Exotics at Home: Anthropologies, Others, and American Modernity

by Micaela di Leonardo

Book Overview

In this pathbreaking study, Micaela di Leonardo reveals the face of power within the mask of cultural difference. From the 1893 World's Fair to Body Shop advertisements, di Leonardo focuses on the intimate and shifting relations between popular portrayals of exotic Others and the practice of anthropology. In so doing, she casts new light on gender, race, and the public sphere in America's past and present.

"An impressive work of scholarship...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226472639
• ISBN13: 9780226472638
• Release Date: June 1998
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 464 Pages
• Weight: 1.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

US popular culture suffers from its own exotic imagination

In this savvy book about American culture, anthropologist di Leonardo dissects the foibles of our "exotic" sensibility--that is, the ways in which we so pleasurably work to define others as different from ourselves. Employing such disparate evidence as Gary Larson cartoons, shops that trade in so-called ethnic goods, fortune tellers, and popular notions of gender, di Leonardo also critiques the role that American anthropologists from Margaret Mead to Clifford Geertz and the popular press have played in promoting the cultural myth of "difference" which ultimately serves to separate us all, one from the other. di Leonardo's meditation on Margaret Mead alone is worth the cost of admission, but be assured the book is about so much more as it takes the entire discipline of anthropology to task. It's about time we had a smart, complex book like this that serves as a cultural reckoning. Makes Torgovnick's "Gone Primitive" look like a first-grade primer.