Anthropology- Bangladesh

BEING THERE: FIELDWORK IN ANTHROPOLOGY

EDITED BY ; C. W. WATSON

BEING THERE.pdf

A HISTORY OF ANTHROPOLOGY

A HISTORY OF ANTHROPOLOGY

THOMAS HYLLAND ERIKSEN AND FINN SIVERT NIELSEN

This is an ambitious book, but not a pretentious one. It is ambitious in that it tries, within the space of relatively few pages, to make sense of the diverse history of anthropology. Our priorities, omissions and interpretations are bound to be contested, since there can be no single authoritative history of anything, least of all a sprawling, dynamic and disputed field like anthropology. Still, the book is unpretentious, since our aim throughout has been to offer a sober and balanced account of the historical growth of anthropology as a discipline, not to propose a radical re-interpretation of it. There exists a growing scholarly literature on the history of anthropology, which this textbook does not try to compete with. Nevertheless, we know of no existing book with exactly the same scope as this one. The scholarly literature is often specialised, and existing textbooks on anthropological history are either more theoretically oriented or more committed to one or a few professional traditions. Although we may not always have succeeded, we have strived to give an impression of the parallel, convergent and interdependent developments of all major traditions in social and cultural anthropology.

The book is chronologically ordered. Beginning with the ‘proto-anthropologies’ from ancient Greece to the Enlightenment, it continues with the creation of academic anthropology and the growth of classical sociology during the nineteenth century. The third chapter concentrates on the four men who, by general consensus, are considered the founding fathers of twentieth-century anthropology, and the fourth chapter indicates how their work was continued, and diversified, by their students. The fifth and sixth chapters both deal with the same period – from about 1946 to about 1968, but concentrate on different trends: Chapter 5 discusses the theoretical controversies surrounding concepts of society and social integration, while Chapter 6 covers concepts of culture and symbolic meaning. In Chapter 7, the intellectual and political upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s are presented, with emphasis on the impulses emanating from Marxism and feminism. Chapter 8 deals with the 1980s, concentrating on the postmodernist movement and its close cousin, postcolonialism, two critical trends, which seriously challenged the discipline’s self-confidence; while the ninth and final chapter presents a few of the major post-postmodern trends that emerged during the 1990s.

A_History_of_Anthropology-074531385X.pdf

ANTHROPOLOGY

BY R.R. MARETT, M.A. READER IN SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD AUTHOR OF “THE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION,” ETC.

“Bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh, are these half-brutish prehistoric brothers. Girdled about with the immense darkness of this mysterious universe even as we are, they were born and died, suffered and struggled. Given over to fearful crime and passion, plunged in the blackest ignorance, preyed upon by hideous and grotesque delusions, yet steadfastly serving the profoundest of ideals in their fixed faith that existence in any form is better than non-existence, they ever rescued triumphantly from the jaws of ever-imminent destruction the torch of life which, thanks to them, now lights the world for us. How small, indeed, seem individual distinctions when we look back on these overwhelming numbers of human beings panting and straining under the pressure of that vital want! And how inessential in the eyes of God must be the small surplus of the individual’s merit, swamped as it is in the vast ocean of the common merit of mankind, dumbly and undauntedly doing the fundamental duty, and living the heroic life! We grow humble and reverent as we contemplate the prodigious spectacle.”
WILLIAM JAMES, in Human Immortality.

Anthropology_Produced by Ron Swanson.doc

Biological Anthropology and Ethics: From Repatriation to Genetic Identity

EDITED BY TRUDY R. TURNER

Anthropology can be defined as the study of humankind in all its aspects. Biological anthropology is one of the four fields of anthropology. Cultural anthropologists, archaeologists, and linguists approach the breadth of the study of the human experience from the touchstone of culture. Biological anthropologists concentrate on the biological basis of human behavior, diversity, and evolution using evolutionary theory as the major organizing principle. It is a particularly diverse field of inquiry. Practitioners of the field face an array of ethical issues as they confront their involvement and obligations to their research subjects, their discipline, society, and the environment. These issues are complex and often contentious. Many biological anthropologists are most familiar with the issues in their own particular subfield; they are not always aware of the similarities across subfields. The participants in this volume represent the major subfields of biological anthropology—primatology, genetics, human biology, paleontology, and skeletal biology. Each participant has confronted ethical challenges in his or her work and has reflected on the nature of ethical challenges and principles in the discipline. The underlying assumptions inherent in the ways we address these ethical issues provide the norms (or principles of action) of the discipline. A code of professional ethics, a common consensus, forms the framework for the ways members of our profession should act.

Biological Anthropology and Ethics.pdf