Nigel Rapport

Social and Cultural Anthropology: The Key Concepts is the ideal introduction to this discipline, defining and discussing its central terms with clarity and authority. Among the concepts explored are: cybernetics, ecriture, the feminine, gossip, human Rights, moralities, stereotypes, thick description, and violence. Each entry is accompanied by extensive cross-referencing and an invaluable list of suggestions for further reading.

How might anthropology seem if it were written in celebration of individuality - of the individual's conscious and creative engagement with socio-cultural milieux - and if it were committed to a liberal agenda which sought to cherish and defend that individuality? Transcendent Individual argues for just such a commitment: a reappraisal of the place of the individual in anthropological theorising and ethnographic writing, and a social-scientific appreciation of the individual as methodological, moral, pragmatic and aesthetic subject. Here is an anthropological account of individual creativity, of the narrativity of individual expression, of the originality of individual becoming, and of the morality of the individual body. Drawing widely on ethnographic and theoretic materials, and bringing into debate a range of voices - Nietzsche, Wilde and Forster, Bateson and Gerald Edelman, George Steiner, Richard Rorty and John Berger, Edmund Leach and Anthony Cohen - the book approaches individuality in terms of a range of issues: biological integrity, consciousness, agency, democracy, discourse, knowledge, consumerism, globalism and play.

"The significance that people grant to their affiliations as members of nations, religions, classes, races, ethnicities and genders is evidence of the vital need for a cosmopolitan project that originates in the figure of Anyone -- the universal and yet individual human being. Cosmopolitanism offers an alternative to multiculturalism, a different vision of identity, belonging, solidarity and justice, that avoids the seemingly intractable character of identity politics: it identifies samenesses of the human condition that underlie the surface differences of history, culture and society, nation, ethnicity, religion, class, race and gender. This book argues for the importance of cosmopolitanism as a theory of human being, as a methodology for social science and as a moral and political paradigm." -- back cover.