<p>Anthropology's Wake is an engaging and wide-ranging critical analysis <br />
of issues and problems endemic to the practice and logic of <br />
representation in contemporary anthropology. It effectively locates <br />
these contemporary discussions within the larger context of historical <br />
and philosophical attempts to evoke the presence of the other.</p>
<b>---âStephen Tyler, <i>Rice University</i></b>
<p>Anthropologyšs Wake is fresh and innovative, featuring more than occasional<br />
flourishes of brilliance. Throughout,it deploys a sophisticated toolkit to<br />
unpack the tensions, imbrications, collusions, and collisions animating the<br />
anthropological imagination. Of particular value is the way in which it<br />
unsettles post-structural/post-colonial anthropology, especially recent<br />
celebrations of self, dialogue, hybridity. Their approach to these issues is<br />
refreshing and satisfying.</p>
<b>---âC. Richard King, <i>Washington State University</i></b>
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 abyssâand 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 Anthropologyâs Wake good faith errors of judgment can no longer be claimed.<b>---âAlberto Moreiras, <i>University of Aberdeen</i></b>
<p>"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 <br />
bit too long, then some of the paired names in the second sentence can <br />
be trimmed.]</p>
<b>---âVictor Li, <i>University of Toronto</i></b>
<p>Anthropology is dead, long live anthropology! This brilliant study is at <br />
once formally innovative (in its wry conflation of monologue and <br />
dialogue, pairing essays by the two authors on the same topics) and <br />
critically relentless in its exposure of the sleights-of-hand (the turn <br />
to dialogue and to the emotions, the projection of an affirmative <br />
hybridity) by which anthropology assures itself of a future out of its <br />
own apparent extinction. What is examined here is not just an academic <br />
subculture looking after its own interests but an entire cast of mind <br />
that cannot resist or properly interrogate the urge to make the other <br />
"something other than other", and which reproduces the foundational <br />
pieties of 'the west' even as it claims to outflank them.</p>
<b>---âDavid Simpson, <i>University of California, Davis</i></b>
A superb and much needed work of critical, collaborative scholarship.<b>---âGeorge Marcus, <i>University of California, Irvine</i></b>
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, Brown University,
An important, timely, and provocative intervention in contemporary discussions on the question of representation.<b>---âNahum Chandler, <i>Tama University</i></b>
Produktdetaljer
Om bidragsyterne
David E. Johnson (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 (Author)
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.