Negotiating Local Subjectivities on the Edge of the Global Inaugural Lecture Delivered on the Appointment to the Chair of Cultural Anthropology at the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences at the University of Amsterdam on 4 Friday May 2007 |
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Author:
| Besnier, Niko |
Series title: | VOR Maatschappij- en Gedragswetenschappen Ser. |
ISBN: | 978-90-485-1008-5 |
Publication Date: | Nov 2007 |
Publisher: | Amsterdam University Press
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Book Format: | Ebook |
List Price: | AUD $17.95 |
Book Description:
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The global interconnections that the twenty-first-century world is experiencing have raised new questions about agency. Some argue that the destabilization of local truths have given rise to new forms of self-understanding that draw on multiple and ungrounded images. These claims must be scrutinized through an examination of agents' everyday negotiations over the meaning of the local and the global, the modern and the traditional. Through an analysis of vignettes from my ethnographic...
More DescriptionThe global interconnections that the twenty-first-century world is experiencing have raised new questions about agency. Some argue that the destabilization of local truths have given rise to new forms of self-understanding that draw on multiple and ungrounded images. These claims must be scrutinized through an examination of agents' everyday negotiations over the meaning of the local and the global, the modern and the traditional. Through an analysis of vignettes from my ethnographic research in two small-scale societies on the edge of global currents, Tonga (South Pacific) and Tuvalu (Central Pacific), I demonstrate that the crafting of the self constitutes a never-ending and always-contested project, in which performance figures prominently as a resource. I propose a research plan for cultural anthropology at the University of Amsterdam that problematizes modernity by focusing, ethnographically and comparatively, on performance as symbolic and material resources for the formation of subjectivity.