James Wyatt Cook
Biographic Data
| ID | 695941 |
|---|---|
| NAME | James Wyatt Cook |
| GIVEN NAMES | James Wyatt |
| FAMILY NAME | Cook |
| SIGNATURE | COOK J W |
| AFFILIATIONS | University College London |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5408-6717 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 91 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1970 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Self-Cultivation
This chapter examines Foucault’s theory of self-cultivation and its influence in anthropology. It considers the criticisms of atomistic individualism and social determinism that are often levelled at practices of self-cultivation and argues that practices of self-cultivation are neither wholly self-directed nor wholly socially determined. Ethnographies of self-cultivation reveal the efforts that people make to shape themselves and the worlds in w…
Introduction. An Anthropology of Intellectual Exchange
Dialogues, encounters and interactions through which particular ways of knowing, understanding and thinking about the world are forged lie at the centre of anthropology. Such ‘intellectual exchange’ is also central to anthropologists’ own professional practice: from their interactions with research participants and modes of pedagogy to their engagements with each other and scholars from adjacent disciplines. This collection of essays explores how…
An Anthropology of Intellectual Exchange: Interactions, Transactions and Ethics in Asia and Beyond
Social Anthropology is a vibrant discipline of relevance to many areaseconomics, politics, business, humanities, health and public policy.This series, published in association with the Cambridge William Wyse Chair in Social Anthropology, focuses on key interventions in Social Anthropology, based on innovative theory and research of relevance to contemporary social issues
Reaching across from here to there, in precarious times: Remote-teaching embodied creative practice through scores, instructions, and poetic invitations
How can we attend to students’ experience of agency, spatiality, sensation, mobility, freedom, and play in tertiary dance and interdisciplinary arts education, while working through lockdowns or in readiness for them? How do we cultivate care, joy, and imagination in such teaching-learning situations? How do we create spaces that are grounded and focussed while also creating maximum space for independence, idiosyncrasy, experimentation, delight i…
Mindfulness and culture: An introduction
Mindfulness and culture
Mindfulness, an awareness training practice originating in Buddhism, is simultaneously championed as a mental health tool and critiqued as a form of neo-liberal subjugation in media representations. Here, anthropology is well positioned to contribute to and meaningfully alter these contemporary debates. Anthropologists' focus on the relationship between psychological categories and culturally embedded ethical practices offers a welcome corrective…
Buddhism
Buddhism has existed for around two and half millennia, and is practiced by over 500 million people in the world today. The anthropology of Buddhism spans the breadth of the Buddhist world and provides rich ethnographic accounts of the religion as lived in diverse social contexts. Anthropological studies have evolved from early taxonomic work to the study of continuities and reinterpretations of socially embedded Buddhist traditions. Today, they …
Ascetic Practice and Participant Observation, or, the Gift of Doubt in Field Experience
Unsettled Care: Temporality, Subjectivity, and the Uneasy Ethics of Care
In this introduction, and indeed this special section, we explore care as a morally ambiguous and relationally unstable set of practices. By exploring care over longer temporal frames and across shifting subjectivities and intersubjectivities, we show how enactments of care are often unsettled by the transforming dynamics of relationships across time and often entail a multiplicity of competing affects and aspirations, such as hope and failure, l…
Unsettling Care: Intersubjective Embodiment in MBCT
Focusing on the place of "embodiment" for therapists in mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, this paper reveals that care often requires an on-going commitment to "being with" forms of uncomfortable self-experience. This work challenges the valorization of caregiving (as "natural," "good," or "rewarding") in anthropology by revealing the unsettled nature of lived experience, replete with difficult and changeable affective relations. Care emerges …
Morality is fundamentally an evolved solution to problems of social co-operation
This debate took place at the Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA) conference in Oxford on 21 September 2018, following the model of the Group Debates in Anthropological Theory at the University of Manchester (GDAT). It brought together and into confrontation two of anthropology's relatively new sub-fields (new at least in their current incarnations), namely evolutionary anthropology and the anthropology of morality and/or ethics. Although…
Buddhism
While Buddhism is a soteriology (a religious doctrine of salvation), the range of ritual practices, religious forms, and social organization included under the umbrella of “Buddhism” is broad and heterogeneous. In Buddhist soteriological teaching, all phenomena are characterized by impermanence, suffering, and non‐self. Buddhism is divided into Theravada and Mahayana variants and has spread globally, with reformist movements flourishing since the…
Diet and disease: Transgressing boundaries between science and society—understanding neglected diseases through the lens of cultural studies and anthropology
It is vital that we consider human health from all perspectives, including the social, geopolitical and cultural aspects of wider society. A prime example of how such forces complicate patterns of disease is provided by examining the underlying epidemiology of cholangiocarcinoma (bile duct cancer (CCA)) in Thailand. With high prevalence in the northeast of Thailand ( Isan ) and most rural communities along the Mekong River in Southeast Asia, CCA …
Mindful in Westminster: The politics of meditation and the limits of neoliberal critique
Analytically, the concept of neoliberalism helps to account for the relationship between forms of governance, self-governance, and capitalist market forces. But how do we decipher its limits? Taking political interest in mindfulness as my ethnographic focus, I explore theoretical categories of neoliberalism and "responsibilization" that cross-cut emerging forms of governance in contemporary British society. I chose this particular ethnographic fo…
The Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory (GDAT), The University of Manchester: The 2011 annual debate - Non-dualism is philosophy not ethnography
Does the concept of non-dualism have ethnographic purchase or is it mainly of philosophical interest? This article comprises the edited presentation and discussions of the 2011 GDAT debate on the motion 'Non-dualism is Philosophy not Ethnography'. The debaters proposing the motion were Michael Scott and Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov. They were opposed by Christopher Pinney and Joanna Cook. Marilyn Strathern acted as jester - playfully and rigorously eng…
Meditation in Modern Buddhism: Renunciation and Change in Thai Monastic Life
In contemporary Thai Buddhism, the burgeoning popularity of vipassanā meditation is dramatically impacting the lives of those most closely involved with its practice: monks and mae chee (lay nuns) living in monastic communities. For them, meditation becomes a central focus of life and a way to transform the self. This ethnographic account of a thriving Northern Thai monastery examines meditation in detail, and explores the subjective significatio…
Hagiographic narrative and monastic practice: Buddhist morality and mastery amongst Thai Buddhist nuns
Drawing on ethnographic analysis of the life-story of a contemporary Thai Buddhist nun (mae chee), this article argues that narrative convention must be understood as constitutive as well as communicative. In hagiographic convention and ascetic discipline gender distinctions are not understood as relevant for spiritual attainment. The use of hagiography by male and female religious professionals located in a gendered hierarchy suggests that relig…
Alms, Money and Reciprocity: Buddhist Nuns as Mediators of Generalised Exchange in Thailand
In this paper I examine the part that women, in the ambiguous role of Buddhist nun (mae chee), now take in the emblematic Buddhist practice of alms donations. The monastic office of 'mae chee' is complicated. It is conveyed through the ritual adoption of religious vows and is usually undertaken for life. However, mae chee ordination is only partial and its status is far below that of monks. In Thai law mae chee are regarded as pious laywomen (upa…
The Faerie Queene and Middle English Romance: The Matter of Just Memory
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Florentine Drama for Convent and Festival
Half-Serious Rhymes: The Narrative Poetry of Luigi Pulci
Mark Davie, Half-serious Rhymes: The Narrative Poetry of Luigi Pulci Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1998. 199 pp. $39.50. ISBN: 0-7165-2601-8. - Luigi Pulci, Morgante: The Epic Adventures of Orlando and His Giant Friend Morgante Trans. Joseph Tusiani. Intro, and notes, Edoardo A. Lèbano. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. xxxiii + 975 pp. $49.95. ISBN: 0-253-33399-7. - Volume 52 Issue 2
The Autobiography of Lorenzo de' Medici the Magnificent: A Commentary on My Sonnets
An Italian Renaissance Sextet: Six Tales in Historical Context
Lauro Martines. An Italian Renaissance Sextet: Six Tales in Historical Context. Trans. Murtha Baca. Series eds., Luigi Ballerini and Paulo Barlera. New York: Marsilio Publishers, 1994. 280 pp. 18.95 paper. - Volume 49 Issue 4
Gods of Play: Baroque Festive Performances as Rhetorical Discourse
Kristiaan P. Aercke. Gods of Play: Baroque Festive Performances as Rhetorical Discourse. Ed. Mihai I. Spariosu. (Margins of Literature.) Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. xii + 284 pp. 19.95 paper. - Volume 49 Issue 4
