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From Experimental Moment to Legacy Moment: Collaboration and the Crisis of Representation

From Experimental Moment to Legacy Moment: Collaboration and the Crisis of Representation COMMENTARY From Experimental Moment to Legacy Moment Collaboration and the Crisis of Representation bob w. white, Université de Montréal More than one wave of criticism has attempted to come to terms with the legacy of Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986), but in many cases these efforts have only reasserted the written word as the locus of anthropological knowledge and the notion of representation as the primary concern for generations of anthropologists to come. In fair- ness, Writing Culture is neither the culprit nor the cause of this malaise but is symptomatic of a much larger problem in the discipline: anthro- pology’s deep-seated anxiety about relevance (Bunzl 2008). I argue that recent attempts to make sense of the legacy of what Marcus and Fisch- er referred to as an “experimental moment in the human sciences” (1986), instead of using the benefi t of hindsight to help us understand what these debates mean for the discipline or for cultural analysis more broadly, have inadvertently narrowed the possibilities for meaningful discussion about ethnography as a critical practice. Recent develop- ments in the fi eld of collaborative ethnography have made signifi cant contributions regarding this question, but there is still a great http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Collaborative Anthropologies University of Nebraska Press

From Experimental Moment to Legacy Moment: Collaboration and the Crisis of Representation

White, Bob W.
Collaborative Anthropologies , Volume 5 – Dec 1, 2012
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Publisher
University of Nebraska Press
ISSN
2152-4009

Abstract

COMMENTARY From Experimental Moment to Legacy Moment Collaboration and the Crisis of Representation bob w. white, Université de Montréal More than one wave of criticism has attempted to come to terms with the legacy of Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986), but in many cases these efforts have only reasserted the written word as the locus of anthropological knowledge and the notion of representation as the primary concern for generations of anthropologists to come. In fair- ness, Writing Culture is neither the culprit nor the cause of this malaise but is symptomatic of a much larger problem in the discipline: anthro- pology’s deep-seated anxiety about relevance (Bunzl 2008). I argue that recent attempts to make sense of the legacy of what Marcus and Fisch- er referred to as an “experimental moment in the human sciences” (1986), instead of using the benefi t of hindsight to help us understand what these debates mean for the discipline or for cultural analysis more broadly, have inadvertently narrowed the possibilities for meaningful discussion about ethnography as a critical practice. Recent develop- ments in the fi eld of collaborative ethnography have made signifi cant contributions regarding this question, but there is still a great

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Collaborative Anthropologies – University of Nebraska Press

Published: Dec 1, 2012

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