Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-hc48f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-28T17:00:24.500Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

“Ethnographies”: American Culture Studies and Postmodern Anthropology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Get access

Extract

When henry nash smith defined American Studies in 1957 as “the study of American culture past and present, as a whole,” he summarized more than two decades of a wide-ranging and self-conscious critical analysis of culture in the United States and, at the same time, initiated the search for the unified or holistic “method” through which American Studies would, finally, achieve maturity as an (interdisciplinary) discipline. The 1930s were the decade when, as Warren Susman pointed out years ago, the complexity of American culture as well as the culture concept were discovered and discussed in the wider public. We think of the work of cultural anthropology, of the studies in cultural relativism by Margaret Mead or of patterns of culture by Ruth Benedict that emphasized the unity of cultures and often were written with a self-critical look at American culture in mind. What was, however, even more important was the fact that during the 1930s American culture manifested itself as a multiculture, as a culture that was characterized even more by variety, heterogeneity, tensions, and alternative traditions than by the strong drive toward national identity and consensus. Cultural anthropologists, critics, and (“documentary”) writers such as “native anthropologist” Zora Neale Hurston, Constance Rourke, or James Agee (with photographer Walker Evans, in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men) worked out radical new methods and strategies of cultural critique and ethnographic writing in the study of American cultures, in the plural. Thus, historian Caroline F. Ware, writing for the American Historical Association in The Cultural Approach to History, could argue in 1940 that the “total cultural approach” does by no means imply that American culture is something like an organic unity, but that “American culture” is exactly the multiplicity of regional, ethnic, and class cultures and the interactions of these cultures in terms of rhetoric as well as of power, not some “common patterns” or the Anglo-Saxon tradition the “other” groups have to “contribute” to.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

NOTES

1. For a discussion of Matthiessen's and Ware's work and the early context of American Studies, see my essay “American Studies and the Radical Tradition: From the 1930s to the 1960s,” Prospects 12 (1987): 2158.Google Scholar

2. Kroeber, A. L. and Parsons, Talcott, “The Concepts of Culture and of Social System,” American Sociological Review 23 (10 1958): 582–83.Google Scholar

3. Ward, John William, Red, White, and Blue: Men, Books, and Ideas in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 5ff., 9.Google Scholar

4. See my essay “American Studies - Beyond the Crisis? Recent Redefinitions and the Meaning of Theory, History, and Practical Criticism,” Prospects 7 (1982): 53113.Google Scholar

5. Mechling, Jay, “In Search of an American Ethnophysics,” in The Study of American Culture: Contemporary Conflicts, ed. Luedtke, Luther (Deland, Fla.: Everett/Edwards, 1977), pp. 241–77Google Scholar; and Caughey, John L., “The Ethnography of Everyday Life: Theories and Methods for American Culture Studies,” American Quarterly 34 (1982): 222–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “Ethnography, Introspection, and Reflexive Culture Studies,” Prospects 7 (1982): 115–39.Google Scholar

6. See, e.g., Turner, Victor, “Process, System, and Symbol: A New Anthropological Synthesis,” Daedalus 106, no. 3 (1977): 6180Google Scholar, and From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982)Google Scholar; Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973)Google Scholar and Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983)Google Scholar. Geertz's work is most pertinently discussed in Lystra, Karen's essay “Clifford Geertz and the Concept of Culture,” Prospects 8 (1983): 3148CrossRefGoogle Scholar, in Gunn, Giles, The Culture of Criticism and the Criticism of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), ch. 5Google Scholar, and in Pecora, Vincent's, “The Limits of Local Knowledge,” in The New Historicism, Ed. Veeser, H. Aram (New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 243–76Google Scholar. Turner's influence can be seen, e.g., in Beeman, Richard, “The New Social History and the Search for ‘Community’ in Colonial America,” American Quarterly 29 (1977): 422–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stepto, Robert B.'s From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979)Google Scholar; Bercovitch, Sacvan, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), esp. pp. xii, 153, 188, 204fGoogle Scholar; and Cowan, Michael, “Boundary as Center: Inventing an American Studies Culture,” Prospects 12 (1987): 120CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an effort to combine in a study of mass culture ethnographic work, Geertz's semiotic theory of culture, reader-response criticism, and Jameson's dialectic of ideology and utopia, see Radway, Janice's Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984)Google Scholar. For a critical discussion of the “symbolic anthropology” of Geertz and Turner, see Ortner, Sherry B., “Theory in Anthropology Since the Sixties,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 26 (01 1984): 127–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7. Clifford, James and Marcus, George E., eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 120Google Scholar, subsequently quoted as Writing Culture with page number in the text; and Tyler, Stephen A., “Ethnography, Intertextuality and the End of Description,” American Journal of Semiotics 3, no. 4 (1985): 8384CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Crapanzano, Vincent, “On the Writing of Ethnography,” Dialectical Anthropology 2, no. 1 (1977): 6973CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Geertz, Clifford's critical look at these recent developments in his book Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988).Google Scholar

