anthropology legitimation globalization anti-semitism

books:

Reading Legitimation Crisis in Tehran: Iran and the Future of Liberalism (Paradigm)

1 review
Danny Postel

Prickly Paradigm Press, 2006

A timely read for these times
Reading this book is like studying for an advanced degree. However, to understand the Middle East, you need to read everything you can get your hands on, even stuff that is above your head. And then read it again until it's not. This book will probably send you off to investigate other concepts, ideas and philosophies - which is good. A very timely read, given the current warmongering ...

Against Bosses, Against Oligarchies: A Conversation with Richard Rorty

4 reviews
Richard M. Rorty

Prickly Paradigm Press, 2002

One of the finest interviews on paperback
If you don't know who Richard Rorty is or what "Oligarchies" means, you will after reading this. "Six bucks". How can you go wrong?

The Hit Man's Dilemma: Or Business, Personal and Impersonal

1 review
Keith Hart

Prickly Paradigm Press, 2005

Economic anthropology at its best
In this short text (it's officially known as a "pamphlet," rather in the tradition of Tom Paine), Keith Hart challenges us to rethink much of what we know about contemporary economics and social relations. The six brief chapters of the text's body treat different themes, covering topics as diverse as recent Bollywood films and the expansion of "intellectual property." Yet the entire work hangs ...

What Happened to Art Criticism? (Prickly Paradigm)

2 reviews
James Elkins

Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003

How art criticism lost its luster...
James Elkins took the trouble to reflect on how art critics are doing their job or rather not doing it. Finally someone is saying that a lot of art critics are no different from news reporters among others: they either have no opinion, or they do not have the guts to express an opinion or it is not in their interest to express and/or have an opinion. Since James Elkins describes in detail how an ...

Neo-liberal Genetics: The Myths and Moral Tales of Evolutionary Psychology

1 review
Susan McKinnon

Prickly Paradigm Press, 2006

fantastic, honest and sourced
A short, devastating book that takes on the "conventional wisdom" of evolutionary psychology as presented by Steven Pinker and his acolytes (as well as, increasingly, in the popular press and among the generally educated.) McKinnon is a fantastic writer, very clear, very "honest" (despite being in a discipline often considered part of the humanities, she has a scientist's respect for facts -- and ...

Museum, Inc.: Inside the Global Art World

1 review
Paul Werner

Prickly Paradigm Press, 2006

A must read
First of all, this book is funny. The stream of consciousness, thinking aloud style of Paul Werner is terribly amusing and extremely entertaining which puts it in a class of its own. Paul Werner does not pontificate, does not condescend... he just dissects with great wit and surgical precision the politics of a privately owned museum in today s world.. We understand how some museums are more ...

Enemies of Promise: Publishing, Perishing, and the Eclipse of Scholarship

2 reviews
Lindsay Waters

Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004

Aesthetic-political provocation of a US 'world gone wrong,'
Enemies of Promise offers a prodding and lucid intervention into the glut and glamor of the over-production system and managerial model of corporate values that has taken hold in US academia and threatens to ruin creativity and block the future. As a series of polemics and reflective musings, the extended "essay" holds up very well and should have a broad and lucid impact, as parts of it already ...

Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology

6 reviews
David Graeber

Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004

Anthropology Against the State
If there is any question thrown at organizers within the various tendrils of the global justice movement intended to make our efforts appear utopian and unrealizable, it would have to be "I understand what you're against, but what are you for?" The implicit idea being that there is no reason to believe that another world is possible in more than a rhetorical sense, or at least not examples to ...

The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness

3 reviews
Donna J. Haraway

Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003

A Social Metaphysics of Humans-in-Relation
The previous comment seems to me to miss the plot of Haraway's text. I don't mean to cause offense by saying this, but only to explain why I feel like I should write. The way I read this manifesto, Haraway is working to lay out a social metaphysics that takes relations with radical otherness as integral to and inseparable from any identity. Classical liberalist / modernist theory imagines ...

The Stock Ticker and the Superjumbo: How the Democrats Can Once Again Become America's Dominant Political ...

1 review
Rick Perlstein

Prickly Paradigm Press, 2005

an insightful round-table discussion
The pamphlet consists of Perlstein's provocative, even gripping, essay on how to rebuild the Democratic Party's brand image (not to mention the nation) with a long-term populist program; short responses from various luminaries along the left-of-center spectrum; and a closing summary by the author. The format works and the net effect is inspiring. Buy this book, read it in an hour, and pass it ...

