Culture, Economy, Power

Anthropology as Critique, Anthropology as Praxis

Edited by Winnie Lem & Belinda Leach

Subjects: Anthropology
Series: SUNY series in Anthropological Studies of Contemporary Issues
Paperback : 9780791452905, 319 pages, April 2002
Hardcover : 9780791452899, 319 pages, April 2002

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Table of contents

1. Introduction
Winnie Lem and Belinda Leach

Part 1: Nations and Knowledge

2. Bicentrism, Culture, and the Political Economy of Sociocultural Anthropology in English Canada
Thomas Dunk

3. The Political Economy of Political Economy in Spanish Anthropology
Susana Narotzky

4. Anthropological Debates and the Crisis of Mexican Nationalism
Guillermo de la Peña

5. Political Economy in the United States
William Roseberry

6. "A Small Discipline": The Embattled Place of Anthropology in a Massified British Higher Education Sector
John Gledhill

Part 2: States and Subjects

7. Sentiment and Structure: Nation and State
Dipankar Gupta

8. Communists Communists Everywhere!: Forgetting the Past and Living with History in Ecuador
Steve Striffler

9. "We Were the Strongest Ones Here": Transformed Livelihoods in Contemporary Spain
Claudia Vicencio

10. The Italian Post-Communist Left and Unemployment: Finding a New Position on Labor
Michael Blim

11. The Language of Contention in Liberal Ecuador
A. Kim Clark

Part 3: Hegemonies and Histories

12. The Decline of Patriarchy? The Political Economy of Patriarchy: Maquiladoras in Yucatan, Mexico
Marie France Labrecque

13. Remembering "The Ancient Ones": Memory, Hegemony, and the Shadows of State Terror in the Argentinean Chaco
Gastón Gordillo

14. Class, Discipline, and the Politics of Opposition in Ontario
Belinda Leach

15. Militant Particularism and Cultural Struggles as Cape Breton Burns Again
Pauline Gardiner Barber

16. Acquiescence and Quiescence: Gender and Politics in Rural Languedoc
Winnie Lem

17. Red Flags and Lace Coiffes: Identity, Livelihood, and the Politics of Survival in the Bigoudennie, France
Charles R. Menzies

18. Out of Site: The Horizons of Collective Identity
Gavin Smith

References

Contributors

Index

Confronts major questions facing anthropology, Marxist theory, cultural studies, feminism, and history.

Description

Grounded in a conviction that anthropological knowledge implies critique and that engaging in anthropology is also ultimately an act of praxis, various contributors explore the ways in which the precepts of Marxism continue to illuminate and enhance our understanding of culture, economy, and politics. They focus on the question of epistemology to examine the process of anthropological intellectual production in different national settings and analyze the ways in which hierarchies of power and forms of state domination figure in the formation of subjectivities in different ethnographic contexts. The authors also reflect upon how class, gender, ethnicity, racialized forms of ethnicity, as well as regional and national identities, are configured through the relationships involved in making a living under late capitalism.

Winnie Lem is Associate Professor of Comparative Development Studies at Trent University and the author of Cultivating Dissent: Work, Identity, and Praxis in Rural Languedoc, also published by SUNY Press. Belinda Leach is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Guelph.

Reviews

"Anthropology has, until recently, often been all materialism or all culture. The articles here make an important contribution to the integration of the two. Many of the chapters represent very significant innovations in approaching questions of memory, discourse, inequality, and globalization. The collection is particularly unique and significant in its contribution to the analysis of anthropology and power. " — Frances Abrahamer Rothstein, coeditor of Anthropology and the Global Factory: Studies of the New Industrialization in the Late Twentieth Century