"Elegantly written essays. . . . Roseberry is the real gem, an
anthropologist with extensive Latin American field experience and
an impressive scholarly grasp of the histories of anthropology and
Marxist theory."--Micaela di Leonardo, The Nation "An extremely
stimulating volume . . . rich and provocative, and codifies a new
depature point."--Choice "As a critic . . . Roseberry writes with
sustained force and clarity. . . . his principal points emerge with
a directness that will make this book attractive to a wide range of
readers."--American Anthropologist "Roseberry in among the most
astute, careful, and theoretically cogent of the anthropologists of
his generation. . . . This book] illustrates well the breadth and
coherence of his thinking and guides the reader through the
complicated intersections of anthropology with history, political
economy, Marxism, and Latin American studies."--Jane Schneider,
CUNY In Anthropologies and Histories, William Roseberry explores
some of the cultural and political implications of an
anthropological political economy. In his view, too few of these
implications have been explored by authors who dismiss the very
possibility of a political economic understanding of culture.
Within political economy, readers are offered sophisticated
treatments of uneven development, but when authors turn to culture
and politics, they place contradictory social experiences within
simplistic class or epochal labels. Within cultural anthropology,
history is often little more than new terrain for extending
anthropological practice. Roseberry places culture and history in
relation to each other, in the context of a reflection on the
political economy of uneven development. In the first half of this
books, he looks at and critiques a variety of anthropological
understandings of culture, arguing for an approach that sees
culture as socially constituted and socially constitutive.
Beginning with a commentary on Clifford Geertz's seminal essay on
the Balinese cockfight, Roseberry argues that Geertz and his
followers pay insufficient attention to cultural differentiation,
to social and political inequalities that affect actors' different
understandings of the world, other people, and of themselves.
Sufficient attention to such questions, Roseberry argues, requires
a concern for political economy. In the second half of the book,
Roseberry explores the assumptions and practices of political
economy, indicates the kind of problems that should be central to
such an approach, and reviews some of the inadequacies of
anthropological studies. William Roseberry is a professor of
anthropology at the New School for Social Research.
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