8. Asad, Talal, ed., Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (London: Ithaca Press, 1973)Google Scholar; Lewis, Diane, “Anthropology and Colonialism,” Current Anthropology 14 (1973): 581602CrossRefGoogle Scholar (with comments and reply); and Leiris, Michel, “L'Ethnographie devant le colonialisme (1950),” in Brisées (Paris: Mercure de France, 1960), pp. 125–45.Google Scholar

9. See also Tyler, Stephen A., “Postmodern Ethnography: From Document of the Occult to Occult Document,”Google Scholar in Clifford, and Marcus, , Writing Culture, esp. pp. 123–24Google Scholar; and Rabinow, Paul, “Representations Are Social Facts: Modernity and Postmodernity in Anthropology,” Writing Culture, pp. 234–41.Google Scholar

10. Clifford, James, “On Ethnographic Authority,” Representations 1 (Spring 1983): 133Google Scholar, reprinted in his The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 2154Google Scholar. A recent example is the volume Debating Muslims: Cultural Dialogues in Postmodernity and Tradition, by Fischer, Michael M. J. and Abedi, Mehdi (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990)Google Scholar, which in its ambiguous title plays upon the dialogues, multiple discursive positionings, contestations, and polyphony among Muslims, between Muslims and non-Muslims, and between the two authors, one a Muslim insider and one a non-Muslim outsider.

11. Cf. White, Hayden, “Critical Pluralism,” Critical Inquiry 12 (Spring 1986): 488ff.Google Scholar

12. Marcus, George E. and Fischer, Michael M. J., Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 1f., 113ff.Google Scholar, subsequently quoted as Anthropology with page number in the text.

13. The relation of surrealism and anthropology is discussed in Clifford, James, “On Ethnographic Surrealism,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 23 (1981): 539–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar, reprinted in The Predicament of Culture, pp. 117–51.Google Scholar

14. Gisela Welz, unpublished paper on the problem of “going/staying native” in anthropological research and practice, 1986. For a critical, wide-ranging discussion of the problem of “auto-ethnography,” see Hayano, David M., “Auto-Ethnography: Paradigms, Problems, and Prospects,” Human Organization 38 (Spring 1979): 99104.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15. Rabinow, Paul, Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), pp. 6, 151–55, 162.Google Scholar

16. Wagner, Roy, The Invention of Culture, rev. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 4.Google Scholar

17. Wagner, , The Invention of Culture, p. 16.Google Scholar

18. Marcus, and Fischer, , Anthropology as Cultural Critique, pp. 30f., 6971Google Scholar. As to the “dialogic mode,” cf. Dwyer, Kevin's essays “The Dialogic of Ethnology,” Dialectical Anthropology 4, no. 3 (1979): 205–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “On the Dialogic of Fieldwork,” Dialectical Anthropology 2, no. 2 (1977): 143–51.Google Scholar

19. Marcus, George E. and Cushman, Dick, “Ethnographies as Texts,” Annual Review of Anthropology 11 (1982): 44CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Tyler, , “Ethnography,” pp. 9193Google Scholar (for a critique of the “ethnography of speaking” and “dialogic anthropology”) and p. 95 (quote). See also Tyler, 's “Postmodern Ethnography;” pp. 126f, 129f., 138.Google Scholar

20. Rabinow, , Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco, pp. 56Google Scholar. Cf. Crapanzano, Vincent's experimental study Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), esp. ch. 4.Google Scholar

The critics of Writing Culture often focus on Stephen Tyler's highly evocative and dense contribution and base their polemic on an understanding of postmodernism as an “anything goes” playful arbitrariness that has nothing to do with the notion of postmodernity developed in the work of Clifford, Marcus, Rabinow et al. This also applies to some of the feminist critiques discussed below.

