An Anthropology of the Enlightenment

An Anthropology of the Enlightenment
Author: Nigel Rapport
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2018-12-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 1350086622

In a time of intellectual uncertainty, the question of how we know what we do about human lives becomes ever more pressing. The essays collated in this volume argue that anthropology can be used to acknowledge, explore and interpret divergence and ideological conflict over human meaning. Using questions raised as part of the Enlightenment movement, this volume is structured around some of the key themes the Enlightenment fostered, including human nature, time, Earth and the Cosmos, beauty, order, harmony and design, moral sentiments, and the query of whether wealthy nations make for healthy publics. The volume focuses in particular on how 'moral sentiment' offered a guiding idea in Enlightenment thought. The idea of 'moral sentiment' is central to the essays' grappling with the ethical anxieties of contemporary anthropology. The essays therefore trace historical connections and fissures and focus on Adam Smith's attempts toward an understanding of what would later be called 'modernity'. With an afterword from Marilyn Strathern, this volume will be a strong addition to the Association of Social Anthropologists conference proceedings.

An Anthropology of the Enlightenment

An Anthropology of the Enlightenment
Author: Huon Wardle
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 187
Release: 2020-05-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000181561

In a time of intellectual uncertainty, the question of how we know what we do about human lives becomes ever more pressing. The essays collated in this volume argue that anthropology can be used to acknowledge, explore and interpret divergence and ideological conflict over human meaning. Using questions raised as part of the Enlightenment movement, this volume is structured around some of the key themes the Enlightenment fostered, including human nature, time, Earth and the Cosmos, beauty, order, harmony and design, moral sentiments, and the query of whether wealthy nations make for healthy publics. The volume focuses in particular on how 'moral sentiment' offered a guiding idea in Enlightenment thought. The idea of 'moral sentiment' is central to the essays' grappling with the ethical anxieties of contemporary anthropology. The essays therefore trace historical connections and fissures and focus on Adam Smith's attempts toward an understanding of what would later be called 'modernity'. With an afterword from Marilyn Strathern, this volume will be a strong addition to the Association of Social Anthropologists conference proceedings.

The Anthropology of the Enlightenment

The Anthropology of the Enlightenment
Author: Larry Wolff
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 678
Release: 2007-09-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 0804779430

The modern enterprise of anthropology, with all of its important implications for cross-cultural perceptions, perspectives, and self-consciousness emerged from the eighteenth-century intellectual context of the Enlightenment. If the Renaissance discovered perspective in art, it was the Enlightenment that articulated and explored the problem of perspective in viewing history, culture, and society. If the Renaissance was the age of oceanic discovery—most dramatically the discovery of the New World of America—the critical reflections of the Enlightenment brought about an intellectual rediscovery of the New World and thus laid the foundations for modern anthropology. The contributions that constitute this book present the multiple anthropological facets of the Enlightenment, and suggest that the character of its intellectual engagements—acknowledging global diversity, interpreting human societies, and bridging cultural difference—must be understood as a whole to be fundamentally anthropological.

A Companion to Adorno

A Companion to Adorno
Author: Peter E. Gordon
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 690
Release: 2020-02-25
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1119146933

A definitive contribution to scholarship on Adorno, bringing together the foremost experts in the field As one of the leading continental philosophers of the last century, and one of the pioneering members of the Frankfurt School, Theodor W. Adorno is the author of numerous influential—and at times quite radical—works on diverse topics in aesthetics, social theory, moral philosophy, and the history of modern philosophy, all of which concern the contradictions of modern society and its relation to human suffering and the human condition. Having authored substantial contributions to critical theory which contain searching critiques of the ‘culture industry’ and the ‘identity thinking’ of modern Western society, Adorno helped establish an interdisciplinary but philosophically rigorous study of culture and provided some of the most startling and revolutionary critiques of Western society to date. The Blackwell Companion to Adorno is the largest collection of essays by Adorno specialists ever gathered in a single volume. Part of the acclaimed Blackwell Companions to Philosophy series, this important contribution to the field explores Adorno’s lasting impact on many sub-fields of philosophy. Seven sections, encompassing a diverse range of topics and perspectives, explore Adorno’s intellectual foundations, his critiques of culture, his views on ethics and politics, and his analyses of history and domination. Provides new research and fresh perspectives on Adorno’s views and writings Offers an authoritative, single-volume resource for Adorno scholarship Addresses renewed interest in Adorno’s significance to contemporary questions in philosophy Presents over 40 essays written by international-recognized experts in the field A singular advancement in Adorno scholarship, the Companion to Adorno is an indispensable resource for Adorno specialists and anyone working in modern European philosophy, contemporary cultural criticism, social theory, German history, and aesthetics.

