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تاريخ النظرية الأنثروبولوجية

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هذا كتابٌ طموح، ليس على سبيل الأدعاء. إنّه طموح لأنّه يحاول- ضمن حيز الصفحات القليلة نسبيًّا- أن يوضح التاريخ المتنوع لعلم الأنثروبولوجيا. وقد ارتبطت أسبقياتنا وحذوفاتنا وتأويلاتنا بالمناقشة والتفنيد؛ حيث إنّه لا وجود لتاريخ منفرد ذي حجة لأي شيء، وأقلها حقلاً باسطًا ذراعيه، حقل ديناميكيّ وموضع خلاف مثل حقل الأنثروبولوجيا. ومع ذلك، فالكتاب لا يزال بسيطًا؛ حيث إنّ هدفنا في كل العمل أن نقدم عملاً متزنًا ومتوازنًا للنمو التاريخي للأنثروبولوجيا كفرعٍ من فروع المعرفة الإنسانية، وليس تقديم إعادة تأويل جذرية له.
ثمّة أدبيات علمية متنامية عن تاريخ الأنثروبولوجيا، والتي لا يحاول هذا الكتاب المنهجي أنْ يتنافس معها. وعلى الرغم من ذلك، لا نعرف عن كتاب بمثل هذا المدى كما في هذا الكتاب على نحو مضبوط؛ إذ غالبًا ما تكون الأدبيات العلمية تفصيلية، والكتب القائمة عن التاريخ الأنثروبولوجي إما نظرية التوجه في الأكثر، أو ملتزمة بواحدة أو القليل من التقاليد المهنية. ورغم أنّنا قد لا ننجح دائمًا، فقد ناضلنا لإعطاء انطباع عن التطورات الموازية والمتقاربة والمتداخلة للتقاليد الرئيسة في الأنثروبولوجيا الاجتماعية والثقافية.
والكتاب منظم زمنيًّا بدءًا بـ‘أوليات الأنثروبولوجيا’ من اليونان العتيقة إلى عصر التنوير، ويستمر مع ابتكار الأنثروبولوجيا الأكاديمية، وتنامي علم الاجتماع الكلاسيكي خلال القرن التاسع عشر. يركز الفصل الثالث على أربعة رجال ممن يعتبرون- بالإجماع العام- الآباء المؤسسين لأنثروبولوجيا القرن العشرين، بينما يشير الفصل الرابع إلى كيف أنّ عملهم استمر وتنوع من قبل الطلبة. ويتعامل كلا الفصلين الخامس والسادس مع نفس الفترة، من حوالي 1946 إلى حوالي 1968، ولكنّهما يركزان على التيارات المختلفة؛ حيث يناقش الفصل الخامس الجدالات النظرية المحيطة بمفاهيم المجتمع والإدماج الاجتماعي، بينما يغطي الفصل السادس مفاهيم الثقافة والمعنى الرمزي. وفي الفصل السابع، عرضت الاضطرابات الثقافية والسياسية للستينيات والسبعينيات، مع التشديد على الدوافع المنبثقة من الحركة الماركسية والحركة النسوية. ويتعامل الفصل الثامن مع الثمانينيات، مركزًا على حركة ما بعد الحداثة، وقريبتها: حركة ما بعد الاستعمار، وهما تياران نقديان اثنان، تحديا بصورة جدية الثقة الذاتية لميدان العلم، فيما يعرض الفصل التاسع والأخير للقليل من تيارات ما بعد الحداثة الرئيسية التي ظهرت في التسعينيات.
لا نعتبر تاريخ الأنثروبولوجيا حكاية للتطور المتصاعد الخطي، فقد استحوذت بعض ‘الجدالات الحديثة’، على سبيل المثال، على اهتمام العلماء منذ عصر التنوير وحتى قبل ذلك. ولكننا نعتقد- في الوقت نفسه- أنّه كان هناك نمو متصاعد ومتراكم في المعرفة والفهم ضمن ميدان العلم، وليس في أقلّها ما يتعلق بالطريقة المنهجية. زد على ذلك أنه كما يستجيب علم الأنثروبولوجيا إلى التغيرات في العالم الخارجي، فإنّ تركيزه النظري الجوهري يتغير وفقًا لذلك. وعليه، قادت الحركة منذ بدايات عصر التصنيع والاستعمار إلى عصر المعلومات للحداثة العولمية ميدان العلم خلال سلسلة من التحولات، والتي استمرت من الناحية الجوهرية لتطرح نفس الأسئلة التي سئلت قبل خمسين، أو مائة، أو حتى مائتي سنة ماضية.

