Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
54
result(s) for
"Ethnophilosophy History."
Sort by:
Science and sustainability : learning from indigenous wisdom
\"This book is about indigenous science: sustainable knowledge and practice of Indigenous peoples around the world which has usually been developed and handed down for generations, but which was often largely ignored by settlers in their lands. Such science has been passed on in performance, art, stories, and in embodied practice, so the book will necessarily examine the meaning of science, problematizing the idea that Western science is the only type that deserves that name, and drawing attention to some of its shortcomings. Methods of acquiring \"science\" are also examined, notably including a personal account of the author's dissatisfaction with her own undergraduate training, and a realization much later of the reasons for this disillusionment. Throughout the book, the author takes the reader with her on the learning process that brought its content to her attention, and therefore introduces the reasons for wanting to share the examples gathered\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Magical criticism
During the Enlightenment, Western scholars racialized ideas, deeming knowledge based on reality superior to that based on ideality. Scholars labeled inquiries into ideality, such as animism and soul-migration, “savage philosophy,” a clear indicator of the racism motivating the distinction between the real and the ideal. In their view, the savage philosopher mistakes connections between signs for connections between real objects and believes that discourse can have physical effects—in other words, they believe in magic. Christopher Bracken’s Magical Criticism brings the unacknowledged history of this racialization to light and shows how, even as we have rejected ethnocentric notions of “the savage,” they remain active today in everything from attacks on postmodernism to Native American land disputes. Here Bracken reveals that many of the most influential Western thinkers dabbled in savage philosophy, from Marx, Nietzsche, and Proust, to Freud, C. S. Peirce, and Walter Benjamin. For Bracken, this recourse to savage philosophy presents an opportunity to reclaim a magical criticism that can explain the very real effects created by the discourse of historians, anthropologists, philosophers, the media, and governments.
eBook
The invention of prehistory : empire, violence, and our obsession with human origins
\"Books about human origins dominate bestseller lists, while national newspapers present breathless accounts of new archaeological findings and speculate about what those findings tell us about our earliest ancestors. We are obsessed with prehistory--and, in this respect, our current era is no different from any other in the last three hundred years. In this coruscating work, acclaimed historian Stefanos Geroulanos demonstrates how claims about the earliest humans not only shaped Western intellectual culture, but gave rise to our modern world. The very idea that there was a human past before recorded history only emerged with the Enlightenment, when European thinkers began to reject faith-based notions of humanity and history in favor of supposedly more empirical ideas about the world. From the \"state of nature\" and Romantic notions of virtuous German barbarians to theories about Neanderthals and a matriarchal paradise where women ruled, Geroulanos captures the sheer variety and strangeness of the claims that animated many of the major thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Charles Darwin, and Karl Marx. Yet as Geroulanos shows, such ideas became, for the most part, the ideological foundations of repressive regimes and globe-spanning empires. Deeming other peoples \"savages\" allowed for guilt-free violence against them; notions of \"killer apes\" who were our evolutionary predecessors made war seem natural. The emergence of modern science only accelerated the West's imperialism. The Nazi obsession with race was rooted in archaeological claims about prehistoric Indo-Germans; the notion that colonialized peoples could be \"bombed back to the Stone Age\" was made possible by not only the technology of flight, but by the anthropological idea that civilization advanced in stages. As Geroulanos argues, accounts of prehistory tell us more about the moment when they are proposed than anything else--and if we hope to start improving our future, we would be better off setting aside the search for how it all started. A necessary, timely, indelible account of how the quest for understanding the origins of humanity became the handmaiden of war and empire, The Invention of Prehistory will forever change how we think about the deep past.\" -- Provided by publisher.
Book
Minds make societies : how cognition explains the world humans create
A scientist integrates evolutionary biology, genetics, psychology, economics, and more to explore the development and workings of human societies.
\"There is no good reason why human societies should not be described and explained with the same precision and success as the rest of nature.\" Thus argues evolutionary psychologist Pascal Boyer in this uniquely innovative book.
Integrating recent insights from evolutionary biology, genetics, psychology, economics, and other fields, Boyer offers precise models of why humans engage in social behaviors such as forming families, tribes, and nations, or creating gender roles. In fascinating, thought-provoking passages, he explores questions such as: Why is there conflict between groups? Why do people believe low-value information such as rumors? Why are there religions? What is social justice? What explains morality? Boyer provides a new picture of cultural transmission that draws on the pragmatics of human communication, the constructive nature of memory in human brains, and human motivation for group formation and cooperation.
\"Cool and captivating…It will change forever your understanding of society and culture.\"—Dan Sperber, co-author of The Enigma of Reason
\"It is highly recommended…to researchers firmly settled within one of the many single disciplines in question. Not only will they encounter a wealth of information from the humanities, the social sciences and the natural sciences, but the book will also serve as an invitation to look beyond the horizons of their own fields.\"—Eveline Seghers, Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture
eBook
African Indigenous Knowledges in a Postcolonial World
This book argues that ancient and modern African indigenous knowledges remain key to Africa’s role in global capital, technological and knowledge development and to addressing her marginality and postcoloniality.
