Reflections on Imagination: Human Capacity and Ethnographic Method - Paperback

by Mark Harris (Editor), Nigel Rapport (Editor)

In this innovative volume, anthropologists turn their attention to a topic that has rarely figured as a focus of concerted investigation. Yet it can be described as an intrinsic aspect of all human knowing. The imagination is part of all processes by which human beings process information about themselves, their identities, their environments and their relations. How do anthropologists use imagination in coming to know their research subjects? How might they, and how should they, use their imagination? And how do research subjects themselves understand, describe, justify and limit their use of the imagination?

Author Biography

Mark Harris is Reader in Social Anthropology and Head of the Department of Anthropology at the University of St Andrews, UK. He is the author Life on the Amazon: The Anthropology of a Brazilian Peasant Village, and Rebellion on the Amazon: Race, Popular Culture and the Cabanagem in the North of Brazil, 1798-1840, the editor of Ways of Knowing and co-editor of Some Other Amazonians. Nigel Rapport is Professor of Anthropological and Philosophical Studies and Director of the Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies at the University of St. Andrews, UK. He is the author of Transcendent Individual: Towards a Literal and Liberal Anthropology, The Trouble with Community: Anthropological Reflections on Movement, Identity and Collectivity, 'I am Dynamite': An Alternative Anthropology of Power, Social and Cultural Anthropology: The Key Concepts, and Of Orderlies and Men: Hospital Porters Achieving Wellness at Work and editor of Questions of Consciousness, British Subjects: An Anthropology of Britain, and Democracy, Science and The Open Society: A European Legacy?