Outsider Within: Reworking Anthropology in the Global Age

by Faye V Harrison

Overview

Outsider Within presents an approach to critically reconstructing the anthropology discipline to better encompass issues of gender and race. Among the nine key changes to the field that Faye V. Harrison advocates are researching in an ethically and politically responsible manner, promoting greater diversity in the discipline, rethinking theory, and committing to a genuine multicultural dialogue. In drawing from materials developed during her distinguished twenty-five year career in Caribbean and African American studies, Harrison analyzes anthropology’s limits and possibilities from an African American woman’s perspective, while also recognizing similarities between peoples, despite social, cultural, and political differences. In seeking to productively engage anthropologists of diverse geographical, cultural, and national origins, Harrison challenges them to work together to transcend stark gender, racial, and national hierarchies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780252074905
Publisher:	University of Illinois Press
Publication date:	02/19/2008
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	376
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Faye V. Harrison is a professor in the African American studies program and department of anthropology, University of Florida, and editor of Resisting Racism and Xenophobia: Global Perspectives on Race, Gender, and Human Rights. In 2004, she won the Society for the Anthropology of North America Prize for Distinguished Achievement in the Critical Study of North America.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments     vii
Introduction     1
Toward a Critical Anthropology of Anthropology
Reworking Anthropology from the "Outside Within"     7
Rehistoricizing Anthropology
Unburying Theory, Repositioning Practice: Anthropological Praxis in Peripheral Predicaments     63
Remapping Routes, Unearthing Roots: Rethinking Caribbean Connections with the U.S. South     82
Engaging Interlocutors in Interdisciplinary Dialogue
Writing against the Grain: Cultural Politics of Difference in Alice Walker's Fiction     109
Probing the Legacy of Empire: Reflexive Notes on Caribbeanist Gordon K. Lewis     134
The Power of Ethnography, the Ethnography of Power
Gangs, Politics, and Dilemmas of Global Restructuring in Jamaica     153
The Gendered Violence of Structural Adjustment     179
Structural Violence Here and There in the Global Era
Everyday Neoliberalism in Cuba: A Glimpse from Jamaica     201
Global Apartheid at Home and Abroad     220
Justice for All: The Challenges of Advocacy Research in the Global Age     238
Blurring Boundaries Between Academia and the World Beyond
Teaching Philosophy     261
Academia, the Free Market, and Diversity     267
A Labor of Love: An Emancipated Woman's Legacy     282
Notes and References     301
Index     347

Editorial Reviews

"This book is intellectually stimulating and insightful, and its ideas are presented with intensity and passion. Harrison clearly relishes her engagement in the anthropology profession, but she also argues that her field must be transformed if it is to have any meaningful input into twenty-first-century scholarship. One of the most gifted and profound writers in anthropology today, it is imperative that her corpus of materials be shared."—Audrey Smedley, professor emerita of anthropology, Virginia Commonwealth University

From the Publisher