Description:
This volume argues that we need to take a step back from the assumption that we know what theory is to investigate how theory--a matter of concepts, of analytic practice, of medium of value, of professional ideology--operates in anthropology and related fields today.
Brief description: Dominic Boyer is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences at Rice University. He is the author of The Life Informatic: Newsmaking in the Digital Era, from Cornell; Spirit and System: Media, Intellectuals, and the Dialectic in Modern German Culture; and Understanding Media: A Popular Philosophy. He is coeditor of, also from Cornell.
Review Quotes:
"Theory Can Be More than It Used to Be illuminates and jeopardizes notions long central to anthropology. Fieldwork and ethnography have both come under much more thorough scrutiny than theory. This book explores the complexities, resonances, and possibilities of theory in relation to contemporary and near-future anthropology. It opens up complex and challenging terrain and provides us with the analytical wherewithal for thinking through--and with--questions of what theory can be and how it can shape and be shaped by the field. Lucid, fascinating, exceptionally engaging, and highly sophisticated, this book is a major contribution to key debates within and beyond anthropology."
--Don Brenneis, University of California, Santa Cruz, coeditor of Annual Review of Anthropology