Search Results

Anthropology after Gluckman places the intimate circle around Max Gluckman, his Manchester School, in the vanguard of modern social anthropology. The book discloses the School’s intense, argument-rich collaborations, developing beyond an original focus in south and central Africa. Where outsiders have seen dominating leadership by Gluckman, a common stock of problems, and much about conflict, Richard Werbner highlights how insiders were drawn to explore many new frontiers in fieldwork and in-depth, reflexive ethnography, because they themselves, in class and gender, ethnicity and national origins, were remarkably inclusive. Characteristically different anthropologists, their careers met the challenges of being a public intellectual, an international celebrity, an institutional good citizen, a social and political activist, an advocate of legal justice. Their living legacies are shown, for the first time, through interlinked social biography and intellectual history to reach broadly across politics, law, ritual, semiotics, development studies, comparative urbanism, social network analysis and mathematical sociology. Innovation – in research methods and techniques, in documenting people’s changing praxis and social relations, in comparative analysis and a destabilizing strategy of re-analysis within ethnography – became the School’s hallmark. Much of this exploration confronted troubling times in Africa, colonial and postcolonial, which put the anthropologists and their anthropological knowledge at risk. The resurgence of debate about decolonization makes the accounts of fierce, End of Empire argument and recent postcolonial anthropology all the more topical. The lessons, even in activism, for social scientists, teachers as well as graduate and undergraduate students are compelling for our own troubled times.

This book examines how Hong Kong filmmakers, spectators and critics wrestled with a perturbation: What is Hong Kong cinema? Framed between the Leftist Riots (1967) and the aftermath of the Umbrella Movement (2014), this book scrutinises the interdependent relationship between cinema and politics by rethinking how Hong Kong cinema has been historically in-formed by dispossession and exclusion, rather than identity and belonging. It traces how Hong Kong’s extraterritoriality has been framed: in its position of being doubly occupied and doubly abandoned by contesting juridical, political, linguistic and cultural forces. It argues that filmmakers and spectators actively define and reconfigure Hong Kong cinema and media by fostering them as a public sphere, where contesting affects associated with these political lives’ shifting extraterritorial conditions and positions can be negotiated. Based on a combination of archival research, industrial studies, textual analysis and media and political philosophies, Extraterritoriality studies how creative works in mainstream cinema, independent films, television, video artworks and documentaries – especially those by marginalised artists – actively rewrite and reconfigure the way Hong Kong cinema and media are defined and located. These stylistically and political diverse works and practices seek – in their respective manners – to foster new ways to live with Hong Kongers’ double occupancy and double ostracisation that constantly deindividuate, desubjectivise, and deautonomise them, and how they can survive in their constant state of exception.