Un/common Cultures: Racism and the Rearticulation of Cultural Difference - Softcover

Visweswaran, Kamala

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822346354 ISBN 13: 9780822346357

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

In Un/common Cultures, Kamala Visweswaran develops an incisive critique of the idea of culture at the heart of anthropology, describing how it lends itself to culturalist assumptions. She holds that the new culturalism--the idea that cultural differences are definitive, and thus divisive--produces a view of "uncommon cultures" defined by relations of conflict rather than forms of collaboration. The essays in Un/common Cultures straddle the line between an analysis of how racism works to form the idea of "uncommon cultures" and a reaffirmation of the possibilities of "common cultures," those that enact new forms of solidarity in seeking common cause. Such "cultures in common" or "cultures of the common" also produce new intellectual formations that demand different analytic frames for understanding their emergence. By tracking the emergence and circulation of the culture concept in American anthropology and Indian and French sociology, Visweswaran offers an alternative to strictly disciplinary histories. She uses critical race theory to locate the intersection between ethnic/diaspora studies and area studies as a generative site for addressing the formation of culturalist discourses. In so doing, she interprets the work of social scientists and intellectuals such as Elsie Clews Parsons, Alice Fletcher, Franz Boas, Louis Dumont, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Clifford Geertz, W. E. B. Du Bois, and B. R. Ambedkar.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kamala Visweswaran is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Asian Studies at the University of Texas, Austin. She is the author of Fictions of Feminist Ethnography.

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"In "Un/common Cultures" Kamala Visweswaran provides an acute, historically informed diagnosis of the relative weakness of the culture concept so central to American anthropology, and a provocative and fascinating explanation of why, during the past two decades, other fields and interdisciplinary arenas have developed more cogent critiques of culture. This first-rate book will be read widely and generate much discussion."--George E. Marcus, co-author of "Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary"

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Un/common Cultures

RACISM AND THE REARTICULATION OF CULTURAL DIFFERENCEBy KAMALA VISWESWARAN

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2010 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4635-7

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.....................................................................................................................ixINTRODUCTION Un/common Cultures: Racism and the Rearticulation of Cultural Difference...............................................11. Wild West Anthropology and the Disciplining of Gender............................................................................182. Race and the Culture of Anthropology.............................................................................................523. The Interventions of Culture: Claude Lvi-Strauss and the Internationalization of the Modern Concept of Race.....................744. Is There A Structural Analysis of Racism? Louis Dumont and the Caste School of Race Relations....................................1035. India in South Africa: Counter-genealogies for a Subaltern Sociology.............................................................1316. Legacies of Culture, Languages of the State......................................................................................1647. Gendered States: Rethinking Culture as a Site of South Asian Human-Rights Work...................................................189EPILOGUE The Traffic in Social Movements: Narmada, Bhopal, Texas....................................................................213NOTES...............................................................................................................................227BIBLIOGRAPHY........................................................................................................................283INDEX...............................................................................................................................319

Chapter One

"Wild West" Anthropology and the Disciplining of Gender

While we were in Boston in 1879, a lady told me that after studying ethnology for years in books and museums she now wished to visit Indian tribes in their own lodges, living as they lived and observing their daily customs herself-especially the women's and children's ways. "Did you ever camp out?" I asked. "No, never." I found it hard to take her plan seriously. She, a thorough product of city life, was evidently nearing her forties. I could not imagine her leaving all her home comforts to go out to the far frontier and live among the Indians in an Indian lodge. Still, she was so earnest that I reluctantly agreed to take her someday with our group for the trip she wished. But I gave her fair warning: "You can't stand such a trip. You'll have to sleep on the cold ground. The food will be strange to you. You'll meet storms on the open prairies and be wet to the skin. Burning sun and wind will blister your face and hands. Long days of travelling will exhaust you. You'll have no privacy night or day. I'm sure you can never endure it." "Yes I can!" she insisted.

The image of tender womanhood scourged by the wilderness of the western frontier was perhaps one of the most potent underlying the ideological structure of "manifest destiny." Stereotypes of the courageous frontier woman notwithstanding, the idea that the West was "no place for a woman" defined the skepticism "pioneer" anthropologists like Alice Fletcher faced from more experienced field companions like Henry Tibbles, as illustrated in his account above.

Yet the first generation of women anthropologists contributed much to destabilizing the trope of "white woman in peril," even as its persistence enabled the popularization of their writing and established their reputations as professionals. If strands of progressivist feminism promulgated by the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) were defined by the mission of "taming" unruly frontier masculinity through appeals to Christian notions of domesticity and familial responsibility, early women anthropologists also participated in the ideology of the western frontier by characterizing native cultures as "wild" and "untamed" by civilization-a kind of feminine counterpart to Rooseveltian "rough-riderism."

Anthropology has been called "the welcoming science" because of the numbers of women in its early ranks. Yet while the presence of women like Erminnie Platt Smith (1836-86), Alice Fletcher (1838-1923), Sara Yorke Stevenson (1847-1921), Matilda Cox Stevenson (1849-1915), Zelia Nuttal (1857-1933), Frances Densmore (18671957), and Elsie Clews Parsons (1874-1941) in anthropology has often been remarked, their significance for the emergence of the discipline has been less well understood.

Platt Smith, Fletcher, Yorke Stevenson, Parsons, and Densmore were all known as engaging and popular public speakers. Platt Smith's parlor lectures on geology and on literary and aesthetic topics led to the founding of the Daughters of Aesthetics in Jersey City in 1879, and she served as its president from 1879 to 1886. The New York Times of 29 August 1880, reporting on one of her Iroquois lectures, noted, "Mrs. Smith is not only a good writer, well-known in literary and scientific circles in New York, Boston, and other cities[,] but also an eloquent speaker ... and is deeply interested in the results of scientific investigation." Fletcher's work with the Omaha began in 1879, when she met long-term collaborator Francis La Flesche at a meeting of the Boston Literary Society. After years of philanthropical work, Fletcher began her professional career as an independent lecturer in order to earn money, speaking on such popular topics as "the lost peoples of America." By 1879 she had received attention as the "noted lecturess of New York City" who "tells a wonderful story and tells it well" with a "pleasing voice and attractive manner." She drew the attention of Frederick Putnam, and by 1880 he was inviting her audiences to tour the Peabody Museum at Harvard University. Women, then, were instrumental in bringing anthropology into the public sphere.

The 1880s thus also witnessed marked redefinition of avenues of public participation for women, of which anthropology was but one. The liberal evolutionist Edward Tylor, addressing the Anthropological Society of Washington in 1884, had similarly argued that "the man of the house, though he can do a great deal, cannot do it all. If his wife sympathizes with his work, and is able to do it, really half the work of investigation seems to me to fall to her, so much is to be learned through the women of the tribe, which the men will not readily disclose." Speaking in particular of Matilda Cox Stevenson's collaboration with her husband, Tylor concluded that it was a lesson "not to sound the 'bullroarer,' and warn the ladies off from their proceedings, but rather to avail themselves thankfully of their help."

Tylor's advice to the Anthropological Society of Washington was not immediately heeded, however. Thus, in 1885 Cox Stevenson established the Women's Anthropological Society, with Fletcher and Zelia Nuttal among its first members. The Women's Anthropological Society concerned itself with social-reform issues such as slum sanitation and the "Negro problem." Fletcher served as the society's vice president in 1885, and as its president from 1893 to 1898. The Anthropological Society of Washington finally admitted women to its membership in 1899, and after that...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822346354
• ISBN 13: 9780822346357
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 360
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland