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Anthropology Texts for TeachingCULTURE WARS
Context, Models and Anthropologists' Accounts
Edited by Deborah James, Evelyn Plaice and Christina Toren
| 240 pages, bibliog., index ISBN 978-1-84545-641-2 Hb $80.00/£50.00 Published (March 2010) Buy now and get 15% off listed price |
The relationship between anthropologists’ ethnographic investigations and the lived social worlds in which these originate is a fundamental issue for anthropology. Where some claim that only native voices may offer authentic accounts of culture and hence that ethnographers are only ever interpreters of it, others point out that anthropologists are, themselves, implanted within specific cultural contexts which generate particular kinds of theoretical discussions. The contributors to this volume reject the premise that ethnographer and informant occupy different and incommensurable “cultural worlds.” Instead they investigate the relationship between culture, context, and anthropologists’ models and accounts in new ways. In doing so, they offer fresh insights into this key area of anthropological research.
Deborah James is Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics. Her research interests, focused on South Africa, include migration, ethnomusicology, ethnicity, property relations and the politics of land reform. She is author of Songs of the Women Migrants: Performance and Identity in South Africa (Edinburgh University Press, 1999) and of Gaining Ground? “Rights” and “Property” in South African Land Reform (Routledge, 2007).
Evelyn Plaice is Associate Professor of Anthropology jointly appointed to the Faculty of Arts and the Faculty of Education at the University of New Brunswick, Canada. Her interests include land, identity and the ethnopolitics of land restitution, and the anthropology of education. She has conducted research in both South Africa and Canada and is the author of .The Native Game: Indian-Settler Relations in Central Labrador (ISER, 1990).
Christina Toren is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews. Her fieldwork areas are Fiji and the Pacific, and Melanesia, and her theoretical interests include exchange processes; spatio-temporality as a dimension of human being; sociality, kinship and ideas of the person; the analysis of ritual; epistemology; ontogeny as a historical process. Her books include Making Sense of Hierarchy: cognition as social process in Fiji (Athlone, 1990) and Mind, Materiality and History: Explorations in Fijian Ethnography (Routledge, 1999).
Related Link: European Association of Social-Anthropologists (EASA)
Series: Volume 12, EASA Series
Contents
Introduction: Culture, context and anthropologists’ accounts Deborah James and Christina Toren
Chapter 1. Alliances And Avoidance: British Interactions with German-Speaking Anthropologists, 1933–1953 Andre Gingrich Chapter 2. Serving the Volk? Afrikaner anthropology revisited John Sharp Chapter 3. ‘Making Natives’: debating indigeneity in Canada and South Africa Evie Plaice Chapter 4. Culture in the Periphery: Anthropology in the Shadow of Greek Civilisation Dimitra Gefou-Madianou Chapter 5. Culture: the Indigenous Account Alan Barnard Chapter 6. We are All Indigenous Now: Culture vs. Nature in representations of the Balkans Aleksandar Bošković Chapter 7. Which cultures, what contexts, and whose accounts? Anatomies of a moral panic in Southall, multi-ethnic London Gerd Baumann Chapter 8. “What about White People’s History?” Class, Race and Culture Wars in 21st Century Britain Gillian Evans Chapter 9. A Cosmopolitan Anthropology? Stephen Gudeman Chapter 10. The door in the middle: six conditions for anthropology João de Pina-Cabral Chapter 11. Adam Kuper: An Anthropologist’s Account Isak Niehaus
Notes on Contributors References Index