scholarly journals On ghosts and mirrors: A contribution on studying anthropology of difference

Sociologija ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aleksandar Boskovic

Starting from the premise that contemporary social sciences are involved in producing and chasing ghosts, the paper presents several key debates in contemporary social and cultural anthropology. One of them is the issue of colonialism, and the other one is the uneasy relationship between feminism and anthropology. Taking the paradigm of Strathern's 'partial connections,' it is claimed that the only way to increase our understanding of the world we live in, is accepting its complexities and ambiguities, and understanding contexts and concrete situations they arise from.

1979 ◽  
Vol 3 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 242-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Kuklick

Despite differences in coloration Miller and Benson are birds of a feather. Although he is no Pollyanna, Miller believes that there has been a modest and decent series of advances in the social sciences and that the most conscientious, diligent, and intelligent researchers will continue to add to this stock of knowledge. Benson is much more pessimistic about the achievements of yesterday and today but, in turn, offers us the hope of a far brighter tomorrow. Miller explains Benson’s hyperbolic views about the past and future by distinguishing between pure and applied science and by pointing out Benson’s naivete about politics: the itch to understand the world is different from the one to make it better; and, Miller says, because Benson sees that we have not made things better, he should not assume we do not know more about them; Benson ought to realize, Miller adds, that the way politicians translate basic social knowledge into social policy need not bring about rational or desirable results. On the other side, Benson sees more clearly than Miller that the development of science has always been intimately intertwined with the control of the environment and the amelioration of the human estate.


Author(s):  
Uljana Feest ◽  
Friedrich Steinle

The authors provide an overview of philosophical discussions about the roles of experiment in science. First, they cover two approaches that took shape under the heading of “new experimentalism” in the 1980s and 1990s. One approach was primarily concerned with questions about entity realism, robustness, and epistemological strategies. The other has focused on exploratory experiments and the dynamic processes of experimental research as such, highlighting its iterative nature and drawing out the ways in which such research is grounded in experimental systems, concepts and operational definitions. Second, the authors look at more recent philosophical work on the epistemology of causal inference, in particular highlighting discussions in the philosophy of the behavioral and social sciences, concerning the extrapolation from laboratory contexts to the world.


1988 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 160-163 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fred W. Riggs

Corning and Hines make a useful contribution to the study of politics by distinguishing sharply between “political development” and “political evolution.” Their emphasis on the multidisciplinary dimensions of real life changes as they occur (and have occurred) throughout the world is also needed. We must, assuredly, go beyond political science, both to the other social sciences (including economics) and also, notably, to the life sciences.


1950 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 143-149
Author(s):  
W. Rex Crawford

The only words in the title of this symposium which do not cause difficulty are “of” and “in,” since even Latin America is a “nomer” that many protest is a “misnomer,” for some parts of the region southeast of the U.S.A., and “pathology” and “democracy” can get into water as hot and deep as any that lies under the thin ice over which the social sciences skate. The very lumping together in our discussion of twenty republics varying as they do in Latin America is a procedure of doubtful accuracy, and one which at first encounter arouses the ire of any good nationalist in these countries. The term “pathological” suggests too strongly a complacent superior attitude on our own part that may befit the propagandist or the naive and uninformed man on the street, but not the social scientist. The world does not fall so neatly into the patterns of perfect democracy and the outer darkness as Mr. Churchill has supposed. Can we not accept a certain relativity in these matters and remember the large-sized mote in our own eye?With the struggle of almost innumerable thinkers to define the direction and goal, we are surely familiar. The writer has no intention of assembling all the definitions available, for if they were all assembled, sociologists might lay the emphasis not upon forms and constitutions so much as upon something broader that earlier theologians would have called men's will and men's love. Since the development of “Mr. Tylor's science,” cultural anthropology, we would be more likely to say that the legal arrangements grow out of and express the culture; that back of them lies a slow secular growth of the idea that personality, the freedom and full development of the individual are ultimate values, not to be sacrificed to the state; that power may be necessary for survival, and that unity or consensus or conformity may be necessary to power, but that something like Albert Schweitzer's “reverence for life” is a deeper principle. These things are no sooner said than we realize that we often sin against the ideals we cherish and fear the freedom to which we give lip-service. The practice falls far short of the preaching.


