Human Nature as Capacity: Transcending Discourse and Classification

by Nigel Rapport (Editor)

Overview

What is it to be human? What are our specifically human attributes, our capacities and liabilities? Such questions gave birth to anthropology as an Enlightenment science. This book argues that it is again appropriate to bring "the human" to the fore, to reclaim the singularity of the word as central to the anthropological endeavor, not on the basis of the substance of a human nature - "To be human is to act like this and react like this, to feel this and want this" - but in terms of species-wide capacities: capabilities for action and imagination, liabilities for suffering and cruelty. The contributors approach "the human" with an awareness of these complexities and particularities, rendering this volume unique in its ability to build on anthropology's ethnographic expertise.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780857458100
Publisher:	Berghahn Books
Publication date:	03/01/2013
Series:	Methodology & History in Anthropology , #20
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.53(d)

About the Author

Nigel Rapport is Professor of Anthropological and Philosophical Studies at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, and directs the Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies. He also held the Canada Research Chair in Globalization, Citizenship and Justice at Concordia University, Montreal, and he has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Recent publications include 'I am Dynamite': An Alternative Anthropology of Power (Routledge, 2003) and Of Orderlies and Men: Hospital Porters Achieving Wellness at Work (Carolina Academic Press, 2008).

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
List of Contributors

Introduction: Human Capacity as an Exceeding, a Going  Beyond
Nigel Rapport

PART I: BEYOND THE ECONOMY

Introduction to Part I
Nigel Rapport

Chapter 1. Conversations with Eulogio: On Migration and the Building of a Life-Project in Motion
Nelson Ferguson

Chapter 2. The Limits of Liminality: Capacities for Change and Transition among Student Travellers
Vered Amit

PART II: BEYOND THE POLITY

Introduction to Part II
Nigel Rapport

Chapter 3. 'Crisis': On the Limits of European Integration and Identity in Northern Ireland
Thomas M. Wilson

Chapter 4. Making the Cosmopolitan Plea: Harold Oram's International Fund-raising in the Early Cold War
Laura Suski

PART III: BEYOND THE CLASSIFACTORY

Introduction to Part III
Nigel Rapport

Chapter 5. Money, Materiality and Imagination: Life on the Other Side of Value
Andrew Irving

Chapter 6. Acts of Entification: The Emergence of Thinghood in Social Life
Tord Larsen

PART IV: BEYOND THE BODY

Introduction to Part IV
Nigel Rapport

Chapter 7. Embodied  Cognition, Communication and the Making of Place and Identity: Reflections on Fieldwork with Masons
Trevor H.J. Marchand

Chapter 8. 'Live in Fragments no Longer': Social Dance and Individual Imagination in Human Nature
Jonathan Skinner

Index
 

Editorial Reviews

"This is an engaging collection which is enhanced by the editor's agenda and his clear and challenging statement of purpose. The notion of 'going beyond' is important, and is well realised in his broad, scholarly, and well-argued introduction...a substantial contribution to anthropological theorising about human beings as such, as that enterprise now stands." - Michael Carrithers, Durham University

From the Publisher