Who or what is human? Animal? And when these terms are coupled with a hyphen, how does that shift the grounds of studying? In human- animal studies the research and intellectual focus is on how animals figure and are configured… Read More ›
Anthropology
Fetishism and Commodity Fetishism
Fetishism is the displacement of desire and fantasy onto alternative objects or body parts (e.g., a foot fetish or a shoe fetish), in order to obviate a subject’s confrontation with the castration complex. According to Sigmund Freud, fetishism is connected… Read More ›
Key Theories of Claude Levi Strauss
Claude Levi Strauss was born into a Belgian Jewish family in 1908. Both his parents were artists, and so while he was learning to read and write, the future anthropologist had a paintbrush or crayon in his hand. Although he… Read More ›
Literary Criticism and Theory in the Twentieth Century
Twentieth-century literary criticism and theory has comprised a broad range of tendencies and movements: a humanistic tradition, descended from nineteenth-century writers such as Matthew Arnold and continued into the twentieth century through figures such as Irving Babbitt and F. R…. Read More ›
Anthropological Criticism: An Essay
Anthropological criticism refers, broadly speaking, to a form of criticism that situates the making, dissemination and reception of literature within the conventions and cultural practices of human societies. Such an undertaking has become increasingly suspect in the twentieth century as… Read More ›
Cultural Anthropology of Clifford Geertz
Clifford Geertz’s (1926- 2006) work defined the field of interpretive social science, and he is regarded as one of the most influential and widely cited American cultural anthropologists of the second half of the twentieth century. He has championed interpretative approaches to… Read More ›
Myth Criticism of Northrop Frye
Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism (1957) introduced the archetypal approach called Myth Criticism, combining the typological interpretation of the Bible and the conception of imagination prevalent in the writings of William Blake. Frye continued the formalist emphasis of New Criticism… Read More ›
Claude Levi Strauss’ Structural Anthropology
Applying Saussurean principles to the realm of anthropology, Claude Levi Strauss in his Structuralist Anthropology (1958) analysed cultural phenomena including mythology, kinship and food preparation. Employing the concepts of langue and parole in his search for the fundamental structures of the human… Read More ›