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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.

Tabla de contenidos provista por Syndetics

• Prologue: In Medias Res
• Travels
• Traveling Cultures
• A Ghost among Melanesians
• Spatial Practices: Fieldwork, Travel, and the Disciplining of Anthropology
• Contacts
• Four Northwest Coast Museums: Travel Reflections
• Paradise
• Museums as Contact Zones
• Palenque Log
• Futures
• Year of the Ram: Honolulu, February 2, 1991
• Diasporas
• Immigrant
• Fort Ross Meditation
• Notes
• References
• Sources
• Acknowledgments
• Index

Reseñas proporcionadas por Syndetics

Library Journal Review

In this series of essays, Clifford (The Predicament of Culture, Harvard Univ., 1988) explores culture further, viewing it in motion and where anthropology stands in relation to it. The author focuses on a "concrete mediation" of the cultural figure "native" and the intercultural "traveler." He discusses anthropological work, especially ethnography, tracing its development using famous anthropologists, including Bronislaw Malinowski and Franz Boas, as milestones. Clifford asserts that "intensive participant-observation is probably anthropology's most enduring contribution to humanistic study," but he finds it "deeply problematic" and "urges its reform and dissemination." Viewing museums as "continuations of indigenous traditions of storytelling, collection, and display," he probes current approaches to the interpretation and display of non-Western arts and cultures. Recommended for academic and anthropology collections.‘Mary J. Nickum, Bozeman, Mont. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Booklist Review

Clifford meditates on our relentlessly moving world in this collection of anthropological essays, travel writing, and miscellanea. According to Clifford, today's modernity unfolds as a constant coming and going. People and things meet and cross paths; regional and national localizations are more a matter of displacement than bounded sites. He takes issue, for example, with the time-honored notion of an ethnographic field site as a delimited, rural periphery where the worldly anthropologist comes to dwell, preferring to see it instead as an opening onto a complex history of travel and cosmopolitan experience. With war, pilgrimage, and work abroad, even the rural villager eventually becomes an airline passenger. Whether discussing immigrants, diasporas, or museums, Clifford looks at the intercultural border as a place of encounter, collision, and communication between different groups. This is a scholarly yet accessible work that asks us to rethink the cultural dimensions of human existence. --Philip Herbst

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

James Clifford is Professor Emeritus in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz.