- Paperback: 345 pages
- Publisher: University of California Press (April 11 1986)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0520057295
- ISBN-13: 978-0520057296
- Product Dimensions: 22.4 x 16.3 x 2 cm
- Shipping Weight: 340 g
- Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
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Amazon Bestsellers Rank:
#161,020 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #20 in Books > Nonfiction > Social Sciences > Anthropology > Ethnology
- See Complete Table of Contents
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Product Description
Review
"The nine critical essays collected here result from an advanced seminar held in 1984 at The School for American Research in Santa Fe, N.M. . . . The questions raised by these essays examine the parameters and consequences of anthropological (and other) writing to an extent that goes beyond any previous collection. The book is highly recommended to professionals in ethnographic field work and to anyone interested in presenting 'other' cultural contexts."--"Science Books and Films
Book Description
In these new essays, a group of experienced ethnographers, a literary critic, and a historian of anthropology, all known for advanced analytic work on ethnographic writing, place ethnography at the center of a new intersection of social history, interpretive anthropology, travel writing, discourse theory, and textual criticism.
The authors analyze classic examples of cultural description, from Goethe and Catlin to Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard, and Le Roy Ladurie, showing the persistence of allegorial 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 political and epistemological 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 volume help us imagine a fully dialectical ethnography 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 invention.
The authors analyze classic examples of cultural description, from Goethe and Catlin to Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard, and Le Roy Ladurie, showing the persistence of allegorial 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 political and epistemological 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 volume help us imagine a fully dialectical ethnography 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 invention.
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
Our frontispiece shows Stephen Tyler, one of this volume's contributors, at work in India in 1963. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
Our frontispiece shows Stephen Tyler, one of this volume's contributors, at work in India in 1963. Read the first page
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Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Must For All Ethnographers,
By Michael Spivey, Ph.D. (Kean a horror movie fan from Wagram ,NC) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Paperback)
As the title says, not only do ethnographers objectively research and write "about" cultures, in the process, they are also "writing Culture": that is, we constitute the cultural realities even as we attempt to describe them. Language is not a transparent window through which we describe an already existing reality. language "is the maker of this world" says Fisher. Understanding this, the ethnographer is confronted with writing and its importance in the ethnographic description and analysis of cultural worlds. Self-reflexivity in writing ethnography is central to the text. Who has the authority to write Others into being? How does my position as a gendered, racial, and class subject affect my "writing-up" of culture? These are just some of the questions posed by this text, with the added bonus of some possible answers as well. A must read for anyone on the verge of conducting ethnographic research. Also a great text for qualitative research courses concerned with issues of postmodernity and postcolonialism.
1.0 out of 5 stars
Trapped in the 1980s,
By A Customer
This review is from: Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Paperback)
These opinionated anthropological essays are so dated, it's not even readable as historical document. Much better work has been written in the more enlightened Clinton years.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Scholarship, Culture, Poetics and Politics: shared concerns,
By
This review is from: Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Paperback)
This collection constitutes another solid, suggestive and significant contribution to what is now one of the most dynamic arenas in the humanities and outside: Culture. The essays speak to all manner of representational practices and explore vital questions that no scholar interested in social dynamics of any kind can afford to ignore.
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