World: An anthropological examination

• Autor(a) principal: Pina-Cabral, Joao
• Data de Publicação: 2017
• Tipo de documento: Livro
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10451/47869
• topic: World; Social Anthropology; Ethnographic theory; representationism; Individualism; Person; Sociocentrism; Personal ontogeny; Worldview; Metaphysical pluralism; Ontological Proof; Imagination

What do we mean when we refer to world? How does world relate to the human person? Are the two interdependent, and, if so, in what way? What is the world at hand for an ethnographer? Much has been said of worlds and worldview, but are we really certain that we know what we mean when we use these words? This book is centrally concerned with exploring the conditions of possibility of the ethnographic gesture and, by implication, with ethnographic theory and the debates that presently fire it. The important changes that have occurred over the past two decades concerning the way in which we relate human cognition with humanity’s embodiedness strongly suggest that we are on the threshold of a new conceptualization of the human condition—a new anthropology— that breaks away from the sociocentric and representationalist constraints that plagued the social sciences throughout the twentieth century. This essay is a contribution toward that momentous change.