The Fetish Revisited

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Release : 2018-10-04
Genre : Social Science
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Book Rating : 433/5 ( reviews)

The Fetish Revisited - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Fetish Revisited write by J. Lorand Matory. This book was released on 2018-10-04. The Fetish Revisited available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Since the early-modern encounter between African and European merchants on the Guinea Coast, European social critics have invoked African gods as metaphors for misplaced value and agency, using the term “fetishism” chiefly to assert the irrationality of their fellow Europeans. Yet, as J. Lorand Matory demonstrates in The Fetish Revisited, Afro-Atlantic gods have a materially embodied social logic of their own, which is no less rational than the social theories of Marx and Freud. Drawing on thirty-six years of fieldwork in Africa, Europe, and the Americas, Matory casts an Afro-Atlantic eye on European theory to show how Marx’s and Freud’s conceptions of the fetish both illuminate and misrepresent Africa’s human-made gods. Through this analysis, the priests, practices, and spirited things of four major Afro-Atlantic religions simultaneously call attention to the culture-specific, materially conditioned, physically embodied, and indeed fetishistic nature of Marx’s and Freud’s theories themselves. Challenging long-held assumptions about the nature of gods and theories, Matory offers a novel perspective on the social roots of these tandem African and European understandings of collective action, while illuminating the relationship of European social theory to the racism suffered by Africans and assimilated Jews alike.

The Fetish Revisited

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Release : 2018-11-23
Genre : Social Science
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Book Rating : 754/5 ( reviews)

The Fetish Revisited - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Fetish Revisited write by J. Lorand Matory. This book was released on 2018-11-23. The Fetish Revisited available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Since the early-modern encounter between African and European merchants on the Guinea Coast, European social critics have invoked African gods as metaphors for misplaced value and agency, using the term “fetishism” chiefly to assert the irrationality of their fellow Europeans. Yet, as J. Lorand Matory demonstrates in The Fetish Revisited, Afro-Atlantic gods have a materially embodied social logic of their own, which is no less rational than the social theories of Marx and Freud. Drawing on thirty-six years of fieldwork in Africa, Europe, and the Americas, Matory casts an Afro-Atlantic eye on European theory to show how Marx’s and Freud’s conceptions of the fetish both illuminate and misrepresent Africa’s human-made gods. Through this analysis, the priests, practices, and spirited things of four major Afro-Atlantic religions simultaneously call attention to the culture-specific, materially conditioned, physically embodied, and indeed fetishistic nature of Marx’s and Freud’s theories themselves. Challenging long-held assumptions about the nature of gods and theories, Matory offers a novel perspective on the social roots of these tandem African and European understandings of collective action, while illuminating the relationship of European social theory to the racism suffered by Africans and assimilated Jews alike.

The Rate and Direction of Inventive Activity Revisited

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Release : 2012-04-15
Genre : Art
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Book Rating : 031/5 ( reviews)

The Rate and Direction of Inventive Activity Revisited - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Rate and Direction of Inventive Activity Revisited write by Josh Lerner. This book was released on 2012-04-15. The Rate and Direction of Inventive Activity Revisited available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. This volume offers contributions to questions relating to the economics of innovation and technological change. Central to the development of new technologies are institutional environments and among the topics discussed are the roles played by universities and the ways in which the allocation of funds affects innovation.

Black Atlantic Religion

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Release : 2009-02-09
Genre : Social Science
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Book Rating : 973/5 ( reviews)

Black Atlantic Religion - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Black Atlantic Religion write by J. Lorand Matory. This book was released on 2009-02-09. Black Atlantic Religion available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Black Atlantic Religion illuminates the mutual transformation of African and African-American cultures, highlighting the example of the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé religion. This book contests both the recent conviction that transnationalism is new and the long-held supposition that African culture endures in the Americas only among the poorest and most isolated of black populations. In fact, African culture in the Americas has most flourished among the urban and the prosperous, who, through travel, commerce, and literacy, were well exposed to other cultures. Their embrace of African religion is less a "survival," or inert residue of the African past, than a strategic choice in their circum-Atlantic, multicultural world. With counterparts in Nigeria, the Benin Republic, Haiti, Cuba, Trinidad, and the United States, Candomblé is a religion of spirit possession, dance, healing, and blood sacrifice. Most surprising to those who imagine Candomblé and other such religions as the products of anonymous folk memory is the fact that some of this religion's towering leaders and priests have been either well-traveled writers or merchants, whose stake in African-inspired religion was as much commercial as spiritual. Morever, they influenced Africa as much as Brazil. Thus, for centuries, Candomblé and its counterparts have stood at the crux of enormous transnational forces. Vividly combining history and ethnography, Matory spotlights a so-called "folk" religion defined not by its closure or internal homogeneity but by the diversity of its connections to classes and places often far away. Black Atlantic Religion sets a new standard for the study of transnationalism in its subaltern and often ancient manifestations.

Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value

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Release : 2001-12-13
Genre : Social Science
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Book Rating : 060/5 ( reviews)

Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value write by D. Graeber. This book was released on 2001-12-13. Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Now a widely cited classic, this innovative book is the first comprehensive synthesis of economic, political, and cultural theories of value. David Graeber reexamines a century of anthropological thought about value and exchange, in large measure to find a way out of ongoing quandaries in current social theory, which have become critical at the present moment of ideological collapse in the face of Neoliberalism. Rooted in an engaged, dynamic realism, Graeber argues that projects of cultural comparison are in a sense necessarily revolutionary projects: He attempts to synthesize the best insights of Karl Marx and Marcel Mauss, arguing that these figures represent two extreme, but ultimately complementary, possibilities in the shape such a project might take. Graeber breathes new life into the classic anthropological texts on exchange, value, and economy. He rethinks the cases of Iroquois wampum, Pacific kula exchanges, and the Kwakiutl potlatch within the flow of world historical processes, and recasts value as a model of human meaning-making, which far exceeds rationalist/reductive economist paradigms.