21. Moore, Henrietta L., Feminism and Anthropology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 190, cf. pp. 194–95Google Scholar. Cf. Rabinow, Paul's discussion of Foucault in “Representations Are Social Facts,” pp. 239–41Google Scholar, his critique of Clifford on pp. 241–47, and his essay “Discourse and Power: On the Limits of Ethnographic Texts,” Dialectical Anthropology 10 (1985): 113.Google Scholar

22. Cf. also Pecora's critique of Geertz's semiotic approach to other cultures, in “The Limits of Local Knowledge,” pp. 264–65.Google Scholar

23. Said, Edward W., “Representing the Colonized: Anthropology's Interlocutors,” Critical Inquiry 15 (Winter 1989): 217CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Marcus and Fischer emphasize the importance of “world historical political economy” in chapter 4 of their book. See also the essay by Marcus, in Writing Culture, pp. 165–93.Google Scholar

24. Said, , “Representing the Colonized,” p. 223Google Scholar; and Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Methuen, 1987), pp. 207, 209–10Google Scholar, and “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Nelson, Cary and Grossberg, Lawrence (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 271315.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25. See Poster, Marc, Foucault, Marxism, and History: Mode of Production versus Mode of Information (Cambridge, Mass.: Polity Press, 1984)Google Scholar, and Critical Theory and Poststructuralism: In Search of a Context (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Rowe, John Carlos, “Metavideo: Fictionality and Mass Culture in a Postmodern Economy,” in Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction, ed. O'Donnell, Patrick and Davis, Robert Con (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 214–35Google Scholar, and “Surplus Economies: Deconstruction, Ideology, and the Humanities,” in The Aims of Representation: Subject/Text/History, ed. Krieger, Murray (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), pp. 131–58.Google Scholar

26. Moore, Henrietta L., Feminism and Anthropology, pp. vi, 6, 193–94.Google Scholar

27. Strathern, Marilyn, “An Awkward Relationship: The Case of Feminism and Anthropology,” Signs 12 (1987): 277, 289–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Rosaldo, M. Z., “The Use and Abuse of Anthropology: Reflections on Feminism and Cross-Cultural Understanding,” Signs 5 (1980): 389417CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Rabinow, , “Representations Are Social Facts,” pp. 254–56.Google Scholar

28. Strathern, Marilyn, “Out of Context: The Persuasive Fictions of Anthropology,” Current Anthropology 28 (06 1987): 265, 267–69, 289–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar, cf. the critical discussion following the article (pp. 270–79).

29. Mascia-Lees, Frances E., Sharpe, Patricia and Cohen, Colleen Ballerino, “The Postmodern Turn in Anthropology: Cautions from a Feminist Perspective,” Signs 15 (1989): 9, 14, 16, 22, 27, 3133.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30. Marcus, and Fischer, , Anthropology as Cultural Critique, pp. 5, 7f., 9.Google Scholar

31. Marcus, and Cushman, , “Ethnographies as Texts,” pp. 5458Google Scholar. See also M. M. J. Fischer's explicit use of an ethnography of literary and film production to explore class-contested, yet philosophically and emotionally similar, strands of Iranian culture in his “Towards a Third World Poetics: Seeing Through Short Stories and Films in the Iranian Culture Area,” Knowledge and Society 5 (1984): 171241.Google Scholar

32. Clifford, , The Predicament of Culture, p. 12Google Scholar. See also Rabinow, Paul, “Representations Are Social Facts,” p. 242.Google Scholar

33. For a critical discussion of recent American radical cultural criticism, see my essay “Tradition, Discontinuity, and Counterdiscourse: Some Problems in American Radical Cultural Criticism Since the 1960s,” in The Crisis of Modernity: Recent Critical Theories of Culture and Society in the United States and West Germany, ed. Lenz, Günter H. and Shell, Kurt L. (Frankfurt: Campus; and Boulder, Col.: Westview, 1986), pp. 191249.Google Scholar