264 pages, Paperback

First published October 20, 2001

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About the author

Thomas Hylland Eriksen

86 books143 followers
Geir Thomas Hylland Eriksen was a Norwegian anthropologist known for his scholarly and popular writing on globalization, identity, ethnicity, and nationalism. He was Professor of Social Anthropology in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo. He has previously served as the President of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (2015–2016), as well as the Editor of Samtiden (1993–2001), Norsk antropologisk tidsskrift (1993–1997), the Journal of Peace Research, and Ethnos.
Hylland Eriksen was among the most prolific and highly cited anthropologists of his generation, and had been recognized for his remarkable success in bringing an anthropological perspective to a broader, non-academic audience. In Norway, Hylland Eriksen was a well-known public intellectual whose advocacy of diversity and cultural pluralism had earned both praise and scorn. Right-wing terrorist Anders Behring Breivik, perpetrator of the 2011 Norway attacks, cited Eriksen critically in his manifesto and during his 2012 trial.
In the academy and beyond, Hylland Eriksen had been highly decorated for his scholarship. He was the recipient of honorary degrees from Stockholm University (2011), the University of Copenhagen (2021), and Charles University in Prague (2021), as well as one of anthropology's most prestigious honors, the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography's Gold Medal (2022). He was a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
1,212 reviews164 followers
June 14, 2021
Excellent Overview of a Complex Field

When you start out studying anthropology, you usually get hit from all sides with a plethora of ideas and “classic” works you must read. You become aware that anthropologists have been writing since the late 19th century, though there were related texts (in some way) stretching back to antiquity. But if you are in a university, the professor will talk knowingly about current work as well. You hear about all kinds of theories, with different defining names, that boost or dismiss previous work endlessly. It’s quite confusing. And it depends whether your institution is in the USA, in the UK, or in Europe. (What to say of Asia, Latin America, or Africa?) Once-separate national traditions of anthropological direction have intertwined to a large degree, but older, more diverse trajectories still exist to some extent. Lots of controversies have risen and disappeared, others still remain. How to make sense out of all this? Who were the creators of anthropology in the past? What approaches did they take? Where did they work and how did they do what they did? You can try to read your way through oceans of text, from author to author, but good luck with that, you’d better be young, otherwise you won’t live long enough to reach the end.

Or---you can read this book! I’m really pleased I bought it. It’s the best summary of the whole field I’ve ever found, written very clearly with a minimum of jargon by two Scandinavian professors. It explains the foundations of the field, tells of the lives and work of a few of the most famous scholars, but supplies the objections that others had to their work. You can read how British, French, and American approaches really differed at first, but over the years began to cross-fertilize. It tells how anthropology did or didn’t mesh with colonial rule in the British and French cases, and how Americans saw anthropology as a way to preserve what they thought were dying cultures of North America. From Malinowski to Margaret Mead, from Gluckman to Geertz, all the famous names appear. Let’s not forget the 1960s graduate student hero, Claude Levi-Strauss. You will perceive, along with the authors, that anthropology can never be a science; it’s an art form. From the view of culture as functional, anthropologists moved on to analysis of structure, especially kinship, and then by the 1960s, more to symbolism and the inner aspects of culture. It’s a long history full of the names of authors and trends, but it’s all here, put together in a very understandable form. Marxism, feminism, modernism and post-modernism are stirred into the mix towards the end. If you emerge finally without a better understanding of how anthropology arrived at its present condition, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle.


Profile Image for Timár_Krisztina.
289 reviews47 followers
June 12, 2021
Mit jelent embernek lenni?

