Book review: "After Ethnos" i
A great believer in serendipity, this played a part in my discovering this book. From the FT Weekend's 'How to Spend It' I noticed the book and its cover in 'the aesthete' Anicka Yi (pp.17-18):
The best book I've read in the past year is After Ethnos by Tobias Rees. He's mapped out the evolutionary transformation of humans and I think it's an important book for the next stages of our species. p.17.
Looking up the book and the publisher's blurb - a request for a review copy was rewarded.
Two points, first I wondered about the meaning of 'ethnos'. A small
word, it seemed to have instant gravitas. It does: being Greek for "a people" (p.1). The quote above does not mention
'anthropology' specifically, but this is very much the book's focus. Once delivered, and making a start I got a taste of what was to follow; and did wonder if I had bitten-off more than I could chew.
As a nurse, I thought I'm not an anthropologist, but as a member of humanity we are all in a sense anthropologists. Surely, it isn't a far stretch from 'people skills', social skills, interpersonal skills to anthropology? Perhaps, if you work in mental illness - health this connection, relatedness is accentuated? Anthropology is of course a specialist subject and the book has helped me 'place' it on the book shelf in relation to cultural studies. The view from Wigan Pier does not get you far, even if it has stretched to within 2.5 degrees of the equator and Amman, Jordan. Anthropology is fieldwork as well as a repository for theories.
Any qualms were quickly put aside. The book while anthropologically technical and philosophical is an easy read. The main text is 121 pages. So a couple of days and you are after ethnos too. I've still to read the notes as I passed-them-by, recording the numbers of several to look up later.
The project of the book on the DUP site includes:
In After Ethnos Tobias Rees endeavors to decouple anthropology from ethnography—and the human from society and culture—and explores the manifold possibilities of practicing a question-based rather than an answer-based anthropology that emanates from this decoupling. What emerges from Rees's provocations is a new understanding of anthropology as a philosophically and poetically inclined, fieldwork-based investigation of what it could mean to be human when the established concepts of the human on which anthropology has been built increasingly fail us.
There is much to savour here, at least in my reading. Rees refers to:
lines of thinking
lines of escape
lines of research
line of flight
A preoccupation for me is 'line(s) of sight' and insight. Much space is given to differentiating anthropology and ethnology. The role of curiosity (key for Rees) about the human and hence the difference between anthropology that is answer-based to one that is question-based.
individual
|
INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES
humanistic ----------------------------------------------- mechanistic
SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL
|
group
|
questions |
answers |
|
a people | the people |
Clearly, the book is a challenge to classical, established, traditional views of anthropology. What is taught, the curriculum and its future.
Rees seeks to disrupt, derail, depart and break free from what is current thinking, to seek escapes. I like reference to chaos, turbulence; the book is nonprogrammatic and all this without resort to a place at which to arrive.
In chapter 1 the sentence: Classical modern ethnology has come to an end.
prompted me - to substitute terms:
Classical and modern nursing (theory and practice?) has come to an end? p.8
Chapter 1 asks: what is anthropology? What is anthropology's job? What's it's domain? The book covers the history of anthropology, ethnology to facilitate a general reader's understanding.
More to follow ...
and thank you to Duke University Press for the review copy.
After Ethnos - acknowledgements
Rees, Tobias. After Ethnos, (2018): Durham and London. Duke University Press.
orcid.org/0000-0002-0192-8965