement, knowledge and description as dimensions not just of being in the world, but of being alive to what is going on there. (shrink)

Ethnographic research, anthropological theory, and the understanding of the objects of inquiry, are co-created through figuration (using tropes and rhetorical figures) and techniques of persuasion. Delving into descriptive ethnography and theoretical texts spanning across classical monographs and recent texts in cultural anthropology, Culture Figures places rhetoric and rhetoricity as central to the discipline's self-understanding. It focuses on how understandings of 'culture' and social life are shaped and conveyed in cultural anthropology through textual rhetoric. The book demonstrates how processes of (...) using tropes and modes of persuasion underlie the creation of meanings or misunderstandings in society. (shrink)

This collection of 49 readings with extensive background description exposes students to the breadth of theoretical perspectives and issues in the field of medical anthropology. The text provides specific examples and case studies of research as it is applied to a range of health settings: from cross-cultural clinical encounters to cultural analysis of new biomedical technologies to the implementation of programs in global health settings.

No detailed description available for "Toward a Marxist Anthropology".

This article discusses the common ground between William James and the tradition of philosophical anthropology. Recent commentators on this overlap have characterised philosophical anthropology as combining science (in particular biology and medicine) and Kantian teleology, for instance in Kant’s seminal definition of anthropology as being concerned with what the human being makes of itself, as distinct from what attributes it is given by nature. This article registers the tension between Kantian thinking, which reckons to ground experience in a priori categories, (...) and William James’s psychology, which begins and ends with experience. It explores overlap between James’s approach and the characteristic holism of 18th-century philosophical anthropology, which centres on the idea of understanding and analysing the human as a whole, and presents the main anthropological elements of James’s position, namely his antipathy to separation, his concerns about the binomial terms of traditional philosophy, his preference for experience over substances, his sense that this holist doctrine of experience shows a way out of sterile impasses, a preference for description over causation, and scepticism. It then goes on to register the common ground with key ideas in the work of anthropologists from around 1800, along with some references to anthropologists who come in James’s wake, in particular Max Scheler and Arnold Gehlen, in order to reconceptualise the connection between James’s ideas and the tradition of anthropological thinking in German letters since the late 18th-century, beyond its characterisation as a combination of scientific positivism and teleology. (shrink)

The categories and contours of a normative social theory are prefigured by its ‘anthropological’ presuppositions. The discourse/communicative-theoretic basis of Habermasian theory was prefigured by a strong anthropological demarcation between an instrumentally structured realm of science, technology and labor versus a normatively structured realm of social interaction. An alternative anthropology, bolstered by current work in the empirical sciences, finds fundamental normative needs for orientation and ‘compensation’ also to be embedded in embodied material practices. An emerging anthropologically informed concept of (...) skill that goes beyond old manual versus intellectual dichotomies and brings forth internal criteria of autonomy and authenticity can serve as a new bridge between categories of social justice, such as Sen and Nussbaum’s basic human ‘capabilities’, and new cutting-edge work in the empirical human sciences and thereby provide Critical Theory with a renewed point of departure that is both normatively and descriptively rich, for advancing its dialectical, historical mission. (shrink)

Those—other social scientists as well as laymen—who have read recent studies of national character and culture by anthropologists, while not having had experience in this field themselves, often seem to believe that the results which such anthropological investigators obtain are interesting, but that the methods used were intuitional, magical, or just invisible. The status of the work is cast in doubt, as falling short of an ideal that scientific description and analysis must be reproducible by any observer to (...) whom a set of techniques of the discipline has been communicated. This paper attempts to show why and how such a belief is erroneous, and then to describe some of the fundamentals of method in current cultural anthropology as used in research and as related to the general structure of scientific method today. (shrink)

There is no descriptive science of the stream of consciousness in the literature of the social sciences, and as a result, we do not have an empirical understanding of the nature of the healthy human mind.This paper will:(1)demonstrate that an empirically valid theory of the healthy mind must be a theory that isderived from a descriptive science ofthe stream of consciousness (2) present the rationale and methodology for doing interviews with a specific group ofTibetan lamas who have been using meditation (...) for over ten and a half centuries todevelop a descriptive science/if the streamofconsciousnessand (3) present briefexcerpts from some ofthe interviews I have been doing with these lamas. In these interviews, the lamas discuss their experiences of their own mind in meditation for the purpose of: (1) developing a descriptive science ofthe stream of consciousness and (2) using that descriptive science to discuss and describe the defining characteristics ofthe healthy human mind. (shrink)

