Culture/Contexture

Explorations in Anthropology and Literary Studies

E. Valentine Daniel, Jeffrey M. Peck

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9780520365919
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780520323698
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The rapprochement of anthropology and literary studies, begun nearly fifteen years ago by such pioneering scholars as Clifford Geertz, Edward Said, and James Clifford, has led not only to the creation of the new scholarly domain of cultural studies but to the deepening and widening of both original fields. Literary critics have learned to "anthropologize" their studies—to ask questions about the construction of meanings under historical conditions and reflect on cultural "situatedness." Anthropologists have discovered narratives other than the master narratives of disciplinary social science that need to be drawn on to compose ethnographies.Culture/Contexture brings together for the first time literature and anthropology scholars to reflect on the antidisciplinary urge that has made the creative borrowing between their two fields both possible and necessary. Critically expanding on such pathbreaking works as James Clifford and George Marcus's Writing Culture and Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer's Anthropology as Cultural Critique, contributors explore the fascination that draws the disciplines together and the fears that keep them apart. Their topics demonstrate the rich intersection of anthropology and literary studies, ranging from reading and race to writing and representation, incest and violence, and travel and time. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1996.

Many titles in the Voices Revived program are also newly available as ebooks, offered at a discounted price to support wider access to scholarly work.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• E. VALENTINE DANIEL: FROM AN ANTHROPOLOGIST’S POINT OF VIEW: THE LITERARY
• JEFFREY M. PECK: FROM A LITERARY CRITIC/GERMANIST’S POINT OF VIEW: ANTHROPOLOGY
• E. VALENTINE DANIEL AND JEFFREY M. PECK: THE CONTRIBUTIONS
• ONE The Culture in Poetry and the Poetry in Culture
• TWO The Story of the Jackal Hunter Girl
• THREE Fresh Lima Beans and Stories from Occupied Cyprus
• FOUR Narrative Ethnography, Elite Culture, and the Language of the Market
• FIVE Exogamous Relations: Travel Writing, the Incest Prohibition, and Hawthorne’s Transformation
• SIX The World in a Text: How to Read Tristes Tropiques
• SEVEN Ethnic Selves/Ethnic Signs: Invention of Self, Space, and Genealogy in Immigrant Writing
• EIGHT Turks as Subjects: The Ethnographic Novels of Paul Geiersbach
• NINE Narrative, Genealogy, and the Historical Consciousness: Selfhood in a Disintegrating State
• TEN Race and Ruins
• ELEVEN Race under Representation
• TWELVE Reading Culture: Anthropology and the Textualization of India
• THIRTEEN Ghostlier Demarcations: Textual Phantasm and the Origins of Japanese Nativist Ethnology
• FOURTEEN The Construction of America: The Anthropologist as Columbus
• FIFTEEN Crushed Glass, or, Is There a Counterpoint to Culture?
• CONTRIBUTORS
• Index