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Capturing the Ineffable

Capturing the Ineffable

An Anthropology of Wisdom

Edited by Philip Y. Kao and Joseph S. Alter

Published by: University of Toronto Press

Imprint: University of Toronto Press

264 Pages, 160.00 × 235.00 × 19.00 mm, 2 figures

Hardcover
9781487503130
Published: May 2020

£58.00

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Contents
Authors

Grounded in ethnographic case studies that examine experiences from which wisdom emerges, Capturing the Ineffable provides a rigorous analysis of the sociocultural context of wisdom in the contemporary world. Each chapter in the volume deals with different aspects and showcases how communities in different contexts - nursing homes, religious organizations, corporations, and monastic institutions, for example - engage with the ineffability of wisdom.

Contributors draw from a range of disciplines and cross-cultural and historical data in order to interpret the meaning and value of wisdom as a human endeavour. This book also represents an anthropological method for evaluating various philosophical and scientific approaches to understanding wisdom, including how wisdom is learned and taught. Readers will be able to appreciate how action, emotion, uncertainty, and cultural systems come to bear on wisdom as a value in human life and expression. In the end, Capturing the Ineffable reveals how the conception and paradoxical nature of wisdom dispels the dichotomies of self/other, structure/agency, known/unknown, nature/culture, and the like. What is at stake is a recasting of wisdom as a particular kind of anthropological endeavour and, thus, a return to and modification of philosophical anthropology.

Introduction: Toward an Anthropology of Wisdom
Philip Kao, University of Pittsburgh

Part I. Seeking Wisdom
Revelations of Delusion: Becoming Isomorphic to the Ugrund, Richard Doyle, Penn State
The Social Life of the Inexpressible: English Benedictine Mysticism, the Ineffable, and the Sublime, Richard Irvine, University of St Andrews

Part II. Discerning Wisdom
How Wisdom in Discovered: Discretion and Emotional Insights in Naikan Meditation in Japan, Clark Chilson, University of Pittsburgh
Navigating Wisdom and Time in the Context of Aging and Eldercare, Philip Kao, University of Pittsburgh

Part III. Transmitting Wisdom
Yoga and Wisdom: Reflections on the Body at the Intersection of Epistemology and Ontology, Joseph Alter, University of Pittsburgh
The Social Construction of Wisdom in Institutions, Charlotte Linde

Part IV. Narrating Wisdom

Of Uncertainty, Sophiology and Contemporary Governance: Zen and the Art of Scenario Planning, James Faubion, Rice University
Grappling with the Ineffable in Three African Situations: An Ethnographic Approach, Wim van Binsbergen, African Studies Centre, Leiden

Philip Y. Kao is a research associate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh.

Joseph S. Alter is the director of the Asian Studies Center and a professor of anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh.