Full Description
Recent insights into the nature of representation and power relations have signaled an important shift in perspective on anthropology: from a fieldwork-based "science" of culture to an interpretive activity bound to the discursive and ideological process called "text-making." This collection of essays reflects the ongoing cross-fertilization between literary criticism and anthropology. Focusing on texts written or influenced by anthropologists between 1900 and 1945, the work relates current perspectives on anthropology's discursive nature to the literary period known as "Modernism.". The essays, each demonstrating anthropology's profound influence on this important cultural movement, are organized according to discourse type: from the comparativist text of Frazer, to the ethnographies of Boas, Benedict, Mead, and Hurston, and on to the surrealist experiments of the College de Sociologie. Meanwhile the book's orientation shifts from essays that approach anthropology from the vantage points of literariness and textual power to those that contemplate what bearing the junction of cultural theory and anthropology can have upon present and future social institutions.
In addition to the editor, contributors include Vincent Crapanzano, Deborah Gordon, Richard Handler, Arnold Krupat, Francesco Loriggio, Michele Richman, Marty Roth, Marilyn Strathern, Robert Sullivan, John B. Vickery, and Steven Webster. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Contents
*FrontMatter, pg. i*Contents, pg. v*Preface, pg. vii*Acknowledgments, pg. xi*Textual Play, Power, and Cultural Critique: An Orientation to Modernist Anthropology, pg. 3*Frazer and the Elegiac: The Modernist Connection, pg. 51*Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough: A Reading Lesson, pg. 69*Out of Context: The Persuasive Fictions of Anthropology, pg. 80*Irony in Anthropology: The Work of Franz Boas, pg. 133*The Politics of Ethnographic Authority: Race and Writing in the Ethnography of Margaret Mead and Zora Neale Hurston, pg. 146*Ruth Benedict and the Modernist Sensibility, pg. 163*Anthropology and Modernism in France: From Durkheim to the College de sociologie, pg. 183*Anthropology, Literary Theory, and the Traditions of Modernism, pg. 215*Marxism and the "Subject" of Anthropology, pg. 243*The Historical Materialist Critique of Surrealism and Postmodernist Ethnography, pg. 266*Afterword, pg. 300*Notes on Contributors, pg. 309*Bibliography, pg. 311*Index, pg. 329
