Originally published in 1982, James Clifford's analytical biography of Maurice Leenhardt (1878 - 1954)--missionary, anthropologist, founder of French Oceanic studies, historian of religion, and colonial reformer--received wide critical acclaim for its insight into the colonial history of anthropology. Drawing extensively on unpublished letters and journals, Clifford traces Leenhardt's life from his work as a missionary on the island of New Caledonia (1902 - 1926) to his subsequent return to Paris where he became an academic anthropologist at the Ecole pratique des hautes etudes, where he followed Marcel Mauss and was succeeded in 1951 by Claude Levi-Strauss.

Person and Myth: Maurice Leenhardt in the Melanesian World

Clifford, James

Religion & Spirituality

University of California Press

In these new essays, a group of experienced ethnographers, a literary critic, and a historian of anthropology, all known for advanced analytic work on ethnographic writing, place ethnography at the center of a new intersection of social history, interpretive anthropology, travel writing, discourse theory, and textual criticism. The authors analyze classic examples of cultural description, from Goethe and Catlin to Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard, and Le Roy Ladurie, showing the persistence of allegorial 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.

Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography : A School of American Research, Advanced Seminar

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Univ. Of California Pr.

The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art

The Predicament of Culture is a critical ethnography of the West in its changing relations with other societies. Analyzing cultural practices such as anthropology, travel writing, collecting, and museum displays of tribal art, Clifford shows authoritative accounts of other ways of life to be contingent fictions, now actively contested in postcolonial contexts. His critique raises questions of global significance: Who has the authority to speak for any group's identity and authenticity? What are the essential elements and boundaries of a culture? How do self and "the other" clash in the encounters of ethnography, travel, and modern interethnic relations? In discussions of ethnography, surrealism, museums, and emergent tribal arts, Clifford probes the late-twentieth century predicament of living simultaneously within, between, and after culture.

History

Harvard University Press

The Predicament of Culture is a critical ethnography of the West in its changing relations with other societies. Analyzing cultural practices such as anthropology, travel writing, collecting, and museum displays of tribal art, James Clifford shows authoritative accounts of other ways of life to be contingent fictions, now actively contested in post-colonial contexts. His critique raises questions of global significance: Who has the authority to speak for any group’s identity and authenticity? What are the essential elements and boundaries of a culture? How do self and “the other” clash in the encounters of ethnography, travel, and modern interethnic relations?
In chapters devoted to the history of anthropology, Clifford discusses the work of Malinowski, Mead, Griaule, Lévi-Strauss, Turner, Geertz, and other influential scholars. He also explores the affinity of ethnography with avant-garde art and writing, recovering a subversive, self-reflexive cultural criticism. The surrealists’ encounters with Paris or New York, the work of Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris in the Collège de Sociologie, and the hybrid constructions of recent tribal artists offer provocative ethnographic examples that challenge familiar notions of difference and identity. In an emerging global modernity, the exotic is unexpectedly nearby, the familiar strangely distanced.

Returns explores homecomings--the ways people recover and renew their roots. Engaging with indigenous histories of survival and transformation, James Clifford opens fundamental questions about where we are going, separately and together, in a globalizing, but not homogenizing, world.
It was once widely assumed that native, or tribal, societies were destined to disappear. Sooner or later, irresistible economic and political forces would complete the work of destruction set in motion by culture contact and colonialism. But many aboriginal groups persist, a reality that complicates familiar narratives of modernization and progress. History, Clifford invites us to observe, is a multidirectional process, and the word "indigenous," long associated with primitivism and localism, is taking on new, unexpected meanings.
In these probing and evocative essays, native people in California, Alaska, and Oceania are understood to be participants in a still-unfolding process of transformation. This involves ambivalent struggle, acting within and against dominant forms of cultural identity and economic power. Returns to ancestral land, performances of heritage, and maintenance of diasporic ties are strategies for moving forward, ways to articulate what can paradoxically be called "traditional futures." With inventiveness and pragmatism, often against the odds, indigenous people today are forging original pathways in a tangled, open-ended modernity. The third in a series that includes The Predicament of Culture (1988) and Routes (1997), this volume continues Clifford's signature exploration of late-twentieth-century intercultural representations, travels, and now returns.

Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century

When culture makes itself at home in motion, where does an anthropologist stand? In a follow-up to The Predicament of Culture, one of the defining books for anthropology in the last decade, James Clifford takes the proper measure: a moving picture of a world that doesn't stand still, that reveals itself en route, in the airport lounge and the parking lot as much as in the marketplace and the museum. 
 In this collage of essays, meditations, poems, and travel reports, Clifford takes travel and its difficult companion, translation, as openings into a complex modernity. He contemplates a world ever more connected yet not homogeneous, a global history proceeding from the fraught legacies of exploration, colonization, capitalist expansion, immigration, labor mobility, and tourism. Ranging from Highland New Guinea to northern California, from Vancouver to London, he probes current approaches to the interpretation and display of non-Western arts and cultures. Wherever people and things cross paths and where institutional forces work to discipline unruly encounters, Clifford's concern is with struggles to displace stereotypes, to recognize divergent histories, to sustain "postcolonial" and "tribal" identities in contexts of domination and globalization. 
 Travel, diaspora, border crossing, self-location, the making of homes away from home: these are transcultural predicaments for the late twentieth century. The map that might account for them, the history of an entangled modernity, emerges here as an unfinished series of paths and negotiations, leading in many directions while returning again and again to the struggles and arts of cultural encounter, the impossible, inescapable tasks of translation.

Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century

When culture makes itself at home in motion, where does an anthropologist stand? In a follow-up to The Predicament of Culture, one of the defining books for anthropology in the last decade, James Clifford takes the proper measure: a moving picture of a world that doesn't stand still, that reveals itself en route, in the airport lounge and the parking lot as much as in the marketplace and the museum.
In this collage of essays, meditations, poems, and travel reports, Clifford takes travel and its difficult companion, translation, as openings into a complex modernity. He contemplates a world ever more connected yet not homogeneous, a global history proceeding from the fraught legacies of exploration, colonization, capitalist expansion, immigration, labor mobility, and tourism. Ranging from Highland New Guinea to northern California, from Vancouver to London, he probes current approaches to the interpretation and display of non-Western arts and cultures. Wherever people and things cross paths and where institutional forces work to discipline unruly encounters, Clifford's concern is with struggles to displace stereotypes, to recognize divergent histories, to sustain "postcolonial" and "tribal" identities in contexts of domination and globalization.
Travel, diaspora, border crossing, self-location, the making of homes away from home: these are transcultural predicaments for the late twentieth century. The map that might account for them, the history of an entangled modernity, emerges here as an unfinished series of paths and negotiations, leading in many directions while returning again and again to the struggles and arts of cultural encounter, the impossible, inescapable tasks of translation.

Absolutely brand new(never opened)-ships immediately [GL]

Temporal Databases: Theory, Design, and Implementation

Science & Math

Tansel, Abdullah Uz

Gadia, Shashi

Mathematics

Benjamin/Cummings Pub. Co.

Originally published in 1982, James Clifford's analytical biography of Maurice Leenhardt (1878&ndash;1954)&mdash;missionary, anthropologist, founder of French Oceanic studies, historian of religion, and colonial reformer&mdash;received wide critical acclaim for its insight into the colonial history of anthropology. Drawing extensively on unpublished letters and journals, Clifford traces Leenhardt's life from his work as a missionary on the island of New Caledonia (1902&ndash;1926) to his subsequent return to Paris where he became an academic anthropologist at the &Eacute;cole Practique des Hautes &Eacute;tudes, where he followed Marcel Mauss and was succeeded in 1951 by Claude L&eacute;vi-Strauss. Clifford sees in Leenhardt's career a foreshadowing of contemporary anthropological concerns with reflexivity, cultural hybridity, and colonial and post-colonial entanglements.

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

Duke University Press Books

Since the publication of Person and Myth: Maurice Leenhardt in the Melanesian World, James Clifford has become one of anthropology's most important interlocutors. A key figure in theory and criticism, he has written seminal essays on topics ranging from art and identity to museum studies and fieldwork. This collection of interviews captures Clifford in exchanges with his critics in Brazil, Hawaii, Japan, the United Kingdom, and Portugal, offering a set of provocative reflections on an intellectual career in transformation.

On the Edges of Anthropology: Interviews (Paradigm)

Anthropology

Prickly Paradigm Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Clifford, James. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Clifford, James

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Clifford, James. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Person and Myth: Maurice Leenhardt in the Melanesian World

Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography : A School of American Research, Advanced Seminar

The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art

The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art

Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century

Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century

Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century

Temporal Databases: Theory, Design, and Implementation

Person and Myth: Maurice Leenhardt in the Melanesian World

On the Edges of Anthropology: Interviews (Paradigm)