The Experts below are selected from a list of 279 Experts worldwide ranked by ideXlab platform

Sylvia Letsosa - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

Bryan Pfaffenberger - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

  • Social Anthropology of Technology
    Annual Review of Anthropology, 1992
    Co-Authors: Bryan Pfaffenberger
    Abstract:

    At the onset of the 20th century, anthropologists such as Balfour, Marett, and Haddon could readily identify three spheres of strength in anthropological research: material culture, Social organization, and physical Anthropology (49). The study of technology and material culture, however, was about to be jettisoned, and with stunning finality. By 1914, Wissler (103:447) complained that the study of these subjects “has been quite out of fashion.” Researchers ,were giving their attention to “language, art, ceremonies, and Social organization” in place of the former almost obsessive concentration on the minute description of techniques and artifacts, and on the tendency to study artifacts without regard for their Social and cultural context. As I aim to show in this chapter, the anthropological study of technology and material culture is poised, finally, for a comeback, if in a different guise. Its findings may significantly alter the way anthropologists analyze everyday life, cultural reproducflon, and human evolution. If this all-but-forgotten field is to play such a role, it must overcome nearly a century of peripheral status. In Anthropology's quest for professionalism, material-culture studies came to stand for all that was academically embarrassing: extreme and conjectural forms of diffusionist and evolutionist explanation, armchair Anthropology, “field work” undertaken by amateurs on collecting holidays, and the simplistic interpretation of artifacts shorn of their Social and cultural context. Malinowski, for instance, condemned the “purely technological enthusiasms” of material culture ethnologists and adopted an “intransigent position” that the study of “technology alone” is “scientifically sterile” (69:460). The study of technology and material culture, a topic that

  • Social Anthropology of technology
    Annual Review of Anthropology, 1992
    Co-Authors: Bryan Pfaffenberger
    Abstract:

    At the onset of the 20th century, anthropologists such as Balfour, Marett, and Haddon could readily identify three spheres of strength in anthropological research: material culture, Social organization, and physical Anthropology (49). The study of technology and material culture, however, was about to be jettisoned, and with stunning finality. By 1914, Wissler (103:447) complained that the study of these subjects "has been quite out of fashion." Researchers were giving their attention to "language, art, ceremonies, and Social organiza­ tion" in place of the former almost obsessive concentration on the minute description of techniques and artifacts, and on the tendency to study artifacts without rcgard for their Social and cultural context. As I aim to show in this chapter, the anthropological study of technology and material culture is poised, finally, for a comeback, if in a different guise. Its findings may signifi­ cantly alter the way anthropologists analyze everyday life, cultural reproduc­ tion, and human evolution. If this all-but-forgotten field is to play such a role, it must overcome nearly a century of peripheral status. In Anthropology's quest for professionalism, material-culture studies came to stand for all that was academically embarrass­ ing: extreme and conjectural forms of diffusionist and evolutionist explana­ tion, armchair Anthropology, "field work" undertaken by amateurs on collecting holidays, and the simplistic interpretation of artifacts shorn of their Social and cultural context. Malinowski, for instance, condemned the "purely technological enthusiasms" of material culture ethnologists and adopted an "intransigent position" that the study of "technology alone" is "scientifically sterile" (69:460). The study of technology and material culture, a topic that

Maia Green - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

  • Representing poverty and attacking representations: Perspectives on poverty from Social Anthropology
    Journal of Development Studies, 2006
    Co-Authors: Maia Green
    Abstract:

    This article considers the potential contribution of Social Anthropology to understanding poverty as both Social relation and category of international development practice. Despite its association with research in communities and countries now considered poor Anthropology has remained disengaged from the current poverty agenda. This disengagement is partly explained by the disciplinary starting point of Anthropology which explores the processes though which categories come to have salience. It is accentuated by the relationship of Anthropology as a discipline to the development policy and the research commissioned to support it. An anthropological perspective on poverty and inequality can shed light on the ways in which particular Social categories come to be situated as poor. It can also reveal the Social processes through which poverty as policy objective becomes institutionalised in development practice and in the Social institutions established to monitor, assess and address it

Jonathan Spencer - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

  • british Social Anthropology a retrospective
    Annual Review of Anthropology, 2000
    Co-Authors: Jonathan Spencer
    Abstract:

    ▪ Abstract This article reviews the history of British Social Anthropology, concentrating on the expansion of the discipline in the British university sector since the 1960s. Particular emphasis is placed on the relationship between Social Anthropology and the main source of its funding, the British government, in particular the Economic and Social Research Council. After a particularly difficult time in the 1980s, Social Anthropology in the 1990s has grown swiftly. In this period of growth, formerly crucial boundaries—between academic Anthropology and practical policy-related research, between “Social” and “cultural” Anthropology—appear to have withered away. Yet British Social Anthropology retains much of its distinctive identity, not least because of the peculiar institutional structures, such as the research seminar, in which the Social anthropological habitus is reproduced in new generations of researchers.

Donna Watson - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.