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Reflecting on Reflexivity
The Human Condition as an Ontological Surprise
Edited by T. M. S. Evens, Don Handelman and Christopher Roberts
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324 pages, bibliog., index
ISBN 978-1-78238-751-0 70% OFF! $150.00/£107.00 $45.00/£32.10 Hb Published (March 2016)
ISBN 978-1-78920-092-8 25% OFF! $34.95/£24.00 $26.21/£18.00 Pb Published (September 2018)
eISBN 978-1-78238-753-4 eBook
Description
Humanness supposes innate and profound reflexivity. This volume approaches the concept of reflexivity on two different yet related analytical planes. Whether implicitly or explicitly, both planes of thought bear critically on reflexivity in relation to the nature of selfhood and the very idea of the autonomous individual, ethics, and humanness, science as such and social science, ontological dualism and fundamental ambiguity. On the one plane, a collection of original and innovative ethnographically based essays is offered, each of which is devoted to ways in which reflexivity plays a fundamental role in human social life and the study of it; on the other—anthropo-philosophical and developed in the volume’s Preface, Introduction, and Postscript—it is argued that reflexivity distinguishes—definitively, albeit relatively—the being and becoming of the human.
T. M. S. (Terry) Evens is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Don Handelman is Sarah Allen Shaine Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the Hebrew University and a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
Christopher Roberts is Professor of Humanities and Religion at Lewis and Clark College.
Subject: Theory & Methodology in Anthropology
Contents
Preface
Terry Evens, Don Handelman, and Christopher Roberts
Introduction: Reflexivity and Selfhood
Terry Evens, Don Handelman, and Christopher Roberts
SECTION I: REFLEXIVITY, SOCIAL SCIENCE, AND ETHICS
Chapter 1. Is There a Difference between Doing Good and Doing Good Research: Anthropology and Social Activism, or the Productive Limits of Reflexivity
Terry Evens
Chapter 2. The Ethic of Being Wrong: Taking Levinas into the Field
Don Handelman
Chapter 3. Cosmopolitan Reflexivity: Consciousness and the Non-Locality of Ritual Meaning
Koenraad Stroeken
Chapter 4. Religionist Reflexivity and the Machiavellian Believer
Christopher Roberts
SECTION II: REFLEXIVITY, PRACTICE, AND EMBODIMENT
Chapter 5. Wittgenstein's Critique of Representation and the Ethical Reflexivity of Anthropological Discourse
Horacio Ortiz
Chapter 6. Human Cockfighting in the Squared Circle: Thai Boxing as a Matter of Reflexivity
Paul Schissel
Chapter 7. Perfect Praxis in AkidÅ—A Reflexive Body-Self
Einat Bar-On Cohen
SECTION III: REFLEXIVITY, SELF, AND OTHER
Chapter 8. Tension, Reflection, and Agency in the Life of a Hausa Grain Trader
Paul Clough
Chapter 9. Reflexivity in Intersubjective and Intercultural Borderlinking
René Devisch
SECTION IV: REFLEXIVITY, DEMOCRACY, AND GOVERNMENT
Chapter 10. The Latent Effects of the Distribution of Political Reflexivity in Contemporary Democracies
Yaron Ezrahi
Postscript: Reflexivity and Social Science
Terry Evens
Index