Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography [Paperback]

James Clifford (Editor), George E. Marcus (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 11, 1986

In these new essays, a group of experienced ethnographers, a literary critic, and a historian of anthropology, all known for advanced analytic work on ethnographic writing, place ethnography at the center of a new intersection of social history, interpretive anthropology, travel writing, discourse theory, and textual criticism.
The authors analyze classic examples of cultural description, from Goethe and Catlin to Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard, and Le Roy Ladurie, showing the persistence of allegorial patterns and rhetorical tropes. They assess recent experimental trends and explore the functions of orality, ethnicity, and power in ethnographic composition.
Writing Culture argues that ethnography is in the midst of a political and epistemological crisis: Western writers no longer portray non-Western peoples with unchallenged authority; the process of cultural representation is now inescapably contingent, historical, and contestable. The essays in this volume help us imagine a fully dialectical ethnography acting powerfully in the postmodern world system. They challenge all writers in the humanities and social sciences to rethink the poetics and politics of cultural invention.

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

"Humanists and social scientists alike will profit from reflection on the efforts of the contributors to reimagine anthropology in terms, not only of methodology, but also of politics, ethics, and historical relevance. Every discipline in the human and social sciences could use such a book."--Hayden White, author of Metahistory

From the Back Cover

"Humanists and social scientists alike will profit from reflection on the efforts of the contributors to reimagine anthropology in terms, not only of methodology, but also of politics, ethics, and historical relevance. Every discipline in the human and social sciences could use such a book."-Hayden White, author of Metahistory

Product Details

• Paperback: 345 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press (April 11, 1986)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520057295
• ISBN-13: 978-0520057296
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #219,702 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Must For All Ethnographers, September 8, 2001

By 

Michael Spivey, Ph.D. (Kean a horror movie fan from Wagram ,NC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Paperback)

As the title says, not only do ethnographers objectively research and write "about" cultures, in the process, they are also "writing Culture": that is, we constitute the cultural realities even as we attempt to describe them. Language is not a transparent window through which we describe an already existing reality. language "is the maker of this world" says Fisher. Understanding this, the ethnographer is confronted with writing and its importance in the ethnographic description and analysis of cultural worlds. Self-reflexivity in writing ethnography is central to the text. Who has the authority to write Others into being? How does my position as a gendered, racial, and class subject affect my "writing-up" of culture? These are just some of the questions posed by this text, with the added bonus of some possible answers as well. A must read for anyone on the verge of conducting ethnographic research. Also a great text for qualitative research courses concerned with issues of postmodernity and postcolonialism.

8 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Scholarship, Culture, Poetics and Politics: shared concerns, March 19, 2003

By 

D. Carlton Hawley Jr. "Carlos" (Fargo, ND United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Paperback)

This collection constitutes another solid, suggestive and significant contribution to what is now one of the most dynamic arenas in the humanities and outside: Culture. The essays speak to all manner of representational practices and explore vital questions that no scholar interested in social dynamics of any kind can afford to ignore.

17 of 63 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars An Anthropological Dead End..., September 27, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Paperback)

When initially published, these essays provided a salutary textual critique of anthropology. Today they read as essays whose implications are circumscribed to the work of that generation of American cultural anthropologists who developed in the shadows of modernist giants (namely Geertz). This collection represents their mid-life crisis, rather than the field of ethnography. Most of their students (and students' students) have not repeated that generation's unreflexive ethical idealism and political naivete. This progress was not a result of these essays. The exception in this book is Tyler's innovative and actually experimental proposal for "writing culture". Otherwise, be warned. Read these critiques by baby boomer-era anthropologists with a grain of salt.