Customer Reviews

Exotics at Home: Anthropologies, Others, and American Modernity (Women in Culture and Society)

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In this savvy book about American culture, anthropologist di Leonardo dissects the foibles of our "exotic" sensibility--that is, the ways in which we so pleasurably work to define others as different from ourselves. Employing such disparate evidence as Gary Larson cartoons, shops that trade in so-called ethnic goods, fortune tellers, and popular notions of gender, di Leonardo also critiques the role that American anthropologists from Margaret Mead to Clifford Geertz and the popular press have played in promoting the cultural myth of "difference" which ultimately serves to separate us all, one from the other. di Leonardo's meditation on Margaret Mead alone is worth the cost of admission, but be assured the book is about so much more as it takes the entire discipline of anthropology to task. It's about time we had a smart, complex book like this that serves as a cultural reckoning. Makes Torgovnick's "Gone Primitive" look like a first-grade primer.

This book seems too cute by half. Its postmodern pretensions made reading it a chore and I made the mistake of hoping that di Leonardo was going to try and make some specific point rather than just treat the entire book as if it were some rambling conversation at a dinner party.