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Starry Nights: Critical Structural Realism in Anthropology offers nothing less than a reinventing of the discipline of anthropology. In these six essays – four published here for the first time – Stephen Reyna critiques the postmodern tenets of anthropology, while devising a new strategy for conducting research. Combative and clear, Starry Nights provides an important critique of mainstream anthropology as represented by Geertz and the postmodern legacy, and envisions a mode of anthropological research that addresses social, cultural and biological questions with techniques that are theoretically rigorous and practically useful.
“Starry Nights is Reyna’s grand attempt to develop a thoroughly holistic and galactic model that will supplement the theoretical architecture of anthropologists as they explore the modern world and should be required reading in any graduate-level theory course in anthropology.” • Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
“This is an important and timely collection of essays by one of the leading exponents of a scientific, materialist anthropology… I could see the usefulness of this collection in seminars on theory at the graduate and undergraduate level.” • David Sutton, Southern Illinois University
Stephen P. Reyna is a Research Associate at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Salle and a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Manchester.
Preface
PART I: EPISTEMOLOGY
Chapter 1. Literary Anthropology and the Case against Science
Chapter 2. What Is Th eory? Something, Time-Being, Art
PART II: ONTOLOGY
Chapter 3. Dialectics of Force: Contradiction, Logics, and Conservation of Délires
PART III: CRITICAL SCIENCE
Chapter 4. Right and Might: Of Approximate Truths and Moral Judgments
Chapter 5. Perpetual Peace? Dreaming in the Time-Being of Empire
Index