Culture Troubles

Politics and the Interpretation of Meaning

Patrick Chabal author Jean-Pascal Daloz author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:C Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd

Published:22nd Nov '05

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Culture Troubles cover

Chabal and Daloz's argument is one based on an analysis of culture understood as a system of meanings rather than as values. Hence, the authors offer a methodology that grounds political analysis in the interpretation of what 'makes sense' to the people concerned. Their approach, which resists the tyranny of particularisms but instead proposes a different 'scientific' method, draws upon a wide range of political, sociological and anthropological sources. The authors illustrate the analytical sharpness of this method with a comparative study of the state and political representation in three very different settings: France, Nigeria and Sweden.

'In Chabal's and Daloz's extended and detailed critique of the whole field of comparative politics we have virtually for the first time a general approach that is neither mired in the abstractions of grand theory ... nor overly concerned with ethnocentric normative judgements. [A...] The result is in my view, a major work, thorough, comprehensive, and genuinely ground-breaking: a treatise in the true sense of the word.' -Clifford Geertz, The Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton 'An original, timely, lucid and challenging book.' -Peter Burke, University of Cambridge

ISBN: 9781850658009

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