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Analytical Categories (analytical + category)
Selected AbstractsBringing Geography Back In: Civilizations, Wealth, and Poverty,INTERNATIONAL STUDIES REVIEW, Issue 3 2003Dwayne Woods This essay focuses on how we can account for the gap between rich and poor nations. The literature is organized under two subsuming analytical categories: space (geographical environment) and culture. At issue is the primacy of environmental factors versus culture in explaining the development of civilizations and their divergence. If geographical environment is primary, then development is determined by natural endowments and constraints. If culture is dominant, then geography can be overcome with luck, effective political institutions, determination, and inventiveness. The literature in this essay is intended to help to sharpen and focus this debate. [source] Relations and disproportions: The labor of scholarship in the knowledge economyAMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Issue 2 2008ALBERTO CORSÍN JIMÉNEZ ABSTRACT In this article, I provide an ethnographic exploration of some of the terms for imagining knowledge in today's "knowledge society," and I attempt to situate the kind of "sociology of knowledge" behind this imagination. In particular, I am interested in the sociological imagination of knowledge in terms of a relational economy, in which knowledge flows uninterruptedly to create and shape what Yochai Benkler has dubbed "the wealth of networks." I pursue this interest through an ethnography of the production of research among humanities scholars at Spain's National Research Council (CSIC). For CSIC's human scientists, books (and other bookish analogues, such as libraries or manuscript collections) occupy a place of prominence in the institutional production of research. This economy of scholarship (between books, between people and books, and between what books do and what institutions and researchers imagine them to do) finds itself at a "disproportionate" distance from the "network economy of information" encountered in the literature on the knowledge economy and promoted in certain circles within CSIC. I contrast the epistemological economies of CSIC scientists' relational and disproportional views on research and, ultimately, attempt to provide an anthropological description of a contemporary sociology of knowledge, including its analytical categories and models. [knowledge, knowledge economy, relations, proportionality, labor, academia] [source] Convention and Intersubjectivity: New Developments in French EconomicsJOURNAL FOR THE THEORY OF SOCIAL BEHAVIOUR, Issue 3 2006JOHN LATSIS The recently formed French School of the "économie des conventions" have claimed that they are developing a revolutionary new approach to the social sciences. This group of researchers in economics, philosophy, sociology, law and history attempt to transcend the inherited analytical frameworks of structural-functionalist sociology and neoclassical economics and provide an alternative picture of the social world. This article will investigate some of these claims in detail. First, I trace the cohesion of the Convention School's ideas around the key concept of convention. Conventionalist theory reflects an ontological shift towards the recognition of intersubjectivity. This shift leads to tension between the advocacy of methodological individualism on the one hand and the use of convention as a central analytical category on the other. [source] Going ,tribal': Notes on pacification in the 21st centuryANTHROPOLOGY TODAY, Issue 2 2009Roberto J. González Few anthropologists today would consider using the term ,tribe' as an analytical category, yet it has become a focal point for military commanders and other leaders prosecuting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Specifically, US-led occupation forces in both countries have begun pursuing ,tribal' strategies in which they have attempted to forge alliances with ,sheiks' and local power brokers. This article examines the reasons for the rapid rise of ,tribal' discourses, the role of social scientists in their propagation and the possible consequences for Iraqis and Afghans. It concludes by comparing these processes to ethnographically-informed pacification efforts initiated in the late 1800s and early 1900s by the European powers, and by suggesting that anthropologists can potentially play a critical role by challenging persistent, damaging assumptions. [source] | ||||||||||