Culture Wars Context, Models and Anthropologists' Accounts [Hardcover]

The relationship between anthropologists ethnographic investigations and the lived social worlds in which these originate is a fundamental issue for anthropology. Where some claim that only native voices may offer authentic accounts of culture and hence that ethnographers are only ever interpreters of it, others point out that anthropologists are, themselves, implanted within specific cultural contexts which generate particular kinds of theoretical discussions. The contributors to this volume reject the premise that ethnographer and informant occupy different and incommensurable cultural worlds. Instead they investigate the relationship between culture, context, and anthropologists models and accounts in new ways. In doing so, they offer fresh insights into this key area of anthropological research.

an important and very interesting contribution to, first of all, critical and reflexive anthropology&Every chapter offers fresh insights into a key area of critical anthropology. Undoubtedly, the volume is very well organized, thoroughly substantiated, and interestingly written. I believe that the reviewed collection of articles is a distinguished, very useful, and sometimes provocative reading for all scholars concerned with a critical approach to social science and especially to social anthropology ? ??Anthropos

Deborah Jamesis Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics. Her research interests, focused on South Africa, include migration, ethnomusicology, ethnicity, property relations and the politics of land reform. She is author ofSongs of the Women Migrants: Performance and Identity in South Africa(Edinburgh University Press, 1999) and ofGaining Ground? Rights and Property in South African Land Reform(Routledge, 2007).

Acknowledgements

Introduction:Culture, context and anthropologists accounts
DeborlÃ