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Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject
Sherry B. Ortner
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Description for Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject
Paperback. The award-winning anthropologist Sherry B. Ortner draws on her longstanding interest in theories of cultural practice to rethink key concepts of culture, agency, and subjectivity. Series: A John Hope Franklin Center Book. Num Pages: 200 pages. BIC Classification: JHM. Category: (P) Professional & Vocational. Dimension: 233 x 155 x 25. Weight in Grams: 298. Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject. 216 pages. Draws on the author's longstanding interest in theories of cultural practice to rethink key concepts of culture, agency, and subjectivity for the social sciences of the twenty-first century. This work contains seven theoretical and interpretive essays that advocate reconfiguring, rather than abandoning, the concept of culture. Cateogry: (P) Professional & Vocational. BIC Classification: JHM. Dimension: 157 x 235 x 12. Weight: 290.
In Anthropology and Social Theory the award-winning anthropologist Sherry B. Ortner draws on her longstanding interest in theories of cultural practice to rethink key concepts of culture, agency, and subjectivity for the social sciences of the twenty-first century. The seven theoretical and interpretive essays in this volume each advocate reconfiguring, rather than abandoning, the concept of culture. Similarly, they all suggest that a theory which depends on the interested action of social beings—specifically practice theory, associated especially with the work of Pierre Bourdieu—requires a more developed notion of human agency and a richer conception of human subjectivity. Ortner shows how social theory must both build upon and move beyond classic practice theory in order to understand the contemporary world.
Some of the essays reflect explicitly on theoretical concerns: the relationship between agency and power, the problematic quality of ethnographic studies of resistance, and the possibility of producing an anthropology of subjectivity. Others are ethnographic studies that apply Ortner’s theoretical framework. In these, she investigates aspects of social class, looking at the relationship between race and middle-class identity in the United States, the often invisible nature of class as a cultural identity and as an analytical category in social inquiry, and the role that public culture and media play in the creation of the class anxieties of Generation X. Written with Ortner’s characteristic lucidity, these essays constitute a major statement about the future of social theory from one of the leading anthropologists of our time.
Product Details
Publisher
Duke University Press
Number of pages
200
Format
Paperback
Publication date
2006
Series
A John Hope Franklin Center Book
Condition
New
Weight
295g
Number of Pages
200
Place of Publication
North Carolina, United States
ISBN
9780822338642
SKU
V9780822338642
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 4 to 8 working days
Ref
99-2
About Sherry B. Ortner
Sherry B. Ortner is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is author of New Jersey Dreaming: Capital, Culture, and the Class of '58, also published by Duke University Press; Life and Death on Mt. Everest: Sherpas and Himalayan Mountaineering; Making Gender: The Politics and Erotics of Culture; and High Religion: A Cultural and Political History of Sherpa Buddhism. She has received numerous awards, including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and the J. I. Staley Prize.
Reviews for Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject
“An important and especially usable collection by one of the most influential essayists in anthropology, introduced by a lucid and original review of key concepts as they have been applied to the remarkable range of Sherry Ortner’s research achievements. Her response to recent challenges to the idea of culture is alone worth the price of the book.”—George Marcus, University of California, Irvine “At once challenging and admirably accessible, these essays trace the thinking of one of anthropology’s most notable practitioners as she—and her discipline—wrestles with key conundrums facing the late-modern social sciences.”—Jean Comaroff, University of Chicago “This is vintage Ortner. No one else writes anthropological theory so clear, so down-to-earth, or so accessible to non-anthropologists.”—William H. Sewell Jr., author of Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation