Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography

by George E. Marcus and James Clifford

Book Overview

These seminal essays place ethnography at the intersection of interpretive anthropology, cultural studies, social history, travel writing, discourse theory, and textual criticism. They grapple with... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520057295
• ISBN13: 9780520057296
• Release Date: April 1986
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 345 Pages
• Weight: 0.96 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Scholarship, Culture, Poetics and Politics: shared concerns

This collection constitutes another solid, suggestive and significant contribution to what is now one of the most dynamic arenas in the humanities and outside: Culture. The essays speak to all manner of representational practices and explore vital questions that no scholar interested in social dynamics of any kind can afford to ignore.

A Must For All Ethnographers

As the title says, not only do ethnographers objectively research and write "about" cultures, in the process, they are also "writing Culture": that is, we constitute the cultural realities even as we attempt to describe them. Language is not a transparent window through which we describe an already existing reality. language "is the maker of this world" says Fisher. Understanding this, the ethnographer is confronted with writing and its importance in the ethnographic description and analysis of cultural worlds. Self-reflexivity in writing ethnography is central to the text. Who has the authority to write Others into being? How does my position as a gendered, racial, and class subject affect my "writing-up" of culture? These are just some of the questions posed by this text, with the added bonus of some possible answers as well. A must read for anyone on the verge of conducting ethnographic research. Also a great text for qualitative research courses concerned with issues of postmodernity and postcolonialism.