“Michael M. J. Fischer’s ‘anthropology outside the frame’ takes on an astounding range of contemporary subjects: Austrian politics, Polish and Iranian films, cyberspace, virtual surgery, xenotransplantation, the autobiographical construction of memory, the technoscientific representation of the social world, and the ethical complexities of fieldwork among tribal peoples. His extension of ethnography beyond its traditional concerns to the investigation of the emerging forms of human consciousness usually vaguely grouped as ‘late-’ or ‘postmodern’ sets out a broad new agenda for cultural description and political critique. An unstandard, adventurous, eye-opening work.”—Clifford Geertz

“True to its title,<i> Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice</i> is about worlds coming into being in technoculture. Attentive especially to the new biologies and biotechnologies, information technologies, and ecological and environmental matters, Michael M. J. Fischer explores what he calls ‘ethical plateaus’ or domains of ethical challenge. This wonderful book neither condemns nor glorifies emergent worlds; instead it gives us deep and intelligent analysis and reflection from a distinctive ethnographic point of view. ‘Culture’ comes alive here. As Fischer reminds us vividly, culture is not a variable. Culture is about relationships, about relating as a verb. Culture is a passage and a topos, and Fischer is a masterful guide.”—Donna Haraway

Anthropology as Cultural Critique helped redefine cultural anthropology in the 1980s. Now, with Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice, pathbreaking scholar Michael M. J. Fischer moves the discussion to a consideration of the groundwork laid in the 1990s for engagements with the fast-changing worlds of technoscience, telemedia saturation, and the reconstruction of societies after massive trauma. Fischer argues that new methodologies and conceptual tools are necessitated by the fact that cultures of every kind are becoming more complex and differentiated at the same time that globalization and modernization are bringing them into exponentially increased interaction. Anthropology, Fischer explains, now operates in a series of third spaces well beyond the nineteenth- and twentieth-century dualisms of us/them, primitive/civilized, East/West, or North/South. He contends that more useful paradigms—such as informatics, multidimensional scaling, autoimmunity, and visual literacy beyond the frame—derive from the contemporary sciences and media technologies.A vigorous advocate of the anthropological voice and method, Fischer emphasizes the ethical dimension of cultural anthropology. Ethnography, he suggests, is uniquely situated to gather and convey observations fundamental to the creation of new social institutions for an evolving civil society. In Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice Fischer considers a dazzling array of subjects—among them Iranian and Polish cinema, cyberspace, autobiographical and fictional narrative, and genomic biotechnologies—and, in the process, demonstrates a cultural anthropology for a highly networked world. He lays the groundwork for a renewed and powerful twenty-first-century anthropology characterized by a continued insistence on empirical fieldwork, engagements with other disciplines, and dialogue with interlocutors around the globe.
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Considers an array of subjects - among them Iranian and Polish cinema, cyberspace, autobiographical and fictional narrative, and biogenetics - and, in the process, demonstrates a cultural anthropology for a highly networked world. This book lays the groundwork for a renewed and powerful twenty-first century anthropology.
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Acknowledgments ix Prologue: The Third Spaces of Anthropology 1 Emergent Forms of Life 1 Deep Play and Social Responsibility in Vienna 29 2 Emergent Forms of Life: Anthropologies of Late or Post Modernities 37 Critique within Technoscientific Worlds 3 Filmic Judgment and Cultural Critique: Iranian Cinema in a Teletechnological World 61 4 Cultural Critique with a Hammer, Gouge, and Woodblock: Art and Medicine in the Age of Social Retraumatization 90 5 Ethnographic Critique and Technoscientific Narratives: The Old Mole, Ethical Plateaus, and the Governance of Emergent Biosocial Polities 145 Subjectivities in an Age of Global Connectivity 6 Autobiograhpical Voices (1,2,3) and Mosaic Memory: Ethnicity, Religion, Science (An Inquiry into the Nature of Autobiographical Genres and Their Uses in Extending Social Theory) 179 7 Post-Avant-Garde Tasks of Polish Film: Ethnographic Odklamane 225 New Pedagogies and Ethics 8 Worlding Cyperspace: Toward a Critical Ethnography in Space, Time, and Theory 261 9 Calling the Future(s): Delay Call Forwarding 305 I. Las Meninas and Robotic-Virtual Surgical systems: the Visual Thread/Fiber-Optic Carrier 309 II. Modules for a Science, Technology, and Society Curriculum: STS@theTurn_[ ]ooo.mit.edu 333 10 In the Science Zone: The Yanomami and the Fight for Representation 370 Epilogue: On Distinguishing Good and Evil in Emergent Forms of Life (Woodblock Print to Newspaper Illustration) 393 Notes 397 Bibliography 427 Index 463
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Essays by a leading anthropologist on current dilemmas of theory, science, ethics, and cinema.

Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9780822332381
Publisert
2003-12-10
Utgiver
Vendor
Duke University Press
Vekt
658 gr
Aldersnivå
P, 06
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Heftet

Om bidragsyterne

Michael M. J. Fischer is Professor of Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Lecturer in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He is the author of Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution and coauthor of Debating Muslims: Cultural Dialogues in Postmodernity and Tradition and Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences.