This review surveys an emergent methodological trend in anthropological research that concerns the adaptation of long-standing modes of ethnographic practices to more complex objects of study. Ethnography moves from its conventional single-site location, contextualized by macro-constructions of a larger social order, such as the capitalist world system, to multiple sites of observation and participation that cross-cut dichotomies such as the “local” and the “global,” the “lifeworld” and the “system.” Resulting ethnographies are therefore both in and out of the world system. The anxieties to which this methodological shift gives rise are considered in terms of testing the limits of ethnography, attenuating the power of fieldwork, and losing the perspective of the subaltern. The emergence of multi-sited ethnography is located within new spheres of interdisciplinary work, including media studies, science and technology studies, and cultural studies broadly. Several “tracking” strategies that shape multi-site...

http://anthro.vancouver.wsu.edu/media/Course_files/anth-490-edward-h-hagen/marcus-1995-ethnography-in-of-the-world-system_the-emergence-of-multi-sited-ethnography.pdf

Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography

萨义德以其独特的双重身份,对西方中心权力话语做了分析,通过对文学作品、演讲演说等文本的解读,将O rie n ta lis m——"东方学",做了三重释义:一门学科、一种思维方式和一种权力话语系统,对东方学权力话语做了系统的批判,同时将东方学放入空间维度对东方学文本做了细致的解读。

萨义德的“Orientalism”释义

By Pierre Bourdieu (London: Routledge, 2010), xxx + 607 pp. £15.99 paper. A combination of social theory, statistical data, illustrations, and interviews, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judg...

Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste

Scholars have vacillated for centuries between two opposing assessments of the role of poetics in social life. A long tradition of thinking about language and society argues that verbal art provides a central dynamic force in shaping linguistic structure and linguistic study. This position emerges clearly in the writings of Vico, Herder, and von Humboldt; attention from Sapir, the Russian "Formalists," and members of the Prague School to the role of poetics contributed to the development of performance studies and ethnopoe­ tics in the last two decades. Nonetheless, poetics has often been marginalized by anthropologists and linguists who believe that aesthetic uses of language are merely parasitic upon such "core" areas of linguistics as phonology, syntax, and semantics, or upon such anthropological fields as economy and social organization. The balance between these two views shifted in favor of poetics in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a new emphasis on performance directed attention away from study of the formal patterning and symbolic content of texts to the emergence of verbal art in the social interaction between performers and

Poetics and performance as critical perspectives on language and social life

Frantz Fanon’s explosive Black Skin, White Masks is a merciless expose of the psychological damage done by colonial rule across the world. Using Fanon’s incisive analytical abilities to expose the consequences of colonialism on the psyches of colonized peoples, it is both a crucial text in post-colonial theory, and a lesson in the power of analytical skills to reveal the realities that hide beneath the surface of things.  
Fanon was himself part of a colonized nation – Martinique – and grew up with the values and beliefs of French culture imposed upon him, while remaining relegated to an inferior status in society. Qualifying as a psychiatrist in France before working in Algeria (a French colony subject to brutal repression), his own experiences granted him a sharp insight into the psychological problems associated with colonial rule.  
Like any good analytical thinker, Fanon’s particular skill was in breaking things down and joining dots. His analysis of colonial rule exposed its implicit assumptions – and how they were replicated in colonised populations – allowing Fanon to unpick the hidden reasons behind his own conflicted psychological make up, and those of his patients. Unflinchingly clear-sighted in doing so, Black Skin White Masks remains a shocking read today.

An Analysis of Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks

The Pintupi, a hunting-and-gathering people of Australia's Western Desert, were among the last Aborigines to come into contact with white society. Despite their extended relocation in central Australian settlements, they have managed to preserve much of their traditional culture and social organization. This book presents a comprehensive ethnographic interpretation of the ways in which Pintupi politics, cosmology, kinship systems, nomadic patterns, and social values reinforce and sometimes contradict each other.

Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: Sentiment, Place, and Politics among Western Desert Aborigines

Painting Culture tells the complex story of how, over the past three decades, the acrylic "dot" paintings of central Australia were transformed into objects of international high art, eagerly sought by upscale galleries and collectors. Since the early 1970s, Fred R. Myers has studied—often as a participant-observer—the Pintupi, one of several Aboriginal groups who paint the famous acrylic works. Describing their paintings and the complicated cultural issues they raise, Myers looks at how the paintings represent Aboriginal people and their culture and how their heritage is translated into exchangeable values. He tracks the way these paintings become high art as they move outward from indigenous communities through and among other social institutions—the world of dealers, museums, and critics. At the same time, he shows how this change in the status of the acrylic paintings is directly related to the initiative of the painters themselves and their hopes for greater levels of recognition.

