Anthropology's Wake: Attending to the End of Culture / Edition 1

by David E. Johnson, Scott Michaelsen

Overview

Posing a powerful challenge to dominant trends in cultural analysis, this book covers the whole history of the concept of culture, providing the broadest study of this notion to date. Johnson and Michaelsen examine the principal methodological strategies or metaphors of anthropology in the past two decades (embodied in works by Edward Said, James Clifford, George Marcus, V. Y. Mudimbe, and others) and argues that they do not manage to escape anthropology's grounding in representational practices. To the extent that it remains a practice of representation, anthropology, however complex, critical, or self-reflexive, cannot avoid objectifying its others.Extending beyond a critique of anthropology, the book reads the twinned notions of the human and culture across the long history of the human sciences broadly conceived, including anthropology, cultural studies, history, literature, and philosophy. Although there is no chance, they argue, for a newanthropology that would not repeat the old anthropology's problem of disciplining the other, they also recognize that there may be no way out of anthropology. We are always writing, thinking, and living in anthropology's wake, within its specific compass or horizon. Moreover, they demonstrate, we have been doing so for a very long time, since at least the beginning of the institution of philosophy in Plato and Aristotle.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780823228782
Publisher:	Fordham University Press
Publication date:	06/16/2008
Edition description:	2
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

DAVID E. JOHNSON is Associate Professor and Chair of Comparative Literature at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. With Michaelsen, he is the co-editor of Border Theory: The Limits of Cultural Politics and of CR: The New Centennial Review, for which work they won the Phoenix Award for Significant Editorial Achievement from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals in 2002.

SCOTT MICHAELSEN is Associate Professor of English at Michigan State University. His current research is at the intersection of questions of anthropology, law, and political science. In addition to his projects with David E. Johnson, he is the author of The Limits of Multiculturalism: Interrogating the Origins of American Anthropology.

Table of Contents

Preface     vii
Acknowledgments     xi
Introduction: Anthropology's Wake   Scott Michaelsen     1
Descartes' Corps   David E. Johnson     28
Our Sentiments   Scott Michaelsen     58
Ex-Cited Dialogue   David E. Johnson     81
An Other Voice   Scott Michaelsen     111
"Unworkable Monstrosities"   David E. Johnson     134
Hybrid Bound   Scott Michaelsen     166
Coda: Anthropology's Present   David E. Johnson     188
Notes     217
Bibliography     241
Index     265

Editorial Reviews

By delineating the epistemological possibilities and dead-ends of some foundational writings on culture and humanity, Johnson and Michaelsen have provided an admirably intelligent diagnosis of the critical condition of Western philosophical-anthropological thinking. Even more challengingly, they ask that we abandon the wish for a remedy in the form of a magical new beginning.

Rey Chow

"Johnson and Michaelsen seek not so much to bury anthropology as to alert us to its many afterlives. Through a series of philosophically searching readings that range breathtakingly from Plato and Aristotle to Clifford Geertz, Descartes to Renato Rosaldo, Lafitau and Heidegger to Marcel Griaule, racial science to postcolonial hybridity, Kant and Rousseau to Fernando Ortiz and Enrique Dussell, they rigorously uncover anthropology's continuing involvement in a problematic politics of representation that it disavows at the same time. Anthropology's Wake will not only shake us out of our anthropological slumbers, it will provoke us to question the very raison d'etre of the human sciences." [If you think it's a bit too long, then some of the paired names in the second sentence can be trimmed.]

University of Toronto - Victor Li

Not against anthropology, but against cold-blooded sentimentality in contemporary anthropology, in cultural studies, and in other segments of the humanities. This is a brilliant critique that moves relentlessly through the notions of emotion, dialogue, and hybridity, and shows that contemporary discourse about otherness or cultural difference rarely fails to find its own abyss—and to fall into it. Is that a structural or an ideological feature of Western university discourse on the human, or on the other human? This book sinks its teeth in the very joint between the two possibilities. The results are provoking. In the wake of Anthropology’s Wake good faith errors of judgment can no longer be claimed.

University of Aberdeen - Alberto Moreiras

Anthropology's Wake is an engaging and wide-ranging critical analysis of issues and problems endemic to the practice and logic of representation in contemporary anthropology. It effectively locates these contemporary discussions within the larger context of historical and philosophical attempts to evoke the presence of the other.

Rice University - Stephen Tyler

A superb and much needed work of critical, collaborative scholarship.

University of California, Irvine - George Marcus

Anthropology¹s Wake is fresh and innovative, featuring more than occasional flourishes of brilliance. Throughout,it deploys a sophisticated toolkit to unpack the tensions, imbrications, collusions, and collisions animating the anthropological imagination. Of particular value is the way in which it unsettles post-structural/post-colonial anthropology, especially recent celebrations of self, dialogue, hybridity. Their approach to these issues is refreshing and satisfying.

Washington State University - C. Richard King

Not against anthropology, but against cold-blooded sentimentality in contemporary anthropology, in cultural studies, and in other segments of the humanities. This is a brilliant critique that moves relentlessly through the notions of emotion, dialogue, and hybridity, and shows that contemporary discourse about otherness or cultural difference rarely fails to find its own abyss-and to fall into it. Is that a structural or an ideological feature of Western university discourse on the human, or on the other human? This book sinks its teeth in the very joint between the two possibilities. The results are provoking. In the wake of Anthropology's Wake good faith errors of judgment can no longer be claimed.-Alberto Moreiras

Anthropology is dead, long live anthropology! This brilliant study is at once formally innovative (in its wry conflation of monologue and dialogue, pairing essays by the two authors on the same topics) and critically relentless in its exposure of the sleights-of-hand (the turn to dialogue and to the emotions, the projection of an affirmative hybridity) by which anthropology assures itself of a future out of its own apparent extinction. What is examined here is not just an academic subculture looking after its own interests but an entire cast of mind that cannot resist or properly interrogate the urge to make the other something other than other, and which reproduces the foundational pieties of 'the west' even as it claims to outflank them.-David Simpson

Anthropology's Wake is an engaging and wide-ranging critical analysis of issues and problems endemic to the practice and logic of representation in contemporary anthropology. It effectively locates these contemporary discussions within the larger context of historical and philosophical attempts to evoke the presence of the other.-Stephen Tyler

From the Publisher

Anthropology is dead, long live anthropology! This brilliant study is at once formally innovative (in its wry conflation of monologue and dialogue, pairing essays by the two authors on the same topics) and critically relentless in its exposure of the sleights-of-hand (the turn to dialogue and to the emotions, the projection of an affirmative hybridity) by which anthropology assures itself of a future out of its own apparent extinction. What is examined here is not just an academic subculture looking after its own interests but an entire cast of mind that cannot resist or properly interrogate the urge to make the other
"something other than other", and which reproduces the foundational pieties of 'the west' even as it claims to outflank them.

University of California, Davis - David Simpson

An important, timely, and provocative intervention in contemporary discussions on the question of representation.

Tama University - Nahum Chandler