Synopses & Reviews
Anthropology has long had a vexed relationship with literature, and nowhere has this been more acutely felt than in France, where most ethnographers, upon returning from the field, write not one book, but two: a scientific monograph and a literary account. In
Far Afieldbrought to English-language readers here for the first timeVincent Debaene puzzles out this phenomenon, tracing the contours of anthropology and literatures mutual fascination and the ground upon which they meet in the works of thinkers from Marcel Mauss and Georges Bataille to Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes.
The relationship between anthropology and literature in France is one of careful curiosity. Literary writers are wary about anthropologists scientific austerity but intrigued by the objects they collect and the issues they raise, while anthropologists claim to be scientists but at the same time are deeply concerned with writing and representational practices. Debaene elucidates the richness that this curiosity fosters and the diverse range of writings it has produced, from Proustian memoirs to proto-surrealist diaries. In the end he offers a fascinating intellectual history, one that is itself located precisely where science and literature meet.
Review
"This is an absorbing and much needed volume that has considerable potential as a teaching tool. It is the first cross national review of history of anthropology in its Euro-American experience. This is an excellent source for anyone who might want to know how anthropology arose in different settings, where it has been, and where it might be going."
Review
"A substantial resource (with extensive bibliographies and further reading references) for students and enthusiasts of anthropology today."
Review
"A substantial resource (with extensive bibliographies and further reading references) for students and enthusiasts of anthropology today."-Emilie Bickerton, Times Literary Supplement(Emilie Bickerton, Times Literary Supplement)
Review
Choice "Outstanding Academic Title" 2006
Review
"The book's originality is immediately apparent: this is the first work to present compact and readable analyses of these rich national traditions side by side. This approach not only allows for illuminating comparisons, it also widens the scope of inquiry by including anthropological traditions usually ignored in general histories of the discipline. . . . A significant and original volume that contributes to our understanding of anthropology's past, and possibly its future."
Review
"A monumental contribution to understanding some key moments in the shaping of anthropology, as well as points where it might proceed in the future. Also, it is presented here as a series of stories, in the best narrative tradition of scholars who know how to address a general public. . . . A true jewel of the anthropological scholarship--provocative for practitioners and informative for students."
Review
Choice "Outstanding Academic Title" 2006
Review
"The history of anthropology is the central arena in which debates about theory are clarified and thrashed out. One Discipline, Four Ways explores the development of anthropology's richest national traditions, and will advance the development of a truly cosmopolitan discipline."
Review
Choice "Outstanding Academic Title" 2006 Adam Kuper - Adam Kuper
Review
“This remarkable and ambitious work expertly takes both a long-view and close-ups of the main currents of twentieth-century French anthropological research and thinking. Travel writing, anthropologys relation to surrealism, the dissolution of science-literature unity in belles-lettres, and structuralism into post-structuralism are all systematically addressed with great insights, great turns of phrase (caught well in translation), and fresh interpretations.”
Review
“Richly detailed and brilliantly argued, Far Afield portrays mid-twentieth century French anthropology as a complex negotiation of ‘literary and ‘scientific pressures. Debaene offers acute readings of classic and lesser-known works in a sustained engagement with fundamental problems of cross-cultural representation.”
Review
“A dazzling study. . . . it cannot be confined to literary analysis. If it is read with so much pleasure, it is precisely because as it delves into the heart of these works, far from sinking into sterile dissection, it offers on the contrary the opportunity for an ambitious reflection on the respective histories of anthropology and literature, and on the complex links woven over time between the two disciplines.”
Review
“Brilliant, demanding book. . . . deeply researched. . . . beautifully translated.”
Review
and#8220;This is an extremely ambitious project that should stimulate both reflection on and engagement with the discipline. . . . Highly recommended.and#8221;
Review
andldquo;Synthesizing biological anthropology, philosophy, the history of mentalitandeacute;s, cultural anthropology, and hundreds of studies of families and schooling by his own lab, Christoph Wulf invites us to think in fresh ways about human bodies, performance and gesture, everyday rituals, and how we learn. This tour de force is four-fields anthropology as itandrsquo;s never before been imagined in the United States.andrdquo;
Review
and#8220;This wonderful volume introduces a theory of human nature that may well be needed in our sprawling discipline, and it is highly recommended, not least as an introduction to a little-known branch on the great tree of anthropology.and#8221;
Review
and#8220;Anthropologyand#160;ambitiously argues for the contemporary viability of a general anthropology in the spirit of the purpose that gave rise to the discipline in the nineteenth century. Such works are very rare indeed in anthropology today, yet they are much needed, since the question of and#8216;what is anthropology beyond ethnography?and#8217; is very much alive. Christoph Wulfand#8217;s book is aand#160;spirited and informed response to that question. It works throughand#160;several important strains of European intellectual history that are key in the formation of anthropology about which most North American anthropologists are likely to know little.and#8221;
Synopsis
One Discipline, Four Ways offers the first book-length introduction to the history of each of the four major traditions in anthropology-British, German, French, and American. The result of lectures given by distinguished anthropologists Fredrik Barth, Andre Gingrich, Robert Parkin, and Sydel Silverman to mark the foundation of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany, this volume not only traces the development of each tradition but considers their impact on one another and assesses their future potentials.
