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The View from Afar

This collection touches on a wide range of anthropological issues, including family and marriage, myths, and rites, the environment and its representation, and constraint and freedom. The essays encompass more than forty years of analysis and constrain arguments that are as relevant today as they were thirty years ago.

"Hardly a field remains untouched—sociobiology, linguistics, botany, genetics, psychiatry, esthetics, ecology, politics, neuroscience, education, morality, psychology. . . . It’s all breathtaking and alarming, some of it wonderful, some of it ridiculous. . . . At times the experience is exhilarating."—Richard A. Shweder, New York Times Book Review

328 pages | 1 line drawing | 6 x 9 | © 1992

Anthropology: Cultural and Social Anthropology

Table of Contents

Preface
Part I - The Innate and the Acquired
1. Race and Culture
2. The Anthropologist and the Human Condition
Part II - Family, Marriage, Kinship
3. The Family
4. An Australian "Atom of Kinship"
5. Cross-Readings
6. On Marriage between Close Kin
Part III - The Environment and Its Representation
7. Structuralism and Ecology
8. Structuralism and Empiricism
9. The Lessons of Linguistics
10. Religion, Language, and History: Concerning an Unpublished Text by Ferdinand de Saussure
11. From Mythical Possibility to Social Existence
Part IV - Beliefs, Myths, and Rites
12. Cosmopolitanism and Schizophrenia
13. Myth and Forgetfulness
14. Pythagoras in America
15. An Anatomical Foreshadowing of Twinship
16. A Small Mythico-Literary Puzzle
17. From Chrétien de Troyes to Richard Wagner
18. A Note on the Tetralogy
Part V - Constraint and Freedom
19. A Meditative Painter
20. To a Young Painter
21. New York in 1941
22. A Belated Word about the Creative Child
23. Reflections on Liberty
References
Acknowledgments
Index

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