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Beyond Description brings anthropologists and other social scientists together to examine the problem of explanation. What is "an explanation?" What can it add? What makes it authoritative, clarifying, or misleading? Whom does it serve and how is it produced? These questions lie at the heart of recent public crises of confidence in expertise, political representation, and classic liberal visions of whom we can rely on for true and trustworthy accounts. In a world beset by events and processes that seem to defy expert predictions of their impossibility, and in which post-hoc accounts can often feel more like rationalizations than explanations, competing voices vie for public presence and seek to silence one another. Anthropology and the social sciences face such questions too, making contemporary explanatory practice both an empirical and a reflexive challenge. By combining ethnographic studies of practices of explanation in a range of contemporary political, medical, artistic, religious, and bureaucratic settings, the essays in Beyond Description offer critical examinations of changing norms and forms of explanation in the world and within anthropology itself.

SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / Cultural & Social. --- political phenomenon, post-truth, cognitive therapy, empirical questions, ethnographic studies, examinations, anthropology, epistemological questions, philosophy, sociology, epistemology, interpretation, social analysis. --- Science --- Philosophy of science --- History as a science

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What happens to people, places and objects that do not fit the ordering regimes and progressive narratives of modernity? Conventional understandings imply that progress leaves such things behind, and excludes them as though they were valueless waste. This volume uses the concept of indeterminacy to explore how conditions of exclusion and abandonment may give rise to new values, as well as to states of despair and alienation. Drawing upon ethnographic research about a wide variety of contexts, the chapters here explore how indeterminacy is created and experienced in relationship to projects of classification and progress.

Social evolution. --- Marginiality, Social. --- Waste products --- Determinism (Philosophy) --- Civilization, Modern --- Social aspects. --- abandonment. --- alienation. --- capitalism. --- conditions of exclusion. --- cultural anthropology. --- cultural progress. --- culture. --- economic. --- economics. --- engaging. --- ethnic studies. --- ethnographic research. --- ethnographic studies. --- ethnography. --- historical. --- history. --- human condition. --- indeterminacy. --- modernity. --- ordering regimes. --- political economy. --- politics. --- progressive narratives. --- social anthropology. --- social change. --- social issues. --- social science. --- sociology.

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Following the transformations and conflicts of the first half of the twentieth century, Austria’s emergence as an independent democracy heralded a new era of stability and prosperity for the nation. Among the new developments was mass tourism to the nation’s cities, spa towns, and wilderness areas, a phenomenon that would prove immensely influential on the development of a postwar identity. Revisiting Austria incorporates films, marketing materials, literature, and first-person accounts to explore the ways in which tourism has shaped both international and domestic perceptions of Austrian identity even as it has failed to confront the nation’s often violent and troubled history.

Tourism --- History of doctrines --- Austria --- Politics and government --- In motion pictures. --- 20th century. --- anthropology textbook. --- austria marketing. --- austria tourist. --- austria. --- austrian identity. --- cultural anthropology. --- democracy. --- democratic. --- domestic perception. --- economy. --- ethnographic studies. --- historical textbook. --- history. --- hospitality travel. --- hungary. --- independent countries. --- influence of tourism on postwar austria. --- international studies. --- national stability and prosperity. --- postwar austria. --- postwar identity. --- spa town. --- tourism. --- travel. --- troubled history. --- violent past. --- world history.

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First published in 1986, Lila Abu-Lughod's Veiled Sentiments has become a classic ethnography in the field of anthropology. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Abu-Lughod lived with a community of Bedouins in the Western Desert of Egypt for nearly two years, studying gender relations, morality, and the oral lyric poetry through which women and young men express personal feelings. The poems are haunting, the evocation of emotional life vivid. But Abu-Lughod's analysis also reveals how deeply implicated poetry and sentiment are in the play of power and the maintenance of social hierarchy. What begins as a puzzle about a single poetic genre becomes a reflection on the politics of sentiment and the complexity of culture. This thirtieth anniversary edition includes a new afterword that reflects on developments both in anthropology and in the lives of this community of Awlad 'Ali Bedouins, who find themselves increasingly enmeshed in national political and social formations. The afterword ends with a personal meditation on the meaning-for all involved-of the radical experience of anthropological fieldwork and the responsibilities it entails for ethnographers.

Ethnology. Cultural anthropology --- Sociology of culture --- anno 1980-1989 --- anno 1970-1979 --- Sahara --- Egypt --- Bedouins --- Folk poetry, Arabic --- Arabic poetry --- Honor --- Sex customs --- Women, Bedouin --- Social life and customs --- History and criticism --- Bedouin authors --- anthropologist --- anthropology --- bedouin --- community of awlad ali bedouins --- egypt --- ethnographic studies --- ethnography --- gender relations --- international relations --- morality --- poems --- poetry collection --- sentimental --- social normality --- travelers --- western desert --- SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / Cultural & Social --- Bedouin women --- Customs, Sex --- Human beings --- Sexual behavior --- Sexual practices --- Manners and customs --- Moral conditions --- Sex --- Honour --- Chivalry --- Conduct of life --- Beduins --- Arabs --- Ethnology --- Nomads --- North Africans --- Arabic literature --- Arabic folk poetry

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Robert Desjarlais's graceful ethnography explores the life histories of two Yolmo elders, focusing on how particular sensory orientations and modalities have contributed to the making and the telling of their lives. These two are a woman in her late eighties known as Kisang Omu and a Buddhist priest in his mid-eighties known as Ghang Lama, members of an ethnically Tibetan Buddhist people whose ancestors have lived for three centuries or so along the upper ridges of the Yolmo Valley in north central Nepal. It was clear through their many conversations that both individuals perceived themselves as nearing death, and both were quite willing to share their thoughts about death and dying. The difference between the two was remarkable, however, in that Ghang Lama's life had been dominated by motifs of vision, whereas Kisang Omu's accounts of her life largely involved a "theatre of voices." Desjarlais offers a fresh and readable inquiry into how people's ways of sensing the world contribute to how they live and how they recollect their lives.

Helambu Sherpa (Nepalese people) --- Death --- Buddhists --- Lamas --- Yohlmu Tam (Nepalese people) --- Yolmo (Nepalese people) --- Yolmo Sherpa (Nepalese people) --- Ethnology --- Sherpa (Nepalese people) --- Lamaists --- Religious adherents --- Buddhist priests --- Religion. --- Religious aspects --- Buddhism. --- Kisang Omu. --- Ghang Lama. --- Omu, Kisang --- Lama, Chang --- Nepal --- Religious life and customs. --- Lamas (Bouddhisme) --- Bouddhistes --- Mort --- Yolmo (Peuple du Népal) --- Biography. --- Biographies --- Aspect religieux --- Bouddhisme --- Religion --- Népal --- Vie religieuse --- biographical profiles. --- biographical. --- buddhist priests. --- death and dying. --- death experience. --- ethnographers. --- ethnographic studies. --- gerontology. --- human struggles. --- interviews. --- life and death. --- life histories. --- life journey. --- life stories. --- nepal. --- nonfiction biography. --- physical senses. --- religious figures. --- sensory experiences. --- sociology. --- spiritual. --- subjective experience. --- tibetan buddhists. --- touching. --- vision. --- yolmo buddhists. --- yolmo elders. --- yolmo valley. --- Ethnography.