How can we hold both public and personal worlds in the eye of a
unified theory of meaning? What ethnographic and theoretical
possibilities do we create in the balance? Anthropology Through
a Double Lens offers a theoretical framework encompassing both
of these domains-a "double lens." Daniel Touro Linger argues that
the literary turn in anthropology, which treats culture as text,
has been a wrong turn. Cultural analysis of the interpretive or
discursive variety, which focuses on public symbols, has difficulty
seeing-much less dealing convincingly with-actual persons. While
emphasizing the importance of social environments, Linger insists
on equal sensitivity to the experiential immediacies of human
lives. He develops a sustained critique of interpretive and
discursive trends in contemporary anthropology, which have too
strongly emphasized social determinism and public symbols while too
readily dismissing psychological and biographical realities.
Anthropology Through a Double Lens demonstrates the power
of an alternative dual perspective through a blend of critical
essays and ethnographic studies drawn from the author's field
research in São Luís, a northeastern Brazilian state capital, and
Toyota City, a Japanese factory town. To span the gap between the
public and the personal, Linger provides a set of analytical tools
that include the ideas of an arena of meaning, systems of systems,
bridging theory, singular lives, and reflective consciousness. The
tools open theoretical and ethnographic horizons for exploring the
process of meaning-making, the force of symbolism and rhetoric, the
politics of representation, and the propagation and formation of
identities. Linger uses these tools to focus on key issues in
current theoretical and philosophical debates across a host of
disciplines, including anthropology, psychology, history, and the
other human sciences..
eISBN: 978-0-8122-0369-1
Subjects: Anthropology
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