34. Cf. Bercoviteh, Sacvan, The American Jeremiad, ch. 6Google Scholar, and “The Problem of Ideology in American Literary History,” Critical Inquiry 12 (Summer 1986): 636, 641Google Scholar; and, especially, Trachtenberg, Alan, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), pp. 8, 73f., 158, 174, 179–81, 231f.Google Scholar

35. Johnson, Barbara, “Rigorous Unreliability,” Yale French Studies, no. 69 (1985): 75Google Scholar, reprinted in her A World of Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), pp. 1725.Google Scholar

36. Johnson, , A World of Difference, p. 2.Google Scholar

37. Johnson, Barbara, “Thresholds of Difference: Structures of Address in Zora Neale Hurston,” Critical Inquiry 12 (Autumn 1985): 278, 289CrossRefGoogle Scholar, reprinted in her A World of Difference, pp. 172–83Google Scholar, and “Symposium: Marxism and Deconstruction,” Genre 17 (Spring/Summer 1984): 78Google Scholar; Johnson, , A World of Difference, p. 6.Google Scholar

38. See my critique of Walter Benn Michaels's The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism in part 3 of my introductory essay “Reconstructing American Literary Studies: History, Difference, and Synthesis,” in Reconstructing American Literary and Historical Studies, ed. Lenz, Guenter H., Keil, Hartmut and Broeck-Sallah, Sabine (Frankfurt: Campus, 1990).Google Scholar

39. See, e.g., White, Hayden, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978)Google Scholar, and The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987)Google Scholar; LaCapra, Dominick, Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983), and History and Criticism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Smith, Barbara Herrnstein, On the Margins of Discourse (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978)Google Scholar; Said, Edward W., Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic Books, 1975)Google Scholar, and The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Spivak, Gayatri, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Methuen, 1987)Google Scholar; and Jameson, Fredric, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981)Google Scholar, and The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971–1986, 2 vols. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988)Google Scholar. Cf. also Hassan, Ihab, “Ideas of Cultural Change,” in Innovation/Renovation: New Perspectives in the Humanities, ed. Ihab, and Hassan, Sally (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), pp. 1538Google Scholar, and The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1987).Google Scholar

40. For a critique of the “comparative” and the “relativistic” “modes” in anthropology, cf. Dwyer, , “The Dialogic of Ethnology,” pp. 207208.Google Scholar

41. Jameson, , The Political Unconscious, p. 35Google Scholar; and White, Hayden, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 204.Google Scholar

42. See esp. Jameson, Fredric, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Social Text 1 (Winter 1979): 130–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Capitalism,” New Left Review, no. 146 (0708 1984): 5392.Google Scholar

43. Gates, Henry Louis Jr., “Criticism in the Jungle,” in Black Literature and Literary Theory, ed. Gates, (New York: Methuen, 1984), p. 8.Google Scholar

44. Gates, Henry Louis Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. xxi.Google Scholar

45. Gates, , The Signifying Monkey, p. xxiGoogle Scholar. See also Baker, Houston A. Jr., Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago:y University of Chicago Press, 1984).Google Scholar

46. See Bhabha, Homi K., “The Other Question,” Screen 24 (1112 1983): 1836CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” October, no. 28 (Spring 1984): 125–33Google Scholar; “Representation and the Colonial Text: A Critical Exploration of Some Forms of Mimeticism,” in The Theory of Reading ed. Gloversmith, Frank (Brighton: Harvester, and Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1984), pp. 93122Google Scholar; “Signs Take for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817,” Critical Inquiry 12 (Autumn 1985): 144–65Google Scholar; and especially “The Commitment to Theory,” New Formations 5 (Summer 1988): 523Google Scholar; JanMohamed, Abdul R., “The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature,” Critical Inquiry 12 (Autumn 1985): 5987CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and JanMohamed, Abdul and Lloyd, David, “Introduction: Toward a Theory of Minority Discourse,” Cultural Critique, no. 6 (Spring 1987): 512, cf. no. 7 (Fall 1987): 5–17.Google Scholar

For recent contributions to problems of “post-colonial discourse,” cf., e.g., Slemon, Stephen, “Monuments of Empire: Allegory/Counter-Discourse/Post-Colonial Writing,” Kunapipi 9, no. 3 (1987): 116Google Scholar; and “Post-Colonial Allegory and the Transformation of History,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 23, no. 1 (1988): 157–68Google Scholar; Tiffin, Helen, “Post-Colonial Literatures and Counter-Discourse,” Kunapipi 9, no. 3 (1987): 1734Google Scholar; and “Post-Colonialism, Post-Modernism and the Rehabilitation of Post-Colonial History,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 23, no. 1 (1988): 169–81Google Scholar; and the contributions to the Spring 1990 issue of Research in African Literatures, vol. 21Google Scholar (I thank my colleague Dieter Riemenschneider for bringing these essays to my attention).