Painting Culture describes in detail the actual practice of painting, insisting that such a focus is necessary to engage directly with the role of the art in the lives of contemporary Aboriginals. The book includes a unique local art history, a study of the complete corpus of two painters over a two-year period. It also explores the awkward local issues around the valuation and sale of the acrylic paintings, traces the shifting approaches of the Australian government and key organizations such as the Aboriginal Arts Board to the promotion of the work, and describes the early and subsequent phases of the works’ inclusion in major Australian and international exhibitions. Myers provides an account of some of the events related to these exhibits, most notably the Asia Society’s 1988 "Dreamings" show in New York, which was so pivotal in bringing the work to North American notice. He also traces the approaches and concerns of dealers, ranging from semi-tourist outlets in Alice Springs to more prestigious venues in Sydney and Melbourne.

With its innovative approach to the transnational circulation of culture, this book will appeal to art historians, as well as those in cultural anthropology, cultural studies, museum studies, and performance studies.

Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art

Fred R. Myers, Representing Culture: The Production of Discourse for Aboriginal Acylic Paintings Steve Feld, From Schizophonia to Schismogenesis:The Discourses and Practices of World Music and World Beat Lynn Hart, Three Walls: Regional Aesthetics and the International Art World Christopher B. Steiner, The Art of the Trade: On the Creation of Value and Authenticity in the African Art Market Molly H. Mullin, The Patronage of Difference: Making Indian Art "Art, Not Ethnology" George E. Marcus, The Power of Contemporary Work in an American Art Tradition to Illuminate its Own Power Relations Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Confusing Pleasures Judith L. Goldstein, The Female Aesthetic Community Nancy Sullivan, Inside Trading: Postmodernism and the Social Drama of Sunflowers in the 1980s Art World Carol S. Vance, Four Essays Hal Foster, The Artist as Ethnographer?

The traffic in culture : refiguring art and anthropology

Representing a new wave of thinking about material culture studies-a topic long overdue for reevaluation-the essays in this volume take a fresh look at the relationship between material culture and exchange theory and illuminate the changing patterns of cultural flow in an increasingly global economy and the cultural differences registered in "regimes of value." The Empire of Things includes an extensive interview with the late Annette B.Weiner, whose work on exchange theory still inspires contemporary material culture studies. The contributors deconstruct the traditional opposition between "gift" and "commodity" and between supposedly "alienable" and "inalienable" objects in ceremonies of exchange-whether on the island of Sumba or among middle-class shoppers in North London. They show how objects can become symbols of national identity, in cases ranging from artworks in Australia to lost body parts of past Mexican presidents.They reveal how the movement of objects through different contexts, across borders, or through art exhibitions exposes contradictions and shifting meanings for different constituencies.

The empire of things : regimes of value and material culture

When I was returning to Central Australia in July of 1988, I noticed an unusual woman on the plane from Sydney to Alice Springs, the heart of Australia's "Outback" where the clothing tends to range from tourist sweat suits and reeboks, to country western style outfits with R. M. Williams stockman's boots, to hippie-traveler casual. Compared to most of the passengers, this woman was dramatically overdressed-wearing fine gold-colored Italian leather sandals, scarlet nailpolish, and a kaftan style designer jacket and trousers made of dark silk. She was accompanied by a man with long black hair drawn back in a ponytail, a black goatee and mustache, and a long black duster coat-the combined effect evoked a late 19th-century studio artist from the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. Leaving the plane, I wondered what these people, who seemed ready for a gallery party in Sydney, could be doing in the frontier town of Alice Springs, particularly since they seemed to know their way around. An hour later, dressed in my uniform of choice, a denim shirt and jeans, I stopped in to greet old friends at the shop of the Papunya Tula Artists company, where I was introduced to the mystery woman. She was Gabrielle Pizzi, the Mel bourne art dealer who is the principal distributor of the acrylic paintings produced by the Aboriginal people with whom I have been working since 1973. Our different ideas about attire for meeting Aboriginal artists in the Outback emphasized our differences. Ironically, my discomfort with their entry into a domain I had considered refreshingly remote from the pretensions of our own society's high culture lead me to examine the world from which they came. Back in New York, in May of 1989 the John Weber Gallery in Soho had a show of Papunya Tula Artists' work, and as I waited there one afternoon to interview the gallery owner, I was jarred by hearing a visitor to the gallery talk with familiarity of Simon Tjakamarra's "colorism" and the decline of Clifford Pos-

Fred Myers

Papers

Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: Sentiment, Place, and Politics among Western Desert Aborigines

Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art

The traffic in culture : refiguring art and anthropology

The empire of things : regimes of value and material culture

Representing Culture: The Production of Discourse(s) for Aboriginal Acrylic Paintings