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.
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