Petrarch's Mirrors of Love and Hell: Canzoniere 45 and 46
Unsettled Care: Temporality, Subjectivity, and the Uneasy Ethics of Care
In this introduction, and indeed this special section, we explore care as a morally ambiguous and relationally unstable set of practices. By exploring care over longer temporal frames and across shifting subjectivities and intersubjectivities, we show how enactments of care are often unsettled by the transforming dynamics of relationships across time and often entail a multiplicity of competing affects and aspirations, such as hope and failure, l…
Mindful in Westminster: The politics of meditation and the limits of neoliberal critique
Analytically, the concept of neoliberalism helps to account for the relationship between forms of governance, self-governance, and capitalist market forces. But how do we decipher its limits? Taking political interest in mindfulness as my ethnographic focus, I explore theoretical categories of neoliberalism and "responsibilization" that cross-cut emerging forms of governance in contemporary British society. I chose this particular ethnographic fo…
The Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory (GDAT), The University of Manchester: The 2011 annual debate - Non-dualism is philosophy not ethnography
Does the concept of non-dualism have ethnographic purchase or is it mainly of philosophical interest? This article comprises the edited presentation and discussions of the 2011 GDAT debate on the motion 'Non-dualism is Philosophy not Ethnography'. The debaters proposing the motion were Michael Scott and Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov. They were opposed by Christopher Pinney and Joanna Cook. Marilyn Strathern acted as jester - playfully and rigorously eng…
Hagiographic narrative and monastic practice: Buddhist morality and mastery amongst Thai Buddhist nuns
Drawing on ethnographic analysis of the life-story of a contemporary Thai Buddhist nun (mae chee), this article argues that narrative convention must be understood as constitutive as well as communicative. In hagiographic convention and ascetic discipline gender distinctions are not understood as relevant for spiritual attainment. The use of hagiography by male and female religious professionals located in a gendered hierarchy suggests that relig…
Alms, Money and Reciprocity: Buddhist Nuns as Mediators of Generalised Exchange in Thailand
In this paper I examine the part that women, in the ambiguous role of Buddhist nun (mae chee), now take in the emblematic Buddhist practice of alms donations. The monastic office of 'mae chee' is complicated. It is conveyed through the ritual adoption of religious vows and is usually undertaken for life. However, mae chee ordination is only partial and its status is far below that of monks. In Thai law mae chee are regarded as pious laywomen (upa…
Morality is fundamentally an evolved solution to problems of social co-operation
This debate took place at the Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA) conference in Oxford on 21 September 2018, following the model of the Group Debates in Anthropological Theory at the University of Manchester (GDAT). It brought together and into confrontation two of anthropology's relatively new sub-fields (new at least in their current incarnations), namely evolutionary anthropology and the anthropology of morality and/or ethics. Although…
Mindfulness and culture
Mindfulness, an awareness training practice originating in Buddhism, is simultaneously championed as a mental health tool and critiqued as a form of neo-liberal subjugation in media representations. Here, anthropology is well positioned to contribute to and meaningfully alter these contemporary debates. Anthropologists' focus on the relationship between psychological categories and culturally embedded ethical practices offers a welcome corrective…
An Anthropology of Intellectual Exchange: Interactions, Transactions and Ethics in Asia and Beyond
Social Anthropology is a vibrant discipline of relevance to many areaseconomics, politics, business, humanities, health and public policy.This series, published in association with the Cambridge William Wyse Chair in Social Anthropology, focuses on key interventions in Social Anthropology, based on innovative theory and research of relevance to contemporary social issues
Buddhism
Buddhism has existed for around two and half millennia, and is practiced by over 500 million people in the world today. The anthropology of Buddhism spans the breadth of the Buddhist world and provides rich ethnographic accounts of the religion as lived in diverse social contexts. Anthropological studies have evolved from early taxonomic work to the study of continuities and reinterpretations of socially embedded Buddhist traditions. Today, they …
Unsettling Care: Intersubjective Embodiment in MBCT
Focusing on the place of "embodiment" for therapists in mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, this paper reveals that care often requires an on-going commitment to "being with" forms of uncomfortable self-experience. This work challenges the valorization of caregiving (as "natural," "good," or "rewarding") in anthropology by revealing the unsettled nature of lived experience, replete with difficult and changeable affective relations. Care emerges …
