Author: Tobias Rees File Type: pdf For most of the twentieth century, anthropologists understood themselves as ethnographers. The art of anthropology was the fieldwork-based description of faraway othersof how social structures secretly organized the living-together of a given society, of how a people had endowed the world surrounding them with cultural meaning. While the poetics and politics of anthropology have changed dramatically over the course of a century, the basic equation of anthropology with ethnographyas well as the definition of the human as a social and cultural beinghas remained so evident that the possibility of questioning it occurred to hardly anyone. In After Ethnos Tobias Rees endeavors to decouple anthropology from ethnographyand the human from society and cultureand explores the manifold possibilities of practicing a question-based rather than an answer-based anthropology that emanates from this decoupling. What emerges from Reess provocations is a new understanding of anthropology as a philosophically and poetically inclined, fieldwork-based investigation of what it could mean to be human when the established concepts of the human on which anthropology has been built increasingly fail us. **Review After Ethnos is full of frame-shifting insights about the relation of anthropology to its methods, of revelatory rhetorical gambits about how we might think about the field in ways different from our received histories, of gentle but powerful exposes of anthropologys dearest disciplinary cliches, and of provocative pointers to possible intellectual and political futures for sociocultural inquiry. A book with which to agree and disagree in unexpected and always stimulating ways. (Stefan Helmreich, author of Sounding the Limits of Life Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond) Fascinating, deliberately provocative, and brilliant, After Ethnos is a field changer it is one of those rare books that can grasp and shift a discipline. (Miriam Ticktin, author of Casualties of Care Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France) About the Author Tobias Rees is Reid Hoffman Professor at the New School of Social Research, a director of the Los Angeles-based Berggruen Institute, and a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. He is the coauthor of Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary, also published by Duke University Press, and author of Plastic Reason An Anthropology of Brain Science in Embryogenetic Terms.

Author: James L. Kastely File Type: pdf Plato isnt exactly thought of as a champion of democracy, and perhaps even less as an important rhetorical theorist. In this book, James L. Kastely recasts Plato in just these lights, offering a vivid new reading of one of Platos most important works the Republic. At heart, Kastely demonstrates, the Republic is a democratic epic poem and pioneering work in rhetorical theory. Examining issues of justice, communication, persuasion, and audience, he uncovers a seedbed of theoretical ideas that resonate all the way up to our contemporary democratic practices. As Kastely shows, the Republic begins with two interrelated crises one rhetorical, one philosophical. In the first, democracy is defended by a discourse of justice, but no one can take this discourse seriously because no one can seein a world where the powerful dominate the weakhow justice is a value in itself. That value must be found philosophically, but philosophy, as Plato and Socrates understand it, can reach only the very few. In order to reach its larger political audience, it must become rhetoric it must become a persuasive part of the larger culturewhich, at that time, meant epic poetry. Tracing how Plato and Socrates formulate this transformation in the Republic, Kastely isolates a crucial theory of persuasion that is central to how we talk together about justice and organize ourselves according to democratic principles. **Review A startling reinterpretation of Plato, one that stands the standard narrative of the history of rhetoric on its head. Kastely persuasively takes the supposed archenemy of rhetoric and makes of him instead a theorist deeply concerned with rhetorics possibilities, and he does so with impeccable scholarship in a tour de force extended rereading of Platos most-read work. (Jeffrey Walker, University of Texas at Austin) Platos Republic presents a faraway, made-up world, a world too distant from the rough-and-tumble world of rhetoric and so many of its chief concerns persuasion, democracy, and deliberation. As a result, the Republic is not typically high on the list of Platos works consulted in rhetorical studies. With The Rhetoric of Platos Republic, Kastely will change that. Patient, open-minded, and careful, Kastely finds in the Republic an account of justice as a renewable resource for democracy and of rhetoric as justices all too rare and precarious means of replenishment. (Debra Hawhee, Pennsylvania State University) Kastelys subtle and illuminating reading of the Republic as a work of both political and rhetorical theory explains Platos democratic philosophy and its embodiment in the rhetorical practices he depicts. Unlike many studies past and present, this portrait of Platos defense of democracy meticulously distinguishes between Platos ideas and those advanced by Socrates. From this perspective, Kastely proposes, some of Socratess rhetorical failures may be seen as crafted by Plato to exemplify the limitations of elite political and philosophical cultures and their discourses. (C. Jan Swearingen, Texas A&M University) About the Author James L. Kastely is professor of English and director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston. He is the author of Rethinking the Rhetorical Tradition From Plato to Postmodernism.