The predicament of culture : twentieth-century ethnography, literature, and art / James Clifford

Incluye bibliografía e índice.

Introduction: the pure products go crazy -- Part one: Discourses ; on the ethnographic authority ; power and dialogue in ethnography: Marcel Griaule's initiation ; on ethnographic self-fashioning: Conrad and Malinowski -- Part two: Displacements ; on ethnographic surrealism ; a poetics of displacement: Victor Segalen ; tell about your trip: Michel Leiris ; a politics of neologism: Aimé Césaire ; the jardin des plantes: postcards -- Part three: Collections ; histories of the tribal and the modern ; on collecting art and culture -- Part four: Histories ; on realism ; identity in mashpee -- References -- Sources -- Index.

"The Predicament of Culture is a critical ethnography of the West in its changing relations with other societies. Analyzing cultural practices such as anthropology, travel writing, collecting, and museum displays of tribal art, James Clifford shows authoritative accounts of other ways of life to be contingent fictions, now actively contested in post-colonial contexts. His critique raises questions of global significance: Who has the authority to speak for any group’s identity and authenticity? What are the essential elements and boundaries of a culture? How do self and “the other” clash in the encounters of ethnography, travel, and modern interethnic relations? In discussions of ethnography, surrealism, museums, and emergent tribal arts, Clifford probes a complex global modernity. Throughout The predicament of culture he argues that culture is now less a site of origins and rooting than of translation and transplanting. In his discussions of the polycultural Joseph Conrad, the surrealist Martiniquan Aimé Césaire, tha Palestinian critic Edward Said, and the embattled Mashpee indians of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, he probes the late-twentieth-century predicament of living simultaneously within, between, and after culture." -- Tomado de la contraportada.