{"product_id":"beyond-description-anthropologies-of-explanation-9781501771576","title":"Beyond Description: Anthropologies of Explanation","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eBeyond Description\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003e brings anthropologists and other social scientists together to examine the problem of explanation.\u003c\/b\u003e What is \"an explanation?\" What can it add? What makes it authoritative, clarifying, or misleading? Whom does it serve and how is it produced? These questions lie at the heart of recent public crises of confidence in expertise, political representation, and classic liberal visions of whom we can rely on for true and trustworthy accounts. In a world beset by events and processes that seem to defy expert predictions of their impossibility, and in which post-hoc accounts can often feel more like rationalizations than explanations, competing voices vie for public presence and seek to silence one another. Anthropology and the social sciences face such questions too, making contemporary explanatory practice both an empirical and a reflexive challenge. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBy combining ethnographic studies of practices of explanation in a range of contemporary political, medical, artistic, religious, and bureaucratic settings, the essays in\u003ci\u003e Beyond Description\u003c\/i\u003e offer critical examinations of changing norms and forms of explanation in the world and within anthropology itself.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eMatei Candea is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of\u003ci\u003e Corsican Fragments\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eComparison in Anthropology\u003c\/i\u003e. Paolo Heywood is Assistant Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Durham. He is the author of \u003ci\u003eAfter Difference\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Cornell University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50535126728978,"sku":"9781501771576","price":35.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_5a21aadc-f542-4d75-bcea-b88c01ae0012.jpg?v=1731431013","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/beyond-description-anthropologies-of-explanation-9781501771576","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}