Writing Culture

The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography

James Clifford, George E. Marcus

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9780520266025
• eBook ISBN: 9780520946286
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

These seminal essays place ethnography at the intersection of interpretive anthropology, cultural studies, social history, travel writing, discourse theory, and textual criticism. They grapple with issues of power and poetics in contemporary situations of globalization, post-coloniality, and post-modernity. Since its publication in 1986, Writing Culture has been a source of generative controversy and innovation in anthropology. It continues to inspire scholars and activists across the humanities, social sciences, and arts who are concerned with experimentation and ethics in cultural analysis.

This anniversary edition is augmented with a new foreword by Kim Fortun, Associate Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, exploring the legacies of Writing Culture in the twenty-first century. 

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword to the 25th Anniversary Edition
• Preface
• Introduction: Partial Truths
• Fieldwork in Common Places
• Hermes’ Dilemma: The Masking of Subversion in Ethnographic Description
• From the Door of His Tent: The Fieldworker and the Inquisitor
• On Ethnographic Allegory
• Post-Modern Ethnography: From Document of the Occult to Occult Document
• The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology
• Contemporary Problems of Ethnography in the Modern World System
• Ethnicity and the Post-Modern Arts of Memory
• Representations Are Social Facts: Modernity and Post-Modernity in Anthropology
• Afterword: Ethnographie Writing and Anthropological Careers
• Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index