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An interdisciplinary exploration of the meanings of hair in Asia from classical times to contemporary contexts.
Of all the human behaviors anthropologists consider, perhaps the most conceptually challenging are those that cannot by directly observed. This volume draws from rich ethnographic data to offer theoretical and methodological tools for mapping the intersections between two such behaviors: dreaming and imagination. Although Western perspectives tend to cast these as personal experiences contained within individual minds, each contributor explores diverse cultural and historical contexts to demonstrate how these behaviours are always in some sense cultural and influenced by social others. The cross-cultural approach suggests theoretical flexibility and expands the study of imagination across multiple disciplines.
One of the major questions of cultural psychology is how to take diversity seriously while acknowledging our shared humanity. This collection, edited by Julia L. Cassaniti and Usha Menon, brings together leading scholars in the field to reconsider that question and explore the complex mechanisms that connect culture and the human mind. The contributors to Universalism without Uniformity offer tools for bridging silos that have historically separated anthropology’s attention to culture and psychology’s interest in universal mental processes. Throughout, they seek to answer intricate yet fundamental questions about why we are motivated to find meaning in everything around us and, in turn, ...
Anthropological perspectives on dreams around the world.
"The characteristics of possession are numerous and vary between different socio-cultural and historical contexts. Different ideas of possession can be observed within different cultural and social contexts both past and present. This makes defining possession all the more difficult. Various approaches to "ideas of possession" in different academic disciplines and in different cultural contexts allow the discourse(s) to benefit from insights that would otherwise remain confined to the society under discussion or the field that determines the method of study. The introduction presents an overview of recent interdisciplinary research on possession and scholarly attempts at a working definition, followed by a brief outline of the individual case studies in this volume"--
Based on over a decade of research, this book connects dream studies to cognitive anthropology, to perspectives in the humanities on mimesis, ambiguity, and metaphor, to current dream research in psychology, and to recent work in economic and political relations. Traveling the dreamscapes of a variety of young people, Mimesis and the Dream explores their encounters with American cultures and the identities that derive from these encounters. While ethnographies typically concern shared social habits and practices, this book concerns shared aspects of subjectivity and how people represent and think about them in dreams. Each chapter grounds theory in actual cases. It will be compelling to scholars in multiple disciplines and illustrates how dreaming offers insights into twenty-first century debates and problems within these disciplines, bringing a vital theoretically eclectic approach to dream studies.
Anthropologist Jeannette Marie Mageo develops a new theory of the self in culture through a psychological and historical ethnography of Samoa, which provides a unique opportunity to consider the dialectic between historical change and personal experience, and uncovers ways in which cultural history is forever leaving its fingerprints upon human lives.
Power and the Self, first published in 2002, deals with an important but neglected topic: the ways in which power is experienced by individuals, both as agents and as objects of the exercise of power. Each contributor presents a series of case studies drawn from a variety of cultural contexts, including the analysis of the appeal of Japanese superhero toys for American children; the conditions that lead to dehumanising treatment of patients in an American nursing home; the experiences of a Turkish immigrant woman in the Netherlands; a contribution relating theories about the capacity to commit genocidal violence to 'everyday forms of violence', and other cases from New Guinea and Samoa. The introduction provides a readable historical review and synthesis of the theoretical ideas that provide the context for the work presented in the book.
This book presents new directions in contemporary anthropological dream research, surveying recent theorizations of dreaming that are developing both in and outside of anthropology. It incorporates new findings in neuroscience and philosophy of mind while demonstrating that dreams emerge from and comment on sociohistorical and cultural contexts. The chapters are written by prominent anthropologists working at the intersection of culture and consciousness who conduct ethnographic research in a variety of settings around the world, and reflect how dreaming is investigated by a range of informants in ever more diverse sites. As well as theorizing the dream in light of current anthropological an...