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.

"vegetarian between meals”: the dalai lama, war, and violence / barry sautman

positions

Barry Sautman
“Vegetarian between Meals”: The Dalai Lama, War, and Violence
positions Spring 2010 18(1): 89-143; doi:10.1215/10679847-2009-025

Abstract
In May 2008 Time magazine's annual “Time 100” list of influential people in the world put the Dalai Lama at the top. This outcome was related to the preceding six weeks of protests in Tibet and attendant Western criticisms of China's Tibet policies, but it also reflected the two-decade-long construction of the Dalai Lama's international persona as a “man of peace” and “compassion personified.”

This essay interrogates the ubiquitous representation of the Dalai Lama as an apostle of nonviolence. It argues that while he urges nonviolence in general, the Dalai Lama has supported a number of wars, especially those of India and the United States, the Tibetan exiles' two chief patrons. Western political elites and media have reciprocated by making a major contribution to the construction of the Dalai Lama's pacifistic persona.

The Dalai Lama's advocacy of nonviolence is associated with a special level of compassion, but that link is also problematic: his compassion has been largely disconnected from specific, major struggles of the oppressed. The primary examples considered here are the fight against apartheid in South Africa and the struggle against the occupation of Palestinian lands. This disconnect arises from the Dalai Lama's self-orientalizing approach to “race” and racial oppression, within which the peoples and interests of the West are valorized and those of the developing world subordinated. That, in turn, is a function not only of Western state and popular patronage, but also of the Dalai Lama's generally conservative worldview.

The construction of the Dalai Lama's persona of “man of peace” adversely affects efforts to resolve the Tibet question. The “Free Tibet movement” is built around the pacifist persona of the Dalai Lama. The movement garners support from that, but it seeks an outcome that can only be realized in the unlikely event that China disintegrates. The constructed “man of peace” persona thus diverts attention from efforts to forge a compromise solution to the Tibet question. This effect will continue until a critique of political representations of the Dalai Lama are allowed to become part of the international discourse of Tibet.