ISBN:
0-520-05729-5
,
978-0-520-05729-6
,
0-520-05652-3
,
978-0-520-05652-7
Sprache:
Englisch
Seiten:
IX, 305 Seiten
Serie:
A _School of American Research Advanced Seminar
Schlagwort(e):
Ethnologie Methodologie
;
Feldforschung
Kurzfassung:
Why have ethnographic accounts recently lost so much of their authority? Why were they ever believable? Who has the right to challenge an "objective" cultural description? Was Margaret Mead simply wrong about Samoa as has recently been claimed? Or was her image of an exotic land a partial truth reflecting the concerns of her time and a complex encounter with Samoans? Are not all ethnographies rhetorical performances determined by the need to tell an effective story? Can the claims of ideology and desire ever be fully reconciled with the needs of theory and observation?These are some of the questions raised by Writing Culture, new essays by a group of experienced ethnographers, a litatry critic, and a historian of anthropology. All the authors are known for advanced analytic work on ethnographic writing. Their prooccupation is both theoretical and practical: they see the writing of cultural accounts as a crucial form of knowledge - the troubles, experimental knowlegde of a self in jeopardy among others.These essays place ethnograpy at the center of a new intersection of social history, interpretive anthropology, traval writing, discourse theory, and textual criticism. They analyze classic examples of cultural description, from Goethe and Catlin to Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard, and Le Roy Lafurie, showing the persistence of allegorical patterns and rhetorical tropes. They assess recent experimental trends and explore the functions of orality, ethnicity, and power in ethnographic composition. Writing Culture argues that ethnography is in the midst of a politcal and epistomological crisis; Western writers no longer portray non-Western peoples with unchallenged authority; the process of cultural representation is now inescapably contingent, historical, and contestable. The essays in this volime help us imagine a fully dialectical ethnnography acting powerfully in the postmodern world system. They challenge all writers in the humanities and social sciences to rethink the poetics and politics of cultural inventions. (Klappentext)
Beschreibung / Inhaltsverzeichnis:
Preface -- Introduction : partial truths / James Clifford -- Fieldwork in common places / Mary Louise Pratt -- Hermes' dilemma : the masking of subversion in ethnographic description / Vincent Crapanzano -- From the door of his tent : the fieldworker and the inquisitor / Renato Rosaldo -- On ethnographic allegory / James Clifford -- Post-modern ethnography : from document of the occult to occult document / Stephen A. Tyler -- The concept of cultural translation in British social anthropology / Talal Asad -- Contemporary problems of ethnography in the modern world system / George E. Marcus -- Ethnicity and the post-modern arts of memory / Michael M.J. Fischer -- Representations are social facts : modernity and post-modernity in anthropology / Paul Rabinow -- Afterword : ethnographic writing and anthropological careers / George E. Marcus -- Bibliography -- Notes on Contributors -- Index
Anmerkung:
Literaturverzeichnis: Seite 267-294"These essays are the product of intensive discussions held at the School of American Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico, during April 1984" (Preface)Enthält 11 BeiträgeVermerk auf Umschlag: Experiments in contemporary anthropology
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