Anthropology's Wake Attending to the End of Culture [Hardcover]

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 anthropologys 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 anthropologys 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 anthropologys 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.

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.

Anthropology?s 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
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