Beyond Description: Anthropologies of Explanation

Open Access Published by Cornell University Press 2023

Beyond Description

Anthropologies of Explanation

Edited by: Paolo Heywood and Matei Candea

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501771583

Overview
Contents

About this book

Beyond Description brings anthropologists and other social scientists together to examine the problem of explanation. What is "an explanation?" What can it add? What makes it authoritative, clarifying, or misleading? Whom does it serve and how is it produced? These questions lie at the heart of recent public crises of confidence in expertise, political representation, and classic liberal visions of whom we can rely on for true and trustworthy accounts. In a world beset by events and processes that seem to defy expert predictions of their impossibility, and in which post-hoc accounts can often feel more like rationalizations than explanations, competing voices vie for public presence and seek to silence one another. Anthropology and the social sciences face such questions too, making contemporary explanatory practice both an empirical and a reflexive challenge.

By combining ethnographic studies of practices of explanation in a range of contemporary political, medical, artistic, religious, and bureaucratic settings, the essays in Beyond Description offer critical examinations of changing norms and forms of explanation in the world and within anthropology itself.

Author / Editor information

Matei Candea is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Corsican Fragments and Comparison in Anthropology. Paolo Heywood is Assistant Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Durham. He is the author of After Difference.

Reviews

Martyn Hammersley, The Open University, author of The Radicalism of Ethnomethodology:

This fascinating and wide-ranging book addresses challenging issues not just in anthropology but across the social sciences.

Karen O'Reilly, oughborough University, author of Ethnographic Methods:

Beautifully written and thoroughly researched, Beyond Description illuminates the relationship between ethnography, anthropology, and explanation in the context of debates around applied anthropology, impact, public sociology, and public dissemination of knowledge.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Introduction: Ethnographies of Explanation and the Explanation of Ethnography Matei Candea and Paolo Heywood Open Access Download PDF	1
Part 1: ON ANTHROPOLOGICAL EXPLANATIONS
1. Are There Anthropological Problems? Paolo Heywood Open Access Download PDF	25
2. On Anthropological Findings Tanya M. Luhrmann Open Access Download PDF	45
3. On (Not) Explaining the Domestic Miracle Jon Bialecki Open Access Download PDF	63
4. Emergent Explanation Matei Candea and Thomas Yarrow Open Access Download PDF	81
5. Bourdieu, the Demystifying Power of Individualism, and the Crisis of Anthropology Gildas Salmon and Nicolas Carter Open Access Download PDF	104
6. The Economic Explanation Richard Staley Open Access Download PDF	125
Part 2: ETHNOGRAPHIES OF EXPLANATION
7. Anthropological Explanation by Virtue of Individual Worldviews and the Case of Stanley Spencer Nigel Rapport Open Access Download PDF	145
8. Explaining Post-truth Jonathan Mair Open Access Download PDF	163
9. Finding Real and Fake Explanations Sarah Green Open Access Download PDF	181
10. Explaining Mindfulness in Political Advocacy Joanna Cook Open Access Download PDF	201
11. Explaining the Politics of the Author Adam Reed Open Access Download PDF	221
Contributors Open Access Download PDF	241
Index Open Access Download PDF	243

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Audience: General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 264
Illustrations
- Illustrations: 1
- Images: 1
- Other: 1 b&w halftone
Keywords: political phenomenon; post-truth; cognitive therapy; empirical questions; ethnographic studies; examinations; anthropology; epistemological questions; philosophy; sociology; epistemology; interpretation; social analysis

eBook

Published: December 18, 2023
ISBN: 9781501771583