George E. Marcus

James Clifford

"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

The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography : a School of American Research Advanced Seminar

Writing Culture

Dominic Boyer

As multisited research has become mainstream in anthropology, collaboration has gained new relevance and traction as a critical infrastructure of both fieldwork and theory, enabling more ambitious research designs, forms of communication, and analysis. Collaborative Anthropology Today is the outcome of a 2017 workshop held at the Center for Ethnography, University of California, Irvine. This book is the latest in a trilogy that includes Fieldwork Is Not What It Used to Be and Theory Can Be More Than It Used to Be. Dominic Boyer and George E. Marcus assemble several notable ventures in collaborative anthropology and put them in dialogue with one another as a way of exploring the recent surge of interest in creating new kinds of ethnographic and theoretical partnerships, especially in the domains of art, media, and information. Contributors highlight projects in which collaboration has generated new possibilities of expression and conceptualizations of anthropological research, as well as prototypes that may be of use to others contemplating their own experimental collaborative ventures.

A Collection of Exceptions

Collaborative Anthropology Today

James D. Faubion

learning anthropology's method in a time of transition

Theory can be more than it used to be

From the frontiers of cyberspace to Tibetans in exile, from computer bulletin boards to faxes, film, and videotape, the ongoing and often startling evolution of media continues to generate fresh new avenues for cultural criticism, political activism, and self-reflection. How is contemporary life affected by this stunning proliferation of information technologies? How does the Internet influence, and perhaps alter, users' experience of community and their sense of self? In what way are giant media conglomerates implicated in these far-reaching developments? Connected, the third volume in the groundbreaking and highly acclaimed Late Editions series, confronts these provocative questions through unique experiments with the interview format. It explores both the new pathways being forged through media and the predicaments of those struggling to find their way in the twilight of the twentieth century.

Engagements with Media

Connected

This is part of a series of annuals designed to probe cultural, institutional and geopolitical change as the 20th century closes. The books provide in-depth interviews with those closely involved with these changes. This volume focuses on the investment of corporations in the concept of culture.

The Diffusion of the Culturally Sensitive Corporate Form

Corporate Futures

During its first six years (1986–1991), the journal Cultural Anthropology provided a unique forum for registering the lively traffic between anthropology and the emergent arena of cultural studies. The nineteen essays collected in Rereading Cultural Anthropology, all of which originally appeared in the journal, capture the range of approaches, internal critiques, and new questions that have characterized the study of anthropology in the 1980s, and which set the agenda for the present. Drawing together work by both younger and well-established scholars, this volume reveals various influences in the remaking of traditions of ethnographic work in anthropology; feminist studies, poststructuralism, cultural critiques, and disciplinary challenges to established boundaries between the social sciences and humanities. Moving from critiques of anthropological representation and practices to modes of political awareness and experiments in writing, this collection offers systematic access to what is now understood to be a fundamental shift (still ongoing) in anthropology toward engagement with the broader interdisciplinary stream of cultural studies. Contributors. Arjun Appadurai, Keith H. Basso, David B. Coplan, Vincent Crapanzano, Faye Ginsburg, George E. Marcus, Enrique Mayer, Fred Meyers, Alcida R. Ramos, John Russell, Orin Starn, Kathleen Stewart, Melford E. Spiro, Ted Swedenburg, Michael Taussig, Julie Taylor, Robert Thornton, Stephen A. Tyler, Geoffrey M. White

Rereading Cultural Anthropology

In recent times, anthropologists have been challenged to rethink the nature of ethnographic research, the meaning of fieldwork and the role of ethnographers. In this book, the authors look at the still traditional training of ethnographers and at alternative models for professional fieldwork training and its intellectual contexts.

Learning Anthropology's Method in a Time of Transition

Fieldwork is Not what it Used to be

Fred R. Myers

Refiguring Art and Anthropology

The Traffic in Culture

Para-Sites, the penultimate volume in the Late Editions series, explores how social actors located within centers of power and privilege develop and express a critical consciousness of their own situations. Departing from the usual focus of ethnography and cultural analysis on the socially marginalized, these pieces probe subjects who are undeniably complicit with powerful institutional engines of contemporary change. In each case, the possibility of alternative thinking or practices is in complex relation to the subject's source of empowerment. These cases challenge the condition of cynicism that has been the favored mode of characterizing the mind-set of intellectuals and professionals, comfortable in their lives of middle-class consumption and work. In their effort to establish para-sites of critical awareness parallel to the levels of political and economic power at which they function, these subjects suggest that those who lead ordinary lives of modest power and privilege might not be parasites in relation to the systems they serve, but may be creating unique and independent critical perspectives.

A Casebook Against Cynical Reason

Para-Sites

W. Russell Neuman

Michael MacKuen

This work draws on research in neuroscience, physiology, and experimental psychology to conceptualize habit and reason as two mental states that interact in a delicate, highly functional balance controlled by emotion. It sheds light on a range of political behaviour, including party identification.

Affective Intelligence and Political Judgment

This text examines conspiracy theories and tackles paranoia as a style of debate within science, psychotherapy, and popular entertainment. A conspiracy theory emerges as a way to address the inadequacies of rational expertise and organization in the face of the changes that undermine them.

A Casebook on Conspiracy as Explanation

Paranoia Within Reason

Eleni Neni K. Panourgia

Neni Panourgiá

Clifford Geertz, in his 1973 'Inspection of Cultures', brought about an epistemological revolution. This book maps the circuits of cross-fertilisations among disciplines in the humanities and social sciences that have developed from Geertz's 'interpretive turn'.

