The Second Royal Society Nuffield Lecture Anthropological models and social reality

In trying to show you the character of social anthropology as an academic discipline, I might try to sketch some substantive and perhaps intriguing findings in the field, or the history of its development, or some of its major intellectual problems today. I have chosen the last of these alternatives, because by showing the general problems we are grappling with I hope to reveal to you, in part no doubt inadvertently, the ways that anthropologists think, and also how our difficulties in part arise from the character of the social reality itself, which we confront and try to understand. The fundamental questions which social anthropology asks are about the forms, the nature, and the extent of order in human social life, as it can be observed in the different parts of the world. There is no need to prejudge the extent of this order; as members of one society we know how unpredictable social life can be. But concretely, human life varies greatly around the world, and it seems possible to characterize its forms to some extent. We seek means systematically to discover, record and understand these forms.

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 82-93
Author(s):  
Aleksandr Subetto

It is proved that the current era is characterized by many governments around the world as dictatorship of "appearance" or "simulation" of the most activities transforming politics, even the tragic events like local ecological catastrophes, local wars, "colour revolutions", the elections in a "theatre", "acting", on the background of market ecocide – really accelerating processes of the first phase of a Global Environmental Disaster, which, at the transition "point of no return" in the near future, may turn into a process of irreversible environmental destruction of all mankind. This dictatorship of "appearance" or simulation as a "curtain" market democracy, hiding the capitalism-led, process of dehumanization of man, is an indicator of the inadequacy of states and political "elites" imperative of survival of mankind, as the imperative out of the ecological impasse of history in market-capitalist format. There comes a reckoning for this departure into the " market-capitalist illusion of apparent prosperity. The societies of the world, including Rossiya, have faced a dilemma:either environmental destruction, or the Noosphere Breakthrough, which, in its essence, is a change in the social organization of social life and its reproduction – the transition from the dominance of capitalism and the market to the Noosphere Ecological Spiritual Socialism on the basis of scientific and educational society and the management of socionatural evolution.


2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 108-124
Author(s):  
Ronald S. Stade

Political correctness has become a fighting word used to dismiss and discredit political opponents. The article traces the conceptual history of this fighting word. In anthropological terms, it describes the social life of the concept of political correctness and its negation, political incorrectness. It does so by adopting a concept-in-motion methodology, which involves tracking the concept through various cultural and political regimes. It represents an attempt to synthesize well-established historiographic and anthropological approaches. A Swedish case is introduced that reveals the kind of large-scale historical movements and deep-seated political conflicts that provide the contemporary context for political correctness and its negation. Thereupon follows an account of the conceptual history of political correctness from the eighteenth century up to the present. Instead of a conventional conclusion, the article ends with a political analysis of the current rise of fascism around the world and how the denunciation of political correctness is both indicative of and instrumental in this process.


1997 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Denis Cosgrove

Archaeology, anthropology, human geography: three disciplines born out of a nineteenth-century imperative among Europeans to apply a coherent model of understanding (Wissen-schaft) to varied forms of social life within a differentiated physical world; three disciplines stretched between the epistemology and methods of the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) which promised certainty, and the hermeneutic reflexivity and critical doubt of the Humanities (Geisteswissenschaften) which promised self-knowledge. Each of these disciplines is today in crisis, and for the same reason. Europe as the place of authoritative knowledge, of civilization, has been decentred upon a post-colonial globe; the white, bourgeois European male has been dethroned as the sovereign subject of a universal and progressive history. Thus, the enlightened intellectual project represented by archaeology, anthropology and human geography, whose findings were unconsciously designed to secure the essentially ideological claims of liberal Europeans, are obliged to renegotiate their most fundamental assumptions and concepts (Gregory, 1993). The linguistic turn in the social sciences and humanities which has so ruthlessly exposed the context-bound nature of their scientific claims — what Ton Lemaire refers to as a critical awareness of their inescapable cultural and historical mediation — forces a recognition that their central conceptual terms, such as ‘culture’, ‘nature’, ‘society’, and ‘landscape’, are far from being neutral scientific objects, open to disinterested examination through the objective and authoritative eye of scholarship. They are intellectual constructions which need to be understood in their emergence and evolution across quite specific histories. Ton Lemaire seeks to sketch something of the history of landscape as such a socially and historically mediated idea: as a mode of representing relations between land and human life, which has played a decisive role in the development of archaeology as a formal discipline. On the foundation of this history he develops a critique of the social and environmental characteristics and consequences of modernity, and seeks to relocate archaeological study within a reformed project of sensitive contemporary ‘dwelling’ on earth.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lchiari

Human social life lately is getting more and more worried. The large number of news for violence between fellow humans is good in people's lives in general, also in families. Not only about violence, disputes, competition, envy and curtains are also coloring that color modern life lately. All people compete to get validation from others, and like the world has lost peace of mind. This paper aims to determine Christianity's point of view on the social life of the present and how a Christian person can stick to the Christ character, who is to love the world, currently filled with hatred, as well as how a character is influenced by culture.


