索书号：C912.4-532/ W956/ 1984（HF）
Writing Culture：The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography：A
School of American Research Advanced Seminar
Contents
JAMES CLIFFORD Introduction: Partial Truths
MARY LOUISE PRATT Fieldwork in Common Places
VINCENT CRAPANZANO Hermes' Dilemma: The Masking of Subversion in
Ethnographic Description
RENATO ROSALDO From the Door of His Tent: The Fieldworker and the Inquisitor
JAMES CLIFFORD On Ethnographic Allegory
STEPHEN A. TYLER Post-Modern Ethnography: From Document of the Occult to
Occult Document
TALAL ASAD The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology
GEORGE E. MARCUS Contemporary Problems of Ethnography in the Modern World
System
MICHAEL M. J. FISCHER Ethnicity and the Post-Modern Arts of Memory
PAUL RABINOW Representations Are Social Facts: Modernity and Post-Modernity in
Anthropology
GEORGE E. MARCUS Afterword: Ethnographic Writing and Anthropological Careers
Abstract
Why have ethnographic accounts recently lost so much of their authority? Why were
they ever believable? Who has the right to challenge an "objective" cultural description?
Was Margaret Mead simply wrong about Samoa as has recently been claimed? Or was her
image of an exotic land a partial truth reflecting the concerns of her time and a complex
encounter with Samoans? Are not all ethnographies rhetorical performances determined
by the need to tell an effective story? Can the claims of ideology and desire ever be fully
reconciled with the needs of theory and observation?
These are some of the questions raised by Writing Culture, new essays by a group of
experienced ethnographers, a literary critic, and a historian of anthropology. All the
authors are known for advanced analytic work on ethnographic writing. Their
preoccupation is both theoretical and practical: they see the writing of cultural accounts as
a crucial form of knowledge—the troubled, experimental knowledge of a self in jeopardy
among others. These essays place ethnography at the center of a new intersection of social
history, interpretive anthropology, travel writing, discourse theory, and textual criticism.
They analyze classic examples of cultural description, from Goethe and Catlin to
Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard, and Le Roy Ladurie, showing the persistence of allegorical
patterns and rhetorical tropes. They assess recent experimental trends and explore the
functions of orality, ethnicity, and power in ethnographic composition.
Writing Culture argues that ethnography is in the midst of a political and
epistemological crisis: Western writers no longer portray non-Western peoples with
unchallenged authority; the process of cultural representation is now inescapably contingent, historical, and contestable. The essays in this volume help us imagine a fully
dialectical ethnography acting powerfully in the postmodern world system. They
challenge all writers in the humanities and social sciences to rethink the poetics and
politics of cultural invention.