Description
Fischer is particularly concerned with cultural anthropology's interactions with science studies, and throughout the book he investigates how emerging knowledge formations in molecular biology, environmental studies, computer science, and bioengineering are transforming some of anthropology's key concepts including nature, culture, personhood, and the body. In an essay on culture, he uses the science studies paradigm of "experimental systems" to consider how the social scientific notion of culture has evolved as an analytical tool since the nineteenth century. Charting anthropology's role in understanding and analyzing the production of knowledge within the sciences since the 1990s, he highlights anthropology's aptitude for tracing the transnational collaborations and multisited networks that constitute contemporary scientific practice. Fischer investigates changing ideas about cultural inscription on the human body in a world where genetic engineering, robotics, and cybernetics are constantly redefining our understanding of biology. In the final essay, Fischer turns to Kant's philosophical anthropology to reassess the object of study for contemporary anthropology and to reassert the field's primacy for answering the largest questions about human beings, societies, culture, and our interactions with the world around us. In Anthropological Futures, Fischer continues to advance what Clifford Geertz, in reviewing Fischer's earlier book Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice, called "a broad new agenda for cultural description and political critique."
Investigates how emerging knowledge formations in molecular biology, environmental studies, computer science, and bioengineering are transforming some of anthropology's key concepts
About the Author
Michael M. J. Fischer is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also a Lecturer in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. His most recent books include Mute Dreams, Blind Owls, and Dispersed Knowledges: Persian Poesis in the Transnational Circuitry and Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice (winner of the American Ethnological Society's Senior Book Prize), both also published by Duke University Press.
Reviews
"This intellectually wide-ranging and spirited book poses the question of what kind of anthropology might be required to deal most effectively with emergent human experience. . . . Fischer has written a book for our times that
will provoke much thinking." - Melinda Hinkson, Anthropological Forum
"Anthropological Futures is both a review of core questions and scholarship and a risk-taking, future-oriented mapping of the knots of culture, nature, person, body, and science. It is a wide-ranging conversation conducted with serious erudition and originality, replete with ideas for work to come."-Donna Haraway, University of California, Santa Cruz
"As always, Michael M. J. Fischer provides deeply grounded yet very experimental and future-oriented ideas about cultural anthropology, and cultural analysis more generally. This book is a fabulous resource."-Kim Fortun, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
"This intellectually wide-ranging and spirited book poses the question of what kind of anthropology might be required to deal most effectively with emergent human experience. . . . Fischer has written a book for our times that will provoke much thinking." -- Melinda Hinkson * Anthropological Forum *
Book Information
ISBN 9780822344766
Author Michael M. J. Fischer
Format Paperback
Page Count 424
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 612g
