Cultural anthropologists can be an intellectually adventurous crowd: open-even eager-to building bridges across disciplines in the name of understanding human behavior and the human experience more broadly. In this first-of-its-kind book, Caroline Brettell explores the cross-disciplinary conversations that have engaged cultural anthropologists both past and present. Brettell highlights a handful of conversations between the discipline of anthropology on the one hand and history, geography, literature, biology, psychology and demography on the other. She also pinpoints how these exchanges address three enduring issues of anthropological concern: the temporal and the spatial dimensions of human experience; the scientific and the humanistic dimensions of the anthropological enterprise; and the individual and the group/population as units of analysis in research. Anthropological Conversations offers detailed accounts of particular ethnographic methodologies and findings (and the theoretical trends informing them) as a means of grasping the big-picture issues. Brettell clearly shows that, by engaging with other fields, cultural anthropologists have been able to think more deeply about what they mean by culture; through this book, she invites readers to continue the conversation.
Introduction: Anthropological Conversations across Disciplines 1-The Presence of the Past in Culture: Anthropology and History Fieldwork in the Archives: Tackling the Methodology of History The Presence of the Past: Anthropological History The Presence of the Past: The Anthropology of History Conclusion: The Presence of the Past: An Engaged Historical Anthropology 2-Space, Place, and Culture: Anthropology and Geography Anthropology and Geography: Early Conversations The Anthropology of Space and Place Gendered Space and Feminist Geography The New Anthropology of Landscape and the Environment Conclusion: From the Etics of Region to the Emics of Space and Place 3-Writing Culture: Anthropology and Literature Ethnography as Genre: Experimenting with Forms of Writing The Literary Observer: Novelists with an Anthropological Eye Conclusion: The Craft of Writing Anthropology 4-The Science in Culture: Anthropology and Biology Biology and Culture in the Twentieth Century: From Boas to Sociobiology to Bioculturalism New Directions in the Integration of Biology and Culture Conclusion 5-The Individual and Culture: Anthropology and Psychology Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and Neo-Freudianism: Seeds of Interaction, Seeds of Cross-Disciplinarity Stress, Trauma, and Meaning-Centered Psychology Anthropology Conclusion: A Cross-Cultural Psychology 6-Culture and Population: Anthropology and Demography Bridging the Divide: Methods, Concepts, and Epistemology The Problems Explored by Anthropological Demographers Conclusion: Toward Convergence and Cross-Disciplinarity? Notes References Index About the Author