9/12: New York After

2 reviews
Eliot Weinberger

Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003

A necessary book--this review will probably get me arrested
Weinberger is one of my favorite essayists. He will skewer anyone and do so with absolute style. He is not a "crrrritic" so much as a commentator. So 9/12. It is frightening to read your own fears mirrored in someone else, to be able to vocalize terror at one's own government. Oddly, the most frightening portrait is not of Bush, that weak-minded tool of his own advisors, but of Condie Rice ...

The Empire's New Clothes: Paradigm Lost, and Regained
Harry D. Harootunian

Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004

Empire and imperialism have returned with a vengeance?not as a set of ideas and practices to be exhumed by the historians, but as paradigms for twenty-first-century living. Harry Harootunian turns his unrelenting gaze to signs of the new imperialism in the world?from the United States? occupation of Iraq to other supposed terrorist enclaves around the globe. The arguments being made today for imperialism?s historical and contemporary value echo ...

Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: Hatreds Old and New in Europe
Matti Bunzl

Prickly Paradigm Press, 2007

The apparent resurgence of hostility toward Jews has been a prominent theme in recent discussions of Europe; at the same time, the adversities faced by the continent?s Muslim population have received increasing attention. In Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia , Matti Bunzl offers a historical and cultural clarification of the key terms in these ongoing problems. Arguing against the common impulse to analogize anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, it ...

The American Game: Capitalism, Decolonization, World Domination, and Baseball (Paradigm)
John D. Kelly

Prickly Paradigm Press, 2006

It is easy to mistake the United States for an empire. But as John D. Kelly explains here, the American approach to global relations is best understood as a competition?one in which the United States, through the reshaping of economic theory and the global economy itself, imposes its own rules on a game played to win. How and where the United States implements these rules can be tracked through complexities in diplomacy and business. But Kelly ...

Talking Politics: The Substance of Style from Abe to "W" (Paradigm (Chicago, Ill.), 6.)

1 review
Michael Silverstein

Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003

A Must read!
this book is an excellent commentary about politics and I feel talkingpolitics.com is another great place to continue the conversation and political chatter that this book will provoke.

The Law in Shambles

2 reviews
Thomas Geoghegan

Prickly Paradigm Press, 2005

Something more than a rant?
This little book is certainly the most lively volume I have ever encountered on legal topics. The author, a prominent Chicago employment lawyer, of decidedly liberal bent, unabashedly unloads on a number of topics, but in an informative way. The author feels that the law has changed in many unfortunate ways. Among the responsible factors he identifies are (1) the decline of unions; (2) ...

Phantom Calls: Race and the Globalization of the NBA

2 reviews
Grant Farred

Prickly Paradigm Press, 2006

Very pertinent book
A very pertinent book on a rarely discussed issue: Yao Ming as not just a basketball player, but a marker for a new kind of race relation in the NBA that falls outside the usual black-white paradigm, as well as a marker for the new global economy, in which even former communist countries like China export their talents to America. Farred's argument is at times very subtle but he is at his best ...

The Secret Sins of Economics

3 reviews
Deirdre N. McCloskey

Prickly Paradigm Press, 2002

Truly a must read.
Short, funny, earth shattering. Most thinking people know in their hearts there is something seriously wrong with economics. Dr. McClosky shows what is wrong clearly and with rigor. In particular any one with a science background will delight in her demolition of the bad science that characterizes so much of economics. This is one of the best pieces I've read on any topic in the past decade.

"Culture" and Culture: Traditional Knowledge and Intellectual Rights
Manuela Carneiro da Cunha

Prickly Paradigm Press, 2008

Brazilian anthropologist Manuela Carneiro da Cunha examines here the complex meaning?and anthropological implications?of the word ?culture? for indigenous peoples. Caneiro da Cunha explores the contradictions inherent in the interface between Western and traditional understandings of knowledge and intellectual property rights. Distinguishing culture from ?culture,? the latter being a reflexive awareness of one?s culture, Carneiro da Cunha then ...

Intellectual Complicity: The State and Its Destructions
Bruce Kapferer

Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004

?Postmodern? warfare and other contemporary forms of mass destruction are an integral part of the larger political and economic schemes from which they emerge. Social and cultural studies of this violence are similarly embedded within their political environment and are thus tinged with the prevailing social philosophy. Bruce Kapferer, a leading figure in political anthropology, here explores the deep links between human destruction and the ...

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