Race and the Enlightenment

Race and the Enlightenment
Author: Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
Total Pages: 178
Release: 1997-02-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780631201366

Emmanuel Eze collects into one convenient and controversial volume the most important and influential writings on race that the European Enlightenment produced.

Before Boas

Before Boas
Author: Han F. Vermeulen
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 638
Release: 2015-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 0803277385

The history of anthropology has been written from multiple viewpoints, often from perspectives of gender, nationality, theory, or politics. Before Boas delves deeper into issues concerning anthropology's academic origins to present a groundbreaking study that reveals how ethnography and ethnology originated during the eighteenth rather than the nineteenth century, developing parallel to anthropology, or the "natural history of man." Han F. Vermeulen explores primary and secondary sources from Russia, Germany, Austria, the United States, the Netherlands, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, France, and Great Britain in tracing how "ethnography" originated as field research by German-speaking historians and naturalists in Siberia (Russia) during the 1730s and 1740s, was generalized as "ethnology" by scholars in Göttingen (Germany) and Vienna (Austria) during the 1770s and 1780s, and was subsequently adopted by researchers in other countries. Before Boas argues that anthropology and ethnology were separate sciences during the Age of Reason, studying racial and ethnic diversity, respectively. Ethnography and ethnology focused not on "other" cultures but on all peoples of all eras. Following G. W. Leibniz, researchers in these fields categorized peoples primarily according to their languages. Franz Boas professionalized the holistic study of anthropology from the 1880s into the twentieth century.

Human Nature and the French Revolution

Human Nature and the French Revolution
Author: Xavier Martin
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2003-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781571814159

What view of man did the French Revolutionaries hold? Anyone who purports to be interested in the "Rights of Man" could be expected to see this question as crucial and yet, surprisingly, it is rarely raised. Through his work as a legal historian, Xavier Martin came to realize that there is no unified view of man and that, alongside the "official" revolutionary discourse, very divergent views can be traced in a variety of sources from the Enlightenment to the Napoleonic Code. Michelet's phrases, "Know men in order to act upon them" sums up the problem that Martin's study constantly seeks to elucidate and illustrate: it reveals the prevailing tendency to see men as passive, giving legislators and medical people alike free rein to manipulate them at will. His analysis impels the reader to revaluate the Enlightenment concept of humanism. By drawing on a variety of sources, the author shows how the anthropology of Enlightenment and revolutionary France often conflicts with concurrent discourses.

Anthropology and the German Enlightenment

Anthropology and the German Enlightenment
Author: Katherine M. Faull
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 1995
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780838753057

"What was the role of anthropology in the German Enlightenment? Why did this discipline emerge as one of the most popular modes of inquiry in the eighteenth century, permeating fields as disparate as aesthetics, medicine, and law? As the essays in this volume show, the "body" of Enlightenment knowledge was by no means universal." "During the German Enlightenment the study of nature, humanity, and everything that humanity created was the topic of the day. But the period that defined moral reason as the sovereign human faculty also applied its scrutiny to the body that such a mind inhabited. What did it look like? Could moral superiority be deduced from physiognomy?" "In the massive effort to "educate" the German populace on what were seen to be the fundamental, a priori differences (physical and moral) between the sexes and the races, the European bourgeois man was considered to embody all human virtues and talents and stem from the only race and sex capable of ruling itself democratically and rationally. To examine the role of anthropology in this enterprise, contributors to this volume were asked to investigate what constitutes the German Enlightenment's interaction between its self-proclaimed rationalism and the pervasive presence of the non-rational; that is, the corporeal."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Enlightenment, Passion, Modernity

Enlightenment, Passion, Modernity
Author: Mark S. Micale
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 554
Release: 2000
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780804731164

Enriched by the methods and insights of social history, the history of mentalites, linguistics, anthropology, literary theory, and art history, intellectual and cultural history are experiencing a renewed vitality. The far-ranging essays in this volume, by an internationally distinguished group of scholars, represent a generous sampling of these new studies."