Ehhez a kérdéshez tartozik például az, hogy melyik korban mit jelentett szembesülni azzal, ami „más”, ami nem „én” vagyok, illetve nem „mi” vagyunk. Többek között ezt kutatja az antropológia. Az sem mindegy, hogy mikor/hol mire használták ezt a szembesülést, adott esetben szembeállítást. Mert lehet eszköze a kíváncsiságnak („ők hogyan viszonyulnak a világ jelenségeihez?”), lehet alapja barátkozásnak és ellenségeskedésnek (az ellenséget ismerni legalább annyira érdeke az embernek, mint a szövetségest), lehet eszköze az önismeretnek („az ő szemükkel nézzük magunkat, így mást is meglátunk, mint amit szoktunk”), sőt a saját identitás megerősítésének is („mi nem olyanok vagyunk, hanem ilyenek”). 

Részletes értékelés a blogon:
https://gyujtogeto-alkoto.blog.hu/202...
Profile Image for Rania.
22 reviews8 followers
May 29, 2018
very helpful and necessary resource for beginners in anthropology fields .
Profile Image for evi.
107 reviews9 followers
December 11, 2025
zapamatuju si tohle všechno ke státnicím? stay tuned for may 2027
Profile Image for Nicholas Whyte.
5,343 reviews209 followers
June 18, 2016
http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2667431.html

Unfortunately this book didn't scratch my itch - not much more than simply listing historical anthropologists and their wider intellectual context, with frustratingly little about the content of their actual work; the fact that they argued with each other intensely is recorded, but what they argued about isn't really, except when it's gossip (how Margaret Mead met Gregory Bateson). I really didn't learn as much from this as I had hoped, and it didn't give me much in the way of pointers for future reading either.
Profile Image for Chris Gager.
2,062 reviews88 followers
November 14, 2011
A required course for Anthro majors at CU. This book is picked only to represent the course. I can't remember the Prof's name but he was one of the old guard in the dept. My last semester... Date is approximate.
Profile Image for m. galal.
28 reviews4 followers
July 15, 2023
كتاب مدهش، مدخل تاريخي غني جدا بالمعلومات والأفكار. بداية مُحمسة جدا لي لدراسة الأنثربولوجيا.
Profile Image for Стефан Петков.
73 reviews4 followers
June 13, 2022
Чудесно въвеждащо в материята обобщаващо изследване на двама водещи скандинавски антрополози. Големият минус е ужасната пунктуация - очевидно коректорът (ако изобщо го има - не е посочен) не си е свършил работата.
Profile Image for Karrarabd.
119 reviews9 followers
December 24, 2022
الترجمة ليست افضل شيء ... العرض التاريخي كان لعلم الاجتماع مع عرض لافكار فلسفية
Profile Image for Hanie rezanejad.
3 reviews
March 18, 2024
This book is such an amazing exploration of Anthropology from its beginnings to the present. It attempts to explain many important topics in anthropology with a high level of precision.
Profile Image for Peter.
875 reviews4 followers
July 2, 2025
Thomas Hylland Eriksen is a professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo in Norway. Finn Sivert Nielsen is a retired associate professor of anthropology at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. Eriksen and Nielsen wrote A History of Anthropology. I read the 2017 edition. Eriksen and Nielsen wrote, “The book is chronologically ordered. Beginning with the ‘proto anthropologies’ from ancient Greece to the Enlightenment, it continues with the creation of academic anthropology and the growth of classical sociology during the nineteenth century. The third chapter concentrates on the four men who, by consensus, are considered the founding fathers of twentieth century anthropology” (Eriksen & Nielsen ix). Eriksen and Neilsen wrote “the men whose work will form the backbone of this chapter were Franz Boas, Bronislaw Malinowski, Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown, and Marcel Mauss” (Eriksen & Nielsen 47). I read the book on the Kindle. Eriksen and Nielsen writes “the fourth indicates how the work of the founding fathers of the field of anthropology was continued, and diversified, by their students” (Eriksen & Nielsen ix). Chapters 5 and 6 covers the field of anthropology “from about 1946 to about 1968” (Eriksen & Nielsen ix). Chapter 7 covers the field of anthropology in the 1960s and 1970s. Chapter 8 covers the field of anthropology in the 1980s. Chapter 9 covers the field of anthropology from the 1990s until the time the book was published. Both Eriksen and Nielsen are characters in the book. I think that if the reader keeps this in mind, the book serves as a good introduction to the history of anthropology.


















1,602 reviews5 followers
June 18, 2012
Hidaslukuinen tenttikirja, jota en ehtinyt lukea kokonaan ja jota oli paikka paikoin aika hankala ymmärtää.
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