Making Things Better: A Workbook on Ritual, Cultural Values, and Environmental Behavior (Oxford Ritual Studies)

In Making Things Better, A. David Napier demonstrates how anthropological description of non-Western exchange practices and beliefs can be a tonic for contemporary economic systems in which our impersonal relationship to ''things'' transforms the animate elements of social life into inanimate sets of commodities. Such a fundamental transformation, Napier suggests, makes us automatons in globally integrated social circuits that generate a cast of a winners and losers engaged in hostile competition for wealth and power. Our impersonal relations to ''things''--and to people as well--are so ingrained in our being, we take them for granted as we sleepwalk through routine life. Like the surrealist artists of the 1920s who, through their art, poetry, films, and photography, fought a valiant battle against mind-numbing conformity, Napier provides exercises and practica designed to shock the reader from their wakeful sleep. These demonstrate powerfully the positively integrative social effects of more socially entangled, non-Western orientations to ''things'' and to ''people.'' His arguments also have implications for the rights and legal status of indigenous peoples, which are drawn out in the course of the book.

Politics & Social Sciences

Napier, A. David

Anthropology

Oxford University Press

In this fascinating and inventive work, A. David Napier argues that the central assumption of immunology—that we survive through the recognition and elimination of non-self—has become a defining concept of the modern age. Tracing this immunological understanding of self and other through an incredibly diverse array of venues, from medical research to legal and military strategies and the electronic revolution, Napier shows how this defensive way of looking at the world not only destroys diversity but also eliminates the possibility of truly engaging difference, thereby impoverishing our culture and foreclosing tremendous opportunities for personal growth. To illustrate these destructive consequences, Napier likens the current craze for embracing diversity and the use of politically correct speech to a cultural potluck to which we each bring different dishes, but at which no one can eat unless they abide by the same rules. Similarly, loaning money to developing nations serves as a tool both to make the peoples in those nations more like us and to maintain them in the nonthreatening status of distant dependents. To break free of the resulting downward spiral of homogenization and self-focus, Napier suggests that we instead adopt a new defining concept based on embryology, in which development and self-growth take place through a process of incorporation and transformation. In this effort he suggests that we have much to learn from non-Western peoples, such as the Balinese, whose ritual practices require them to take on the considerable risk of injecting into their selves the potential dangers of otherness—and in so doing ultimately strengthen themselves as well as their society. The Age of Immunology, with its combination of philosophy, history, and cultural inquiry, will be seen as a manifesto for a new age and a new way of thinking about the world and our place in it.

The Age of Immunology: Conceiving a Future in an Alienating World

History

University of Chicago Press

Masks are found world-wide in connection with seasonal festivals, rites of passage, and curative ceremonies. They provide a means of investigating the paradoxical problems that appearances pose in the experience of transitional states. In this far-reaching work, A. David Napier studies mask iconography and the role played by masks in the realization of change. The masks of preclassical Greece¯in particular those of the Satyr and the Gorgon¯provide his starting point. A comparison of Greek to Eastern and especially Indian models follows, and the book concludes with an examination of the interpretation of Hindu ideas in Bali that demonstrates the importance of ambivalence in mask iconography.

Masks, Transformation, and Paradox

Univ. Of California Pr.

In five wide-ranging essays, A. David Napier explores the ways in which the foreign becomes literally and metaphorically embodied as a part of cultural identity rather than being seen as something outside it. Pre-classical Greece, Baroque Italy, and Western postmodernism are among the artistic domains Napier considers, while the symbolic terrain ranges from Balinese cosmography to body symbolism in biomedicine.

Foreign Bodies: Performance, Art, and Symbolic Anthropology

Arts & Photography

University of California Press

In five wide-ranging essays, A. David Napier explores the ways in which the foreign becomes literally and metaphorically embodied as a part of cultural identity rather than being seen as something outside it. Pre-classical Greece, Baroque Italy, and Western postmodernism are among the artistic domains Napier considers, while the symbolic terrain ranges from Balinese cosmography to body symbolism in biomedicine.

Today, much theory in the social sciences assumes that the acceptance of experience as inevitably unruly means that it is characterized by constant change and even by chaos. In such a world, we are told, the unordered qualities of daily living create so much uncertainty that identity itself becomes unstable. But this view, David Napier argues, begs a fundamental question: if contemporary life is as flexible and unstructured as, for example, postmodernists maintain, and we, in turn, are products of such a world, how might any of us order our thinking enough to recognize what is meaningful in life, let alone describe our experiences in ways that might have meaning for others?If we are truly the products of modernity, Napier says, we must either accept our inability to structure and shape our own sensations or, alternately, argue for some form of humanism that sees a struggling, existential self living unsettled within its unstructured environment. Were either circumstance universally the case, the world would, of course, be a rather different place; for there would be no shared literature called "postmodern," and there would be no one to dissect such experience for us: no authors with coherent identities, no theories that could be communicated, no books bought or read, no university departments dedicated to the industry of chaos. In short, there would be no ordered space for interpersonal understanding in such a world. This is the premise that informs The Righting of Passage.In this challenging book Napier offers a novel argument that accounts for diffuse and flexible notions of the self while also illustrating how a coherent, communicating self persists amid such apparent instability. This he does by arguing something entirely counterintuitive to both modernist and postmodernist positions—namely, that modernity's increasing separation of embodiment from meaning not only slows down human transformation but attenuates human growth by encouraging us to perceive risk as largely pathological. Today, the combined forces of stress management, depth psychology, therapeutic writing, dislocated meaning, and of institutional conformity work together to produce a reduction—not a proliferation—of change in human life.

The Righting of Passage: Perceptions of Change After Modernity (Contemporary Ethnography)

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Psychology & Counseling

University of Pennsylvania Press

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

Books by Napier, A. David

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

Making Things Better: A Workbook on Ritual, Cultural Values, and Environmental Behavior (Oxford Ritual Studies)

Making Things Better: A Workbook on Ritual, Cultural Values, and Environmental Behavior (Oxford Ritual Studies)

The Age of Immunology: Conceiving a Future in an Alienating World

Masks, Transformation, and Paradox

Foreign Bodies: Performance, Art, and Symbolic Anthropology

Foreign Bodies: Performance, Art, and Symbolic Anthropology

The Righting of Passage: Perceptions of Change After Modernity (Contemporary Ethnography)