Why America′s Top Pundits Are Wrong - Anthropoligists Talk Back

1. Auflage 2004
ISBN: 978-0-520-24356-9
Verlag: University of California Press

Buch, Englisch, Band 13, 282 Seiten, Trade Paperback, Format (B × H): 151 mm x 230 mm, Gewicht: 404 g

Reihe: California Series in Public Anthropology

In this fresh, literate, and biting critique of current thinking on some of today's most important and controversial topics, leading anthropologists take on some of America's top pundits.

This absorbing collection of essays subjects such popular commentators as Thomas Friedman, Samuel Huntington, Robert Kaplan, and Dinesh D'Souza to cold, hard scrutiny and finds that their writing is often misleadingly simplistic, culturally ill-informed, and politically dangerous. Mixing critical reflection with insights from their own fieldwork, twelve distinguished anthropologists respond by offering fresh perspectives on globalization, ethnic violence, social justice, and the biological roots of behavior. They take on such topics as the collapse of Yugoslavia, the consumer practices of the American poor, American foreign policy in the Balkans, and contemporary debates over race, welfare, and violence against women. In the clear, vigorous prose of the pundits themselves, these contributors reveal the hollowness of what often passes as prevailing wisdom and passionately demonstrate the need for a humanistically complex and democratic understanding of the contemporary world.

Available: November 2004

Pub Date: January 2005

Autoren/Hrsg.

Besteman, Catherine

Gusterson, Hugh

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Politische Soziologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Wissenssoziologie, Wissenschaftssoziologie, Techniksoziologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Ethnologie Theorie und Methoden der Ethnologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Ethnologie Kultur- und Sozialethnologie: Allgemeines
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Kultursoziologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politische Kultur Politische Soziologie und Psychologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1. Introduction
Hugh Gusterson and Catherine Besteman
2. The Seven Deadly Sins of Samuel Huntington
Hugh Gusterson
3. Samuel Huntington, Meet the Nuer:

Kinship, Local Knowledge, and the Clash of Civilizations
Keith Brown
4. Haunted by the Imaginations of the Past:

Robert Kaplan’s Balkan Ghosts
Tone Bringa
5. Why I Disagree with Robert Kaplan
Catherine Besteman
6. Globalization and Thomas Friedman
Angelique Haugerud
7. On The Lexus and the Olive Tree, by Thomas L. Friedman
Ellen Hertz and Laura Nader
8. Extrastate Globalization of the Illicit
Carolyn Nordstrom
9. Class Politics and Scavenger Anthropology in

Dinesh D’Souza’s Virtue of Prosperity
Kath Weston
10. Sex on the Brain: A Natural History of Rape

and the Dubious Doctrines of Evolutionary Psychology
Stefan Helmreich and Heather Paxson
11. Anthropology and The Bell Curve
Jonathan Marks
Notes
Suggested Further Reading
List of Contributors
Acknowledgments
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Catherine Besteman is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Colby College and author of Unraveling Somalia: Race, Violence, and the Legacy of Slavery (1999), among other books. Hugh Gusterson, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Science at MIT, is author of Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War (California, 1996) and People of the Bomb (2004).