Course Plan:

"Contextualizing Context - Explorations in Invertive Anthropology"

Finn Sivert Nielsen, Spring 2002

---------- 05.02.02 Tuesday - Introduction: Why Context? ----------

Dilley, Roy (ed.) (1999): "Introduction: The Problem of Context", in: The Problem of Context, p.1-42, New York: Berghahn Books.

Thursday seminar:

Herbst, David P. (1988): The Changing Context of Knowing. A Post-Høvringen Paper, Oslo: Work Research Institute (Photocopy).

Barth, Fredrik (1959): "Underlying Frameworks of Organization", in: Political Leadership Among Swat Pathans, p.13-30, London: Athlone Press.

Mimica, Jadran (1988): "The Cultural Context of Counting" & "Social Exchange, Value and the Perception of Quantity", in: Intimations of Infinity. The Mythopoeia of the Iqwaye Counting System and Number, p.13-25, Oxford: Berg.

---------- 12.02.02 Tuesday - Nature ----------

Bateson, Gregory (1968 [1972]): "Conscious Purpose versus Nature", in: Steps to an Ecology of Mind, p.426-439, New York: Ballantine.

Rappaport, Roy (1979): "Adaptive Structure and Its Disorders", in: Ecology, Meaning and Religion, p.145-170, Berkeley: North Atlantic Books.

Homer-Dixon, Thomas F. and Jeffrey H. Boutwell, George W. Rathjens (1993): "Environmental Change and Violent Conflict", Scientific American, February.

Livingstone, Margaret S. (1999): "Art, Illusion and the Visual System", Scientific American, January, p.68-75.

---------- 19.02.02 Tuesday - Locality ----------

Appadurai, Arjun (1995): "The Production of Locality", in Richard Fardon (ed.): Counterworks. Managing the Diversity of Knowledge, p.204-223, London & New York: Routledge.

Cheater, Angela P. (1995): "Globalization and the New Technologies of Knowing. Anthropological Calculus or Chaos", in Marilyn Strathern (ed.): Shifting Contexts. Transformations in Anthropological Knowledge, p.117-127, London: Routledge, The Uses of Knowledge: Global and Local Relations, ASA Decennial Conference Series.

---------- 25.02.02 Tuesday - Meaning ----------

Wagner, Roy (1986): "Too Definite for Words", in: Symbols That Stand for Themselves, p.14-33, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Olwig, Kenneth Robert (1993): "Sexual Cosmology: Nation and Landscape in the Conceptual Interstices of Nature and Culture; or, What does Landscape Really Mean?", in Barbara Bender (ed.): Landscape: Politics and Perspectives, p.307-340, Oxford: Berg.

Exerpts on Gestalt Theory: To be copied separately.

Nielsen, Finn Sivert (1989/1996): "What the Form Contains. Towards a Theory of Intention", in: In Worlds of Mirrors. Models of Complex Societies and Anthropological Complexity, Oslo, Tromsø: Manuscript.

NB! This article is not printed in the compendium, but available on the course homepage.

---------- 05.03.02 Tuesday - Anthropology ----------

Sahlins, Marshall (1994): "Goodbye to Tristes Tropes: Ethnography in the Context of Modern World History", in Robert Borowsky (ed.): Assessing Cultural Anthropology, p.377-395, New York: McGraw Hill.

Strathern, Marilyn (1990): "Out of Context. The Persuasive Fictions of Anthropology", in Marc Manganaro (ed.): Modernist Anthropology. From Fieldwork to Text, p.80-130, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Siegel, Lee (2001): "Cold Verities: The Chilly Ethics of American Pragmatism", Harper's Magazine, October 2001, p.84-90.

Kabakov, Ilya (1989 [1995]): "On Emptiness", in E. E. Berry & Anesa Miller-Pogacar (ed.): Re-Entering the Sign: Articulating New Russian Culture, p.91-98, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

---------- 12.03.02 Tuesday - Body ----------

Clark, Katerina (1995): "Aural Hieroglyphics? Some Reflections on the Role of Sound in Recent Russian Films and Its Historical Context", in Nancy Condee (ed.): Soviet Hieroglyphics. Visual Culture in Late Twentieth-Century Russia, p.1-21, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Vitebsky, Piers (1993): "Is Death the Same Everywhere? Contexts of Knowing and Doubting", in Mark Hobart (ed.): An Anthropological Critique of Development. The Growth of Ignorance, p.100-114, London: Routledge.

Bateson, Gregory (1953 [1972]): "Metalogue: Why do things have outlines?", in: Steps to an Ecology of Mind, p.27-32, New York: Ballantine.

 

---------- 19.03.02 Tuesday - Culture ----------

Verdery, Katherine (1995): "Faith, Hope, and Caritas in the Land of the Pyramids: Romania, 1990 to 1994", Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 37, No. 4, p.625-669.

Haney, Lynne (1999): "'But We Are Still Mothers': Gender, the State, and the Construction of Need in Postsocialist Hungary", in Michael Burawoy & Katherine Verdery (ed.): Uncertain Transition. Ethnographies of Change in the Postsocialist World, p.151-184, New York: Rowman & Littlefield.

Thursday seminar: Conclusions