Starry Nights: Critical Structural Realism in Anthropology / Edition 1

by Stephen P. Reyna

Overview

Starry Nights: Critical Structural Realism in Anthropology offers nothing less than a reinventing of the discipline of anthropology. In these six essays – four published here for the first time – Stephen Reyna critiques the postmodern tenets of anthropology, while devising a new strategy for conducting research. Combative and clear, Starry Nights provides an important critique of mainstream anthropology as represented by Geertz and the postmodern legacy, and envisions a mode of anthropological research that addresses social, cultural and biological questions with techniques that are theoretically rigorous and practically useful.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781785334610
Publisher:	Berghahn Books
Publication date:	04/01/2017
Series:	Loose Can(n)ons , #1
Pages:	220
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Stephen P. Reyna is a Research Associate at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Salle and a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Manchester.

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction

PART I: EPISTEMOLOGY

Chapter 1. Literary Anthropology and the Case against Science
Chapter 2. What Is Th eory? Something, Time-Being, Art

PART II: ONTOLOGY

Chapter 3. Dialectics of Force: Contradiction, Logics, and Conservation of Délires

PART III: CRITICAL SCIENCE

Chapter 4. Right and Might: Of Approximate Truths and Moral Judgments
Chapter 5. Perpetual Peace? Dreaming in the Time-Being of Empire

Index

Editorial Reviews

"Starry Nights is Reyna's grand attempt to develop a thoroughly holistic and galactic model that will supplement the theoretical architecture of anthropologists as they explore the modern world and should be required reading in any graduate-level theory course in anthropology." - Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

"This is an important and timely collection of essays by one of the leading exponents of a scientific, materialist anthropology... I could see the usefulness of this collection in seminars on theory at the graduate and undergraduate level." - David Sutton, Southern Illinois University

From the Publisher