Explores how exceptional conditions surrounding the state of Israel—its suffering of existential insecurity—predisposes its citizenry to the virtue of moral attentiveness.Paying "moral attention" to the world has been exhorted philosophically by the likes of Emmanuel Levinas, Simone Weil, and Iris Murdoch. This entails attending to the true nature of being, to the individuality of life—its sublime particularity—and transcending a habitude of cultural convention and...

'Community' is one of social science's longest-standing concepts. The assumption of much social science has been that humans belong in communities, as social and cultural beings.The trouble with 'community' is that this is not necessarily so; the personal social networks of individuals' actual experience crosscut collective categories, situations and institutions. Communities can prove unviable or imprisoning; the reality of community life and identity can often be very different f...

Do notions of community remain central to our sense of who we are, or can we see beyond community closures to a human whole?This volume explores the nature of contemporary sociality. It focuses on the ethical, organisational and emotional claims and opportunities sought or fashioned for mobilising and evading social collectivities in a world of mobile subjects.Vered Amit and Nigel Rapport present an examination of the tensions and interactions between everyday forms of flui...

This book focuses on anthropology's ambition for comprehensiveness and its interdisciplinary nature. It consists of concise essays, each around 2,500 words, in which contributors examine how concepts traditionally linked to philosophy or other disciplines are interpreted and applied within anthropology. Each contributor selects a personally inspiring concept and illustrates its relevance to anthropology, showcasing how it takes on new meaning within an anthropological framework. These essa...

Power is conventionally regarded as being held by social institutions. We are taught to believe that it is these social structures that determine the environment and circumstances of individual lives. In I Am Dynamite, the anthropologist Nigel Rappaport argues for a different view. Focusing on the lives and works of the writer and Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi, refugee and engineer Ben Glaser, Israeli ceramicist and immigrant Rachel Siblerstein, artist Stanley Spencer, and philoso...

Many of us feel a pressing desire to be different—to be other than who we are. Self-conscious, we anxiously perceive our shortcomings or insufficiencies, wondering why we are how we are and whether we might be different. Often, we wish to alter ourselves, to change our relationships, and to transform the person we are in those relationships. Not only a philosophical question about how other people change, self-alteration is also a practical care—can I change, and how?

In conversation, and in the company of a new generation of scholars working in the field, Nigel Rapport and Huon Wardle re-explore the terrain and meaning of cosmopolitan studies now. This book offers a new survey and theorisation of cosmopolitan research, a burgeoning topic responding to increasingly complex patterns of human interaction in world society. It considers the question of cosmopolitan methodology: What are the methods needed for, or elicited by, studying cosmopolitan situation...

This volume is the first handbook to explore existentialism as epistemology and method. Transdisciplinary in scope, it considers the nature of human subjectivity and how human experience ought to be studied, examining the connections that exist between the individual’s imagining of the world and their everyday practice within it.With attention to the question of whether humans are ultimately alone in their self-knowledge or whether what they know of themselves is constructed in com...

Global movement is commonly characterized as one of the quintessential experiences of our age. Market forces, territorial conflicts and environmental changes uproot an increasing number of people, while mass communication, travel, tourism, and a global market of commodities, texts, tastes, fashions and ideologies place individuals more than ever in a global arena. As traditional conceptions of individuals as members of stationary, fixed and separate societies and cultures no longer convinc...

The anthropology of Britain is hotly debated. What does it mean to live in Britain and to be 'British', and is an anthropology of Britain even a legitimate undertaking? British Subjects presents a forthright voice in this debate. Key anthropological concerns such as community, rationality, aesthetics, the body, power, work and leisure, nationalism and transnationalism are found reflected in the lives of a wide range of British 'subjects'--from farmers to dancers, children to retired miners...

In a time of intellectual uncertainty, the question of how we know what we do about human lives becomes ever more pressing. The essays collated in this volume argue that anthropology can be used to acknowledge, explore and interpret divergence and ideological conflict over human meaning. Using questions raised as part of the Enlightenment movement, this volume is structured around some of the key themes the Enlightenment fostered, including human nature, time, Earth and the Cosmos, beauty,...

Love ‘discovers the reality’ of individual human beings, wrote Iris Murdoch; love ‘deifies’ the person, wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. This book proposes love as a kind of civic virtue: that ‘loving recognition’ might function as a universal form of ethical engagement and inclusion. ‘Loving recognition’ is proposed as a civil practice that enshrines the individuality of human identity, overcoming the labels and classes of ethnicity, nationality, religiosity and social status.A particul...