Anthropological theory

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Edith Turner

"In this seminal work, Edith Turner extends the concept of communitas that Victor Turner developed nearly four decades ago. Communitas is inspired fellowship, a group's unexpected joy in sharing common experiences, the sense felt by a group when their life together takes on full meaning. Turner shows how communitas is a driving force in history as it operates personally, in religion, in revolution, in all domains of human life. It is grounded in lived events, and may occur as the climax to a process that takes people from violence to shared intimate transcendence. Turner establishes by narration and multicultural case studies the fundamental importance of communitas to human personal, social, and spiritual well-being. She even follows the instinctive response that humanity makes to the overall natural world, thus including the spiritual bonding of the human and the non-human. Then the book shows exactly how we align ourselves to recognize communitas in action. This is--its 'key.' At heart, this is a very religious book, or as Turner writes, a connection among 'nature, spirit-energy, and soul.'"--Publisher's website.

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Didier Fassin, Samuel Lézé

"This Reader is an essential resource for students and scholars interested in the anthropology of morality. The collection includes classical and more recent material, carefully chosen to provide a critical and historical overview of an important and developing field. The selections are contextualized with lucid editorial material, including a substantial introduction"--

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David M. Fetterman

Sifting through notepads filled with illegible scrawl, listening to hours of tape recordings, labeling and organizing piles of photographs and slides and cross-referencing disks of data are all too familiar pictures to the ethnographic researcher. How does one manage a mountain of data and make meaningful statements? By using the new, updated Ethnography that has proved so reliable to thousands of researchers. This edition takes a step into a new frontier - the Internet, which is one of the most-powerful resources available to ethnographers. The book now provides insights into the uses of the internet, including conducting searches about topics or sites, collecting census data, conducting interviews by "chatting" and video-conferencing, sharing notes and pictures about research sites, debating issues with colleagues on listservs and in online journals, and downloading useful data collection and analyses software. Maintained from the first edition is coverage of the nature of fieldwork, the equipment needed to conduct research, the analysis of data, the differences and similarities between qualitative and quantitative approaches and writing the report. Throughout the book author David M. Fettermen provides insights into putting people at ease, research ethics, and sensitivity to other cultures.

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Harald Atmanspacher, Gerhard J. Dalenoort

This book discusses a fundamental problem of the natural sciences, namely, the observation of physical and biological systems and the principles by which we gain information about these systems. Is it relevant whether the human observer is himself a part of the system in question? What difference does this make to our representation of the physical world? These difficult questions have occupied scientists and philosophers from Decartes to Bell. In the light of recent advances in quantum mechanics and the theory of dynamical systems, there is good reason to tackle these problems afresh. This book will provide stimulating reading for scientists and philosophers interested in the fundamentals of their trade.