Love ‘discovers the reality’ of individual human beings, wrote Iris Murdoch; love ‘deifies’ the person, wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. This book proposes love as a kind of civic virtue: that ‘loving recognition’ might function as a universal form of ethical engagement and inclusion. ‘Loving recognition’ is proposed as a civil practice that enshrines the individuality of human identity, overcoming the labels and classes of ethnicity, nationality, religiosity and social status.A particul...

Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophical work on ‘the Other’ offers a challenge to the discipline of anthropology that claims knowledge of the human. For Levinas, the ‘secrecy’ of subjectivity – a fundamental facet of the human condition – demands an ethics of ignorance and not-knowing; the mystery of otherness is only to be approached through ‘inspiration’. Can anthropology meet a Levinasian challenge if it would define itself as a science as well as a humanistic documentation of social life? Thi...

Transcendent Individual argues for a reappraisal of the place of the individual in anthropolgical theory and ethnographic writing. A wealth of voices illustrate and inform the text, showing ways in which individuals creatively 'write', narrate and animate cultural and social life. This is an anthropology imbued with a liberal morality which is willing to make value judgements over and against culture in favour of individuality.Rapport draws widely on ethnographic and theore...

What is it to be human? What are our specifically human attributes, our capacities and liabilities? Such questions gave birth to anthropology as an Enlightenment science. This book argues that it is again appropriate to bring “the human” to the fore, to reclaim the singularity of the word as central to the anthropological endeavor, not on the basis of the substance of a human nature – “To be human is to act like this and react like this, to feel this and want this” – but ...

The anthropology of Britain is hotly debated. What does it mean to live in Britain and to be 'British', and is an anthropology of Britain even a legitimate undertaking? British Subjects presents a forthright voice in this debate. Key anthropological concerns such as community, rationality, aesthetics, the body, power, work and leisure, nationalism and transnationalism are found reflected in the lives of a wide range of British 'subjects'--from farmers to dancers, children to retired miners...

Do notions of community remain central to our sense of who we are, or can we see beyond community closures to a human whole?This volume explores the nature of contemporary sociality. It focuses on the ethical, organisational and emotional claims and opportunities sought or fashioned for mobilising and evading social collectivities in a world of mobile subjects.Vered Amit and Nigel Rapport present an examination of the tensions and interactions between everyday forms of flui...

How do anthropologists write their texts? What is the nature of creativity in the discipline of anthropology? This book follows anthropologists into spaces where words, ideas and arguments take shape and explores the steps in a creative process. In a unique examination of how texts come to be composed, the editors bring together a distinguished group of anthropologists who offer valuable insight into their writing habits. These reflexive glimpses into personal creativity reveal not only th...

A pioneering attempt to formulate an anthropological approach to consciousness, Questions of Consciousness explores the importance of the conscious self, and of the `conscious collectively', in the construction and interpretation of social relations and process. It thereby explicitly raises questions, the answers to which have previously been neglected in anthropology: how aware are people of their behaviour? To what extent is the consciousness of individuals modelled by the cultures and s...

This volume is the first handbook to explore existentialism as epistemology and method. Transdisciplinary in scope, it considers the nature of human subjectivity and how human experience ought to be studied, examining the connections that exist between the individual’s imagining of the world and their everyday practice within it.With attention to the question of whether humans are ultimately alone in their self-knowledge or whether what they know of themselves is constructed in com...

Many of us feel a pressing desire to be different—to be other than who we are. Self-conscious, we anxiously perceive our shortcomings or insufficiencies, wondering why we are how we are and whether we might be different. Often, we wish to alter ourselves, to change our relationships, and to transform the person we are in those relationships. Not only a philosophical question about how other people change, self-alteration is also a practical care—can I change, and how?

Explores how exceptional conditions surrounding the state of Israel—its suffering of existential insecurity—predisposes its citizenry to the virtue of moral attentiveness.Paying "moral attention" to the world has been exhorted philosophically by the likes of Emmanuel Levinas, Simone Weil, and Iris Murdoch. This entails attending to the true nature of being, to the individuality of life—its sublime particularity—and transcending a habitude of cultural convention and...

In this ground-breaking book, a theory of ’distortion’ - of the way in which the processes of human life are subject to interference, diversion and transformation - is developed by way of the art of one of Britain’s greatest twentieth-century painters and that art’s public reception. Devoted to his native village of Cookham-on-Thames, Stanley Spencer painted not only landscapes and portraits with loving detail but also the ’memory-feelings’ which he felt were a ’sacred’ part of his conscio...