Bücher von Jonathan Friedman

This provocative work offers an anthropological analysis of the phenomenon of political correctness, both as a general phenomenon of communication, in which associations in space and time take precedence over the content of what is communicated, and as specific critical historical conjunctures in which new elites attempt to redefine social reality.

The state is frequently conceived as a universal, although one apparently extraordinarily difficult to define. It often appears in academic discourse and, especially, in the popular imagination as an abstraction, usually nebulous, grasped as pervasive - a spectre to be feared. In this book, distinguished scholars from around the world take issue with this purported universality, exploring alternative imaginings of the state, of power and of global processes at the margins.Taking an anthropological perspective based in diverse ethnographic contexts outside, or marginal to, Europe and North America, if not beyond their controlling influence in globalizing realities, this volume reveals different complexes of power, as well as processes that are external to power and often against it (contra Foucault, and as Pierre Clastres has famously argued).The authors stress not only the different structures of institutional power, but also the persistence or transmutation of local kinds of power and their relevant cosmologies into contemporary globalized settings. They find innovative kinds of modernity, reconfigurations that have effects that cannot be reduced to over-generalized and often intenselyEurocentric concepts of power and the kinds of subjectivities realized by them. In this, the volume opens up the diversity of experiences of the state and offers new directions for its study.

This new edition contains the full text of the original volume along with two related articles by the author and a new introduction. This work is suitable for advanced students and academics in anthropology.

`Friedman has produced a book of importance.... It features many tantalizing insights and observations in the author's attempt to comprehend the global constitution of the world and the "positional identities" - not least the identities of social scientists - within the global arena' - Theory, Culture & Society