Metaphysical Community: The Interplay of the Senses and the Intellect

Urban, Greg

ISBN 10: 0292785291 / ISBN 13: 9780292785298

Published by University of Texas Press, 1996

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 0292785291-2-36973221

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Metaphysical Community: The Interplay of the Senses and the Intellect
• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Publication Date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0292785291
• ISBN 13: 9780292785298
• Binding: paperback
• Condition: Very Good
• Weight: 17 ounces

About this title

Synopsis

Winner, Senior Book Prize, American Ethnological Society

Starting with the post-structuralist idea that truth systems are lodged in discourse, and that discourse varies from society to society, Greg Urban seeks to discover the nature and extent of that variation. His journey to an Amerindian society in which dreams are more prominent than everyday aspects of the sensible world leads him to radically reformulate one of the main problematics of Western thought: the relationship between our sensations of the world and the understandings we form of them.

Metaphysical Community proposes that this dichotomy comes from the interplay between two sides of discourse-its intelligible side as a carrier of meanings, and its sensible side as thing-in-the-world that must be replicated. This insight leads to the heart of the book-the exploration of the uneasy tension that binds experience and understanding, phenomena and noumena.

Urban challenges basic assumptions that underlie social and cultural anthropology and much of the social sciences and humanities. His provocative insights will be of interest to all those concerned with anthropology, cultural studies, literary criticism, the sociology and politics of culture, and philosophy.

About the Author

Greg Urban is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and author of A Discourse-Centered Approach to Culture: Native South American Myths and Rituals.