The Ethnological Imagination

First published in 1990, The Ethnographic Imagination explores how sociologists use literary and rhetorical conventions to convey their findings and arguments, and to 'persuade' their colleagues and students of the authenticity of their accounts. Looking at selected sociological texts in the light of contemporary social theory, the author analyses how their arguments are constructed and illustrated, and gives many new insights into the literary convention of realism and factual accounts.

Fuyuki Kurasawa unearths what he terms "the ethnological imagination," a substantial countercurrent of thought that interprets and contests Western modernity's existing social order through comparison and contrast to a non-Western other. Kurasawa traces and critiques the writings of some of the key architects of this way of thinking: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Claude Levi-Strauss, and Michel Foucault. In the work of these thinkers, Kurasawa finds little justification for two of the most prevalent claims about social theory: the wholesale "postmodern" dismissal of the social-theoretical enterprise because of its supposedly intractable ethnocentrism and imperialism, or, on the other hand, the traditionalist and historicist revival of a canon stripped of its intercultural foundations. Kurasawa's book defends a cultural perspective that eschews both the false universalism of "end of history" scenarios and the radical particularism embodied in the vision of "the clash of civilizations." It contends that the ethnological imagination can invigorate critical social theory by informing its response to an increasingly multicultural world--a response that calls for a reconsideration of the identity and boundaries of the West.

Kurasawa (sociology, York U., Toronto) suggests what he calls the ethnological imagination as one of the possible routes out of the impasse created by the apparent exhaustion or inadequacy of Western social theory to deal with cross-cultural thinking, which becomes ever more urgent in light of increasing cultural pluralism and difference in the glo

Over the years John and Jean Comaroff have broadened the study of culture and society with their reflections on power and meaning. In their work on Africa and colonialism they have explored some of the fundamental questions of social science, delving into the nature of history and human agency, culture and consciousness, ritual and representation. How are human differences constructed and institutionalized, transformed and (sometimes) effaced, empowered and (sometimes) resisted? How do local cultures articulate with global forms? How is the power of some people over others built, sustained, eroded, and negated? How does the social imagination take shape in novel yet collectively meaningful ways? Addressing these questions, the essays in this volume–several never before published–work toward an "imaginative sociology," demonstrating the techniques by which social science may capture the contexts that human beings construct and inhabit. In the introduction, the authors offer their most complete statement to date on the nature of historical anthropology. Standing apart from the traditional disciplines of social history and modernist social science, their work is dedicated to discovering how human worlds are made and signified, forgotten and remade.

Few ideas are as important and pervasive in the discourse of the twentieth century as the idea of culture. Yet culture, Christopher Herbert contends, is an idea laden from its inception with ambiguity and contradiction. In Culture and Anomie, Christopher Herbert conducts an inquiry into the historical emergence of the modern idea of culture that is at the same time an extended critical analysis of the perplexities and suppressed associations underlying our own exploitation of this term. Making wide reference to twentieth-century anthropologists from Malinowski and Benedict to Evans-Pritchard, Geertz, and Lévi-Strauss as well as to nineteenth-century social theorists like Tylor, Spencer, Mill, and Arnold, Herbert stresses the philosophically dubious, unstable character that has clung to the "culture" idea and embarrassed its exponents even as it was developing into a central principle of interpretation. In a series of detailed studies ranging from political economy to missionary ethnography, Mayhew, and Trollope's fiction, Herbert then focuses on the intellectual and historical circumstances that gave to "culture" the appearance of a secure category of scientific analysis despite its apparent logical incoherence. What he describes is an intimate relationship between the idea of culture and its antithesis, the myth or fantasy of a state of boundless human desire—a conception that binds into a single tradition of thought such seemingly incompatible writers as John Wesley, who called this state original sin, and Durkheim, who gave it its technical name in sociology: anomie. Methodologically provocative and rich in unorthodox conclusions, Culture and Anomie will be of interest not only to specialists in nineteenth-century literature and intellectual history, but also to readers across the wide range of fields in which the concept of culture plays a determining role.

The Raft of Odysseus looks at the fascinating intersection of traditional myth with an enthnographically-viewed Homeric world. Carol Dougherty argues that the resourcefulness of Odysseus as an adventurer on perilous seas served as an example to Homer's society which also had to adjust in inventive ways to turbulent conditions. The fantastic adventures of Odysseus act as a prism for the experiences of Homer's own listeners--traders, seafarers, storytellers, soldiers--and give us a glimpse into their own world of hopes and fears, 500 years after the Iliadic events were supposed to have happened.

The term culture in its anthropological sense did not enter the American lexicon with force until after 1910—more than a century after Herder began to use it in Germany and another thirty years after E. B. Tylor and Franz Boas made it the object of anthropological attention. Before Cultures explores this delay in the development of the culture concept and its relation to the description of difference in late nineteenth-century America. In this work, Brad Evans weaves together the histories of American literature and anthropology. His study brings alive not only the regionalist and ethnographic fiction of the time but also revives a range of neglected materials, including the Zuni sketchbooks of anthropologist Frank Hamilton Cushing; popular magazines such as Century Illustrated Monthly, which published Cushing's articles alongside Henry James's; the debate between Joel Chandler Harris, author/collector of the Uncle Remus folktales, and John Wesley Powell, perhaps the most important American anthropologist of the time; and Du Bois's polemics against the culture concept as it was being developed in the early twentieth century. Written with clarity and grace, Before Cultures will be of value to students of American literature, history, and anthropology alike.

Willis argues that ethnography plays a vital role in constituting "sensuousness" in textual, ethodological and substantive ways, but it can do this only through the deployment of an associated theoretical imagination which cannot be found simply there in the field. He presents a bold ethnographically oriented view of the world, emphasising the need for a deep-running social but also aesthetic sensibility. In doing so he aims to bring new insights to the understanding of human action and its dialectical relation to social and symbolic structures.