How to Do Things With Words

A. L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, "culture: A critical review of concepts and definitions"

The recent collection of articles, The Art of Translation [Masterstvo perevoda], follows publication of two other books on the subject, The Problems of Translation of Creative Writing [Voprosy khudozhestvennogo perevoda] and another work also bearing the title The Art of Translation.

The Theory and Practice of Translation

Although the chapters that appear in this book have been previously published separately in different places at different
times, they have been revised by the author for their publication as a book and are all related to the problem of
historical representation. By putting together essays on Droysen, Foucault, Jameson and Ricoeur, Hayden White hasmanaged to give an encompassing account of a problematic issue that has been one of the major concerns of
historical studies as well as of many other areas of the human sciences: that of the importance of narrative representation in the description or explanation of the “object” of study of
the human sciences. Although the authors mentioned deal with this subject in different ways, White finds in them
common characteristics which confirm the point made by him that historical narratives are, from a semiological
perspective, concerned with the production of meanings.

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The content of the Form: narrative discourse and historical representation

A pioneering attempt to relate the theory of literary fiction to a more general theory of fiction, using fictions of apocalypse as a model. This pioneering exploration of the relationship of fiction to age-old conceptions of chaos and crisis offers many new insights into some of the most unyielding philosophical and aesthetic enigmas. Examining the works of a wide range of writers from Plato to William Burroughs, Kermode demonstrates how writers have persistently imposed their \"fictions\" upon the face of eternity and how these have reflected the apocalyptic spirit.

Frank Kermode and the Invented World@@@The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction

▪ Abstract Pentecostal-charismatic Christianity (P/c), the form of Christianity in which believers receive the gifts of the Holy Spirit, is rapidly spreading and can be counted as one of the great success stories of the current era of cultural globalization. Literature on P/c presents a paradoxical picture of the cultural dynamics accompanying its spread. Many scholars argue that P/c is markedly successful in replicating itself in canonical form everywhere it spreads, whereas others stress its ability to adapt itself to the cultures into which it is introduced. Authors thus use P/c to support both theories that construe globalization as a process of Westernizing homogenization and those that understand it as a process of indigenizing differentiation. This review argues that approaches to P/c globalization need to recognize that P/c posesses cultural features that allow it, in most cases, to work in both ways at once. After considering definitional and historical issues and explanations for P/c's spread, t...

The Globalization of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity

In the 1980s, anthropology set aside a focus on societies defined as radically ‘other’ to the anthropologists' own. There was little consensus at the time, however, about who might replace the other as the primary object of anthropological attention. In important respects, I argue, its replacement has been the suffering subject. Tracing this change, I consider how it addressed key problems of the anthropology of the other, but I also suggest that some strengths of earlier work – particularly some of its unique critical capacities – were lost in the transition. The conclusion considers how recent trends in anthropology might coalesce in a further shift, this one toward an anthropology of the good capable of recovering some of the critical force of an earlier anthropology without taking on its weaknesses.

Beyond the suffering subject: toward an anthropology of the good

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Prologue: A Heavy Christmas and a Pig Law for People Introduction: Christianity and Cultural Change PART ONE: THE MAKING OF A CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY 1. From Salt to the Law: Contact and the Early Colonial Period 2. Christianity and the Colonial Transformation of Regional Relations 3. Revival, Second-Stage Conversion, and the Localization of the Urapmin Church PART TWO: LIVING IN SIN 4. Contemporary Urapmin in Millennial Time and Space 5. Willfulness, Lawfulness, and Urapmin Morality 6. Desire and Its Discontents: Free Time and Christian Morality 7. Rituals of Redemption and Technologies of the Self 8. Millennialism and the Contest of Values Conclusion: Christianity, Cultural Change, and the Moral Life of the Hybrid Notes References Index

Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society

To this point, the anthropology of Christianity has largely failed to develop. When anthropologists study Christians, they do not see themselves as contributing to a broad comparative enterprise in the way those studying other world religions do. A close reading of the Comaroffs’ Of Revelation and Revolution illustrates the ways in which anthropologists sideline Christianity and leads to a discussion of reasons the anthropology of Christianity has languished. While it is possible to locate the cause in part in the culture of anthropology, with its emphasis on difference, problems also exist at the theoretical level. Most anthropological theories emphasize cultural continuity as opposed to discontinuity and change. This emphasis becomes problematic where Christianity is concerned, because many kinds of Christianity stress radical change and expect it to occur. Confronted by people claiming that radical Christian change has occurred in their lives, anthropologists become suspicious and often explain away th...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/508690

Continuity thinking and the problem of christian culture : Belief, time, and the anthropology of christianity

The essays in this Social Thought and Commentary section are exercises in a tried and true anthropological trick, albeit one that these days is perhaps not so often performed. The trick involves taking some very focused, one might even say " small," bits of ethnography and using them to unsettle major doctrines of social thought. Among famous David and Goliath efforts along these lines, one thinks of Malinowski's deployment of the details of Trobriand social structure and personal life to cast doubt on the universality of the Oedipus complex, or, closer thematically to our focus here, of Michelle Rosaldo's Ilongot-based assault on speech act theory (to which we return below). Neither of these efforts even approached complete success in unseating the paradigms they took on-entrenched ideas die hard-but they did stimulate a lot of valuable social-theoretical debate. Our aim here is to try to do the same. The focused bit of ethnography which all of the contributors to this special section have in hand is the assertion, widespread in the societies of the Pacific, that it is impossible or at least extremely difficult to know what other people think or feel. We have called this idea the doctrine of "the opacity of other minds." The opacity doctrine is not limited to the Pacific (as noted in several of the essays that follow), and it is likely that in most societies one can occasionally find people ruminating on how difficult it is to see into the hearts and minds of others. But the opacity doctrine is unusually well developed in many of the cultures of the Pacific, where it is not so much a matter of episodic personal reflection as it is a widely shared and taken-for-granted fact about the world, and one that shapes normative orders and everyday practice. In Pacific societies where the opacity doctrine is present, for example, people are often expected to refrain from speculating (at least publicly) about what others may be thinking, and penalties for gossip about other people's intentions are often very high (see Schieffelin, this collection). For related reasons, people tend to put little store in the veracity of what others say about their own thoughts, rarely expecting that they can take such reports as reliable guides to how those who make them will behave in the future. Many other examples of the way opacity ideas shape the course of daily life appear in the papers collected here. But these brief observations should be enough to carry the point that such ideas have real ramifications in the Pacific societies in which they appear. If our privileged piece of data is quite focused, the social theoretical target at which we aim it is broader. It is the contention of our essays that Pacific opacity doctrines ought to force a rethinking of some fairly settled approaches to topics such as the nature of theories of mind, the role of intention in linguistic communication and social interaction more generally, and the importance of empathy in human encounters and in anthropological method. In all of these areas, Pacific assumptions about the impossibility of knowing the minds of others fundamentally contradict social scientific models that assume such knowledge is possible, and that further assume that gaining such knowledge stands universally as a regulating ideal for human beings in engagement with their fellows. Can our theories imagine that we might approach other people without assuming that we can know something about what goes on in their heads? Or that we might interpret their speech without explicitly making guesses about their intentions in producing it? Or that we can get along with others without assuming that we can replicate their thoughts and feelings within ourselves as a way of understanding how things are with them? Could we ever cooperate with each other without being able to mind-read on all these levels? At least as they talk about their lives, many people in the Pacific appear to answer yes to these questions. …

Joel Robbins

Papers

The Globalization of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity

Beyond the suffering subject: toward an anthropology of the good

Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society

Continuity thinking and the problem of christian culture : Belief, time, and the anthropology of christianity

Introduction: Cultural and Linguistic Anthropology and the Opacity of other minds