Author(s):  
Giovanni Pedrini

Afghanistan is an ancient land, rich in traditions and cultures having their roots in the millennial history of this country. Situated along the ancient caravan routes of Central Asia, by its caravanserais and markets it has represented an important point for exchange, communication and cultural interaction between the East and the West. Afghanistan is partly linked to the complex genealogical tree of Central Asia, full of intricate branches; one of those branches, at its eastern extremity, is knotted with the ‘Roof of the World’ (Bam-e Dunya): the vast orographic area of Pamir bordering on Tajikistan, Pakistan and China. This Afghan border territory (Wakhan Woluswali) includes different ecological areas: from the high-altitude valleys to the pastures in the plateaus, as far as the highest mountains of Pamir. Wakhan is populated particularly by Wakhi and, in its easternmost part, by Kyrgyz people. The Wakhi follow a subsistence strategy based on mountain agriculture combined with pasturage; they are Ismaili Nizaris and they speak a language (khik-zik, khik-wor) belonging to the north-eastern branch of the Iranian languages. Identity and religious cultures significantly influence the social life of those small mountain communities cut off on the ‘Roof of the World’.


1997 ◽  
pp. 43-51
Author(s):  
Pavlo Pavlenko

The last centuries before the beginning of the Christian era, the first centuries after that, were enveloped in the history of mankind as a period of the total crisis and the decline of the Greco-Roman civilization, a crisis that covered virtually all spheres of the social life of the Roman world and which, as ever before, experienced almost every one, whether he is a slave or a free citizen, a small merchant or a big slave or an aristocrat. As a reaction to the crisis, in various parts of the empire the civil wars and the slavery uprising erupt in different parts of the empire. Under such conditions of life, the world around itself no longer seemed to man to be self-sufficient, harmonious, stable, "good" and warded by a cohort of traditional deities. Yes, and the gods themselves were now turned out to be incapable, unable to change the unceasing flow of fatal doom.


2021 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-43
Author(s):  
Paula Petričević

Abstract The author explores the socialist emancipation of women in Montenegro during World War II and its aftermath, using the example of the 8 March celebrations. The social life of this ‘holiday of the struggle of all the women in the world’ speaks powerfully of the strength and fortitude involved in the mobilization of women during the war and during the postwar building of socialist Yugoslavia, as well as the sudden modernization and unprecedented political subjectivation of women. The emancipatory potential of these processes turned out to be limited in the later period of stabilization of Yugoslav state socialism and largely forgotten in the postsocialist period. The author argues that the political subjectivation of women needs to be thought anew, as a process that does not take place in a vacuum or outside of a certain ideological matrix, whether socialist or liberal.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-177
Author(s):  
Salamah Eka Susanti

The progress of information, communication and transportation technology has had a wide influence on daily life, and even overhauled the social system. It is difficult to put the process of social, cultural and political change nowadays apart from the development of global dynamics. The process of globalization has a huge influence on the development of religious values. Religion as a view that consists of various doctrines and values has a great influence on society. They recognize the importance of the role of religion in social life - the politics of the world community. plays an important role in the process of globalization. Because of the importance of the role of religion in people's lives, it is necessary to understand the extent of religion in responding to various social problems. Religion is reduced to provide rules of life and as an instrument for understanding the world that will bring happiness to human life. In line with these changes, finally emerged three forms of fundamental paradigms that developed among Muslims in the face of globalization, namely: conservative, liberal and alternative paradigms. Keywords: Paradigm, Islamic, Globalization.


Author(s):  
Kai Erikson

This book is a masterful introduction to, and appreciation of, sociology as a window into our world. The culmination of a distinguished career, and a fascinating exploration into the nature of human social life, the book describes the field of sociology as a way of looking at the world rather than as a simple gathering of facts about it. It notes that sociologists look out at the same human scenes as poets, historians, economists, or any other observers of the vast social landscape spread out before them, but select different aspects of that vast panorama to focus on and attend to. The book considers how sociology became a field of study, and how it has turned its attention over time to new areas of study such as race and gender and what the book calls “social speciation.” The book provides readers with new ways of The Individual and the Social thinking about human culture and social life.


For frequenters of the library of the Royal Society it is still hard to get accustomed to the absence o f M r H. W . Robinson, who was for so long not only a familiar and friendly figure to all readers, but was a man to whom seekers turned instinctively for information about less familiar records bearing on the history of science, especially those in which the Royal Society was concerned. He was an unrivalled expert on matters contained in the Society’s extensive archives, which were within recent memory not so well catalogued and classified as they are today, thanks to the labours o f Mr Kaye and his collaborators. He had a rare knowledge, the fruit of years o f study, o f the whereabouts of scarce books, documents and manuscripts bearing on particular aspects o f the science of the past, o f delineations of scientific instruments and of portraits of men o f science, and this knowledge he was always delighted to place at the disposal of serious enquirers. Scholars in all parts of the world have in their publications acknowledged with gratitude their indebtedness to him for recondite information gladly furnished. Henry William Robinson was born on 23 March 1888, in W ood Green, a pleasant suburb in the north of London, and throughout his life he was closely associated with the social life of the neighbourhood.


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