Jack David Eller

Woxsen School of Business India

Jack David Eller is a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Woxsen University, Hyderabad, India. His areas of specialization include anthropology of religion, psychological anthropology, anthropology of violence, and anthropology of contemporary politics and culture. He is the author of numerous articles and over twenty books, including most recently Beyond Liminality: Ontologies of Abundant Betweenness and Apisteology: The Study of Not-Believing. He is also the editor or co-editor of several volumes, including Nonbelievers, Apostates, and Atheists in the Muslim World, and, for IntechOpen, Gun Violence and Prevention – Connections, Cultures, and Consequences and Anthropology—History, Theory, Practice, and Engagement.

3books edited

6chapters authored

Latest work with IntechOpen by Jack David Eller

Indigenous peoples exist in many, if not most, of the world’s countries today, usually as fairly peripheral if not invisible minorities. Often they are viewed (if they are viewed at all) as remnants of tribal or premodern pasts or, at best, as quaint illustrations of “traditional cultures”. However, although they have suffered colonialism, conquest, disease, dispossession, and cultural loss, the indigenous peoples who have survived this onslaught (and many have not) are increasingly active in the promotion, preservation, or sometimes revival of their cultures and identities. The historical experiences and contemporary activities of indigenous peoples are diverse, and the very label is contentious, but in unison with more tolerant and supportive states and a dense web of translocal institutions, indigenous peoples are vocally and increasingly successfully expressing their intentions to maintain their uniqueness while also participating, in their own ways and on their own terms, in the modern world. The chapters of this volume explore the complex terrain of indigeneity and several specific cases in Anglophone settler-colonial states and in non-Anglophone or non-Western states, where indigenous peoples are confronting dominant populations, contributing to modern non-indigenous projects, or using modern non-indigenous concepts and technologies to become modern while remaining indigenous.

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Indigenous People

Edited by Jack David Eller

Books edited

By Jack David Eller

The United States dominates most policy debates and academic studies of gun violence, but this dominance overshadows the often much higher rate of firearm-related injury and death inflicted in its southern neighbors. This chapter explores guns and gun violence in Latin America and the Caribbean, where some countries experience war-level death rates from firearms despite considerably lower rates of gun ownership in those countries. The chapter presents data—which is unfortunately often scarce, incomplete, or dated—on the region as a whole and on specific countries, identifying trends but also distinct and important variation, both geographically and historically. This variation challenges simplistic explanations in terms of the region’s violent past or an enduring “culture of violence.” The discussion thus then turns to the elucidation of factors that influence the incidence of gun violence, from poverty, urbanization, gangs, and drug trafficking to concerns about weak states and personal security. Finally, the chapter shares some of the gun policies and regulations in the region, surveying the steps that countries have taken—and others like its great northern neighbor can take—to curtail the damage and loss of life attributed to guns.

Part of the book: Gun Violence and Prevention

Introductory Chapter: A World of Gun Violence

By Jack David Eller

Part of the book: Gun Violence and Prevention

If Anthropology Is Not Ethnography, Then What Is It?

By Jack David Eller

Almost two decades ago, Tim Ingold declared that anthropology is not ethnography, in one of the latest moments of anthropological soul-searching. His comments have spawned an industry of anthropological response, positive and negative; interestingly, they were contemporaneous with other reformulations of the discipline along more philosophical lines (e.g., ontological, phenomenological, or existential anthropology). This chapter explores the implications of separating the anthropological enterprise from the ethnographic one, providing an opportunity to reflect on the long history of anthropology, a century or more before Boas and Malinowski transformed it into an empirical activity, wedding anthropology and ethnography. The chapter argues that, indeed, anthropology and ethnography have always been two distinct undertakings—ethnography originally done by amateurs for practical reasons, anthropology initially focused on biological and racial questions before cultural ones—and that, even at the height of ethnographic anthropology, anthropologists had other, more-than-ethnographic interests. Finally, the chapter attempts to sort out the jumbled terminology of fieldwork, participant observation, ethnography, ethnology, and anthropology and contribute to the development of not a post-ethnographic but a supra-ethnographic anthropology.

Part of the book: Anthropology

Introductory Chapter: The Many Lives of Anthropology

By Jack David Eller

Part of the book: Anthropology

Jack David Eller

Latest work with IntechOpen by Jack David Eller

Indigenous People

Books edited

Anthropology

Gun Violence and Prevention

Chapters authored

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Mahmoud Alinejad

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