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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.
List 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
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.
Summary
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.
Additional text
“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