Moving from Edward Burnett Tylor all the way through the development of modern fieldwork, Barth reveals the repressive tendencies that prevented Britain from developing a variety of anthropological practices until the late 1960s. Gingrich, meanwhile, articulates the development of anthropology in German, paying particular attention to the Nazi period, of which surprisingly little analysis has been offered until now. Parkin then assesses the French tradition and, in particular, its separation of theory and ethnographic practice. Finally, Silverman traces the formative influence of Franz Boas, the expansion of the discipline after World War II, and the "fault lines" and promises of contemporary anthropology in the United States.
Synopsis
One Discipline, Four Ways offers the first book-length introduction to the history of each of the four major traditions in anthropology-British, German, French, and American. The result of lectures given by distinguished anthropologists Fredrik Barth, Andre Gingrich, Robert Parkin, and Sydel Silverman to mark the foundation of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany, this volume not only traces the development of each tradition but considers their impact on one another and assesses their future potentials.Moving from Edward Burnett Tylor all the way through the development of modern fieldwork, Barth reveals the repressive tendencies that prevented Britain from developing a variety of anthropological practices until the late 1960s. Gingrich, meanwhile, articulates the development of anthropology in German, paying particular attention to the Nazi period, of which surprisingly little analysis has been offered until now. Parkin then assesses the French tradition and, in particular, its separation of theory and ethnographic practice. Finally, Silverman traces the formative influence of Franz Boas, the expansion of the discipline after World War II, and the "fault lines" and promises of contemporary anthropology in the United States.
Synopsis
Originally published in German, Christoph Wulfandrsquo;s Anthropology sets its sights on a topic as ambitious as its title suggests: anthropology itself. Arguing for an interdisciplinary and intercultural approach to anthropology that incorporates science, philosophy, history, and many other disciplines, Wulf examinesandmdash;with breathtaking scopeandmdash;all the ways that anthropology has been understood and practiced around the globe and through the years.and#160;Seeking a central way to understand anthropology in the midst of many different approaches to the discipline, Wulf concentrates on the human body. An emblem of society, culture, and time, the body is also the result of many mimetic processesandmdash;the active acquisition of cultural knowledge. By examining the role of the body in the performance of rituals, gestures, language, and other forms of imagination, he offers a bold new look at how culture is produced, handed down, and transformed. Drawing such examinations into a comprehensive and sophisticated assessment of the discipline as a whole, Anthropology looks squarely at the mystery of humankind and the ways we have attempted to understand it.
About the Author
Fredrik Barth is research fellow at the Norwegian Ministry of Culture and professor of anthropology at Boston University. Andre Gingrich is professor in the Department for Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna and head of the Anthropology Unit at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Robert Parkin is departmental lecturer in social anthropology at Oxford University. Sydel Silverman is president emerita of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and professor emerita of anthropology at the City University of New York.
Table of Contents
Preface to the English Edition
Introduction
The Ethnographers Two Books
Science and Literature: A Genealogy
I Ethnography in the Eyes of Literature
1 The Birth of a Discipline
Breaks and Discontinuities
Fieldwork
Ethnographys Prestige
2 The French Exception
The Speculative Origins of French Ethnography
Everything involving the exercise of the mind”
Malinowski: A Counterexample
3 Rhetoric, the Document, and Atmosphere
From the Science of Customs to Total Social Facts
Evocative Documents
The Supplement to the Ethnographers Expedition
The Impossible Return to Belles Lettres
The Human Document and the Living Museum
4 A literature that is not meaningless like our own”
Some of the innocent flavor of the original text”
LÎle de Pâques: 1941, 1951
Mauss, Fieldwork, and Ethnographic Documents
5 The Lost Unity of Heart and Mind
The Philosophical Voyage as Paradise Lost
From the Enlightenment to the Renaissance
A New Humanism"
II Ladieu au Voyage
6 Ceci nest pas un voyage”
Travel: Polemics, Prestige, and Legitimacy
The Ethnographer, the Adventurer, and the Tourist
Spatializing Cultural Difference
LAfrique fantôme and Tristes Tropiques: Impossible Intimacy
This is not travel writing”
7 Les Flambeurs dhommes:
The Ethiopian Chronicles of Marcel Griaule
The Ethnographer and the Littérateur
The Inadequacies of the Ethnographic Document
The Impossible Evocative Document
Excursus: Sociology and Cruelty
Ethnography and Cultural Knowledge
8 LAfrique fantôme: Leiris and the Living Document”
The Impossible Foreword
Reading LAfrique fantôme
From Communion to Representation
Theatricality and the Family
Living Document, Phantom” Africa
9 Tristes Tropiques:
The Search for Correspondence and the Logic of the Sensible
The boat entered the harbor at 5:30 in the morning”
From Conrad to Proust
From the Deserts of Memory to the Science of the Concrete
History, Entropy, Entropology”
Doorways that reveal other worlds and other times”
III Literature in the Eyes of Ethnography
10 Literature, Letters, and the Social Sciences
Lanson, 1895: The Dispossession of the Artist by the Scientist
The Man of Letters and the Social Division of Labor
Humanities, Sciences, and Counterrevolutionary Thought
Lanson, 1904: From Literature to Science
11 Disputes over Territory
Ramon Fernandez, 1935: A Conversation between
the Scientist and the Essayist
Breton, 19481966: You will never really know the Mayas”
Bataille, Barthes, Blanchot, 1956: The Reception of Tristes Tropiques
12 19551970: A New Deal
The End of the Documentary Paradigm
Ethnography and Literature in the Real World”
(Post)colonial Literature and the Ethnographic
The Terre humaine” Series: Literature from Within and Without
Barthes and Structures”
Barthes, 1967: From Science to Literature
Conclusion
Literature
Ethnography
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index