Bruce Kapferer

In this pamphlet, the renowned anthropologist Bruce Kapferer revists Stanley Kubrick's classic film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, making the case for the continued relevance of its mythic force. Hailed in its time as a critical examination of European and American realities at the peak of the Cold War, in the late 1960's, Kubrick's work is, as Kapferer shows, just as significant for the contemporary world?after Iraq War, aftedr the crash, and in light of the many and various other effects of neo-liberalism. Kapferer tackles Kubrick's central theme: the changing relation of humanity to technology, as seen through the lens of Nietzsche's Zarathustra and the overarching concept of ?the Eternal Return.” This tour de force by one of anthropology's most insightful and imaginative thinkers testifies to the mythic power of Kubrick's film, and its refusal to go away.

Kubrick, Nietzsche, and Anthropology

2001 and Counting

As corporate practices are becoming more fused with state processes, the state itself is increasingly taking on a corporate structure, as well as a more overt oligarchic character. Evidence of this can be seen in the growing domination of political organizations and institutions by close-knit social groups (familial dynasties, closed associations, or personal networks) that seek exclusive control over economic resources. These new forms of state power that are emerging are not reducible to the past, and the nation-state, as the essays in this volume show, is giving way to a political-economic formation that has multiple state-like effects and is able to act in ways systemic with deterritorializing global processes. Exploring these processes in different concrete locations from North America to Russia, West Africa, and Australia, the authors show that current configurations of global, imperial, and state power cannot be understood without examining their relation to formations of oligarchic control. They bring us closer to an understanding of the ways in which the nation-state is being transformed by globalization.

New Formations of Global Power

Oligarchs and Oligopolies

The Sinhalese exorcism rituals are perhaps the most complex and the most magnificent in performance still extant. For this second edition, the author has written a new preface and introduction in which he argues that the techniques of healing in Sri Lanka and the aesthetics of this healing cannot be reduced to Western psychoanalytic or psychotherapeutic terms, and develops new and original approaches to ritual and the aesthetic in general.

A Celebration of Demons

Bjørn Enge Bertelsen

Analyzing both historical contexts and geographical locations, this volume explores the continuous reformation of state power and its potential in situations of violent conflict. The state, otherwise understood as an abstract and transcendent concept in many works on globalization in political philosophy, is instead located and analyzed here as an embedded part of lived reality. This relationship to the state is exposed as an integral factor to the formation of the social - whether in Africa, the Middle East, South America or the United States. Through the examination of these particular empirical settings of war or war-like situations, the book further argues for the continued importance of the state in shifting social and political circumstances. In doing so, the authors provide a critical contribution to debates within a broad spectrum of fields that are concerned with the future of the state, the nature of sovereignty, and globalization.

War and Social Upheaval

Crisis of the State

Angela Hobart

In various ways, the essays presented in this volume explore the structures and aesthetic possibilities of music, dance and dramatic representation in ritual and theatrical situations in a diversity of ethnographic contexts in Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia. Each essay enters into a discussion of the "logic" of aesthetic processes exploring their social and political and symbolic import. The aim is above all to explore the way artistic and aesthetic practices in performance produce and structure experience. Angela Hobart is the coordinating lecturer at Goldsmiths College on Intercultural Therapy and lectures at the British Museum on the Art and Culture of South East Asia. Bruce Kapferer is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen, Adjunct Professor at James Cook University and Honorary Professor at University College London.

Formations of Symbolic Construction and Experience

Aesthetics in Performance

Stressing the importance of performance in the organization of ritual experience, Kapferer reveals that music, dance, and comicdrama are key aesthetic forms in Sinhalese demon ceremonies.

Exorcism and the Aesthetics of Healing in Sri Lanka

Numerous humanly caused destructions of just the last hundred years dwarf the World Trade Center disaster, and the attention still addressed to it may over the next few years appear disproportionate. But the significance of events is always determined by the social, political, and cultural forces that are articulated through a particular event. The attack of 9/11 was an event waiting to happen, and when it did occur the even itself became a catalyst and impetus for the changing and redirection of global realities. This volume offers provocative assessments of the reaction to the event from a variety of perspectives that will no doubt stimulate the debate on the meaning and consequences of 9/11.

Critical Perspectives

The World Trade Center and Global Crisis

The civil war in Sri Lanka and the part that nationalism seemed to play in it inspired the writing of this book some twenty-three years ago. The argument was developed through a comparative analysis of nationalism in Sri Lanka with the author's native Australia. At the time this constituted an innovative approach to comparison in anthropology, as well as to nationalism and its possibilities. It was not based on differences but on the way in which perspectives from within the two nationalisms, when seen side-by-side, could present an understanding of their implication in producing the violence of war, racism, and social exclusion. The book has lost none of its importance and urgency as proven by the chapters in the Appendix, written by top scholars working in Sri Lanka and in Australia. These contributions bring together new material and critically explore the book's themes and their continued relevance to the various trajectories in nationalist processes since the first publication of the book.

