When tradition makes itself at residence in movement, the place does an anthropologist stand? In a follow-up to The Predicament of Tradition, one of many defining books for anthropology within the final decade, James Clifford takes the correct measure: a transferring image of a world that does not stand nonetheless, that reveals itself en route, within the airport lounge and the car parking zone as a lot as within the market and the museum.
On this collage of essays, meditations, poems, and journey studies, Clifford takes journey and its tough companion, translation, as openings into a posh modernity. He contemplates a world ever extra related but not homogeneous, a world historical past continuing from the fraught legacies of exploration, colonization, capitalist enlargement, immigration, labor mobility, and tourism. Starting from Highland New Guinea to northern California, from Vancouver to London, he probes present approaches to the interpretation and show of non-Western arts and cultures. Wherever folks and issues cross paths and the place institutional forces work to self-discipline unruly encounters, Clifford’s concern is with struggles to displace stereotypes, to acknowledge divergent histories, to maintain “postcolonial” and “tribal” identities in contexts of domination and globalization.
Journey, diaspora, border crossing, self-location, the making of houses away from residence: these are transcultural predicaments for the late twentieth century. The map that may account for them, the historical past of an entangled modernity, emerges right here as an unfinished sequence of paths and negotiations, main in lots of instructions whereas returning time and again to the struggles and humanities of cultural encounter, the inconceivable, inescapable duties of translation.
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