Culture Writing

Focusing on the 1950s and early 1960s, Culture Writing argues that this period in Britain, the United States, France, and the Caribbean was characterized by dynamic exchanges between literary writers and anthropologists on both sides of the Atlantic. As the British and French empires collapsed and the United States rose to global power in the early Cold War, and as intellectuals from the decolonizing world challenged the cultural hegemony of the West, some anthropologists began to assess their discipline's complicity with empire and experimented with literary forms and technique. Culture Writing shows that the "literary turn" in anthropology took place earlier than has conventionally been assumed, in the 1950s rather than the 1970s and 80s. Simultaneously, some literary writers reacted to the end of the period of modernist experimentation by turning to ethnographic methods for representing the people and cultural practices of Britain, France, and the United States, bringing anthropology back home. There is analysis of literary writers who had a significant professional engagement with anthropology and brought some of its techniques and research questions into literary composition: Barbara Pym (Britain), Ursula Le Guin and Saul Bellow (United States), douard Glissant (Martinique), and Michel Leiris (France). On the side of ethnography, the book analyzes works by anthropologists who either explicitly or surreptitiously adopted literary forms for their writing about culture: Laura Bohannan (United States), Michel Leiris and Claude L vi-Strauss (France), and Mary Douglas (Britain). Culture Writing concludes with an epilogue that shows how the literature-anthropology conversation continues into the postcolonial period in the work of Indian author-anthropologist Amitav Ghosh and Jamaican author-sociologist Erna Brodber.

Extrait de la couverture : ""Here, for the first time, is a book that brings women's writings out of exile to rethink anthropology's purpose at the end of the century. ... As a historical resource, the collection undertakes fresh readings of the work of well-known women anthropologists and also reclaims the writings of women of color for anthropology. As a critical account, it bravely interrogates the politics of authorship. As a creative endeavor, it embraces new Feminist voices of ethnography that challenge prevailing definitions of theory and experimental writing."

"Literally translated as "self-culture-writing," autoethnography-as process and product-holds promise for scholars and researchers who describe, understand, analyze, and critique the ways which selves, cultures, writing, and representation intersect. The possibility of autoethnography as a viable methodological approach to provide ways of understanding, crafting, and teaching autoethnography" --

"Humanists and social scientists alike will profit from reflection on the efforts of the contributors to reimagine anthropology in terms, not only of methodology, but also of politics, ethics, and historical relevance. Every discipline in the human and social sciences could use such a book."--Hayden White, author of Metahistory

Eexplores "neglected circulatory writing processes" to better understand why and how digital writers compose, revise, and deliver arguments that undergo sometimes constant revision.

With fourteen articles written by well-known anthropologists, this book addresses the theme of representation in anthropology and explores the directions in which anthropology is moving following the debates of the 1980s.

Using the influential and field-changing Writing Culture as a point of departure, the thirteen essays in Writing Culture and the Life of Anthropology address anthropology's past, present, and future. The contributors, all leading figures in anthropology today, reflect back on the "writing culture" movement of the 1980s, consider its influences on ethnographic research and writing, and debate what counts as ethnography in a post-Writing Culture era. They address questions of ethnographic method, new forms the presentation of research might take, and the anthropologist's role. Exploring themes such as late industrialism, precarity, violence, science and technology, globalization, and the non-human world, this book is essential reading for those looking to understand the current state of anthropology and its possibilities going forward. Contributors. Anne Allison, James Clifford, Michael M.J. Fischer, Kim Fortun, Richard Handler, John L. Jackson, Jr., George E. Marcus, Charles Piot, Hugh Raffles, Danilyn Rutherford, Orin Starn, Kathleen Stewart, Michael Taussig, Kamala Visweswaran

This book is about culture shock and the writing process. For a student, the relationship between writing and the challenge of living in a foreign culture may not be obvious. The purpose of Writing Across Culture is to aid the student in documenting and analyzing the connection. If culture can be broadly defined as the unwritten rules of every-day life, one effective method for learning these rules is to write about them as they are discovered. In this way, it is possible to see writing as a tool for cultural inquiry and comprehension, and, hence, an antidote for culture shock. Writing Across Culture encourages its readers to become writers engaged in a dialogue - between the individual and the new society - about everyday cultural differences.