A noted anthropologist examines the complexities of human
interaction across cultures and continents in a densely academic
but revelatory collection of essays. "How do groups negotiate
themselves in external relationships, and how is a culture also a
site of travel for others?" These are two of the broad questions
raised by Clifford (History of Consciousness/Univ. of Calif., Santa
Clara) in pursuit of his admonition that "new representational
strategies are needed, and are, under pressure, emerging." Thus
does Clifford discuss diasporic and migratory peoples, unexplored
Western influences on indigenous peoples, and the effects of new
communication technologies on the global movement of people.
Writing on the changing nature of ethnographic fieldwork, Clifford
notes that such work was customarily centered on a "localization"
of natives under the erroneous belief that while Western cultures
were "restless and expansive," the rest of humanity was "rooted and
immobile." Clifford points to the ways an indigenous culture's
artifacts are displayed by former colonial powers; a "contact zone"
in the basement of the Portland Art Museum brings together Tlingit
elders and museum staff while continuing "the ongoing power
imbalances of contact relation." Other "contacts" Clifford
chronicles are fleeting snippets: his own recollections of
traveling by subway from one New York City cultural outpost to
another; his family's Barbadian cleaning woman; a day in Honolulu
in 1991 encompassing impressions of the Chinese New Year and the
Persian Gulf War. Elsewhere, Clifford focuses on the political and
economic consequences of recent transnational movements; he warns
against construing an "ideal type" of diasporic people,
particularly in light of modern communication and travel technology
and changing economies. Nearly all peoples, he maintains, are
travelers in one way or another. Controversial in places,
self-evident in others - and slow going for the casual reader - but
overall a fresh and well-documented perspective on human global
movement. (Kirkus Reviews)
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.
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