“Philosophical Anthropology,” which is reconstructed here, does not deal with anthropology as a philosophical subdiscipline but rather as a particular philosophical approach within twentieth-century German philosophy, connected with thinkers such as Max Scheler, Helmuth Plessner and Arnold Gehlen. This paper attempts a more precise description of the core identity of Philosophical Anthropology as a paradigm, observes the differences between the authors within the paradigm, and differentiates the paradigm as a whole from other twentieth-century philosophical approaches, such as transcendental philosophy, (...) evolutionary theory or naturalism, existentialism, and hermeneutic philosophy. In determining the human being as “excentric positionality,” Philosophical Anthropology arrives at unique categorical intertwinings between the biological, social and cultural sciences. (shrink)

In this volume leading historians and anthropologists with an interest in law gather to analyse the nature and meaning of law in diverse societies. They start from the concept of legalism, taken from the anthropologist Lloyd Fallers, whose 1960s work on Africa engaged, unusually, with jurisprudence. The concept highlights appeal to categories and rules. The degree to which legalism in this sense informs people's lives varies within and between societies, and over time, but it can colour equally both 'simple' and (...) 'complex' law. Breaking with recent emphases on 'practice', nine specialist contributors explore, in a wide-ranging set of cases, the place of legalism in the workings of social life. The essays make obvious the need to question our parochial common sense where ideals of moral order at other times and places differ from those of modern North Atlantic governance. State-centred law, for instance, is far from a 'central case'. Legalism may be 'aspirational', connecting people to wider visions of morality; duty may be as prominent a theme as rights; and rulers from thirteenth-century England to sixteenth-century Burma appropriate, as much they impose, a vision of justice as consistency. The use of explicit categories and rules does not reduce to simple questions of power. The cases explored range from ancient Asia Minor to classical India, and from medieval England and France to Saharan oases and southern Arabia. In each case they assume no knowledge of the society or legal system discussed. The volume will appeal not only to historians and anthropologists with an interest in law, but to students of law engaged in legal theory, for the light it sheds on the strengths and limitations of abstract legal philosophy."--Publisher's description. (shrink)

A growing interest in affect holds much promise for anthropology by providing a new frame to examine and articulate subjective and intersubjective states, which are key parts of human consciousness and behavior. Affect has its roots in the social, an observation that did not go unnoticed by Durkheim and since then has been kept in view by those social scientists interested in the emotions, feelings, and subjectivity. However, the challenge for ethnographers has always been to articulate in words and conceptualize (...) theoretically what is only felt and sensed. What we are calling “evocative ethnography” is an ethnography that meets this challenge to make room for, and hold onto, feelings and affect in its description and explanation. The papers in this special issue accomplish that, as well as provide some anthropological insights into affect theory. (shrink)

This paper makes an attempt at the conceptual foundation of descriptive ethical theories in terms of evolutionary anthropology. It suggests, first, that what human social actors tend to accept to be morally valid and legitimate ultimately rests upon empirical authority relations and, second, that this acceptance follows an evolved pattern of hierarchical behaviour control in the social animal species. The analysis starts with a brief review of Thomas Hobbes'' moral philosophy, with special emphasis on Hobbes'' authoritarian view of moral validity (...) and of the common political origins and ultimate basis of legitimacy of moral and legal systems. Hobbes'' philosophical conceptions are then put into the context of Max Weber''s influential empirical theory of legitimacy, especially charismatic revelation and authority as the ultimate source of all moral, legal and religious obligations. Weber''s concept of charismatic authority is given a biobehavioural interpretation in terms of ritualised status signals indicating an individual''s superior physical and emotional dispositions to control the social actions of others. Various conclusions are drawn concerning the concept of moral validity and its possible evolutionary interpretations. (shrink)

_The purpose_ of this article is to explain in religious, secular, and post-secular contexts the functional potential of conceptualizing the miracle as a text or message with a motivational effect. _Theoretical basis._ Max Weber, Ernst Tugendhat, Alexander Geppert and Till Kössler analysed the processes of enchantment and disenchantment of the world on a philosophical basis. The representatives of the Frankfurt school (Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin) and their followers describe the cultural processes of post-secularism (Jürgen Habermas, Peter Sloterdijk) in (...) detail. The logic of cultural and social representation of amazing events and their descriptions can be realized by combining hermeneutic analysis with a functionalist approach based on the model of Niklas Luhmann and the discursive ethics of Karl-Otto Apel. _Originality._ Desired cultural, social and political situations in society often arise unexpectedly and suddenly, which provokes to characterize them as a miracle. However, at the basis of the emergence of such situations are the rules of social communication, in particular those that provide for asymmetric communication with questions that await answers. A miracle appears at the moment of transformation of asymmetric communication into a symmetrical one: each specific miracle-phenomenon needs its own metaphorical understanding and interpretation as a message. _Conclusions._ The article proposes an analysis of miracle phenomenon in its cosmological, anthropological and educational implications. Some tendencies fixed by communicative turn of the contemporary philosophy are also contributed to considering the miracle in its objective and subjective representations. The semantics of the miracle is analysed according to the relevant problem fields. The functionality of miracle is examined on its ability to show orientation for the contemporary societies with their tendency to post-secularity. The fusion of Pre-modernity and Late Modernity is taking into account when the semantics of miracle is described accordingly to their communication functionality. The enchanting and disenchanting dialectic is explained on semantics of miracle as a world and cosmic events. (shrink)

The concept of legal pluralism has been used widely in legal scholarship to draw attention to the existence of multiple legal orders. Scholars have relied upon it to avoid the ideology of legal centralism, to counter colonialism, and to highlight the neglect of Indigenous laws. These are ameliorative approaches, which aim to expand the concept of law for particular purposes. But it is not clear that they help to explain what law is and does. In this article, I contrast these (...) normative and critical projects with analytic and descriptive approaches to the concept of law. Descriptive conceptual analysis, using empirical examples to enhance the insights of legal theorists, can better shed light on what is distinctive about law as a social form. The article illustrates this approach with a number of historical and anthropological examples. This leads us, I suggest, to form rather than function, that is, to the quality of legalism. The creation and use of general rules and abstract categories, that is, usefully distinguishes law, as a category that encompasses both state and non-state forms, from the wider class of norms encompassed by the expansive theories of the legal pluralists. (shrink)

What is “human being”? In this book, Thomas Langan draws on a lifetime of study to offer a new understanding of this central question of our existence, turning to phenomenology and philosophical anthropology to help us better understand who we are as individuals and communities and what makes us act the way we do. While recognizing the human being as an individual with a particular genetic makeup and history, Langan also probes the real essence of human being that philosophers have (...) tended to ignore. He argues that human being is the result of the experiences of humans throughout time—an ontological reality that not only incorporates our collective memories, institutions, habits, ethical practices, and religious faiths but also unfolds in time with its own history to inform individuals in the present. He provides tools and descriptions for accessing this broader historical and present-day reality, investigating deeper structures of human being to show how those historical roots can be appropriated and made meaningful. Building on Langan’s earlier works, _Human Being_ is also readily accessible on its own. Langan shows how the larger issues discussed in those books, ranging from the Catholic tradition to high technology, relate to being human while he brings to light new philosophical insights and ideas. Because human beings continue to evolve, informing our everyday understanding of the world, Langan shows how vital it is for us to think through the sense of human being and how great a challenge that is in today’s society. His work offers insight into human being that invites readers to think and live more deeply in their humanity—and to face the challenges of a rapidly changing world by reawakening perennial quests for love and the divine, and the very search for meaning itself. (shrink)

According to Clifford Geertz, the purpose of anthropology is not to explain culture but to explicate it. That should cause us to rethink our relationship with machine learning. It is, we contend, perfectly possible that machine learning algorithms, which are unable to explain, and could even be unexplainable themselves, can still be of critical use in a process of explication. Thus, we report on an experiment with anthropological AI. From a dataset of 175K Facebook comments, we trained a neural (...) network to predict the emoji reaction associated with a comment and asked a group of human players to compete against the machine. We show that a) the machine can reach the same accuracy as the players, b) it fails in roughly the same ways as the players, and c) easily predictable emoji reactions tend to reflect unambiguous situations where interpretation is easy. We therefore repurpose the failures of the neural network to point us to deeper and more ambiguous situations where interpretation is hard and explication becomes both necessary and interesting. We use this experiment as a point of departure for discussing how experiences from anthropology, and in particular the tension between formalist ethnoscience and interpretive thick description, might contribute to debates about explainable AI. (shrink)