Experiments in Interpretive Anthropology

Ethnographica Moralia

Encompassing a range of disciplines—notably anthropology, politics, history, comparative literature, and philosophy—the unprecedented annual publication Late Editions exposes unsettling dilemmas and unprecedented challenges facing cultural studies on the brink of the twenty-first century. Successive volumes will appear annually until the year 2000, each engaging the predicaments of particular institutions, nations, and persons at this point of social, cultural, and political change. The project will test the limits of scholarly conventions by finding new ways to expose cultural formations emerging from the maturation or exhaustion of once-powerful ideas whose validity is now deeply in question. Perilous States, the first volume of Late Editions, presents conversations between American scholars, most of whom are anthropologists, and individuals situated amidst political and social upheaval. Pimarily but not exclusively from Eastern Europe, the cast includes Russian writers, Hungarian scientists and academics, Armenian politicians, Siberian religious and medical leaders, a Gypsy leader, a Polish poet, a French politician, and a white South African musician who is a self-styled Zulu. Their voices unite around themes of democracy, market economy, individual rights, and the reawakened force of suppressed ethnic and racial identities. To obtain fresh perspectives on these cultural and social transformations, the volumes will consist of in-depth conversations, relayed in essay form, between scholars and individuals in other cultures with whom they share affinities. This novel approach blends the immediacy of interviews, the objectivity of journalism, and the intellectual rigor of scholarship. Contributors to this volume are Marjorie Balzer, Sam Beck, David B. Coplan, Michael M. J. Fischer, Nia Georges, Bruce Grant, Douglas R. Holmes, Stella Gregorian, George E. Marcus, Kathryn Milun, Eleni Papagaroufali, Paul Rabinow, Julie Taylor, and Tom White.

Conversations on Culture, Politics, and Nation

Perilous States

Elites, Ethnographic Issues

In the 1980s, George Marcus spearheaded a major critique of cultural anthropology, expressed most clearly in the landmark book Writing Culture, which he coedited with James Clifford. Ethnography through Thick and Thin updates and advances that critique for the late 1990s. Marcus presents a series of penetrating and provocative essays on the changes that continue to sweep across anthropology. He examines, in particular, how the discipline's central practice of ethnography has been changed by "multi-sited" approaches to anthropology and how new research patterns are transforming anthropologists' careers. Marcus rejects the view, often expressed, that these changes are undermining anthropology. The combination of traditional ethnography with scholarly experimentation, he argues, will only make the discipline more lively and diverse. The book is divided into three main parts. In the first, Marcus shows how ethnographers' tradition of defining fieldwork in terms of peoples and places is now being challenged by the need to study culture by exploring connections, parallels, and contrasts among a variety of often seemingly incommensurate sites. The second part illustrates this emergent multi-sited condition of research by reflecting it in some of Marcus's own past research on Tongan elites and dynastic American fortunes. In the final section, which includes the previously unpublished essay "Sticking with Ethnography through Thick and Thin," Marcus examines the evolving professional culture of anthropology and the predicaments of its new scholars. He shows how students have increasingly been drawn to the field as much by such powerful interdisciplinary movements as feminism, postcolonial studies, and cultural studies as by anthropology's own traditions. He also considers the impact of demographic changes within the discipline--in particular the fact that anthropologists are no longer almost exclusively Euro-Americans studying non-Euro-Americans. These changes raise new issues about the identities of anthropologists in relation to those they study, and indeed, about what is to define standards of ethnographic scholarship. Filled with keen and highly illuminating observations, Ethnography through Thick and Thin will stimulate fresh debate about the past, present, and future of a discipline undergoing profound transformations.

Ethnography through Thick and Thin

Tobias Rees

Paul Rabinow

In this compact volume two of anthropology’s most influential theorists, Paul Rabinow and George E. Marcus, engage in a series of conversations about the past, present, and future of anthropological knowledge, pedagogy, and practice. James D. Faubion joins in several exchanges to facilitate and elaborate the dialogue, and Tobias Rees moderates the discussions and contributes an introduction and an afterword to the volume. Most of the conversations are focused on contemporary challenges to how anthropology understands its subject and how ethnographic research projects are designed and carried out. Rabinow and Marcus reflect on what remains distinctly anthropological about the study of contemporary events and processes, and they contemplate productive new directions for the field. The two converge in Marcus’s emphasis on the need to redesign pedagogical practices for training anthropological researchers and in Rabinow’s proposal of collaborative initiatives in which ethnographic research designs could be analyzed, experimented with, and transformed. Both Rabinow and Marcus participated in the milestone collection Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Published in 1986, Writing Culture catalyzed a reassessment of how ethnographers encountered, studied, and wrote about their subjects. In the opening conversations of Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary, Rabinow and Marcus take stock of anthropology’s recent past by discussing the intellectual scene in which Writing Culture intervened, the book’s contributions, and its conceptual limitations. Considering how the field has developed since the publication of that volume, they address topics including ethnography’s self-reflexive turn, scholars’ increased focus on questions of identity, the Public Culture project, science and technology studies, and the changing interests and goals of students. Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary allows readers to eavesdrop on lively conversations between anthropologists who have helped to shape their field’s recent past and are deeply invested in its future.

Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary

Michael M. J. Fischer

Michael M. Fischer

Anthropologists George Marcus and Michael Fischer argue that, since the 1960s, anthropological writing has evolved into a critical function for the purpose of using knowledge of other cultures to examine hidden assumptions about our own. In surveying this development of anthropological writing, the authors gives us a fascinating sweep across the whole history of 20th-century anthropology.

George E. Marcus

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