after writing culture: epistemology and praxis in contemporary anthropology

Allison James, Jennifer Lorna Hockey, Association of Social Athropologists. Conference
Routledge, 1997 - Social Science - 273 pages

Amazon Books.

Seremetakis says "'ability to construct a memory of the self that is different from the Westernised rationalised self.. her 'dreaming' disclosed her inheritance in a cultural order from which she had been estranged .."(p. 25) 


Seremetakis says  '"reach back into her own past, to recover a bodily memory implanted by the shared substance commensality and the metaphorisation (transportation) of mythic meanings which 'create passageways between time and spaces'" (p.32)

Evan-Pritchard's classic study of Azande witchcraft writes, "The memory of dream images may influence subsequent behaviours and subsequent happenings may intrude upon the memory of dream images so that they conform to one another," (1937:384) (p. 71)


Evans-Pritchard, E.E. (1937) Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande. Oxford University Press. 1976 abridged edition.

Seremetakis, C.N. (1991) 'The Memory Of The Senses: Historical Perception, Commensal Exchange and Modernity', Visual Anthropology Review, 9 (2): 2-18.


Anthropologists now openly acknowledge that social anthropology can no longer fulfill its traditional aim of providing holistic, objective representations of people of "exotic" cultures.After Writing Cultureasks what theoretical and practical role contemporary anthropology can play in our increasingly unpredictable and complex world. With fourteen articles written by well-known anthropologists, the work explores some of the directions in which contemporary anthropology is moving, following the questions raised by the "writing culture" debates of the 1980s. Some of the chapters cover: the concept of caste in Indian society, Scottish ethnography, how dreams are culturally conceptualized, representations of the family, theme parks and the anthropologist in Japan, people's place in the landscape of Northern Australia, and representing the identity of the New Zealand Maori.

writing culture: the poetics and politics of ethnography

James Clifford, George E. Marcus
6 Reviews
University of California Press, 1986 - Social Science - 305 pages

Google Books.

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.