Confronting uncertainty
Anthropology and zones of the extraordinary
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2260440 |
|---|---|
| Authors | I Niehaus (0000-0002-9573-0238, Brunel University of London, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2013 |
| Volume | 40 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 651-660 |
| Publication date | 2013-11-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | American Ethnologist (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0094-0496 • E-ISSN: 1548-1425 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/amet.12045 |
| OpenAlex | W1554286027 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 10 |
| References cited | 35 |
Anthropological theory has privileged consideration of the regularities of everyday life and has paid far less attention to irregular events that disrupt the social order. In this article, I contribute to ongoing theoretical attempts to redress this imbalance. While I acknowledge the potential historical importance of irregular and extraordinary events, I do not see them as entirely free-floating. Here I concur with Marshall Sahlins, who convincingly shows how people order unusual events through mythopraxis and also how social structures facilitate individual agency. I contemplate a third possible relation between structure and event, namely, "framing." Drawing on my fieldwork in Bushbuckridge, South Africa, I show how people located and framed unfortunate and destructive events in zones that stood apart from everyday life. This process provides insight into witchcraft and homicide, topics that can no longer be understood only in terms of systemic agency
Agency (philosophy · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Everyday life · Framing (construction · Political science · Redress · Social life · Social science · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Archaeology and Rock Art Studies · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Law · Philosophy
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Nationalism without borders
Ironies of Solidarity
Uncertain futures and everyday hedging in a humanitarian city
When Time Freezes
Sanguma and scepticism
Responsibilization of care
In the middle of up and down ikigai is there
What Would They do if you Greeted?' The Potentiality of Greetings in the New South Africa
Symbolic wounds
Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England
Modernity at large
The Anthropology of violence
Critical Events
Transnational Connections
The Manchester School
Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction
Ethnographic Sorcery
Anthropology and the Cognitive Challenge
Outline of a Theory of Practice
Anthropological Locations
Witchcraft and a Life in the New South Africa
Images of Power and the Power of Images
In the Event
The Rules of Sociological Method
Structural Anthropology
Beyond Rationalism
Dr. Wouter Basson, Americans, and Wild Beasts
Methodology of Social Sciences
Apologies to Thucydides
A Scientific Theory of Culture and Other Essays
Explaining the Present
Bodies, Heat, and Taboos
Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand
Doing Politics in Bushbuckridge
Beyond the utility of violence
The Cape Nguni Witch Familiar As a Mediatory Construct
Spreading the Risk
Occult economies and the violence of abstraction
Unbewitching as therapy
Culture of Terror-Space of Death. Roger Casement's Putumayo Report and the Explanation of Torture
Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties
| Citations per year | 0.91 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2015 - 2025 (11) |
| Highly cited | No |