Interview with Abraham Polonsky
Interview with Abraham Polonsky Jim Cook, Jim Cook Teacher The Jewish Free School Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Kingsley Canham Kingsley Canham The Jewish Free School Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Screen, Volume 11, Issue 3, summer 1970, Pages 57–73, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/11.3.57 Published: 01 July 1970
Petrarch's Mirrors of Love and Hell: Canzoniere 45 and 46
An Italian Renaissance Sextet: Six Tales in Historical Context
Lauro Martines. An Italian Renaissance Sextet: Six Tales in Historical Context. Trans. Murtha Baca. Series eds., Luigi Ballerini and Paulo Barlera. New York: Marsilio Publishers, 1994. 280 pp. 18.95 paper. - Volume 49 Issue 4
Gods of Play: Baroque Festive Performances as Rhetorical Discourse
Kristiaan P. Aercke. Gods of Play: Baroque Festive Performances as Rhetorical Discourse. Ed. Mihai I. Spariosu. (Margins of Literature.) Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. xii + 284 pp. 19.95 paper. - Volume 49 Issue 4
The Autobiography of Lorenzo de' Medici the Magnificent: A Commentary on My Sonnets
Half-Serious Rhymes: The Narrative Poetry of Luigi Pulci
Mark Davie, Half-serious Rhymes: The Narrative Poetry of Luigi Pulci Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1998. 199 pp. $39.50. ISBN: 0-7165-2601-8. - Luigi Pulci, Morgante: The Epic Adventures of Orlando and His Giant Friend Morgante Trans. Joseph Tusiani. Intro, and notes, Edoardo A. Lèbano. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. xxxiii + 975 pp. $49.95. ISBN: 0-253-33399-7. - Volume 52 Issue 2
Florentine Drama for Convent and Festival
The Faerie Queene and Middle English Romance: The Matter of Just Memory
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Alms, Money and Reciprocity: Buddhist Nuns as Mediators of Generalised Exchange in Thailand
In this paper I examine the part that women, in the ambiguous role of Buddhist nun (mae chee), now take in the emblematic Buddhist practice of alms donations. The monastic office of 'mae chee' is complicated. It is conveyed through the ritual adoption of religious vows and is usually undertaken for life. However, mae chee ordination is only partial and its status is far below that of monks. In Thai law mae chee are regarded as pious laywomen (upa…
Hagiographic narrative and monastic practice: Buddhist morality and mastery amongst Thai Buddhist nuns
Drawing on ethnographic analysis of the life-story of a contemporary Thai Buddhist nun (mae chee), this article argues that narrative convention must be understood as constitutive as well as communicative. In hagiographic convention and ascetic discipline gender distinctions are not understood as relevant for spiritual attainment. The use of hagiography by male and female religious professionals located in a gendered hierarchy suggests that relig…
Meditation in Modern Buddhism: Renunciation and Change in Thai Monastic Life
In contemporary Thai Buddhism, the burgeoning popularity of vipassanā meditation is dramatically impacting the lives of those most closely involved with its practice: monks and mae chee (lay nuns) living in monastic communities. For them, meditation becomes a central focus of life and a way to transform the self. This ethnographic account of a thriving Northern Thai monastery examines meditation in detail, and explores the subjective significatio…
The Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory (GDAT), The University of Manchester: The 2011 annual debate - Non-dualism is philosophy not ethnography
Does the concept of non-dualism have ethnographic purchase or is it mainly of philosophical interest? This article comprises the edited presentation and discussions of the 2011 GDAT debate on the motion 'Non-dualism is Philosophy not Ethnography'. The debaters proposing the motion were Michael Scott and Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov. They were opposed by Christopher Pinney and Joanna Cook. Marilyn Strathern acted as jester - playfully and rigorously eng…
Diet and disease: Transgressing boundaries between science and society—understanding neglected diseases through the lens of cultural studies and anthropology
It is vital that we consider human health from all perspectives, including the social, geopolitical and cultural aspects of wider society. A prime example of how such forces complicate patterns of disease is provided by examining the underlying epidemiology of cholangiocarcinoma (bile duct cancer (CCA)) in Thailand. With high prevalence in the northeast of Thailand ( Isan ) and most rural communities along the Mekong River in Southeast Asia, CCA …
Mindful in Westminster: The politics of meditation and the limits of neoliberal critique
