James W. Fernandez

Persuasions and performances : the play of tropes in culture

Introduction Acknowledgments Part I. Persuasions 1. Persuasions and Performances: Of the Beast in Every Body and the Metaphors of Everyman 2. The Mission of Metaphor in Expressive Culture Part II. Performances 3. Poetry in Motion: Being Moved by Amusement, Mockery, and Mortality in the Asturian Mountains 4. Syllogisms of Association: Some Modern Extensions of Asturian Deepsong 5. Lexical Fields: And Some Movements About, Within, and Between Them 6. Some Reflections on Looking into Mirrors 7. Edification by Puzzlement 8. Returning to the Whole 9. The Dark at the Bottem of the Stairs: The Inchoate in Symbolic Inquire and Some Strategies for Coping with It 10. Moving up in the world: Transcendence in Symbolic Anthropology 11. Convivial Attitudes: A Northern Spanish Kayak Festival in Its Historical Moment Index

Exotic Readings of Cultural Texts [and Comments and Reply]

Author(s): Roger M. Keesing, Richard D. Davis, Arie De Ruijter, J. W. Fernandez, Joshua A. Fishman, Remo Guidieri, George Lakoff, Norm Mundhenk, Paul Newman and R. Daniel Shaw Source: Current Anthropology, Vol. 30, No. 4 (Aug. Oct., 1989), pp. 459-479 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2743374 Accessed: 03-05-2016 17:10 UTC

African Religious Movements—Types and Dynamics

For those who follow African events closely it is the phenomenon of nationalism which attracts greatest attention. It was a rising sense of national identity which threw off the colonial yoke, and this ongoing creation and exaltation of culture and society at the national level can either foster or frustrate the creation of viable political units. We are therefore obliged to keep abreast of African nationalism if we are to understand the course of events and forecast the shape of things to come in this developing continent.

Unbelievably Subtle Words: Representation and Integration in the Sermons of an African Reformative Cult

Norman Cohn tells us that after 1320 in Germany when persecution had driven the Brethren of the Free Spirit underground, a greater reliance on conspiratorial understandings developed in this millenarian movement. The heretical Beghards took to secret sermons before sympathetically disposed communities. Notice was sent out that the Angel of the Divine Word had arrived and was waiting in hiding. Sympathizers would stream to hear the holy man.

Culture and transcendent humanization: on the «Dynamic of the categorical»

One way of conceiving of the anthropological task is that of countering the degradations and “dehumanizations” of the “other” to which the species is prone by promoting “transcendent humanization.” However efficiently and professionally anthropologists gather their materials and form them into their ethnographic and ethnologic analyses, may not this “ethical impulse” be postulated as the “final cause” of our efforts? But what could such a sonorous phrase mean ? And what is its relationship to the systematic study of the “differences that make or do not make a difference” in culture to which anthropology has long been devoted? I will argue that it involves a dynamic of categories and that this dynamic is itself an object of systematic study. Recently, for example, some anthropologists have been writing “against culture,” seeing the culture concept and associated theory more as barriers than as benefits to pan‐human understanding. I will argue that this is an instance of “transcendent humanization.” One can...

Field Work in Southwestern Europe

I both agree and disagree with Llobera’s critique of Mediterranean Anthropology provoked in him by the Braga Congress. But it would be easier for me to work my way out of this paradox (or, perhaps, the paradoxes of his argument) if I could be sure what he meant by history, fieldwork and the scientific tradition. In such a few pages that would have been difficult. But it does force some interpolation. I certainly agree that the Mediterranean has been a ’constructed object’ of anthropological interest particularly appealing perhaps to Anglo Saxons and other north Europeans. Elsewhere’ I have tried to show why the particular set of values and practices which have been generalized to the Mediterranean as a whole prove gratifying even fortifying as objects of study to north Europeans and north Americans living rather repressed highly organized and efficient yet quite open ended lives in cold, damp and dark climates. And historically north Europeans have good political economic reasons for cutting Mediterranean peoples off from their roots and treating them as exotic objects of study... even though a great deal if not most north European cultural forms and social practices ultimately derive from the Mediterranean. For turnabout is fair play. Just as the Greeks, Romans and the succession of Iberians once generalized about the ‘northern barbarians’

The Shaka Complex

IN A CENTURY UPON WHICH Freud has set his mark the circumstances of childhood are the more clearly perceived as having important consequences for the character we manifest in our adult years. We do not have to accept a childhood determinism to recognize that the child is father of the man and that that fatherhood rests on a web of family circumstances-a web of tensions in primary human relationships. These tensions the agonies of kinship must relate to our adult selves and the drama of cultures in which we play our part.

Cultural Relativism, Anthropology of

This article discusses views toward cultural relativism in the history of anthropology, from Franz Boas to the present. It shows the grounding of versions of relativism in the anthropological field experience of cultural diversity, and identifies the tensions between anthropology and more foundationalist philosophies. Yet it notes the openings toward more perspectival views in philosophy as well, and distinguishes between kinds of relativism in anthropological thought and practice. Debates argued over foundationalism and relativism too often draw on stereotyped depictions of the alternatives.

Symbolic anthropology evolving

James L. Peacock. Consciousness and Change: Symbolic Anthropology in Evolutionary Perspective. New York: Halstead Press, 1975. xi + 264 pp. Chapter notes, references, suggested readings, and indices.

Dance Exchange in Western Equatorial Africa

14.95.