prickly paradigm press llc (252 resultados)

Condición: Good. Ships from the UK. Former library book; may include library markings. Used book that is in clean, average condition without any missing pages.

Paperback. Condición: New. We often assume that science and myth stand in opposition-with science providing empirically supported truths that replace the false ideas found in traditional mythologies. But the rhetoric of contemporary popular science and related genres tells a different story about what contemporary readers really want from science. In The Science of Myths and Vice Versa, Gregory Schrempp offers four provocative vignettes that bring copious amounts of research on both traditional and modern mythologies to bear on the topic of science in contemporary popular culture. Schrempp shows how writers such as Malcolm Gladwell and Michael Pollan successfully fuse science and myth to offer compelling narratives about how we can improve our understanding of ourselves and our world. The most effective science writers, he finds, are those who make use of the themes and motifs of folklore to increase the appeal of their work. Schrempp's understanding of science and myth as operating not in opposition but in reciprocal relation offers an essential corrective to contemporary mischaracterizations.

Condición: Good. Ships from the UK. Former library book; may include library markings. Used book that is in clean, average condition without any missing pages.

PAP. Condición: New. New Book. Shipped from UK. Established seller since 2000.

Paperback. Condición: New. "The most interesting human beings, so far as talk is concerned, are anthropologists, farmers, prostitutes, psychiatrists, and the occasional bartender." So wrote Joseph Mitchell, the legendary New Yorker journalist and chronicler of the full spectrum of humanity in New York City from the 1930s to the '60s, when his last columns were published. The critic Malcolm Cowley called Mitchell "the best reporter in the country," while Stanley Edgar Hyman would later write that he was "a reporter only in the sense that Defoe is a reporter, a humorist only in the sense that Faulkner is a humorist." But, before he found fame, Mitchell worked as a beat reporter with an unusually keen sense of style and uncommonly graceful prose at the now-defunct World-Telegram. There, he wrote a series of articles on the anthropologist Franz Boas, who influenced his trenchant observations of humanity.Man with Variations republishes Mitchell's writings on Boas, which weave together interviews with the great anthropologist and his students and colleagues to recount a formative period in American anthropology, as well as the journalist's own compelling set of reflections on the human condition.Man with Variations will be essential reading for anyone interested in the history of the discipline, and it will also be welcomed by the new generation of readers who are discovering Mitchell's work.

Paperback. Condición: New. A critical synthesis of the work of Lauren Berlant, Moishe Postone, and Michael Silverstein.The Treadmill Affect draws upon the work of three University of Chicago professors, each a former program director at the Center for Transcultural Studies: literary and cultural critic Lauren Berlant, historian and social theorist Moishe Postone, and linguist Michael Silverstein. Through this intellectual synthesis, Benjamin Lee demonstrates the critical possibilities of uniting a revived linguistic turn with Marxist accounts of affect and subjectivity, adding new dimensions to the "treadmill" affective structure of cruel optimism.

Condición: Good. Ships from the UK. Former library book; may include library markings. Used book that is in clean, average condition without any missing pages.

Paperback. Condición: New. A critical exegesis of large language models, like ChatGPT, and recent advances in artificial intelligence. If speech has long been an emblem of the human species, then talking machines seem to be harbingers of some kind of technological singularity. Indeed, if the brilliance-or at least eloquence-of large language models is any indication, we seem to be poised at the threshold of general AI, a form of artificial intelligence that will not only surpass human intelligence but maybe even replace humans altogether. This slim text lays out a critical genealogy of the highly contested relation between human values, machinic parameters, and corporate powers. It also provides a theory of the reasons for, and effects of, our current social and technological horizon.

Paperback. Condición: New. Reveals how America is a nation founded on grievance. Grievance is an American mode of being that can be traced back to the Declaration of Independence, that is at the root of the Civil War and accounts in large measure for the failure of Reconstruction, that runs through the Civil Rights moment, and that showed itself again in the events of January 6, 2021. Grievance, in America, always concatenates with racism and evinces itself most violently in those moments when white supremacy, fallaciously, presents itself as being under attack. This book explores this elemental yet destructive thread of the American character.

