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 in terms of species-wide capacities: capabilities for action and imagination, liabilities for suffering and cruelty. The contributors approach “the human” with an awareness of these complexities and particularities, rendering this volume unique in its ability to build on anthropology’s ethnographic expertise.
Table of Content
List of Illustrations
List of Contributors
Introduction: Human Capacity as an Exceeding, a Going Beyond
Nigel Rapport
PART I: BEYOND THE ECONOMY
Introduction to Part I
Nigel Rapport
Chapter 1. Conversations with Eulogio: On Migration and the Building of a Life-Project in Motion
Nelson Ferguson
Chapter 2. The Limits of Liminality: Capacities for Change and Transition among Student Travellers
Vered Amit
PART II: BEYOND THE POLITY
Introduction to Part II
Nigel Rapport
Chapter 3. ‘Crisis’: On the Limits of European Integration and Identity in Northern Ireland
Thomas M. Wilson
Chapter 4. Making the Cosmopolitan Plea: Harold Oram’s International Fund-raising in the Early Cold War
Laura Suski
PART III: BEYOND THE CLASSIFACTORY
Introduction to Part III
Nigel Rapport
Chapter 5. Money, Materiality and Imagination: Life on the Other Side of Value
Andrew Irving
Chapter 6. Acts of Entification: The Emergence of Thinghood in Social Life
Tord Larsen
PART IV: BEYOND THE BODY
Introduction to Part IV
Nigel Rapport
Chapter 7. Embodied Cognition, Communication and the Making of Place and Identity: Reflections on Fieldwork with Masons
Trevor H.J. Marchand
Chapter 8. ‘Live in Fragments no Longer’: Social Dance and Individual Imagination in Human Nature
Jonathan Skinner
Index
About the author
Nigel Rapport is Professor of Anthropological and Philosophical Studies at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, and directs the Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies. He also held the Canada Research Chair in Globalization, Citizenship and Justice at Concordia University, Montreal, and he has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Recent publications include ‘I am Dynamite’: An Alternative Anthropology of Power (Routledge, 2003) and Of Orderlies and Men: Hospital Porters Achieving Wellness at Work (Carolina Academic Press, 2008).
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