Besteman / Gusterson Why America's Top Pundits Are Wrong

Anthropologists Talk Back
1. Auflage 2005
ISBN: 978-0-520-93848-9
Verlag: University of California Press
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, Band 13, 282 Seiten

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

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)

Besteman, Catherine
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).