The doctrine of the sleeping soul is a doctrine developed to accommodate local wisdom in Indonesia. This doctrine describes the metaphysical part of man after death. A local pearl of wisdom discussed is the Javanese death slametan tradition. The purpose of this article is to develop the doctrine of the sleeping soul according to the narrative of Jesus’ words in Mark 5:35–42 and the Prophet Daniel in Daniel 12:1–3 in representing the metaphysical anthropological view of the Javanese death slametan (...) tradition in terms of the theory of collective memory. The descriptions of the sleeping soul doctrine in the Javanese death slametan tradition are as follows: Firstly, there is a collective memory in giving appreciation to the metaphysical side of humans after death. Secondly, the sleeping soul doctrine is developed from the collective memory of the Javanese death slametan tradition and the Hebrew view. Thirdly, the sleeping soul doctrine is a contextualisation doctrine of the Javanese death slametan tradition. Contribution: The implications of this research give birth to the doctrine of the sleeping soul in the framework of the preservation of Javanese culture, especially in the Javanese culture of death [ slametan ]. This study proves that Christianity has contributed to caring for culture rather than alienating it. (shrink)

Thick description was originally proposed to overcome the limitations of quantitative research and ground anthropological observations in concrete people’s expectations, rather than in normative theories. The ultimate objective was to account for the emotional aspects of worldviews and value-orientations that would otherwise be left tacit or implicit by quantitative investigations. The present paper aimed at reviewing the _conceptual framework_ that has characterized this relational turn and has made possible a deeper understanding of the subjective experience. The primary objective (...) is thus to make explicit the assumptions upon which thick description relies and discuss how these renewed conditions allow meaning to emerge in interpersonal relationships. We argue that both these objectives would be theoretically attainable if primarily centered on the exploration of the _possibility space_ and on the patient’s experience as driven by the power of _counterfactual thinking_. Under these conditions, human subjects may be led to recognize the contextual and semiotic dimension of _boundaries_ and, in so doing, become aware of the beneficial effects of weaving past and new experiences in meaningful relationships. (shrink)

What was probably the first collection of human skulls for purposes of study was established by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach in Göttingen at the end of the 18th century. In subsequent years, the number of such collections increased, but their importance for scientific research remained modest. A breakthrough took place only in the 1850s when studies on the so-called cranial index by Karl Ernst von Baer and Anders Retzius gave skull collections a new lease on life, raising physical anthropology from a (...) solely descriptive science to an empirically based “biological anthropology” which used quantitative methods. As a result, Baer was among the first to distinguish between linguistic and morphologic criteria when systematising human populations. This article discusses the development of Baer's ideas concerning the aims and methods of physical anthropology during his career. It pays special attention to the role of scientific collections in moulding Baer's theories. (shrink)

This paper aims to explore the theme of art in Helmuth Plessner’s philosophical anthropology and show the possibilities of its use in the analysis of artistic creation and artwork. The article is divided into three parts: in the first part, it presents the background of Plessner’s anthropological project and the intersection of his philosophy with Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. This strategy enables the synergy of both approaches which can be used for reflection of art. The second part displays the scope (...) and ingenuity of Plessner’s approach through a selection of texts where he addresses art. And finally, the third part delves into a functional elaboration of the anthropology of an artwork, specifically, using Max Beckmann as an example, into the question of anthropological foundations in art making, and the question of new form in art. For the latter question, I use the approach to architecture as an example relying on corporeality and Umwelt as guiding concepts. This analysis provides, on the one hand, description of anthropologically significant phenomena of artistic production of the first half of the twentieth century, and on the other hand, reveals functional determinations of corporeality, the world, and resonance with the world, the so-called equilibrium, which can be used to understand the artwork, and artistic production in the creation of a new form in art. (shrink)

The article is devoted to certain fundamental and discussed threads defined as dilemmas of political anthropology. Starting from specific rudimentary descriptions of human nature, the natural state or natural man, initiated by thinkers described by Barnard as “precursors of anthropology,” as well as referring to the problems of contemporary political philosophy, the papers aims to bring closer the issues concerning the fall of human and his “regeneration,” the “mask regime,” tensions between a human being and society, conflict and cooperation; dialogue (...) and antagonism. The proposed interpretations of the thoughts of Hobbes, Machiavelli, or Rousseau have the character of “retroactive reading.” It means that the references made to historical-philosophical examples activate the contexts of contemporary thought, or even give them new meanings, and at the same time trigger a thought that leans towards the future. (shrink)

