Anthropology and Social Theory

Sherry B. Ortner is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is author of New Jersey Dreaming: Capital, Culture, and the Class of '58, also published by Duke University Press; Life and Death on Mt. Everest: Sherpas and Himalayan Mountaineering; Making Gender: The Politics and Erotics of Culture; and High Religion: A Cultural and Political History of Sherpa Buddhism. She has received numerous awards, including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and the J. I. Staley Prize.

• Introduction: Updating Practice Theory 1Chapter One: Reading America: Preliminary Notes on Class and Culture 19Chapter Two: Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal 42Chapter Three: Identities: The Hidden Life of Class 63Chapter Four: Generation X: Anthropology in a Media-Saturated World 80Chapter Five: Subjectivity and Cultural Critique 107Chapter Six: Power and Projects: Reflections on Agency 129Notes 155References Cited 167Index 181

“An important and especially usable collection by one of the most influential essayists in anthropology, introduced by a lucid and original review of key concepts as they have been applied to the remarkable range of Sherry Ortner’s research achievements. Her response to recent challenges to the idea of culture is alone worth the price of the book.”-George Marcus, University of California, Irvine “At once challenging and admirably accessible, these essays trace the thinking of one of anthropology’s most notable practitioners as she-and her discipline-wrestles with key conundrums facing the late-modern social sciences.”-Jean Comaroff, University of Chicago “This is vintage Ortner. No one else writes anthropological theory so clear, so down-to-earth, or so accessible to non-anthropologists.”-William H. Sewell Jr., author of Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation