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The Ground Between: Anthropologists Engage Philosophy
The guiding inspiration of this book is the attraction and distance that mark the relation between anthropology and philosophy. This theme is explored through encounters between individual anthropologists and particular regions of philosophy. Several of the most basic concepts of the discipline—including notions of ethics, politics, temporality, self and other, and the nature of human life—are products of a dialogue, both implicit and explicit, between anthropology and philosophy. These philosophical undercurrents in anthropology also speak to the question of what it is to experience our being in a world marked by radical difference and otherness. In The Ground Between , twelve leading anthropologists offer intimate reflections on the influence of particular philosophers on their way of seeing the world, and on what ethnography has taught them about philosophy. Ethnographies of the mundane and the everyday raise fundamental issues that the contributors grapple with in both their lives and their thinking. With directness and honesty, they relate particular philosophers to matters such as how to respond to the suffering of the other, how concepts arise in the give and take of everyday life, and how to be attuned to the world through the senses. Their essays challenge the idea that philosophy is solely the province of professional philosophers, and suggest that certain modalities of being in the world might be construed as ways of doing philosophy. Contributors . João Biehl, Steven C. Caton, Vincent Crapanzano, Veena Das, Didier Fassin, Michael M. J. Fischer, Ghassan Hage, Clara Han, Michael Jackson, Arthur Kleinman, Michael Puett, Bhrigupati Singh
- GenresAnthropologyPhilosophy
360 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 30, 2015
Picked this one up from JNU's stand at the New Delhi World Book Fair 2015. The authors assimilate their ideas and concepts to create an engaging discussion between Anthropology and Philosophy through various ethnographic surveys and personal recollections of lived experiences. Their concepts unravel an underlying knot between the academic disciplines as they strive to create a bridge of understanding between the two. The book, which is otherwise a good intellectual thought-starter, at times leaves you wanting for terse conclusions to parallels. I believe the nascence of this academic engagement would eventually pave the way for firm conceptual establishments over the course of time. A good read for lovers of wisdom and human relations.
July 6, 2024
Read "The Difficulty of Kindness, Boundaries, Time, and the Ordinary" by Clara Han.
Draws on ethnographic accounts from a working class neighborhood in La Pincoya, Chile. The town was formed in the early 1970s through a series of organized land seizures by 'urban poor' towards the bookend of Chile's rapid period of industrialization. This saw the infrastructural effects of Frei Montalva's Operacion Sitio policy, which attempted to provide housing through incentivizing people to buy land on the outskirts of established urban centers for cheaper prices (essentially government-sponsored gentrification). Following Frei, Salvador Allende gave everyone who bought those plots of land titles to their own (land) property, and the extensive family networks which moved to towns like La Pincoya started to build neighborhoods fully consistent of and co-extensive with land bought through Operacion Sitio (known as auto-construccion). Clara Han provides intricate accounts of the kinship and neighborhood relations which play out in La Pincoya, revealing how conditions of mutual economic precarity within and across privately owned spaces create understandings of dignity, charity, neighborly-kindness and kinship-kindness take shape. One of the more interesting points she makes is that neighborly-kindness involves an aspect of both performance and material acts of kindness, whereby neighbors perform acts of kindness disguised by a performance that disavows the critical nature of their kindness and their neighbors need for such kindness. She provides examples of people lying about having 'extra food' from a meal the day prior after noticing their neighbor is struggling due to a defected husband, and then going home to cook a substantial amount of food only to give it to them that day. I find that this performance is itself the act of kindness which preserves the dignity of the neighbor as neighbor. This is what Clara Han refers to as 'boundaries,' revealing that social relations sanctioned by 'neighborly bonds' must maintain these bounded forms of relation, whereby there is no outright acknowledgment of another person's economic struggle. Instead, one should curtail one's proximity to the Other by affirming the other's performance of self-autonomy through a performance of obliviousness which, doubly, curtails the performative act of giving itself (which can often take place in humanitarian forms of aid, whereby a gift glorifies the giver and humbles the receiver into a grateful, indebted recipient). These micro social interactions reveal a politics of neighborliness and kindness which is not only performative without a broader aim, but maintains the very dignity of La Pincoya's residents, and helps to reconcile histories of displacement and disenfranchisement.
Draws on ethnographic accounts from a working class neighborhood in La Pincoya, Chile. The town was formed in the early 1970s through a series of organized land seizures by 'urban poor' towards the bookend of Chile's rapid period of industrialization. This saw the infrastructural effects of Frei Montalva's Operacion Sitio policy, which attempted to provide housing through incentivizing people to buy land on the outskirts of established urban centers for cheaper prices (essentially government-sponsored gentrification). Following Frei, Salvador Allende gave everyone who bought those plots of land titles to their own (land) property, and the extensive family networks which moved to towns like La Pincoya started to build neighborhoods fully consistent of and co-extensive with land bought through Operacion Sitio (known as auto-construccion). Clara Han provides intricate accounts of the kinship and neighborhood relations which play out in La Pincoya, revealing how conditions of mutual economic precarity within and across privately owned spaces create understandings of dignity, charity, neighborly-kindness and kinship-kindness take shape. One of the more interesting points she makes is that neighborly-kindness involves an aspect of both performance and material acts of kindness, whereby neighbors perform acts of kindness disguised by a performance that disavows the critical nature of their kindness and their neighbors need for such kindness. She provides examples of people lying about having 'extra food' from a meal the day prior after noticing their neighbor is struggling due to a defected husband, and then going home to cook a substantial amount of food only to give it to them that day. I find that this performance is itself the act of kindness which preserves the dignity of the neighbor as neighbor. This is what Clara Han refers to as 'boundaries,' revealing that social relations sanctioned by 'neighborly bonds' must maintain these bounded forms of relation, whereby there is no outright acknowledgment of another person's economic struggle. Instead, one should curtail one's proximity to the Other by affirming the other's performance of self-autonomy through a performance of obliviousness which, doubly, curtails the performative act of giving itself (which can often take place in humanitarian forms of aid, whereby a gift glorifies the giver and humbles the receiver into a grateful, indebted recipient). These micro social interactions reveal a politics of neighborliness and kindness which is not only performative without a broader aim, but maintains the very dignity of La Pincoya's residents, and helps to reconcile histories of displacement and disenfranchisement.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews