Disappointment
Toward a Critical Hermeneutics of Worldbuilding
Fordham University Press
This book can be opened with
Increasingly, anthropologists, political theorists and philosophers are calling for imaginative and creative analyses and theories that might help us think and bring about an otherwise. Disappointment responds to this call by showing how collaboration between an anthropologist and a political movement of marginalized peoples can disclose new possibilities for being and acting politically. Drawing from nearly a decade of research with the global anti-drug war movement, Jarrett Zigon puts ethnography in dialogue with both political theory and continental philosophy to rethink some of the most fundamental ontological, political and ethical concepts. The result is to show that ontological starting points have real political implications, and thus, how an alternative ontological starting point can lead to new possibilities for building worlds more ethically attuned to their inhabitants.
A clear and powerful rethinking of the concept of the political grounded in the world of situations rather than the subject of enunciations, Disappointment announces the arrival of a major new figure in the ontological turn in anthropology.——Elizabeth Povinelli, Columbia University
Jarrett Zigon is the William and Linda Porterfield Professor of Biomedical Ethics and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Virginia.
Introduction
1 - The Effective History of Rights
2 – Progress (Or, the repetition of differential sameness)
3 – Worlds and Situations
4 – An Ethics of Dwelling
5 – World-building and Attunement
Epilogue – Critical Hermeneutics