Un/common Cultures

Visweswaran, Kamala:
Un/common cultures : racism and the rearticulation of cultural difference / Kamala Visweswaran. - Durham and London : Duke University Press, 2010. - xii, 341 S.
ISBN 978-0-8223-4621-0
US$ 84,95 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-8223-4635-7
US$ 23,95 (paperback)
DDC: 301

Beschreibung
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 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 by pointing to the importance of critical race theory for locating 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. [Verlagsinformation]

Inhalt
Acknowledgments. ix
Introduction. Un/common Cultures: Racism and the Rearticulation of Cultural Differenceq. 1
1. Wild West Anthropology and the Disciplining of Gender. 18
2. Race and the Culture of Anthropology. 52
3. The Interventions of Culture: Claude Lévi Strauss and the Internationalization of the Modern Concept of Race. 74
4. On Louis Dumont: Is There a Structural Analysis of Racism? 103
5. India in South Africa: Counter-genealogies for a Subaltern Sociology. 131
6. Legacies of Culture, Languages of the State. 164
7. Gendered States: Culture as a Site of South Asian Human-Rights Work. 189
Epilogue. The Traffic in Social Movements: Narmada, Bhopal, Texas. 213
Notes. 227
Bibliography. 283
Index. 319

Autorin
KAMALA VISWESWARAN is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas. She is the author of Fictions of Feminist Ethnography. Profile page.

Quellen: Duke University Press; WorldCat; Google Books; Amazon