Paperback. Condición: New. Surrealism was not merely an artistic movement to its adherents but an "instrument of knowledge," an attempt to transform the way we see the world by unleashing the unconscious as a radical, new means of constructing reality. Born out of the crisis of civilization brought about by World War I, it presented a sustained challenge to scientific rationalism as a privileged mode of knowing. In certain ways, surrealism's critique of white, Western civilization anticipated many later attempts at producing feminist and postcolonial epistemologies. With Making Trouble, sociologist and cultural historian Derek Sayer explores what it might mean to take surrealism's critique of civilization seriously. Drawing on a remarkable range of sources, Sayer first establishes surrealism as an important intellectual antecedent to the study of the human sciences today. He then makes a compelling and well-written argument for rethinking surrealism as a contemporary methodological resource for all those who still look to the human sciences not only as a way to interpret the world, but also to change it.

PAP. Condición: New. New Book. Shipped from UK. Established seller since 2000.

Paperback. Condición: New. This is the long-awaited fifth edition of Marshall Sahlins' classic series of bon mots, ruminations, and musings on the ancients, anthropology, and much else in between. It's been twenty-five years since Sahlins first devised some after-dinner entertainment at a decennial meeting of the Association of Social Anthropologists in Great Britain, published soon thereafter by Prickly Paradigm's first incarnation, Prickly Pear. What the Foucault? contains all the old chestnuts, but has been thoroughly updated, and is laced through with all the wit and wisdom we've come to expect.

Paperback. Condición: New. Data is too big to be left to the data analysts. Data: Now Bigger and Better! brings together researchers whose work is deeply informed by the conceptual frameworks of anthropology-frameworks that are comparative as well as field-based. From kinship to gifts, everything old becomes rich with new insight when the anthropological archive washes over "big data." Bringing together anthropology's classic debates and contemporary interventions, the book counters the future-oriented speculation so characteristic of discussions regarding big data. Drawing on long-standing experience in industry contexts, the contributors also provide analytical provocations that can help reframe some of the most important shifts in technology and society in the first half of the twenty-first century.

Paperback. Condición: New. In the twenty-first century, the idea of race in sports is rapidly changing. The National Basketball Association, for instance, was recently home to a new kind of racial conflict. After a recent playoff loss, Houston head coach, Jeff Van Gundy alleged that Yao Ming, his Chinese star center, was the victim of phantom calls, or refereeing decisions that may have been ethnically biased. Grant Farred here shows how this incident can be seen as a pivotal moment in the globalization of the NBA. With some forty percent of its players coming from foreign nations, the idea of race in the NBA has become increasingly multifaceted. Farred explains how allegations of phantom calls, such as Van Gundy's challenge the fiction that America is a post-racial society and compel us to think in new ways about the nexus of race and racism in America.

Paperback. Condición: New. President Bush was roundly criticized for likening America's antiterrorism measures to a "crusade" in 2001. Far from just a gaffe, however, such medievalism has become a dominant paradigm for comprehending the identity and motivations of America's perceived enemy in the war on terror. Yet as Bruce Holsinger argues here, this cloying post-9/11 rhetoric has served to obscure the more intricate ideological machinations of neomedievalism, the global idiom of the non-state actor: non-governmental organizations, transnational corporate militias, and terrorist organizations such as al Qaeda. "Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror" addresses the role of neomedievalism in contemporary politics. While international-relations theorists promote neomedievalism as a model for understanding emergent modes of global sovereignty, neoconservatives exploit its conceptual slipperiness for their own tactical ends. Holsinger concludes with a careful parsing of the Bush administration's torture memos, which enlist neomedievalism's model of feudal sovereignty on behalf of the abrogation of human rights.

