Writing Culture

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."

"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

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

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.

Two decades after the publication of Clifford and Marcus’ volume Writing Culture, this collection provides a fresh and diverse reassessment of the debates that this pioneering volume unleashed. At the same time, Beyond Writing Culture moves the debate on by embracing the more fundamental challenge as to how to conceptualise the intricate relationship between epistemology and representational practices rather than maintaining the original narrow focus on textual analysis. It thus offers a thought-provoking tapestry of new ideas relevant for scholars not only concerned with ‘the ethnographic Other’, but with representation in general.

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.

This seminal collection of essays critiquing ethnography as literature is augmented with a new foreword by Kim Fortun, exploring the ways in which Writing Culture has changed the face of ethnography over the last 25 years.

At a time when concepts of identity and self-representation are abundant in both literary and cultural studies, Postcolonialsim and Life-Writing, brings together the two increasingly popular and important fields of postcolonial studies and life writing.