Violence, Intolerance, and Political Culture in Sri Lanka and Australia

Legends of People, Myths of State

This series aims to reflect the richness and vitality of contemporary work in anthropology. Volumes included explore not only current developments within social and cultural anthropology, but also the interfaces between these areas and such fields as biological anthropology and archaeology. They challenge established conventions and represent a significant advance in a range of areas of anthropological enquiry which are of wide interest to an international readership.

Sorcery has long been associated with the "dark side" of human development, along with magic and witchcraft. This text argues, however, that sorcery practices reveal critical insights into how consciousness is formed, and how human beings constitute their social

Practices of Consciousness and Power

The Feast of the Sorcerer

This book seeks a reconsideration of the phenomenon of sorcery and related categories. The contributors to the volume explore the different perspectives on human sociality and social and political constitution that practices typically understood as sorcery, magic and ritual reveal. In doing so the authors are concerned to break away from the dictates of a western externalist rationalist understanding of these phenomena without falling into the trap of mysticism. The articles address a diversity of ethnographic contexts in Africa, Asia, the Pacific and the Americas.

Rethinking Magic, Witchcraft and Sorcery

Beyond Rationalism

The very institution of the state is widely conceived of as inseparable from war. If it constitutes peace within the borders or order of its sovereignty, this very peace may be the condition for its potential for war with those other states and social formation outside it. This volume represents different analytical standpoints and positions within global processes, inviting further discussion on contemporary realities and the development of new formations of war and violence.

Civil Violence in Emerging Global Realities

State, Sovereignty, War

Analyzing both historical contexts and geographical locations, this volume explores the continuous reformation of state power and its potential in situations of violent conflict. The state, otherwise understood as an abstract and transcendent concept in many works on globalization in political philosophy, is instead located and analyzed here as an embedded part of lived reality. This relationship to the state is exposed as an integral factor to the formation of the social – whether in Africa, the Middle East, South America or the United States. Through the examination of these particular empirical settings of war or war-like situations, the book further argues for the continued importance of the state in shifting social and political circumstances. In doing so, the authors provide a critical contribution to debates within a broad spectrum of fields that are concerned with the future of the state, the nature of sovereignty, and globalization.

In various ways, the essays presented in this volume explore the structures and aesthetic possibilities of music, dance and dramatic representation in ritual and theatrical situations in a diversity of ethnographic contexts in Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia. Each essay enters into a discussion of the "logic" of aesthetic processes exploring their social and political and symbolic import. The aim is above all to explore the way artistic and aesthetic practices in performance produce and structure experience.

Martin Holbraad

Julia F. Sauma

Ruptures brings together leading and emerging international anthropologists to explore the concept of ‘rupture’. Understood as radical and often forceful forms of discontinuity, rupture is the active ingredient of the current sense of a world in turmoil, lying at the heart of some of the most defining experiences of our time: the rise of populist politics, the corollary impulse towards protest and even revolutionary change, as well as moves towards violence and terror, and the responses these moves elicit. Rupture is addressed in selected ethnographic and historical contexts: images of the guillotine in the French revolution; reactions to Trump’s election in the USA; the motivations of young Danes who join ISIS in Syria; ‘butterfly effect’ activism among environmental anarchists in northern Europe; the experiences of political trauma and its ‘repair’ through privately sponsored museums of Mao’s revolution in China; people’s experience of the devastating 2001 earthquake in Gujarat; the ‘inner’ rupture of Protestant faith among Danish nationalist theologians; and the attempt to invent ex nihilo an alphabet for use in Christian prophetic movements in Congo and Angola. Ruptures takes in new directions broader intellectual debates about continuity and change. In particular, by thematising rupture as a radical, sometimes violent, and even brutal form of discontinuity, it adds a sharper critical edge to contemporary discourses, both in social theory and public debate and policy.

Ruptures

The powerful individualist and subjectivist turn in anthropology - a turn that cannot be easily separated from larger political processes of neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism - is one factor resulting in notions of the social and of society as becoming little else than empty shells of small or no analytical value. The essays presented here, all by leading anthropologists, take a variety of positions on the matter of the retreat of the social. All demonstrate that if anthropology and other social sciences are to fulfill the task of a critical understanding of the diverse realities in which we all must live, these disciplines will find it impossible to so do without a strong concept of the social.

Bruce Kapferer

About

Books

Join the club