Books in the Anthropological Studies of Creativity and Perception series

Presents studies of walking in a range of regional and cultural contexts, exploring the diversity of ways of walking and the variety of meanings it can embody. This book offers insights into human movement, landscape and social life.

Design and Anthropology challenges conventional thinking regarding the nature of design and creativity, in a way that acknowledges the improvisatory skills and perceptual acuity of people. Combining theoretical investigations and documentation of practice based experiments.

Making and Growing brings together the latest work in the fields of anthropology and material culture studies to explore the differences - and the relation - between making things and growing things, and between things that are made and things that grow. Though the former are often regarded as artefacts and the latter as organisms.

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?

In this innovative volume, anthropologists turn their attention to a topic that has rarely figured as a focus of concerted investigation and yet which can be described as an intrinsic aspect of all human knowing and part of all processes by which human beings process information about themselves, their identities, their environments and their relations: the imagination. 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? Presenting a range of case studies from a variety of locations including the UK, US, Africa, East Asia and South America, this collection offers a comparative exploration of how imagination has been conceptualized and understood in a range of analytical traditions, with regard to issues of both methodology and ethnomethodology. With emphasis not on abstraction but on imagination as activity, technique and subject situated in the middle of lives, Reflections on Imagination sheds new light on imagination as a universal capacity and practice - something to which human beings attend whenever they make sense of their environments and situate their life-projects in these environments - the means by which worlds come to be.

How does peripherality challenge methodology and theory-making? This book examines how the peripheral can be incorporated into ethnographic research, and reflects on what it means to be on the periphery-ontologically and epistemologically.

"This volume develops and refines the concept of atmosphere, seeking to render it productive for anthropological and social scientific research"--