• Sign up for new title announcements and special offers.

  • Cloth: $84.95 - In Stock
    978-0-8223-3811-6
  • Paperback: $23.95 - In Stock
    978-0-8223-3864-2
  • Quantity
  • Add To Bag
  • Introduction: Updating Practice Theory 1

    Chapter One: Reading America: Preliminary Notes on Class and Culture 19

    Chapter Two: Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal 42

    Chapter Three: Identities: The Hidden Life of Class 63

    Chapter Four: Generation X: Anthropology in a Media-Saturated World 80

    Chapter Five: Subjectivity and Cultural Critique 107

    Chapter Six: Power and Projects: Reflections on Agency 129

    Notes 155

    References Cited 167

    Index 181

  • “[T]his collection of essays is easily accessible to non-anthropologists. . . . [T]he latest work from Ortner would be a valuable addition to one's collection.”

    “[T]his volume presents a strand of Ortner’s own intellectual history while simultaneously engaging recent questions of power, history, the problem of agency, and how to incorporate subjectivity into analyses of culture. . . . Ortner is a master at making complex issues accessible to readers at all levels.

    “This is a fascinating set of essays. . . . [A] delightful and challenging intellectual foray into [Ortner’s]theoretical reasoning.”

    “[Ortner’s] book is a compelling and original combination of Geertz’s literary flair, Bourdieu’s reflexivity, and Sahlins’s comprehensiveness, together with a capacity for synthetic thought that is very much her own.”

    Ortner writes about agency and subjectivity with eloquence and clarity. . . . [T}his is a highly accessible book that should find a home in many people’s libraries (and on several course reading lists), whether they belong to professional anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, or interested members of the public.”

    Reviews

  • “[T]his collection of essays is easily accessible to non-anthropologists. . . . [T]he latest work from Ortner would be a valuable addition to one's collection.”

    “[T]his volume presents a strand of Ortner’s own intellectual history while simultaneously engaging recent questions of power, history, the problem of agency, and how to incorporate subjectivity into analyses of culture. . . . Ortner is a master at making complex issues accessible to readers at all levels.

    “This is a fascinating set of essays. . . . [A] delightful and challenging intellectual foray into [Ortner’s]theoretical reasoning.”

    “[Ortner’s] book is a compelling and original combination of Geertz’s literary flair, Bourdieu’s reflexivity, and Sahlins’s comprehensiveness, together with a capacity for synthetic thought that is very much her own.”

    Ortner writes about agency and subjectivity with eloquence and clarity. . . . [T}his is a highly accessible book that should find a home in many people’s libraries (and on several course reading lists), whether they belong to professional anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, or interested members of the public.”

  • “An important and especially usable collection by one of the most influential essayists in anthropology, introduced by a lucid and original review of key concepts as they have been applied to the remarkable range of Sherry Ortner’s research achievements. Her response to recent challenges to the idea of culture is alone worth the price of the book.” — George Marcus, University of California, Irvine

    “At once challenging and admirably accessible, these essays trace the thinking of one of anthropology’s most notable practitioners as she—and her discipline—wrestles with key conundrums facing the late-modern social sciences.” — Jean Comaroff, University of Chicago

    “This is vintage Ortner. No one else writes anthropological theory so clear, so down-to-earth, or so accessible to non-anthropologists.” — William H. Sewell Jr., author of Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation

  • Permission to Photocopy (coursepacks)

    If you are requesting permission to photocopy material for classroom use, please contact the Copyright Clearance Center at copyright.com;

    If the Copyright Clearance Center cannot grant permission, you may request permission from our Copyrights & Permissions Manager (use Contact Information listed below).

    Permission to Reprint

    If you are requesting permission to reprint DUP material (journal or book selection) in another book or in any other format, contact our Copyrights & Permissions Manager (use Contact Information listed below).

    Images/Art

    Many images/art used in material copyrighted by Duke University Press are controlled, not by the Press, but by the owner of the image. Please check the credit line adjacent to the illustration, as well as the front and back matter of the book for a list of credits. You must obtain permission directly from the owner of the image. Occasionally, Duke University Press controls the rights to maps or other drawings. Please direct permission requests for these images to permissions@dukeupress.edu.
    For book covers to accompany reviews, please contact the publicity department.

    Subsidiary Rights/Foreign Translations

    If you're interested in a Duke University Press book for subsidiary rights/translations, please contact permissions@dukeupress.edu. Include the book title/author, rights sought, and estimated print run.

    Disability Requests

    Instructions for requesting an electronic text on behalf of a student with disabilities are available here.

    Rights & Permissions Contact Information

    Email: permissions@dukeupress.edu
    Email contact for coursepacks: asstpermissions@dukeupress.edu
    Fax: 919-688-4574
    Mail:
    Duke University Press
    Rights and Permissions
    905 W. Main Street
    Suite 18B
    Durham, NC 27701

    For all requests please include:
    1. Author's name. If book has an editor that is different from the article author, include editor's name also.
    2. Title of the journal article or book chapter and title of journal or title of book
    3. Page numbers (if excerpting, provide specifics)
    For coursepacks, please also note: The number of copies requested, the school and professor requesting
    For reprints and subsidiary rights, please also note: Your volume title, publication date, publisher, print run, page count, rights sought

  • Description

    In Anthropology and Social Theory the award-winning anthropologist Sherry B. Ortner draws on her longstanding interest in theories of cultural practice to rethink key concepts of culture, agency, and subjectivity for the social sciences of the twenty-first century. The seven theoretical and interpretive essays in this volume each advocate reconfiguring, rather than abandoning, the concept of culture. Similarly, they all suggest that a theory which depends on the interested action of social beings—specifically practice theory, associated especially with the work of Pierre Bourdieu—requires a more developed notion of human agency and a richer conception of human subjectivity. Ortner shows how social theory must both build upon and move beyond classic practice theory in order to understand the contemporary world.

    Some of the essays reflect explicitly on theoretical concerns: the relationship between agency and power, the problematic quality of ethnographic studies of resistance, and the possibility of producing an anthropology of subjectivity. Others are ethnographic studies that apply Ortner’s theoretical framework. In these, she investigates aspects of social class, looking at the relationship between race and middle-class identity in the United States, the often invisible nature of class as a cultural identity and as an analytical category in social inquiry, and the role that public culture and media play in the creation of the class anxieties of Generation X. Written with Ortner’s characteristic lucidity, these essays constitute a major statement about the future of social theory from one of the leading anthropologists of our time.

    About The Author(s)

    Sherry B. Ortner is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is author of New Jersey Dreaming: Capital, Culture, and the Class of '58, also published by Duke University Press; Life and Death on Mt. Everest: Sherpas and Himalayan Mountaineering; Making Gender: The Politics and Erotics of Culture; and High Religion: A Cultural and Political History of Sherpa Buddhism. She has received numerous awards, including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and the J. I. Staley Prize.

Explore More

RELATED WORKS

SIGN UP FOR E-MAIL

Sign up for Subject Matters email updates to receive discounts, new book announcements, and more.

Share

TELL A FRIEND

ADD TO A READING LIST

Create a reading list or add to an existing list. Sign-in or register now to continue.


About

Help

Information For

Connect

Contact Us

  • Duke University Press
  • 905 W. Main St. Ste 18-B
  • Durham, NC 27701
  • U.S. phone (toll-free): 888-651-0122
  • International: 1-919-688-5134
  • orders@dukeupress.edu