Description
This book is about how Martin Heidegger's work relates to modern anthropology, and how it can help improve the discipline. It argues that many contemporary anthropologists neglect to recognize the ways that language and other representational practices conceal the world and human subjectivity. It also suggests that Heidegger's critique of western technology provides the basis for a return to anthropology's sociological foundations.
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Tree Leaf Talk bursts the constructionist bubble. The book is a passionate appeal for a rigorously down-to-earth anthropology, rooted in the slow, pedestrian rhythms of day-to-day activity through which experience, history and meaning are sedimented in the land." -Tim Ingold, University of Aberdeen This is the first book to explore the relationship between Martin Heidegger's work and modern anthropology. Heidegger attracts much scholarly interest among social scientists, but few have explored his ideas in relation to current anthropological debates. The discipline's modernist foundations, the nature of cultural constructionism and of art-even what an anthropology of art must include-are all informed and illuminated by Heidegger's work. The author argues that many contemporary anthropologists, in their concern to return subjectivity and "voice" to their interlocutors, neglect to recognize that language and other representational practices conceal the world and human subjectivity as much as reveal it. The author also suggests that Heidegger's critique of western technology provides the basis for a return to anthropology's sociological foundations. Emerging out of over ten years of original research, and drawing on a rich knowledge of Australian and Melanesian ethnography, this book reassesses the underlying framework of modern and, particularly, visual anthropology.
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