Towards an Anthropology of Data
Title | Towards an Anthropology of Data PDF eBook |
Author | Rachel Douglas-Jones |
Publisher | John Wiley & Sons |
Total Pages | 180 |
Release | 2021-05-18 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 9781119816768 |
This volume presents a set of theoretically inventive pieces that engage with data across its many locations, from government databases to ecological field stations, from kitchen tables to concrete bunkers. Contributors demonstrate how thinking with data can be conceptually generative for anthropology, prompting us to reconsider our understanding of topics including bodies, persons, and the social itself Shows how 'big' data which may have once seemed limited to business or high tech, ethnographers are now finding data – and its attendant values and practices – in their field sites around the world Examines how data has motivated a sweep of dystopian visions, signaling the invasion of privacy, political manipulation, or shadowy data doubles Discusses how anthropologists have been cautious in taking data itself as an object of theoretical interest, even as the effects of data become manifest in our ethnographies By putting data in its place, the chapters collected here develop conceptual tools that will prove useful for anthropologists who find 'data' in their data
Anthropological Data in the Digital Age
Title | Anthropological Data in the Digital Age PDF eBook |
Author | Jerome W. Crowder |
Publisher | Springer Nature |
Total Pages | 270 |
Release | 2019-11-01 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 3030249255 |
For more than two decades, anthropologists have wrestled with new digital technologies and their impacts on how their data are collected, managed, and ultimately presented. Anthropological Data in the Digital Age compiles a range of academics in anthropology and the information sciences, archivists, and librarians to offer in-depth discussions of the issues raised by digital scholarship. The volume covers the technical aspects of data management—retrieval, metadata, dissemination, presentation, and preservation—while at once engaging with case studies written by cultural anthropologists and archaeologists returning from the field to grapple with the implications of producing data digitally. Concluding with thoughts on the new considerations and ethics of digital data, Anthropological Data in the Digital Age is a multi-faceted meditation on anthropological practice in a technologically mediated world.
Ethnography for a data-saturated world
Title | Ethnography for a data-saturated world PDF eBook |
Author | Hannah Knox |
Publisher | Manchester University Press |
Total Pages | 229 |
Release | 2018-10-03 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 152612761X |
This edited collection aims to reimagine and extend ethnography for a data-saturated world. The book brings together leading scholars in the social sciences who have been interrogating and collaborating with data scientists working in a range of different settings. The book explores how a repurposed form of ethnography might illuminate the kinds of knowledge that are being produced by data science. It also describes how collaborations between ethnographers and data scientists might lead to new forms of social analysis
Borderlands
Title | Borderlands PDF eBook |
Author | Michel Agier |
Publisher | John Wiley & Sons |
Total Pages | 208 |
Release | 2016-09-02 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 074569683X |
The images of migrants and refugees arriving in precarious boats on the shores of southern Europe, and of the makeshift camps that have sprung up in Lesbos, Lampedusa, Calais and elsewhere, have become familiar sights on television screens around the world. But what do we know about the border places – these liminal zones between countries and continents – that have become the focus of so much attention and anxiety today, and what do we know about the individuals who occupy these places? In this timely book, anthropologist Michel Agier addresses these questions and examines the character of the borderlands that emerge on the margins of nation-states. Drawing on his ethnographic fieldwork, he shows that borders, far from disappearing, have acquired a new kind of centrality in our societies, becoming reference points for the growing numbers of people who do not find a place in the countries they wish to reach. They have become the site for a new kind of subject, the border dweller, who is both 'inside' and 'outside', enclosed on the one hand and excluded on the other, and who is obliged to learn, under harsh conditions, the ways of the world and of other people. In this respect, the lives of migrants, even in the uncertainties or dangers of the borderlands, tell us something about the condition in which everyone is increasingly living today, a 'cosmopolitan condition' in which the experience of the unfamiliar is more common and the relation between self and other is in constant renewal.
The Anthropology of the Future
Title | The Anthropology of the Future PDF eBook |
Author | Rebecca Bryant |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Total Pages | 239 |
Release | 2019-03-28 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 1108421857 |
Anticipation -- Expectation -- Speculation -- Potentiality -- Hope -- Destiny.
Toward an Anthropology of the Will
Title | Toward an Anthropology of the Will PDF eBook |
Author | Keith M. Murphy |
Publisher | Stanford University Press |
Total Pages | 240 |
Release | 2010-02-10 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 0804773777 |
Toward an Anthropology of the Will is the first book that systematically explores volition from an ethnographically informed anthropological point of view. While philosophers have for centuries puzzled over the degree to which individuals are "free" to choose how to act in the world, anthropologists have either assumed that the will is a stable, constant fact of the human condition or simply ignored it. Although they are usually quite comfortable discussing the relationship between culture and cognition or culture and emotion, anthropologists have not yet focused on how culture and volition are interconnected. The contributors to this book draw upon their unique insights and research experience to address fundamental questions, including: What forms does the will take in culture? How is willing experienced? How does it relate to emotion and cognition? What does imagination have to do with willing? What is the connection between morality, virtue, and willing? Exploring such questions, the book moves beyond old debates about "freedom" and "determinacy" to demonstrate how a richly nuanced anthropological approach to the cultural experience of willing can help shape theories of social action in the human sciences.
Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value
Title | Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value PDF eBook |
Author | D. Graeber |
Publisher | Springer |
Total Pages | 344 |
Release | 2001-12-13 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 0312299060 |
Now a widely cited classic, this innovative book is the first comprehensive synthesis of economic, political, and cultural theories of value. David Graeber reexamines a century of anthropological thought about value and exchange, in large measure to find a way out of ongoing quandaries in current social theory, which have become critical at the present moment of ideological collapse in the face of Neoliberalism. Rooted in an engaged, dynamic realism, Graeber argues that projects of cultural comparison are in a sense necessarily revolutionary projects: He attempts to synthesize the best insights of Karl Marx and Marcel Mauss, arguing that these figures represent two extreme, but ultimately complementary, possibilities in the shape such a project might take. Graeber breathes new life into the classic anthropological texts on exchange, value, and economy. He rethinks the cases of Iroquois wampum, Pacific kula exchanges, and the Kwakiutl potlatch within the flow of world historical processes, and recasts value as a model of human meaning-making, which far exceeds rationalist/reductive economist paradigms.