Changing Fields of Anthropology: From Local to Global

Description

This book explores major shifts and reorientations in the recent history of American Anthropology, reflecting the author's vision of what anthropology is and what it has the potential to become. The title phrase 'changing fields' can be read in two ways: One meaning refers to how, since the mid-1960s, the larger national and global social, intellectual, and political fields within which American anthropology is situated have profoundly changed. The second meaning refers to how, in response to these changing fields, the author, like many other anthropologists, changed the locations of his fieldwork along with his research problems and theoretical perspectives. The book engages three fundamental intellectual-political challenges that American anthropology is destined to confront (or at its peril, avoid): becoming more self-reflexive, achieving theoretical and methodological holism, and defense of universal human rights. Dedication Contents Preface Introduction Part I: Fieldwork in the Classic Mode 1 The Concept of Aire and Susto: Symbolic Representations of Perceived Social and Geographic Environment 2 A Very Bad Disease of the Arms 3 Drunkenness and Religious Conversion in a Mexican Village 4 La Trucha: A Short Story Part II: Transitional Fieldwork in the Border Area 5 From the Invisible Hand to Visible Feet: Anthropological Studies of Migration and Development 6 Our Misunderstood Terrorists 7 Spiritualist Healing In Mexico 8 Oral Performance by Mexican Spiritualists in Possession Trance 9 Integration of the Mixteca and the Western U.S.-Mexico Border Region via Migratory Wage Labor Part III: Transnational and Practical Anthropology 10 The Local and the Global: The Anthropology of Globalization and Transnationalism 11 Mixtec Political Consciousness: From Passive to Active Resistance 12 Borders and Boundaries of State and Self at the End of Empire 13 Mixtec Ethnicity: Social Identity, Political Consciousness, and Political Activism 14 Class and Identity: The Jujitsu of Domination and Resistance in Oaxacalifornia 15 The Race to Deterritorialize in the Game of Value Index About the Author