Novedades del último mes en eBooks de Antropología social y cultural

En una era de derrumbes y calamidades, frente a la deriva descivilizadora de los acontecimientos actuales, este libro propone una exploración exhaustiva del concepto de civilización, desde su protohistoria nebulosa en la que se expresaba la idea de algo muy semejante a lo que se llamaria con esa palabra a partir de mediados del siglo xviii hasta la modernidad globalizada de nuestros dias.Si bien los fenomenos catastroficos del colonialismo y el imperialismo buscaron su legitimacion en la presunta y falaz superioridad de la civilizacion occidental y cristiana, Jose Emilio Burucua establece un hiato profundo entre el origen europeo e iluminista del concepto y su voluntad de convertirlo, modificarlo, transformarlo en una nocion capaz de dar cuenta de las creaciones culturales de otros horizontes geograficos e historicos. La curializacion de los guerreros, el cultivo de las flores y la creacion de una gastronomia compleja, la existencia de una poesia lirica, la practica extendida de las traducciones y la presencia de un sistema de administracion de misericordia son las notas esenciales de la civilizacion que conducen su relato a traves de regiones y pensadores, obras literarias y artisticas, debates teoricos y transformaciones sociales y politicas, acontecimientos historicos y referencias incesantes al mundo contemporaneo.En este libro ambicioso y deslumbrante, con gran erudicion y un rigor intelectual notable, Burucua recobra y le da nuevo aliento a un concepto decisivo para iluminar el pasado y el presente de la humanidad: "El pensamiento social y antropologico no puede prescindir de la nocion ni dejar de colocarla en el centro de la escena para discutir el rumbo de las culturas de toda la Tierra".

Siuatamatik: diversidade de gênero nahua explora os fenômenos em torno da constituição da pessoa kuilot, alguém que não se atém aos parâmetros de gênero binário num contexto nahua do centro do México

A Editora Contracorrente tem a satisfação de anunciar o lançamento da obra "Letramento Racial: uma proposta de reconstrução da democracia brasileira", do aclamado jurista Adilson José Moreira. Redigi

O que sugerimos como tema para reflexão neste livro é o modo como distintas vulnerabilidades e desigualdades, que se manifestam de modo situado e relacional em contextos organizacionais, revelam proc

Anthropologys originals aim, that of Maine and Morgan in the second half of the nineteenth-century, was to explain social variability. Behind that variability, anthropologists searched for regularities that a theory would explain. It was thus both comparative and positivist (aiming to be scientific). The first theory to emerge was evolutionism. It was soon followed by functional structuralism, structuralism and all the other isms that came after. In the final analysis, unlike scientific theories, all these theories did not supplant one another but merely agglutinated. The original project of a comparative and positivist anthropology thus completely failed, and the new gurus explain it by the very nature of anthropologys subject, human beings in society, which they claim are not amenable to scientific discourse.In this first of two books, Professor Michel Verdon rejects this defeatist explanation. To him, the failure does not stem from anthropologys objects but from the knowing subject. The explanation lies in the process of knowing; it is epistemological, and he finds the ultimate reason in the cosmology that underlies all theories, and that no one has hitherto explored. This enables him completely to upturn the traditional wisdom: it is this implicit cosmology that radically hinders any conceptual rigour in the study of social organization since it defines groups in a way that makes them ontologically variable. In the light of this unique diagnosis he can define a new language, which he labels operational, that yields rigourous comparisons leading to refutable and rectifiable theories. In a second book that will soon follow, he applies this language to a number of ethnographies and draws from them astonishing conclusions about societies traditionally studied by anthropology.