The contributors engage the unresolved problematics of the historical and contemporary linkages between African knowledges and the African academy, and between African and global knowledges. The book relies on historical and comparative political analysis to explore the global context for the application of indigenous knowledges for tackling postcolonial challenges of knowledge production, conflict and migration, and women’s rights on the continent in transcontinental African contexts.
Asserting the enduring potency of African indigenous knowledges for the transformation of policy, the African academy and the study of Africa in the global academy, this book will be of interest to scholars of African Studies, postcolonial studies and decolonisation and global affairs.
eBook
Rational Ritual
Why do Internet, financial service, and beer commercials dominate Super Bowl advertising? How do political ceremonies establish authority? Why does repetition characterize anthems and ritual speech? Why were circular forms favored for public festivals during the French Revolution? This book answers these questions using a single concept: common knowledge.
Game theory shows that in order to coordinate its actions, a group of people must form \"common knowledge.\" Each person wants to participate only if others also participate. Members must have knowledge of each other, knowledge of that knowledge, knowledge of the knowledge of that knowledge, and so on. Michael Chwe applies this insight, with striking erudition, to analyze a range of rituals across history and cultures. He shows that public ceremonies are powerful not simply because they transmit meaning from a central source to each audience member but because they let audience members know what other members know. For instance, people watching the Super Bowl know that many others are seeing precisely what they see and that those people know in turn that many others are also watching. This creates common knowledge, and advertisers selling products that depend on consensus are willing to pay large sums to gain access to it. Remarkably, a great variety of rituals and ceremonies, such as formal inaugurations, work in much the same way.
By using a rational-choice argument to explain diverse cultural practices, Chwe argues for a close reciprocal relationship between the perspectives of rationality and culture. He illustrates how game theory can be applied to an unexpectedly broad spectrum of problems, while showing in an admirably clear way what game theory might hold for scholars in the social sciences and humanities who are not yet acquainted with it.
In a new afterword, Chwe delves into new applications of common knowledge, both in the real world and in experiments, and considers how generating common knowledge has become easier in the digital age.
eBook
How Things Shape the Mind
An account of the different ways in which things have become cognitive extensions of the human body, from prehistory to the present.
An increasingly influential school of thought in cognitive science views the mind as embodied, extended, and distributed rather than brain-bound or “all in the head.” This shift in perspective raises important questions about the relationship between cognition and material culture, posing major challenges for philosophy, cognitive science, archaeology, and anthropology. In How Things Shape the Mind, Lambros Malafouris proposes a cross-disciplinary analytical framework for investigating the ways in which things have become cognitive extensions of the human body. Using a variety of examples and case studies, he considers how those ways might have changed from earliest prehistory to the present. Malafouris's Material Engagement Theory definitively adds materiality—the world of things, artifacts, and material signs—into the cognitive equation. His account not only questions conventional intuitions about the boundaries and location of the human mind but also suggests that we rethink classical archaeological assumptions about human cognitive evolution.
eBook
BATMAN IN THE CLASSROOM
Though the interaction of philosophy with pop culture has so far mostly taken the form of books for nonphilosophers that use various shows and movies as sources of examples to illustrate \"traditional\" philosophical issues, this article contends that serious engagement with the informal philosophical discussions expressed in popular entertainments constitutes a kind of \"ethnophilosophy\" and should be considered an important part of the discipline. Our disciplinary responsibility for maintaining and considering the history of philosophy ought to include even the philosophical conversations that occur outside the academy; however unlike \"proper\" philosophy this material may be, it nonetheless represents engagement—sometimes substantial engagement—with the same issues that concern those of us who are considered \"professional\" philosophers, and thus is legitimately of interest to us.
Journal Article
An Introduction to Africana Philosophy
In this undergraduate textbook Lewis R. Gordon offers the first comprehensive treatment of Africana philosophy, beginning with the emergence of an Africana (i.e. African diasporic) consciousness in the Afro-Arabic world of the Middle Ages. He argues that much of modern thought emerged out of early conflicts between Islam and Christianity that culminated in the expulsion of the Moors from the Iberian Peninsula, and from the subsequent expansion of racism, enslavement, and colonialism which in their turn stimulated reflections on reason, liberation, and the meaning of being human. His book takes the student reader on a journey from Africa through Europe, North and South America, the Caribbean, and back to Africa, as he explores the challenges posed to our understanding of knowledge and freedom today, and the response to them which can be found within Africana philosophy.
eBook
African Philosophy and the Lingering Question of Methodology
Since the post-World War II era there has been a lingering controversy about what we should be doing in the name of African philosophy. Whilst some argue that it is the espousing of collective traditional practices, norms and values, others argue that it is the critical argumentation done by individual philosophers on any topic worth philosophical attention. There has been an attempt to forge a compromise in what is called sage philosophy, but there is no guaranteed accuracy in this attempt. My argument is that the debate persists because of a hasty expectation of African philosophy. Secondly, it appears that we cannot avoid argumentation as a methodology in African philosophy, contrary to the position of some supporters of the \"ethno\" philosophy school.
Journal Article