The article explores the theme of environment in Valeriy Podoroga’s analytical anthropo­logy, offering an enactivist reading of his “The Metaphysics of Landscape”. The analyti­cal strategy of “The Metaphysics of Landscape” is contrasted with that of later works such as “Mimesis” and “Anthropograms”. Whereas in the later works the analytical tech­niques are set by a variety of optical concepts, metaphors and images, thus representing a strategy of “exclusionary observation”, in “The Metaphysics of Landscape” the analysis follows rather the movement of observer’s (...) body included in the environment and aims at the reconstruction of an integrated, sensorimotor, yet imaginary experience. Three frag­ments of Podoroga’s text, reconstructing imaginary bodies and landscapes embedded in the works of Kirkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, are interpreted as three different ways of coupling body and environment, generating three different models of bodily-environmental experience. Finding the correspondence of the fragments of the descrip­tion of this experience to some key points of enactivist epistemology and aesthetics, the author shows that the enactivist approach makes it possible to formalize those tech­niques of analysis that allow us to discover the rules of dependence between some im­plicit modus of writing and the bodily experience of reading. (shrink)

In his concept of an anthropological physiology, F.J.J. Buytendijk has tried to lay down the theoretical and scientific foundations for an anthropologically-oriented medicine. The aim of anthropological physiology is to demonstrate, empirically, what being specifically human is in the most elementary physiological functions. This article contains a sketch of Buytendijk''s life and work, an overview of his philosophical-anthropological presuppositions, an outline of his idea of an anthropological physiology and medicine, and a discussion of some episternological and (...) methodological problems. It is demonstrated that Buytendijk''s design of an anthropological physiology is fragmentary and programmatic and that his methodology offers few points of contact for specific anthropological experimental research.Notwithstanding, it is argued that Buytendijk''s description of the subjective, animated body forms a pre-eminent point of reference for all research in physiology and psychology in which the specific human aspect is not ignored beforehand. (shrink)

The article formulates the main issues that form the research field of the anthropology of sacrifice. The first group of problems is associated with a description of the fundamental anthropological nature of the phenomenon of sacrifice and answering the question of whether sacrifice is a cultural universal, and if so, what this universality can be based on, what prototypical forms of sacrifice can be identified and how they can be described. The second group of problems is associated with (...) the task of understanding how the phenomenon of sacrifice is changing today and what anthropological meaning these changes have. In a situation where explicit human sacrifice is taboo, one can speak of the emergence of substitute practices and the emergence of analogs in which the structural elements of the classical ritual are distributed in space and time and are presented in a different order. As a result, in modern society, victims-sufferers are analogous to classical sacrificial victims and therefore often go through sacralizing rituals and practices. However, a fundamentally important question is whether a structure change in distributed sacrifice incurs a change in social functions? And if these changes exist, how essential they are, how much they affect the very semantic core of the anthropology of sacrifice. The third group of problems is associated with the sphere of praxis in its classical understanding, i.e., it represents issues related to political, economic, and ethical implications associated with the phenomenon of sacrifice and analogs of the ritual of sacrifice in modern societies. Here it is also impossible to avoid relating modern discourses and practices to archaic prototypes and identifying similarities and differences, and most importantly, describing transformations and problematizing their anthropological meaning. Since modern society is immersed in the media environment, it is extremely important to discuss the influence of the media on these processes. In general, the anthropology of sacrifice as a research project allows us to look at many of the most pressing social issues of our time from a new angle. (shrink)

This extract is the first English translation of Hans Blumenberg's posthumous publication Beschreibung des Menschen, which was published by Suhrkamp Verlag in 2006. Based on lectures concerning the German tradition of philosophical anthropology that Blumenberg gave at the University of Münster, the book's basic project is the explicit fusion of Husserlian phenomenology with philosophical anthropology — an attempt to grasp what the human is by identifying its basic structures. The result is a highly nuanced conception of the possibility of human (...) self-reflection that is at the core of philosophy and of culture as a recipe for the species’ survival. Instead of answering the question “What is man?” Blumenberg proposes here a minimalist anthropology that seeks to answer a different question: “How is man possible?” The chapters selected for translation are intended to give readers a sense of the book, little known in the Anglophone world, which in its original German runs to some nine hundred pages. (shrink)

Kant’s efforts to replace psychology as a theoretical natural science with anthropology as a pragmatic science are examined on the basis of his anthropology lectures. For Kant, psychology posits the soul as a distinct substance, but his pragmatic anthropology makes no such metaphysical assumption. It can succeed by limiting itself to providing historical rather than rational cognition, being descriptive rather than explanative, and having a worldly rather than an academic perspective. Kant’s reflections on culture in the Critique of Judgment are (...) claimed to account for certain final changes in the anthropology that was published in 1798. (shrink)