Culture Wars

The relationship between anthropologists' ethnographic investigations and the lived social worlds in which these originate is a fundamental issue for anthropology. Where some claim that only native voices may offer authentic accounts of culture and hence that ethnographers are only ever interpreters of it, others point out that anthropologists are, themselves, implanted within specific cultural contexts which generate particular kinds of theoretical discussions. The contributors to this volume reject the premise that ethnographer and informant occupy different and incommensurable "cultural worlds." Instead they investigate the relationship between culture, context, and anthropologists' models and accounts in new ways. In doing so, they offer fresh insights into this key area of anthropological research.

Autorentext

Christina Toren is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews. Her fieldwork areas are Fiji and the Pacific, and Melanesia, and her theoretical interests include exchange processes; spatio-temporality as a dimension of human being; sociality, kinship and ideas of the person; the analysis of ritual; epistemology; ontogeny as a historical process. Her books include Making Sense of Hierarchy: cognition as social process in Fiji (Athlone, 1990) and Mind, Materiality and History: Explorations in Fijian Ethnography (Routledge, 1999).

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Acknowledgements

Introduction: Culture, context and anthropologists' accounts
Deborah James and Christina Toren

Chapter 1. Alliances And Avoidance: British Interactions with German-Speaking Anthropologists, 19331953
Andre Gingrich

Chapter 2. Serving the Volk? Afrikaner anthropology revisited
John Sharp

Chapter 3. 'Making Natives': debating indigeneity in Canada and South Africa
Evie Plaice

Chapter 4. Culture in the Periphery: Anthropology in the Shadow of Greek Civilisation
Dimitra Gefou-Madianou

Chapter 5. Culture: the Indigenous Account
Alan Barnard

Chapter 6. We are All Indigenous Now: Culture vs. Nature in representations of the Balkans
Aleksandar Bokovi

Chapter 7. Which cultures, what contexts, and whose accounts? Anatomies of a moral panic in Southall, multi-ethnic London
Gerd Baumann

Chapter 8. What about White People's History? Class, Race and Culture Wars in 21st Century Britain
Gillian Evans

Chapter 9. A Cosmopolitan Anthropology?
Stephen Gudeman

Chapter 10. The door in the middle: six conditions for anthropology
João de Pina-Cabral

Chapter 11. Adam Kuper: An Anthropologist's Account
Isak Niehaus

Notes on Contributors
References
Index