Analytically, the concept of neoliberalism helps to account for the relationship between forms of governance, self-governance, and capitalist market forces. But how do we decipher its limits? Taking political interest in mindfulness as my ethnographic focus, I explore theoretical categories of neoliberalism and "responsibilization" that cross-cut emerging forms of governance in contemporary British society. I chose this particular ethnographic fo…
Buddhism
While Buddhism is a soteriology (a religious doctrine of salvation), the range of ritual practices, religious forms, and social organization included under the umbrella of “Buddhism” is broad and heterogeneous. In Buddhist soteriological teaching, all phenomena are characterized by impermanence, suffering, and non‐self. Buddhism is divided into Theravada and Mahayana variants and has spread globally, with reformist movements flourishing since the…
Ascetic Practice and Participant Observation, or, the Gift of Doubt in Field Experience
Unsettled Care: Temporality, Subjectivity, and the Uneasy Ethics of Care
In this introduction, and indeed this special section, we explore care as a morally ambiguous and relationally unstable set of practices. By exploring care over longer temporal frames and across shifting subjectivities and intersubjectivities, we show how enactments of care are often unsettled by the transforming dynamics of relationships across time and often entail a multiplicity of competing affects and aspirations, such as hope and failure, l…
Unsettling Care: Intersubjective Embodiment in MBCT
Focusing on the place of "embodiment" for therapists in mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, this paper reveals that care often requires an on-going commitment to "being with" forms of uncomfortable self-experience. This work challenges the valorization of caregiving (as "natural," "good," or "rewarding") in anthropology by revealing the unsettled nature of lived experience, replete with difficult and changeable affective relations. Care emerges …
Morality is fundamentally an evolved solution to problems of social co-operation
This debate took place at the Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA) conference in Oxford on 21 September 2018, following the model of the Group Debates in Anthropological Theory at the University of Manchester (GDAT). It brought together and into confrontation two of anthropology's relatively new sub-fields (new at least in their current incarnations), namely evolutionary anthropology and the anthropology of morality and/or ethics. Although…
Buddhism
Buddhism has existed for around two and half millennia, and is practiced by over 500 million people in the world today. The anthropology of Buddhism spans the breadth of the Buddhist world and provides rich ethnographic accounts of the religion as lived in diverse social contexts. Anthropological studies have evolved from early taxonomic work to the study of continuities and reinterpretations of socially embedded Buddhist traditions. Today, they …
Reaching across from here to there, in precarious times: Remote-teaching embodied creative practice through scores, instructions, and poetic invitations
How can we attend to students’ experience of agency, spatiality, sensation, mobility, freedom, and play in tertiary dance and interdisciplinary arts education, while working through lockdowns or in readiness for them? How do we cultivate care, joy, and imagination in such teaching-learning situations? How do we create spaces that are grounded and focussed while also creating maximum space for independence, idiosyncrasy, experimentation, delight i…
Mindfulness and culture: An introduction
Mindfulness and culture
Mindfulness, an awareness training practice originating in Buddhism, is simultaneously championed as a mental health tool and critiqued as a form of neo-liberal subjugation in media representations. Here, anthropology is well positioned to contribute to and meaningfully alter these contemporary debates. Anthropologists' focus on the relationship between psychological categories and culturally embedded ethical practices offers a welcome corrective…
Self-Cultivation
This chapter examines Foucault’s theory of self-cultivation and its influence in anthropology. It considers the criticisms of atomistic individualism and social determinism that are often levelled at practices of self-cultivation and argues that practices of self-cultivation are neither wholly self-directed nor wholly socially determined. Ethnographies of self-cultivation reveal the efforts that people make to shape themselves and the worlds in w…
Introduction. An Anthropology of Intellectual Exchange
Dialogues, encounters and interactions through which particular ways of knowing, understanding and thinking about the world are forged lie at the centre of anthropology. Such ‘intellectual exchange’ is also central to anthropologists’ own professional practice: from their interactions with research participants and modes of pedagogy to their engagements with each other and scholars from adjacent disciplines. This collection of essays explores how…
Sociology (20 works) · Philosophy (16 works) · Art (12 works) · Epistemology (11 works) · Anthropology (10 works) · History (10 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Psychology (8 works) · Ethnography (7 works) · Theology (7 works)