Anthropology
A Continental Perspective
9780226925073
9780226925066
9780226925080
Anthropology
A Continental Perspective
Originally published in German, Christoph Wulf’s Anthropology sets its sights on a topic as ambitious as its title suggests: anthropology itself. Arguing for an interdisciplinary and intercultural approach to anthropology that incorporates science, philosophy, history, and many other disciplines, Wulf examines—with breathtaking scope—all the ways that anthropology has been understood and practiced around the globe and through the years.
Seeking a central way to understand anthropology in the midst of many different approaches to the discipline, Wulf concentrates on the human body. An emblem of society, culture, and time, the body is also the result of many mimetic processes—the active acquisition of cultural knowledge. By examining the role of the body in the performance of rituals, gestures, language, and other forms of imagination, he offers a bold new look at how culture is produced, handed down, and transformed. Drawing such examinations into a comprehensive and sophisticated assessment of the discipline as a whole, Anthropology looks squarely at the mystery of humankind and the ways we have attempted to understand it.
Reviews
Table of Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Paradigms of Anthropology
1 Evolution—Hominization—Anthropology
2 Philosophical Anthropology
3 Anthropology in the Historical Sciences: Historical Anthropology
4 Cultural Anthropology
5 Historical Cultural Anthropology
Core Issues of Anthropology
6 The Body as a Challenge
7 The Mimetic Basis of Cultural Learning
8 Theories and Practices of the Performative
9 The Rediscovery of Rituals
10 Language—The Antinomy between the Universal and the Particular
11 Images and Imagination
12 Death and Recollection of Birth
Future Prospects
Notes Selected Bibliography Index
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