Culture Wars: Context, Models and Anthropologists' Accounts

Published by Berghahn Books 2010

Culture Wars

Context, Models and Anthropologists' Accounts

Edited by: Deborah James , Evelyn Plaice and Christina Toren

Volume 12 in the series EASA Series

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781845458119

Overview
Contents

About this book

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.

Author / Editor information

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).

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).

Reviews

"an important and very interesting contribution to, first of all, critical and reflexive anthropology…Every chapter offers fresh insights into a key area of critical anthropology. Undoubtedly, the volume is very well organized, thoroughly substantiated, and interestingly written. I believe that the reviewed collection of articles is a distinguished, very useful, and sometimes provocative reading for all scholars concerned with a critical approach to social science and especially to social anthropology" · Anthropos

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Introduction. Culture, Context and Anthropologists’ Accounts Deborah James and Christina Toren Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Chapter 1 Alliances and Avoidance: British Interactions with German-speaking Anthropologists, 1933–1953 Andre Gingrich Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	19
Chapter 2 Serving the Volk? Afrikaner Anthropology Revisited John Sharp Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	32
Chapter 3 ‘Making Indians’: Debating Indigeneity in Canada and South Africa Evie Plaice Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	45
Chapter 4 Culture in the Periphery: Anthropology in the Shadow of Greek Civilization Dimitra Gefou-Madianou Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	57
Chapter 5 Culture: the Indigenous Account Alan Barnard Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	73
Chapter 6 We are All Indigenous Now: Culture versus Nature in Representations of the Balkans Aleksandar Boskovic Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	86
Chapter 7 Which Cultures, What Contexts, and Whose Accounts? Anatomies of a Moral Panic in Southall, Multi-ethnic London Gerd Baumann Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	97
Chapter 8 ‘What about White People’s History?’: Class, Race and Culture Wars in Twenty-first-Century Britain Gillian Evans Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	115
Chapter 9 A Cosmopolitan Anthropology? Stephen Gudeman Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	136
Chapter 10 The Door in the Middle: Six Conditions for Anthropology João de Pina-Cabral Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	152
Chapter 11 Adam Kuper: an Anthropologist’s Account Isak Niehaus Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	170
References Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	189
Notes on Contributors Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	209
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	213

Language: English
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 228
Keywords: Theory and Methodology; Cultural Studies (General)

eBook

Published: March 1, 2010
ISBN: 9781845458119