Paperback. Condición: New. How can economics become genuinely quantitative? This is the question that French sociologist Gabriel Tarde tackled at the end of his career, and in this pamphlet, Bruno Latour and Vincent Antonin Lepinay offer a lively introduction to the work of that forgotten genius of nineteenth-century social thought. Tarde's solution was in total contradiction to the dominant views of his time: to quantify the connections between people and goods, you need to grasp 'passionate interests'. In Tarde's view, capitalism is not a system of cold calculations - rather it is a constant amplification in the intensity and reach of passions. In a stunning anticipation of contemporary economic anthropology, Tarde's work defines an alternative path beyond the two illusions responsible for so much modern misery: the adepts of the Invisible Hand and the devotees of the Visible Hand will learn how to escape the sterility of their fight and recognize the originality of a thinker for whom everything is intersubjective, hence quantifiable.At a time when the regulation of financial markets is the subject of heated debate, Latour and Lepinay provide a valuable historical perspective on the fundamental nature of capitalism.

Paperback. Condición: New. A memoir of reading and working with books by the renowned Booklist editor. With the infectious curiosity of an inveterate bibliophile and the prose of a fine stylist, Donna Seaman charts the course of her early reading years in a book-by-book chronicle of the significance books have held in her life. River of Books recounts Seaman's journey in becoming an editor for Booklist, a reviewer, an author, and a literary citizen, and lays bare how she nourished both body and soul in working with books. Seaman makes palpable the power and self-recognition that she discovered in a life dedicated to reading.

PAP. Condición: New. New Book. Shipped from UK. Established seller since 2000.

Condición: New. For decades, Israel and Palestine have been locked in ongoing conflict over land that each claims as its own. In 2011, the author lived in Ramallah in Palestine's occupied West Bank and taught in nearby Jerusalem. In this book, he offers a personal take on the conflict. Num Pages: 122 pages, 78 colour plates. BIC Classification: 1FBH; 1FBP; HBJF1; JPSD; JW. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 116 x 178 x 11. Weight in Grams: 136. . 2013. Paperback. . . . .

Condición: New. Num Pages: 86 pages. BIC Classification: 1FPC; HBTQ; JNAM; JPS; JPVH. Category: (P) Professional & Vocational. Dimension: 178 x 114 x 15. Weight in Grams: 666. . 2017. Paperback. . . . .

Paperback. Condición: New. In precarious and tumultuous times, schemes of social support, including cash transfers, are increasingly indispensable. Yet the inadequacy of the nation-state frame of membership that such schemes depend on is becoming evermore evident, as non-citizens form a growing proportion of the populations that welfare states attempt to govern. In Presence and Social Obligation, James Ferguson argues that conceptual resources for solving this problem are closer to hand than we might think. Drawing on a rich anthropology of sharing, he argues that the obligation to share never depends only on membership, but also on presence: on being "here." Presence and Social Obligation strives to demonstrate that such obligatory sharing based on presence can be observed in the way that marginalized urban populations access state services, however unequally, across the global South. Examples show that such sharing with non-nationals is not some sort of utopian proposal but part of the everyday life of the modern service-delivering state. Presence and Social Obligation is a critical yet refreshing approach to an ever-growing way of being together.

Paperback. Condición: New. Anti-Semitism is on the rise. How is this still possible? Once again, we are witness to a surge in right-wing authoritarianism, ethnonationalism, and white supremacism, and the racist, xenophobic, and misogynist violence they spread. Like historic newsreels brought back to life, renewed waves of refugees are turned away at borders, placed in cages, or washed up lifeless on the shore. Such striking similarities between present and past suggest that we are not done with the issues raised by the historical Jewish Question: that is, what is the place of "the Jew"-the minority, the relic, the rootless stranger, the racialized other, the exiled, the displaced, the immigrant, the diasporic? In The Jewish Question Again, leading scholars grapple with our inability to keep these struggles in the past and why we continue to repeat these atrocities. This book explores the haunting recurrence of the Jewish Question today and begs why we find ourselves here yet again.

