Full Description
Anthropology written for a popular audience is the most neglected branch of the discipline. In the 1980s postmodernist anthropologists began to explore the literary and reflective aspects of their work. Popularizing Anthropology advances that trend by looking at a key but previously marginalized genre of anthropology.
The contributors, who are well known anthropologists, explore such themes as: why so many anthropologists are women; how the Japanese have reacted to Ruth Benedict; why Margaret Mead became so successful; how the French media promote Levi-Strauss and Louis Dumont; Why Bruce Chatwin tells us more about Aboriginals than many anthropologists in Australia; how personal accounts of fieldwork have evolved since the 1950s; how to write a personal account of fieldwork.
Popularizing Anthropology unearths a submerged tradition within anthropology and reveals that, from the beginning, anthropologists have looked beyond the boundaries of the academy for their listeners. It aims to establish the popularization of the discipline as an illuminating topic of investigation in its own right, arguing that it is not an irrelevant appendage to the main body of the subject but has always been an integral part of it.
Contents
Notes on contributors, Preface, 1 Popularizing anthropology, 2 Tricky tropes: styles of the popular and the pompous, 3 Typecasting: anthropology's dramatis personae, 4 The chrysanthemum continues to flower: Ruth Benedict and some perils of popular anthropology, 5 Communicating culture: Margaret Mead and the practice of popular anthropology, 6 Enlarging the context of anthropology: the case of Anthropology Today, 7 Claude Lévi-Strauss and Louis Dumont: media portraits, 8 Proximity and distance: representations of Aboriginal society in the writings of Bill Harney and Bruce Chatwin, 9 Women readers: other utopias and own bodily knowledge, 10 A bricoleur's workshop: writing Les lances du crepuscule, 11 Fieldwork styles: Bohannan, Barley, and Gardner, Index
