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2 Anthropology jeremy gould There is no self-evident consensus on what constitutes genuine anthropology. For some, anthropology is defined by its fieldwork-based methodology; for others, it is its nonreductionist commitment to fleshing out complex causalities from the empirical foliage of thick description. For others still, anthropology is simply a general social science of nonWestern societies. This writer’s understanding of the anthropological enterprise revolves around the need for a self-reflective perspective on the nature and use of normative discourse in
11 Anthropological filmmaking: an empirical art Theoretical considerations Anthropological filmmaking is necessarily defined by what is considered anthropological at any particular time. But because there is no unanimity about the definition of anthropology, either today or historically, there are many different conceptions of what constitutes an anthropological film. These range from using film (or video) as a simple recording technology, to films made according to specific rules or principles (designed to yield certain categories of knowledge), to audio
Anthropology after Gluckman places the intimate circle around Max Gluckman, his Manchester School, in the vanguard of modern social anthropology. The book discloses the School’s intense, argument-rich collaborations, developing beyond an original focus in south and central Africa. Where outsiders have seen dominating leadership by Gluckman, a common stock of problems, and much about conflict, Richard Werbner highlights how insiders were drawn to explore many new frontiers in fieldwork and in-depth, reflexive ethnography, because they themselves, in class and gender, ethnicity and national origins, were remarkably inclusive. Characteristically different anthropologists, their careers met the challenges of being a public intellectual, an international celebrity, an institutional good citizen, a social and political activist, an advocate of legal justice. Their living legacies are shown, for the first time, through interlinked social biography and intellectual history to reach broadly across politics, law, ritual, semiotics, development studies, comparative urbanism, social network analysis and mathematical sociology. Innovation – in research methods and techniques, in documenting people’s changing praxis and social relations, in comparative analysis and a destabilizing strategy of re-analysis within ethnography – became the School’s hallmark. Much of this exploration confronted troubling times in Africa, colonial and postcolonial, which put the anthropologists and their anthropological knowledge at risk. The resurgence of debate about decolonization makes the accounts of fierce, End of Empire argument and recent postcolonial anthropology all the more topical. The lessons, even in activism, for social scientists, teachers as well as graduate and undergraduate students are compelling for our own troubled times.
10 Anthropology and the cinematic imagination S ome years ago George Marcus (1990) wrote a paper on the cinematic imagination and its emergence in contemporary ethnographic writing. Marcus was referring to the cinematic technique of montage – not montage as the French use the term, referring to film editing in general, but montage as defined by Soviet theorists and filmmakers such as Kuleshov, Eisenstein and Pudovkin. For them, montage meant the juxtaposition of shots to produce a specific effect. The effect could be kinaesthetic, psychological or intellectual
there has been an unacknowledged relationship of Manchester anthropology that Max Gluckman promoted, and in which F. G. Bailey was trained, to a small network of Melanesianists, myself included. The chapter begins with a brief account of the orientation and interests of what I shall call ‘Mancunian Realism’, Gluckman’s actor-centred methodology. I then appraise the political
This article presents an account of the involvement of forensic anthropology in the investigation of human rights abuses in the modern era, and the difficulties it faces with respect to lack of adequate funding, volatile settings, the presence of unexploded ordnance, corruption in governmental agencies and a lack of good will, absence of support for NGOs and the curtailment of formal judicial proceedings to effect transitional justice. Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Spain, Mexico and the Northern Triangle are provided as regional examples of the problems encountered when attempting to conduct forensic anthropological investigations to locate mass graves, retrieve victims and obtain proper identifications. Interventions by various organisations are highlighted to illustrate their assistance to forensic and non-forensic individuals through technical support, training and mentoring in the areas of crime-scene management and identification techniques. Interventions in mass-grave processing when state agencies have failed, the importance of DNA banks and information from family members and witnesses are also presented.
The construction of an underground car park beneath the main square of Turin, Italy in 2004 led to the unearthing of the skeletonised remains of twenty-two individuals attributable to the early eighteenth century. At this time the city was besieged during the War of the Spanish Succession in a hard-fought battle that resulted in unexpected triumph for the Piedmontese, a victory that marked a fundamental turning point in Italian history. The current study assesses the strength of evidence linking the excavated individuals to the siege and assesses their possible role in the battle through consideration of their biological profiles, patterns of pathology and the presence of traumatic injuries. This article presents the first analysis of evidence for the siege of Turin from an anthropological point of view, providing new and unbiased information from the most direct source of evidence available: the remains of those who actually took part.
In the second half of the nineteenth century there were many parallels between the disciplines of history and anthropology. Both employed an empiricist methodology, and, while historians charted the rise of nations, anthropologists traced the cultural and social evolution of mankind. During the first half of the twentieth century, however, the disciplines diverged, only to re-engage once again towards the end of the century as historians became interested in the symbolic and holistic dimensions of anthropological theory, and anthropologists began to inject a
) To discuss the oeuvre of Bailey seems an impossible task within the space of a short book chapter, and yet not. Recently and usefully, his writings were split into three periods by Stanley Barrett, who speaks of an early ‘Indian phase’, ‘the transactional model’ phase, and a final focus on ‘anthropology at home’ (Barrett 2020a ). Barrett
10 Anthropology and the postcolonial The story of ethnic difference in Africa has threatened to overwhelm larger debates about postcolonial identity politics across the continent. Once told in terms of tribe, now ethnicity and ethnogenesis, this narrative apparently remains spell-binding. Yet as in the colonial politics of everyday life that we saw shown in early Manchester School studies, so too ethnic identities are only a small fraction of the identities mobilized in the postcolonial politics of everyday life, and anthropology has faced a major challenge to