Metaphysical Community

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Overview

Starting with the post-structuralist idea that truth systems are lodged in discourse, and that discourse varies from society to society, Greg Urban seeks to discover the nature and extent of that variation. His journey to an Amerindian society in which dreams are more prominent than everyday aspects of the sensible world leads him to radically reformulate one of the main problematics of Western thought: the relationship between our sensations of the world and the understandings ...
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Overview

Starting with the post-structuralist idea that truth systems are lodged in discourse, and that discourse varies from society to society, Greg Urban seeks to discover the nature and extent of that variation. His journey to an Amerindian society in which dreams are more prominent than everyday aspects of the sensible world leads him to radically reformulate one of the main problematics of Western thought: the relationship between our sensations of the world and the understandings we form of them.
Metaphysical Community proposes that this dichotomy comes from the interplay between two sides of discourse—its intelligible side as a carrier of meanings, and its sensible side as thing-in-the-world that must be replicated. This insight leads to the heart of the book—the exploration of the uneasy tension that binds experience and understanding, phenomena and noumena.
Urban challenges basic assumptions that underlie social and cultural anthropology and much of the social sciences and humanities. His provocative insights will be of interest to all those concerned with anthropology, cultural studies, literary criticism, the sociology and politics of culture, and philosophy.

"Leading exponent of discourse-centered approach examines social organization of the Shokleng, Gãe-speaking peoples of southern Brazil. Author suggests a reading in terms of the problematic of knowledge: the theme of intelligibility and sensibility and their interrelations; logical empiricism and its connection to the world; the attachment of circulating discourse to sensible space; the relation of discourse and power relations; and the relation of discourse to reference"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 57.

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Editorial Reviews

Choice
This is one of the most sophisticated explanations available on the many and varied links between language and culture.... By constantly juxtaposing the sensible and the intelligible, [Urban] shows the adaptive qualities of culture and communication, and casts an old controversy about social organization in a totally new light. As abstract as this may sound, it is concretized with one of the best explications in print about the process of ethnographic fieldwork and how an outsider can go from observations of behavior to analysis and interpretation of historical and sociocultural patterns and processes.
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780292785298
  • Publisher: University of Texas Press
  • Publication date: 2/15/1996
  • Pages: 308
  • Product dimensions: 6.00 (w) x 9.00 (h) x 0.69 (d)

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
1. A Tapir's Heart
2. We the Living
3. The Hole in the Sky
4. A Lock of Hair in a Ball of Wax
5. The Jaguar's Spots
6. This Is Your Making
7. Rocks That Talk
8. Between Myth and Dream
Notes
References
Index
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