How do we live ethical lives alongside others? A fascinating, mind-expanding exploration of our moral universeWe have always lived with ethically significant others, whether they are the pets we keep, the gods we believe in or the machines we are endowing with life. How should we treat them as our world changes?In Animals, Robots, Gods, acclaimed anthropologist Webb Keane provides a new vision of ethics, defined less by our minds, religion or socie...

The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences provides a remarkable comparative assessment of the variations of positivism and alternative epistemologies in the contemporary human sciences. Often declared obsolete, positivism is alive and well in a number of the fields; in others, its influence is significantly diminished. The essays in this collection investigate its mutations in form and degree across the social science disciplines. Looking at methodological assumptions field by ...

The Cunning of Recognition is an exploration of liberal multiculturalism from the perspective of Australian indigenous social life. Elizabeth A. Povinelli argues that the multicultural legacy of colonialism perpetuates unequal systems of power, not by demanding that colonized subjects identify with their colonizers but by demanding that they identify with an impossible standard of authentic traditional culture.Povinelli draws on seventeen years of ethnographic research amon...

Anthropology has recently seen a lively interest in the subject of ethics and comparative notions of morality and freedom. This masterclass brings together four of the most eminent anthropologists working in this field—Michael Lambek, Veena Das, Didier Fassin, and Webb Keane—to discuss, via lectures and responses, important topics facing anthropological ethics and the theoretical debates that surround it.The authors explore the ways we understand morality across many different cult...

Across much of the postcolonial world, Christianity has often become inseparable from ideas and practices linking the concept of modernity to that of human emancipation. To explore these links, Webb Keane undertakes a rich ethnographic study of the century-long encounter, from the colonial Dutch East Indies to post-independence Indonesia, among Calvinist missionaries, their converts, and those who resist conversion. Keane's analysis of their struggles over such things as prayers, offerings...

The human propensity to take an ethical stance toward oneself and others is found in every known society, yet we also know that values taken for granted in one society can contradict those in another. Does ethical life arise from human nature itself? Is it a universal human trait? Or is it a product of one's cultural and historical context? Webb Keane offers a new approach to the empirical study of ethical life that reconciles these questions, showing how ethics arise at the intersection o...

Brought to you by Penguin.How do we live ethical lives alongside others? A fascinating, mind-expanding exploration of our moral universeWe have always lived with ethically significant others, whether they are the pets we keep, the gods we believe in or the machines we are endowing with life. How should we treat them as our world changes?In Animals, Robots, Gods, acclaimed anthropologist Webb Keane provides a new vision of eth...

In this provocative study of the task of English-Canadian philosophy, Ian Angus contends that English Canada harbours a secret and unofficial dream of self-rule that is revealed through critiques of empire. Looking at the main tensions between local dwelling and the globalized market, Identity and Justice shows how contemporary society's reactions to technological advances and a world market economy have produced increasingly isolated individuals and prevented the emergence of a c...

This wide-ranging and accessible book provides a thorough overview of the key debates in gender and political theory.

his book offers a description, explanation, and evaluation of Michael Oakeshott’s democratic theory. He was not a democratic theorist as such, but as a twentieth-century English political theorist for whom liberal theory held deep importance, his thought often engaged democratic theory implicitly, and many times did so explicitly. The author’s project penetrates two renewals. The first is the revitalization of interest in Oakeshott, and the second is the renewal of democratic theory which ...

Geography is a subject which throughout its history has been dominated by men; men have undertaken the heroic explorations which form the mythology of its foundation, men have written most of its texts and, as many feminist geographers have remarked, men's interests have structured what counts as legitimate geographical knowledge. This book offers a sustained examination of the masculinism of contemporary geographical discourses.Drawing on the work of feminist theories about the in...

This timely book aims to change the way we think about religion by putting emotion back onto the agenda. It challenges a tendency to over-emphasise rational aspects of religion, and rehabilitates its embodied, visceral and affective dimensions. Against the view that religious emotion is a purely private matter, it offers a new framework which shows how religious emotions arise in the varied interactions between human agents and religious communities, human agents and objects of devotion, a...