******************************************************
*        http://www.anthropologymatters.com            *
* A postgraduate project comprising online journal,    *
* online discussions, teaching and research resources  *
* and international contacts directory.                *
 ******************************************************

Dear ANTHROPOLOGY-MATTERS Subscribers,

I hope the following will be of interest to you:

Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject
Sherry B. Ortner 

"At once challenging and admirably accessible, these essays trace the thinking of one of anthropology's most notable practitioners as she-and her discipline-wrestles with key conundrums facing the late-modern social sciences."-Jean Comaroff, University of Chicago 

"An important and especially usable collection by one of the most influential essayists in anthropology, introduced by a lucid and original review of key concepts as they have been applied to the remarkable range of Sherry Ortner's research achievements. Her response to recent challenges to the idea of culture is alone worth the price of the book."-George Marcus, University of California, Irvine 

"This is vintage Ortner. No one else writes anthropological theory so clear, so down-to-earth, or so accessible to non-anthropologists."-William H. Sewell Jr., author of Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation 


In Anthropology and Social Theory the award-winning anthropologist Sherry B. Ortner draws on her longstanding interest in theories of cultural practice to rethink key concepts of culture, agency, and subjectivity for the social sciences of the twenty-first century. The seven theoretical and interpretive essays in this volume each advocate reconfiguring, rather than abandoning, the concept of culture. Similarly, they all suggest that a theory which depends on the interested action of social beings-specifically practice theory, associated especially with the work of Pierre Bourdieu-requires a more developed notion of human agency and a richer conception of human subjectivity. Ortner shows how social theory must both build upon and move beyond classic practice theory in order to understand the contemporary world.

Some of the essays reflect explicitly on theoretical concerns: the relationship between agency and power, the problematic quality of ethnographic studies of resistance, and the possibility of producing an anthropology of subjectivity. Others are ethnographic studies that apply Ortner's theoretical framework. In these, she investigates aspects of social class, looking at the relationship between race and middle-class identity in the United States, the often invisible nature of class as a cultural identity and as an analytical category in social inquiry, and the role that public culture and media play in the creation of the class anxieties of Generation X. Written with Ortner's characteristic lucidity, these essays constitute a major statement about the future of social theory from one of the leading anthropologists of our time.


Sherry B. Ortner is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is author of New Jersey Dreaming: Capital, Culture, and the Class of '58, also published by Duke University Press; Life and Death on Mt. Everest: Sherpas and Himalayan Mountaineering; Making Gender: The Politics and Erotics of Culture; and High Religion: A Cultural and Political History of Sherpa Buddhism. She has received numerous awards, including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and the J. I. Staley Prize. 

   
CONTENTS

Introduction Updating Practice Theory 1
Chapter One Reading America: Preliminary Notes on Class and Culture 19
Chapter Two Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal 42
Chapter Three Identities: The Hidden Life of Class 63
Chapter Four Generation X: Anthropology in a Media-Saturated World 80
Chapter Five Subjectivity and Cultural Critique 107
Chapter Six Power and Projects: Reflections on Agency 129
Notes 155
References Cited 167
Index 181

Duke University Press
January 2007
200 pages 
Paperback - £13.99 ISBN 0-8223-3864-5

SPECIAL DISCOUNTED PRICE OF £9.99 to ANTHROPOLOGY-MATTERS Subscribers 

Postage and Packing £2.75 

To order a copy please contact Marston on 44(0)1235 465500 or email [log in to unmask]  or visit our website www.combinedacademic.co.uk

(PLEASE QUOTE REF NUMBER: AST107AM for discount)

Julia Monk
Marketing Manager
Combined Academic Publishers
48 Baldslow Road
Hastings
East Sussex 
TN34 2EY
Tel/Fax: 44 (0)1424 436533
Email: [log in to unmask]

*************************************************************
*           Anthropology-Matters Mailing List                 *
* To join this list or to look at the archived previous       *
* messages visit:                                             *
* http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/Anthropology-Matters.HTML   *
* If you have ALREADY subscribed: to send a message to all    *
* those currently subscribed to the list,just send mail to:   *
*        [log in to unmask]                  *
*                                                             *
*       Enjoyed the mailing list? Why not join the new        *
*       CONTACTS SECTION @ www.anthropologymatters.com        *
*    an international directory of anthropology researchers   *
***************************************************************