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Notes on Sources In this book I have made what I consider to be fairly obvious (at least to anthropologists) points about the nature of culture, about the relationship between anthropological models of the cultural and fieldwork, and of the way these models emerge out of contrasts—far too often between a reified “us” and a stereotyped “them,” but also crucially in comparisons among societies differently situated in cultural space. The points are obvious and have been made since anthropology matured as a discipline as early as the 1930s and 1940s. Because of this I have tried to allude primarily to canonical authors and canonical texts (e.g. Benedict 1934, 1946; Boas 1911, 1940; Evans-Pritchard, 1937, 1940; Malinowski 1922, 1927; Mead 1928, 1935) that I would count as making up a core reading list for someone interested in understanding the contours of cultural anthropology. To this list I would add a fairly extensive sample of the writings of Clifford Geertz (e.g., Geertz 1968, 1973, 1983, 1988, 1995), whose work I feel epitomizes anthropology’s apogee (see Ortner 1999). I also refer to a handful of scholars in other disciplines—in history and in sociology (e.g., Bennett 1995; Bourdieu 1984; Laqueur 1990) who reveal the transdisciplinary nature of basic concepts and research agendas. In writing about the Lauje I draw on the work more extensively covered in Nourse (1999). In general, I wanted to avoid the cacophony of citation and footnotes, so I keep these to a minimum. In addition to specific sources I cite and the books cited above I also add a handful of references in the notes on each chapter as a resource for students—excerpts from which would have made up a kind of reading list I am imagining I would assign for a year-long seminar for undergraduates or for a reading group composed of people with college educations who want to learn about our discipline. The list would be short enough to be manageable. But it would also cover the major issues and themes. Other anthropologists will have their lists; there will be considerable overlap but also much divergence. We are after all an anarchic and egalitarian discipline. 211 Notes on Sources 212 Introduction: Culture by Contrast and Theory in Anthropology “Culture by contrast” is a phrase I borrow from Deborah Kaspin, who used it in her Introduction to Cultural Anthropology course as a mnemonic to talk about the ways a theory of culture emerged in a contrastive relationship to other theories of human behavior—biology being the most salient—and that the idea of culture only exists in terms of its contrasts. She planned to write a book built around the way culture emerges out of this field of contrasting ideas. Culture, as she argued, could never be a stand-alone concept. I borrowed the phrase when I substituted for her while she took a sabbatical—and have made of it something much less sophisticated than she had envisaged. Among the several good introductory texts I recommend to my students are Lassiter (2006) and Metcalf (2005), as well as a very accessible collection of essays by Shweder (2003). In these and other texts of the genre one will get useful summaries of holism, fieldwork, cultural relativism, and ethnocentrism, not to mention culture and society—anthropology’s core concepts if you will. We all tend to say much the same things about these terms and we have not really changed our collective tune since the mid-twentieth century. As will be obvious in this and subsequent chapters, I find many of the chapters in Geertz (1973; see also 1983) foundational to my approach. Geertz is arguably the most influential anthropologist of the late twentieth century. When scholars in other disciplines, particularly in the more humanistically oriented of the social studies broadly conceived, look to anthropology for insight, they start with Geertz. For an overview of the Geertzian concept of culture in the discipline, and critiques of that concept, see Ortner (1999) and Gable and Handler (2008). For a historical sketch of the development of the “idea of culture” more generally, see Eagleton (2000). For a good history of the development of social anthropology, see Kuper (1973). Also see Kuper (1999) for a critical appraisal of American cultural anthropology generally, especially the work of Geertz and Sahlins. But read Sahlins (1999a, 1999b) for a defense. Other works—Ortner and Whitehead (1981), Clifford and Marcus (1986), Marcus and Fisher (1986), Clifford (1988), and Handler...

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