america
american foreign policy
anthology
anthropologists
anthropology
biology
Category=JHMC
contemporary world
controversial topics
democratic
dinesh dsouza
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eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
essay collection
ethnic violence
fieldwork
gendered violence
globalization
history and sociology
humanistic
modern critique
nonfiction essays
political thought
poverty
pundits
race issues
robert kaplan
samuel huntington
social issues
social justice
social science
thomas friedman
under scrutiny
welfare
yugoslavia
Product details
- ISBN 9780520243569
- Weight: 499g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 17 Jan 2005
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In this fresh, literate, and biting critique of current thinking on some of today's most important and controversial topics, leading anthropologists take on some of America's top pundits. This absorbing collection of essays subjects such popular commentators as Thomas Friedman, Samuel Huntington, Robert Kaplan, and Dinesh D'Souza to cold, hard scrutiny and finds that their writing is often misleadingly simplistic, culturally ill-informed, and politically dangerous. Mixing critical reflection with insights from their own fieldwork, twelve distinguished anthropologists respond by offering fresh perspectives on globalization, ethnic violence, social justice, and the biological roots of behavior. They take on such topics as the collapse of Yugoslavia, the consumer practices of the American poor, American foreign policy in the Balkans, and contemporary debates over race, welfare, and violence against women. In the clear, vigorous prose of the pundits themselves, these contributors reveal the hollowness of what often passes as prevailing wisdom and passionately demonstrate the need for a humanistically complex and democratic understanding of the contemporary world.
Available: November 2004 Pub Date: January 2005
Catherine Besteman is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Colby College and author of Unraveling Somalia: Race, Violence, and the Legacy of Slavery (1999), among other books. Hugh Gusterson, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Science at MIT, is author of Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War (California, 1996) and People of the Bomb (2004).
