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

Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art

The Predicament of Culture

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century

Routes

Roger King

Denver, Colorado, May 29-31, 1991

Proceedings of the 1991 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data

Returns explores homecomings--the ways people recover and renew their roots. Engaging with indigenous histories of survival and transformation, James Clifford opens fundamental questions about where we are going, separately and together, in a globalizing, but not homogenizing, world. It was once widely assumed that native, or tribal, societies were destined to disappear. Sooner or later, irresistible economic and political forces would complete the work of destruction set in motion by culture contact and colonialism. But many aboriginal groups persist, a reality that complicates familiar narratives of modernization and progress. History, Clifford invites us to observe, is a multidirectional process, and the word "indigenous," long associated with primitivism and localism, is taking on new, unexpected meanings. In these probing and evocative essays, native people in California, Alaska, and Oceania are understood to be participants in a still-unfolding process of transformation. This involves ambivalent struggle, acting within and against dominant forms of cultural identity and economic power. Returns to ancestral land, performances of heritage, and maintenance of diasporic ties are strategies for moving forward, ways to articulate what can paradoxically be called "traditional futures." With inventiveness and pragmatism, often against the odds, indigenous people today are forging original pathways in a tangled, open-ended modernity. The third in a series that includes The Predicament of Culture (1988) and Routes (1997), this volume continues Clifford's signature exploration of late-twentieth-century intercultural representations, travels, and now returns.

Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century

Returns

Alexander Tuzhilin

The International Workshop on Temporal Databases held in Zurich, Switzerland, 17-18 September 1995 brought together researchers from academic and industrial institutions with database practitioners interested in keeping up with the state-of-the-art developments in the management of temporal data. A previous workshop in Arlington, Texas in June 1993 focused on the development of an infrastructure that would spur the development of commercial implementations of many of the generally agreed-upon features of temporal database management that have emerged from the temporal database research community over more than a decade of research. This ARP AlNSF-sponsored Arlington workshop saw the formation of the TSQL2 Language Design Committee, which led to the development of the recently completed TSQL2 Language Specification, and also created a "consensus" glossary of temporal database terminology and a test suite of temporal database queries. The Zurich workshop was conceived from the outset to be universal in scope, and international in participation. The Call for Papers sought to evoke the highest quality and most up-to-date temporal database research from around the world. Mindful of the important work accomplished by the previous workshop, the Call also specifically sought out research papers and panels that would comment and build upon the widely publicized results from Arlington. These proceedings contain the papers that were selected for presentation at the International Workshop, on Temporal Databases held in Zurich, Switzerland on 17-18 September 1995.

Proceedings of the International Workshop on Temporal Databases, Zurich, Switzerland, 17–18 September 1995

Recent Advances in Temporal Databases

Since the publication of Person and Myth: Maurice Leenhardt in the Melanesian World, James Clifford has become one of anthropology's most important interlocutors. A key figure in theory and criticism, he has written seminal essays on topics ranging from art and identity to museum studies and fieldwork. This collection of interviews captures Clifford in exchanges with his critics in Brazil, Hawaii, Japan, the United Kingdom, and Portugal, offering a set of provocative reflections on an intellectual career in transformation.

Interviews

On the Edges of Anthropology

When culture makes itself at home in motion, where does an anthropologist stand? In a follow-up to The Predicament of Culture, one of the defining books for anthropology in the last decade, James Clifford takes the proper measure: a moving picture of a world that doesn’t stand still, that reveals itself en route, in the airport lounge and the parking lot as much as in the marketplace and the museum. In this collage of essays, meditations, poems, and travel reports, Clifford takes travel and its difficult companion, translation, as openings into a complex modernity. He contemplates a world ever more connected yet not homogeneous, a global history proceeding from the fraught legacies of exploration, colonization, capitalist expansion, immigration, labor mobility, and tourism. Ranging from Highland New Guinea to northern California, from Vancouver to London, he probes current approaches to the interpretation and display of non-Western arts and cultures. Wherever people and things cross paths and where institutional forces work to discipline unruly encounters, Clifford’s concern is with struggles to displace stereotypes, to recognize divergent histories, to sustain “postcolonial” and “tribal” identities in contexts of domination and globalization. Travel, diaspora, border crossing, self-location, the making of homes away from home: these are transcultural predicaments for the late twentieth century. The map that might account for them, the history of an entangled modernity, emerges here as an unfinished series of paths and negotiations, leading in many directions while returning again and again to the struggles and arts of cultural encounter, the impossible, inescapable tasks of translation.

Cuando la cultura se adapta al movimiento, ¿dónde se sitúa un antropólogo? Viajes, diásporas, cruces de fronteras, construcción de hogares lejos del propio: he aquí los dilemas transculturales de hoy, mientras vagamos por los lugares y no-lugares de un mundo marcado por intensos procesos de descolonización y globalización. James Clifford investiga los desplazamientos geográficos, las mezclas de culturas y su potencial creador de nuevas prácticas. En este collage de ensayos, reflexiones, poemas e informes de viajes —que abarca desde la zona montañosa de Nueva Guinea hasta el norte de California, desde Vancouver hasta Londres—, el investigador utiliza el viaje y su difícil acompañante, el traslado cultural, como aperturas a una modernidad compleja y abigarrada. Contempla un mundo cada vez más conectado, pero no por eso homogéneo; una historia global que proviene de abundantes legados en parte saturados por la exploración, la colonización, la expansión capitalista, la inmigración, la movilidad laboral y el turismo.

Itinerarios transculturales

die anthropologische Wende in der Literaturwissenschaft

Kultur als Text

Returns explores homecomings--the ways people recover and renew their roots. Engaging with indigenous histories of survival and transformation, James Clifford opens fundamental questions about where we are going, separately and together, in a globalizing, but not homogenizing, world. It was once widely assumed that tribal societies were destined to disappear. Sooner or later, irresistible economic and political forces would complete the destruction begun by culture contact and colonialism. But aboriginal groups persist, a reality that complicates familiar narratives of modernization. History is a multidirectional process where the word "indigenous," long associated with primitivism and localism, takes on unexpected meanings. In these probing essays, native people in California, Alaska, and Oceania are shown to be agents, not victims, struggling within and against dominant forms of cultural identity and economic power. Their returns to the land, performances of heritage, and diasporic ties are strategies for moving forward, ways to articulate what can paradoxically be called "traditional futures." With inventiveness and pragmatism, often against the odds, indigenous people are forging original pathways in a tangled, open-ended modernity. Third in a series that includes The Predicament of Culture and Routes, this volume continues Clifford's signature exploration of intercultural representations, travels, and now returns.

James Clifford

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