47. Spivak, Gayatri, “The Politics of Interpretations,” Critical Inquiry 11 (1982): 277Google Scholar, reprinted in In Other Worlds, pp. 118–33.Google Scholar

48. Johnson, , “Thresholds of Difference,” pp. 289, cf. 279, 285Google Scholar. Cf. Johnson, Barbara and Gates, Henry Louis Jr., “A Black and Idiomatic Free Indirect Discourse,” in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God: Modern Critical Interpretations, ed. Bloom, Harold (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), pp. 7385.Google Scholar

49. de Lauretis, Teresa, Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 7, 15, 186.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

50. Carby, Hazel V., Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 15, 179 n. 34.Google Scholar

51. Modleski, Tania, “Some Functions of Feminist Criticism, or The Scandal of the Mute Body,” October, no. 49 (Summer 1989): 1114.Google Scholar

52. Modleski, , “Some Functions of Feminist Criticism,” pp. 8, 11, 1520, 2122Google Scholar. See Bhabha, Homi, “The Commitment to Theory,” p. 7Google Scholar. For a more detailed discussion of feminist criticism and black criticism, see my essay “Reconstructing American Literary Studies,” part 4.

53. Bercovitch, , “The Problem of Ideology,” p. 639Google Scholar, cf. “America as Canon and Context: Literary History in a Time of Dissensus,” American Literature 58 (1986): 99107Google Scholar, and his “Afterword,” in Ideology and Classic American Literature, ed. Bercovitch, Sacvan and Jehlen, Myra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 418–46Google Scholar. See also Kolodny, Annette, “The Integrity of Memory: Creating a New Literary History of the United States,” American Literature 57 (1985): 291307.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

54. For a critical analysis of the dangers and the potential of the “new pluralism” see Bercovitch, , “Afterword,” Ideology and Classic American Literature, pp. 437–39Google Scholar. Cf. my essay “Reconstructing American Literary Studies,” part 5.

55. White, Hayden, “The Context in the Text: Method and Ideology in Intellectual History,” The Content of the Form, pp. 185213Google Scholar; and Jameson, Fredric, The Political Unconscious, pp. 76, 98, and passim.Google Scholar

56. Bercovitch, , “America as Canon and Context,” p. 101Google Scholar, and “The Problem of Ideology in American Literary History,” pp. 634, 650Google Scholar; cf. his “Preface,” in Bercovitch, Sacvan, ed., Reconstructing American Literary History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. viix.Google Scholar

57. Clifford, James, “Introduction: Partial Truths,”Google Scholar in Clifford, and Marcus, , Writing Culture, p. 2.Google Scholar

58. “Life history” as cultural construction and performance is most stimulatingly discussed in Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett's essay “Authoring Lives,” in Life History as Cultural Construction/Performance, ed. Hofer, Tamás and Niedermüller, Péter (Budapest, 1988), pp. 133–78Google Scholar. See also Myerhoff, Barbara, “Telling One's Story,” The Center Magazine 12 (03 1980): 2240.Google Scholar

59. Shostak, Marjorie, Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981; rept. New York: Vintage Books, 1983), p. 21Google Scholar, cf. p. 5, subsequently quoted with page numbers in the text. For critical comments on Nisa cf. Clifford, and Marcus, , Writing Culture, pp. 4246, 103109Google Scholar, and Marcus, and Fischer, , Anthropology as Cultural Critique, pp. 5759.Google Scholar

60. See the radical critique of the treatment of the Third World – and especially of Third World women - in Western feminism and anthropology in Amadiume, Ifi, Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society (London and New Jersey: Zed Books, 1987).Google Scholar

