Anthropological futures
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Anthropological futures
（Experimental futures : technological lives, scientific arts, anthropological voices）
Duke University Press, 2009
- : pbk
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [331]-377) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
In Anthropological Futures, Michael M. J. Fischer explores the uses of anthropology as a mode of philosophical inquiry, an evolving academic discipline, and a means for explicating the complex and shifting interweaving of human bonds and social interactions on a global level. Through linked essays, which are both speculative and experimental, Fischer seeks to break new ground for anthropology by illuminating the field's broad analytical capacity and its attentiveness to emergent cultural systems. Fischer is particularly concerned with cultural anthropology's interactions with science studies, and throughout the book he investigates how emerging knowledge formations in molecular biology, environmental studies, computer science, and bioengineering are transforming some of anthropology's key concepts including nature, culture, personhood, and the body. In an essay on culture, he uses the science studies paradigm of "experimental systems" to consider how the social scientific notion of culture has evolved as an analytical tool since the nineteenth century. Charting anthropology's role in understanding and analyzing the production of knowledge within the sciences since the 1990s, he highlights anthropology's aptitude for tracing the transnational collaborations and multisited networks that constitute contemporary scientific practice. Fischer investigates changing ideas about cultural inscription on the human body in a world where genetic engineering, robotics, and cybernetics are constantly redefining our understanding of biology. In the final essay, Fischer turns to Kant's philosophical anthropology to reassess the object of study for contemporary anthropology and to reassert the field's primacy for answering the largest questions about human beings, societies, culture, and our interactions with the world around us. In Anthropological Futures, Fischer continues to advance what Clifford Geertz, in reviewing Fischer's earlier book Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice, called "a broad new agenda for cultural description and political critique."
Table of Contents
Prologue ix
1. Culture and Cultural Analysis as Experimental Systems 1
2. Four Cultural Genealogies (or Haplotype Genealogical Tests) for a Recombinant Anthropology of Science and Technology 51
3. Emergent Forms of (Un)Natural Life 114
4. Body Marks (Bestial/Natural/Divine): An Essay on the Social and Biotechnical Imaginaries, 1920-2008, and Bodies to Come 159
5. Personhood and Measuring the Figure of Old Age: The Geoid as Transitional Object 197
6. Ask Not What Man Is But What We May Expect of Him 215
Conclusions and Way Ahead: Cosmopolitanism, Cosmopolitics, and Anthropological Futures 235
Epilogue: Postings from Anthropologies to Come 244
Notes 273
References 331
Index 379
by "Nielsen BookData"
