Beyond Writing Culture: Current Intersections of Epistemologies and Representational Practices

This is a book that will attract a great deal of attention among anthropologists and social scientists in general. It is a great advance on earlier critiques of Writing Culture (1986) that have emerged at intervals, a large number of them cited by the contributors. Its strength lies particularly in its transdisciplinary perspectives and the clarity of both critique and new representations. The prologue is a tour de force. · Joan Vincent, Professor Emerita, Barnard College/Columbia UniversityTwo decades after the publication of Clifford and Marcus' volume Writing Culture, this collection provides a fresh and diverse reassessment of the debates that this pioneering volume unleashed. At the same time, Beyond Writing Culture moves the debate on by embracing the more fundamental challenge as to how to conceptualise the intricate relationship between epistemology and representational practices rather than maintaining the original narrow focus on textual analysis. It thus offers a thought-provoking tapestry of new ideas relevant for scholars not only concerned with 'the ethnographic Other', but with representation in general.Olaf Zenker is Assistant Professor in Social Anthropology at the University of Bern, Switzerland. He did his Ph.D. at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle on the Irish language and identity in Catholic West Belfast. His publications focus on conflict and identity formations, including a study on communicative constructions of group membership among homeless people:Techniken zur kommunikativen Herstellung von Gruppenzugehörigkeit (Berlin, 2004).Karsten Kumoll is Programme Manager at the German Council of Science and Humanities (Wissenschaftsrat), advising the Federal and State (Länder) governments on the system of higher education and research. He obtained his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Freiburg. Its subject was Marshall Sahlins' complete works and it was subsequently published as: Kultur, Geschichte und die Indigenisierung der Moderne: Eine Analyse des Gesamtwerks von Marshall Sahlins (Bielefeld, 2007).