61. Gwaltney, John Langston, Drylongso: A Self-Portrait of Black America (New York: Random House, 1980), pp. xxiif, xxxGoogle Scholar. The concepts of “native anthropology” in a “colonial/postcolonial context” is discussed in Jones, Delmos J., “Towards a Native Anthropology,” Human Organization 29 (1970): 251–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also several contributions to The Politics of Anthropology, ed. Huizer, G. and Mannheim, B. (The Hague/Paris: Mouton, 1979).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

62. Gwaltney, , Drylongso, pp. xivxvi.Google Scholar

63. See Gwaltney, John L., “The Propriety of Field Work: A Native Assessment,” Black Scholar 12 (0506 1981); 1928CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “Common Sense and Science: Urban Core Black Observations,” in Anthropologists at Home inNorth America: Methods and Issues in the Study of One's Own Society, ed. Messerschmidt, Donald A. (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 4661Google Scholar. A different version of the first essay appeared in Black Scholar 11 (0910 1980): 3239.Google Scholar

64. Golden, Marita, Migrations of the Heart: An Autobiography (New York: Ballantine Books, 1983), pp. 200, 222, 226, 237.Google Scholar

65. Golden, , Migrations of the Heart, pp. 239f., 244Google Scholar. It would be very rewarding to compare Golden's autobiography with the novels of Buchi Emecheta.

66. See Fischer, Michael M. J., “Ethnicity and the Post-Modern Arts of Memory,”Google ScholarClifford, and Marcus, , Writing Culture, p. 196Google Scholar, on Migrations of the Heart cf. pp. 215–18.Google Scholar

67. Walker, Alice in Tate, Claudia, ed., Black Women Writers at Work (New York: Continuum, 1983), pp. 176, 184Google Scholar, and her novel Meridian (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1976; rept. New York: Pocket Books, 1977), pp. 28, 201.Google Scholar

68. Walker, Alice, “Finding Celie's Voice,” Ms. 14 (12 1985): 72Google Scholar. For a brilliant exposition of Walker's “rewriting” of the black “speakerly text” and of Hurston, 's Their Eyes Were Watching God in The Color PurpleGoogle Scholar, see Gates, , The Signifying Monkey, ch. 7.Google Scholar

69. Walker, Alice, The Color Purple (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982)Google Scholar, quoted from the paperback edition by Pocket Books (New York, 1985), pp. 138, 145, 154–60, 161–62, 167, 175, 234, 236, 238, 242–43, 245, 248, 284–86.

70. Byerman, Keith, Fingering the Jagged Grain: Tradition and Form in Recent Black Fiction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), pp. 168–69.Google Scholar

71. For a more extensive discussion of Walker's fiction-and of Bambara, 's The Salt-EatersGoogle Scholar — see my essay “History, Folk Tradition, and Fictional Voice: Die schwarze Südstaatenliteratur seit dem Civil Rights Movement,” Gulliver, no. 21 (1987): 93113.Google Scholar

72. Bambara, Toni Cade, The Salt-Eaters (New York: Random House, 1980), pp. 198, 210, 249.Google Scholar

73. Bambara, , The Salt-Eaters, pp. 65, 93, 161, 199f., 264Google Scholar; see ya Salaam, Kalamu, “Searching for the Mother Tongue: An Interview with Toni Cade Bambara,” First World 2, no. 4 (1980): 48, 50Google Scholar; Bambara, in Tate, , Black Women Writers at Work, p. 29Google Scholar; and Traylor, Eleanor, “Music as Theme: The Jazz Mode in the Works of Toni Cade Bambara,” in Black Women Writers (1950–1980), ed. Evans, Mari (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1983), pp. 5870.Google Scholar

74. Bambara, in Salaam, , p. 48Google Scholar, and in Tate, , Black Women Writers at Work, pp. 30, 32Google Scholar, and in Bambara, , “Salvation Is the Issue,”Google Scholar in Evans, , Black Women Writers, pp. 43, 45, 47.Google Scholar

75. Bambara, , The Salt-Eaters, pp. 114, 290, cf. 270.Google Scholar

76. Geertz, Clifford, “Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Social Thought,” American Scholar 49 (Spring 1980): 166Google Scholar. For a further elaboration of “cultural mapping” in the postmodern context, cf. Jameson, , “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Capitalism.”Google Scholar