Paperback. Condición: New. An argument against the idea of the indigenous chief as a liberal political figure. Across Africa, it is not unusual for proponents of liberal democracy and modernization to make room for some aspects of indigenous culture, such as the use of a chief as a political figure. Yet for Olu?f??mi Ta?i?wo`, no such accommodation should be made. Chiefs, he argues, in this thought-provoking and wide-ranging pamphlet, cannot be liberals-and liberals cannot be chiefs. If we fail to recognize this, we fail to acknowledge the metaphysical underpinnings of modern understandings of freedom and equality, as well as the ways in which African intellectuals can offer a distinctive take on the unfinished business of colonialism.

Paperback. Condición: New. In his classic essay The Gift, Marcel Mauss argued that gifts can never be truly free; rather, they bring about an expectation of reciprocal exchange. For over one hundred years, his ideas on economy, social relations, and exchange have inspired new modes of thought, none more so than what crystallized in the 1980s around an innovative group of French academics. In TheGift Paradigm, Alain Caillé provides the first in-depth, English-language introduction to La Revue du MAUSS-or, "Anti-Utilitarian Movement in the Social Sciences," combining the work of anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers, and others. Today, the very idea of a "general social science" seems unthinkable, unless you count the pervasive sway of a utilitarian logic in orthodox economics, or the diffuse influence of neoliberalism. Here, Caillé offers a distinctly different reading of economy and society, inspired by Mauss-as vital now as ever.

Paperback. Condición: New. In the mid-sixteenth century, Jesuit missionaries working in what is now Brazil were struck by what they called the inconstancy of the people they met, the indigenous Tupi-speaking tribes of the Atlantic coast. Though the Indians appeared eager to receive the Gospel, they also had a tendency to forget the missionaries' lessons and 'revert' to their natural state of war, cannibalism, and polygamy. This peculiar mixture of acceptance and rejection, compulsion and forgetfulness was incorrectly understood by the priests as a sign of the natives' incapacity to believe in anything durably. In this pamphlet, world-renowned Brazilian anthropologist "Eduardo Viveiros de Castro" situates the Jesuit missionaries' accounts of the Tupi people in historical perspective. In the process he draws out some startling and insightful implications of their perceived inconstancy in relation to anthropological debates on culture and religion.

Condición: New. Adapting the discontinuous and multitonal critical procedures of works like Carlyle's "Sartor Resartus" and Laura Riding's "Anarchism Is Not Enough", this book subjects literary studies to a patacritical investigation. It argues that aesthetics is a science of exceptions, and that any given critical practice is also an exception from itself. Num Pages: 113 pages. BIC Classification: DSA. Category: (UF) Further/Higher Education. Dimension: 178 x 114 x 10. Weight in Grams: 666. . 2009. Paperback. . . . .

Condición: New. Reflecting the decline in college courses on Western Civilization, this book aims to accelerate the trend by reducing "Western Civ" to about two hours. It cites Nietzsche to the effect that deep issues are like cold baths; one should get into and out of them as quickly as possible. Num Pages: 224 pages. BIC Classification: JHM. Category: (P) Professional & Vocational. Dimension: 116 x 178 x 7. Weight in Grams: 104. . 2008. 74th Edition. Paperback. . . . .

Paperback / softback. Condición: New. New copy - Usually dispatched within 4 working days. 114.

Paperback. Condición: New. Since the end of the nineteenth century, the division between nature and culture has been fundamental to Western thought. In this groundbreaking work, renowned anthropologist Philippe Descola seeks to break down this divide, arguing for a departure from the anthropocentric model and its rigid dualistic conception of nature and culture as distinct phenomena. In its stead, Descola proposes a radical new worldview, in which beings and objects, human and nonhuman, are understood through the complex relationships between them. The "Ecology of Others" presents a compelling challenge to anthropologists, ecologists, and environmental studies scholars to rethink the way we conceive of humans, objects, and the environment. Thought-provoking and engagingly written, it will be required reading for all those interested in moving beyond the current confines of this fascinating debate.

Condición: Good. Former library book; may include library markings. Used book that is in clean, average condition without any missing pages.