Anthropology's Wake - by David E Johnson & Scott Michaelsen (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Posing a powerful challenge to dominant trends in cultural analysis, this book covers the whole history of the concept of culture, providing the broadest study of this notion to date. Johnson and Michaelsen examine the principal methodological strategies or metaphors of anthropology in the past two decades (embodied in works by Edward Said, James Clifford, George Marcus, V. Y. Mudimbe, and others) and argues that they do not manage to escape anthropology's grounding in representational practices. To the extent that it remains a practice of representation, anthropology, however complex, critical, or self-reflexive, cannot avoid objectifying its others.

Extending beyond a critique of anthropology, the book reads the twinned notions of the human and culture across the long history of the human sciences broadly conceived, including anthropology, cultural studies, history, literature, and philosophy. Although there is no chance, they argue, for a "new" anthropology that would not repeat the old anthropology's problem of disciplining the other, they also recognize that there may be no way out of anthropology. We are always writing, thinking, and living in anthropology's wake, within its specific compass or horizon. Moreover, they demonstrate, we have been doing so for a very long time, since at least the beginning of the institution of philosophy in Plato and Aristotle.

Review Quotes

"Johnson and Michaelsen seek not so much to bury anthropology as to alert us to its many afterlives. Through a series of philosophically searching readings that range breathtakingly from Plato and Aristotle to Clifford Geertz, Descartes to Renato Rosaldo, Lafitau and Heidegger to Marcel Griaule, racial science to postcolonial hybridity, Kant and Rousseau to Fernando Ortiz and Enrique Dussell, they rigorously uncover anthropology's continuing involvement in a problematic politics of representation that it disavows at the same time. Anthropology's Wake will not only shake us out of our anthropological slumbers, it will provoke us to question the very raison d'etre of the human sciences." [If you think it's a
bit too long, then some of the paired names in the second sentence can
be trimmed.]

-----Victor Li, University of Toronto

Anthropology is dead, long live anthropology! This brilliant study is at
once formally innovative (in its wry conflation of monologue and
dialogue, pairing essays by the two authors on the same topics) and
critically relentless in its exposure of the sleights-of-hand (the turn
to dialogue and to the emotions, the projection of an affirmative
hybridity) by which anthropology assures itself of a future out of its
own apparent extinction. What is examined here is not just an academic
subculture looking after its own interests but an entire cast of mind
that cannot resist or properly interrogate the urge to make the other
"something other than other", and which reproduces the foundational
pieties of 'the west' even as it claims to outflank them.

-----David Simpson, University of California, Davis

By delineating the epistemological possibilities and dead-ends of some foundational writings on culture and humanity, Johnson and Michaelsen have provided an admirably intelligent diagnosis of the critical condition of Western philosophical-anthropological thinking. Even more challengingly, they ask that we abandon the wish for a remedy in the form of a magical new beginning.---Rey Chow, Brown University

Anthropology's Wake is an engaging and wide-ranging critical analysis
of issues and problems endemic to the practice and logic of
representation in contemporary anthropology. It effectively locates
these contemporary discussions within the larger context of historical
and philosophical attempts to evoke the presence of the other.

-----Stephen Tyler, Rice University

Anthropology¹s Wake is fresh and innovative, featuring more than occasional
flourishes of brilliance. Throughout, it deploys a sophisticated toolkit to
unpack the tensions, imbrications, collusions, and collisions animating the
anthropological imagination. Of particular value is the way in which it
unsettles post-structural/post-colonial anthropology, especially recent
celebrations of self, dialogue, hybridity. Their approach to these issues is
refreshing and satisfying.

-----C. Richard King, Washington State University

A superb and much needed work of critical, collaborative scholarship.-----George Marcus, University of California, Irvine

An important, timely, and provocative intervention in contemporary discussions on the question of representation.-----Nahum Chandler, Tama University

Not against anthropology, but against cold-blooded sentimentality in contemporary anthropology, in cultural studies, and in other segments of the humanities. This is a brilliant critique that moves relentlessly through the notions of emotion, dialogue, and hybridity, and shows that contemporary discourse about otherness or cultural difference rarely fails to find its own abyss--and to fall into it. Is that a structural or an ideological feature of Western university discourse on the human, or on the other human? This book sinks its teeth in the very joint between the two possibilities. The results are provoking. In the wake of Anthropology's Wake good faith errors of judgment can no longer be claimed.-----Alberto Moreiras, University of Aberdeen

About the Author

David E. Johnson (Author)
David E. Johnson is Associate Professor and Chair of Comparative Literature at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. With Michaelsen, he is the co-editor of Border Theory: The Limits of Cultural Politics and of CR: The New Centennial Review, for which work they won the Phoenix Award for Significant Editorial Achievement from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals in 2002.

Scott Michaelsen (Author)
Scott Michaelsen is Associate Professor of English at Michigan State University. His current research is at the intersection of questions of anthropology, law, and political science. In addition to his projects with David E. Johnson, he is the author of The Limits of Multiculturalism: Interrogating the Origins of American Anthropology.