2016 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Johannes Reimer ◽  
Zuze Banda

This article posits that Christians, while being in the world, are not of this world. This duality confronts them with the twofold need to be fully compliant with the demands of their faith and its calling to evangelise this world, on the one hand; and to live fully as fellow citizens of this world, and to cooperate with them in search of solutions for this world’s challenges, on the other hand. Lessons are drawn from cultural anthropology theories to underscore dynamic processes of change, that start from non-threatening positions of working together inclusively, thus building trust, and advancing progressively, paving ways for dialogically sharing the Gospel. These developments are at the end argued and justified theologically, and then concluded with pragmatic examples drawn from live ministries born out of the co-author’s initiatives.Keywords: Evangelism; missions; cultural-anthropology; inclusiveness; change; trust; convivential; society-transformative


1941 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert C. Brooks

So controversial is the subject of thai address–“Reflections on the ‘World Revolution’ of 1940”–that a few words of justification in in order. You may be assured that it was not chosen without considerable thought and trepidation. To begin with, I made a study of the addresses of my thirty-four predecessors, as presented in the pages of the American Political Science Review. Without exception, these papers impressed me as wise, scholarly, finely stated, and cogently argued. Occasionally they were lightened by the lambent play of humor. On the other hand, several of them wen decidedly dry–a quality lees refreshing in discourses than in wines. Many of my predecessors dealt penetratingly and profoundly with topics taken from the fields of specialisation wherein they were masters, often the greatest of American masters. Others discussed broadly and philosophically the nature of political science, its relations to the social sciences in general, or the problems encountered in teaching this science.Of course so brief a summary cannot do justice to the almost infinite variety of materials presented by past presidents of our Association. There was, however, one type of subject which as a rule they avoided—that of contemporary, controversial political affairs. Even during the years of the First World War and immediately thereafter, this proved to be the case with only one or two exceptions. No doubt the motive which prompted most of my predecessors to avoid issues of the day was a sound one.


2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 219
Author(s):  
Husnul Muttaqin

Modern social sciences, including sociology, believe that religion is outside the world of science. The growth of the sciences is characterized by their secular perspectives. On the other side, the idea of islamization of social sciences is trapped in the dichotomy between secular social sciences and Islamic social sciences. In this article, the writer discuss an alternative paradigm of the integration between social science (Sociology) and religion. Based on the idea of Prophetic Social Science proposed by Kuntowijoyo, the writer states the importance of an alternative paradigm to develop sociology, called Prophetic Sociology. Prophetic Sociology is constructed based on three fundamental and integral pillars: humanization, liberation and transcendence.


2015 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 43-64
Author(s):  
Lionel Obadia

This paper attempts to outline the issue of “territory”, and other related conceptual categories such as “space”, in religious studies. Based on recent as well as older publications, it critically addresses current debates on the ambiguous status of “territory”. In such discussions, the world is generally described in terms of cultural and religious flows, subjected to deterritorialization processes. However, relocating “space” and “territory” to the forefront of Social Sciences and Religious Studies is urgent, as evidenced empirically and theoretically: it appears that opposing the shifting paradigms of “deterritorialization” on the one hand, and “spatial turn” on the other, stems from epistemological inaccuracies, rather than from a solid ground of empirically-observed religious realities. Hence, this paper offers a series of critical rejoinders to the opposed paradigms of “deterritorialization” and “spatial turn” in religious studies.


Author(s):  
Wisri Wisri ◽  
Abd. Mughni

Attempts to understand reality as it exists in its purity without the need to "intervention" by anything and anyone. Regardless of that advantages and disadvantages, that has provided a valuable contribution to the world of science, overcoming the crisis of methodology, and could become an influential discipline. Phenomenology tries to come near to the object of the study critically and carefully in observation, by not prejudiced with any previous conceptions. Therefore, it is seen as a rigorous science (a tight science) by the phenomenologist. Hermeneutic initially "only" interpret the texts of holy book, in the development becoming more expansive. It spread abroad to the other fields in the social sciences, especially philology, dassein and existential understanding, interpretation, and interpretation system. Finally phenomenology and hermeneutic can be firmly united by Ricoeur. They reputed that they can not be separated and should be accompanied each other. Phenomenology is a basic "irreplaceable" assumption for hermeneutic. On the contrary, hermeneutic is the proponent for phenomenology to running the program well. While the goal of critical theory is to eliminate the various forms of domination and encourage freedom, justice and equality. This theory uses the reflective method by getting constructive critisism to the social administration or institution, politic or economic, which tended to obstructive to the attainment of freedom, justice, and equality.


Each language bears an imprint of the society that speaks it — speakers' relationships to each other, their beliefs and ways of viewing the world, and other facets of their social environment, alongside speakers' habitat, subsistence, and physical environment. A grammar of each language will relate to, and be integrated with, the meanings and the choices which reflect societal practices. Ihe integration of language and society, as reflected in grammatical features of languages, is what this volume is about. It starts with a typological introduction summarising the main issues relevant to the integration of language and society, with special focus on grammatical phenomena. These include honorific forms, genders and classifiers, possession, evidentiality, comparative constructions, and demonstrative systems. It is followed by several studies focused on the ways in which societal norms and beliefs are reflected in languages of diverse typological profiles. The data are drawn from languages of Australia and New Guinea (Dyirbal and Idi), South America (Chamacoco, Ayoreo, Murui, and Tariana), Asia (Japanese, Brokpa, and Dzongkka), and Africa (Iraqw). The volume advances our understanding of the ways in which non-linguistic traits have their correlates in language, and how they change if the society undergoes transformations. The outcomes will be a valuable resource for scholars and students of typology, general linguistics, linguistic and cultural anthropology, and social sciences.


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