Using cultural anthropology to analyze debates that reverberate throughout the human sciences, George E. Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer look closely at cultural anthropology's past accomplishments, its current predicaments, its future direction, and the insights it has to offer other fields of study. The result is a provocative work that is important for scholars interested in a critical approach to social science, art, literature, and history, as well as anthropology. This second edition considers new challenges to the field which have arisen since the book's original publication.

Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences

Politics & Social Sciences

Marcus, George E.

Fischer, Michael M. J.

Anthropology

University of Chicago Press

Social Sciences

The aim of this book is to present in their historical context the debates that have been taking place in the Muslim world recently. It describes the place of Iranian culture in contemporary art and thought and the increasing influence Muslims are having on Western societies. In an introductory autobiographical chapter, Mehdi Abedi introduces readers to the world of Shi'ite believers. Beginning with the overthrow of Mossadegh in 1953 he describes Iranian class structure, patronage network, socialization, and religious psychology and shows how the political consciousness of an entire generation of Iranian youth - both religious fundamentalist and Marxist - was formed and exercised. Continuing with a description of how Muslims read and interpret the Qur'an, Michael Fischer and Mehdi Abedi set the interpretations against contemporary theories of reading in the modernist and postmodernist West and against contemporary Jewish and Christian thought. Other chapters analyze the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca and its various functions; describe the debate about nationalism and Islam between Shariati and Motahhari, two thinkers crucial to the revolution; outline the historical evolution of Baha'ism as apart from Shi'ism; and consider the burgeoning diaspora of Muslims in the West, using Houston as an example. A final chapter considers Iranian art as illustrative of the postmodern, intercultural context of the revolution and of contemporary Islam.

Debating Muslims: Cultural Dialogues in Postmodernity and Tradition (New Directions in Anthropological Writings)

Abedi, Mehdi

Religion & Spirituality

Univ of Wisconsin Pr

In a world of multinational commerce, satellite broadcasting, migration, terrorism, and global arms dealing, what is said and how it is said in one society can no longer be isolated from what is said and how it is said in another. Debating Muslims focuses on Iranian culture, Shi’ite Islam, and Iranians in the United States, offering an experiment in postmodern ethnography and an invitation to think in a multifaceted way about Islam in the contemporary world.

Debating Muslims: Cultural Dialogues in Postmodernity and Tradition (New Directions in Anthropological Writing)

History

University of Wisconsin Press

Unlike much of the instant analysis that appeared at the time of the Iranian revolution, Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution is based upon extensive fieldwork carried out in Iran. Michael M. J. Fischer draws upon his rich experience with the mullahs and their students in the holy city of Qum, composing a picture of Iranian society from the inside-the lives of ordinary people, the way that each class interprets Islam, and the role of religion and religious education in the culture. Fischer's book, with its new introduction updating arguments for the post-Revolutionary period, brings a dynamic view of a society undergoing metamorphosis, which remains fundamental to understanding Iranian society in the early twenty-first century.

Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution

Middle East

Unravels the explosive complexities of contemporary Iran, studying the role of religion and religious education in the culture and depicting the lives of ordinary citizens

Harvard University Press

Unravels the explosive complexities of contemporary Iran, studying the role of religion and religious education in the culture and depicting the lives of ordinary citizens

Shi'ism, Resistance, And Revolution

The recent revival of interest in the Muslim world has generated numerous studies of modern Islam, most of them focusing on the Sunni majority. Shi'ism, an often stigmatized minority branch of Islam, has been discussed mainly in connection with Iran. Yet Shi'i movements have been extraordinarily effective in creating political strategies that have

Norton, Augustus R.

Krämer, Martin

Bakhash, Shaul

Bailey, Clinton

Westview Press

Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice

Anthropology as Cultural Critique helped redefine cultural anthropology in the 1980s. Now, with Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice, pathbreaking scholar Michael M. J. Fischer moves the discussion to a consideration of the groundwork laid in the 1990s for engagements with the fast-changing worlds of technoscience, telemedia saturation, and the reconstruction of societies after massive trauma. Fischer argues that new methodologies and conceptual tools are necessitated by the fact that cultures of every kind are becoming more complex and differentiated at the same time that globalization and modernization are bringing them into exponentially increased interaction. Anthropology, Fischer explains, now operates in a series of third spaces well beyond the nineteenth- and twentieth-century dualisms of us/them, primitive/civilized, East/West, or North/South. He contends that more useful paradigms—such as informatics, multidimensional scaling, autoimmunity, and visual literacy beyond the frame—derive from the contemporary sciences and media technologies.A vigorous advocate of the anthropological voice and method, Fischer emphasizes the ethical dimension of cultural anthropology. Ethnography, he suggests, is uniquely situated to gather and convey observations fundamental to the creation of new social institutions for an evolving civil society. In Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice Fischer considers a dazzling array of subjects—among them Iranian and Polish cinema, cyberspace, autobiographical and fictional narrative, and genomic biotechnologies—and, in the process, demonstrates a cultural anthropology for a highly networked world. He lays the groundwork for a renewed and powerful twenty-first-century anthropology characterized by a continued insistence on empirical fieldwork, engagements with other disciplines, and dialogue with interlocutors around the globe.

Duke University Press Books

Anthropology as Cultural Critique helped redefine cultural anthropology in the 1980s. Now, with Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice, pathbreaking scholar Michael M. J. Fischer moves the discussion to a consideration of the groundwork laid in the 1990s for engagements with the fast-changing worlds of technoscience, telemedia saturation, and the reconstruction of societies after massive trauma. Fischer argues that new methodologies and conceptual tools are necessitated by the fact that cultures of every kind are becoming more complex and differentiated at the same time that globalization and modernization are bringing them into exponentially increased interaction. Anthropology, Fischer explains, now operates in a series of third spaces well beyond the nineteenth- and twentieth-century dualisms of us/them, primitive/civilized, East/West, or North/South. He contends that more useful paradigms—such as informatics, multidimensional scaling, autoimmunity, and visual literacy beyond the frame—derive from the contemporary sciences and media technologies.A vigorous advocate of the anthropological voice and method, Fischer emphasizes the ethical dimension of cultural anthropology. Ethnography, he suggests, is uniquely situated to gather and convey observations fundamental to the creation of new social institutions for an evolving civil society. In Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice Fischer considers a dazzling array of subjects—among them Iranian and Polish cinema, cyberspace, autobiographical and fictional narrative, and genomic biotechnologies—and, in the process, demonstrates a cultural anthropology for a highly networked world. He lays the groundwork for a renewed and powerful twenty-first-century anthropology characterized by a continued insistence on empirical fieldwork, engagements with other disciplines, and dialogue with interlocutors around the globe.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Fischer, Michael M. J.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Fischer, Michael M. J.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Fischer, Michael M. J.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences

Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences

Debating Muslims: Cultural Dialogues in Postmodernity and Tradition (New Directions in Anthropological Writings)

Debating Muslims: Cultural Dialogues in Postmodernity and Tradition (New Directions in Anthropological Writing)

Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution

Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution

Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution

Shi'ism, Resistance, And Revolution

Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice

Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice