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Anthropology / History

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Central Sites, Peripheral Visions Cultural and Institutional Crossings in the History of Anthropology Edited by Richard Handler History of Anthropology (VOLUME ELEVEN) Richard Handler, Series Editor “Four substantive, edgy essays are matched with George Stocking’s tour de force depiction of an ‘ordinary’ mid-century anthropologist persecuted as a Communist by the FBI. The multiple avenues of exploration opened in this work will be traveled for some time to come.” —Michael Lambek, University of Toronto Central Sites, Peripheral Visions presents five case studies that explore the dilemmas, moral as well as political, that emerge out of anthropology’s unique positon as both control and periphery. From David Koester’s analysis of how ethnographic descriptions of Iceland marginalized that country's population, to Kath Weston’s account of an offshore penal colony where officials mixed prison work with ethnographic pursuits, from Brad Evans’s reflections on the “bohemianism” of both the Harlem vogue and American anthropology, to Arthur J. Ray’s study of anthropologists who serve as expert witnesses in legal cases, the essays in the eleventh volume of the History of Anthropology series reflect on anthropology’s always problematic status as centrally peripheral, or peripherally central. Finally, George W. Stocking, Jr., in a contribution that is almost a book in its own right, traces the professional trajectory of American anthropologist Robert Gelston Armstrong, who was unceremoniously expelled from his position at the University of Chicago because of his communist sympathies in the 1950s. By taking up Armstrong’s unfinished business decades later, Stocking engages in an extended meditation on the relationship between center and periphery and offers “a kind of posthumous reparation,” a page in the history of the discipline for a distant colleague who might otherwise have remained in the footnotes. Richard Handler is professor of anthropology at the University of Virginia. He is author of Critics against Culture and Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec, and coauthor of Jane Austen and the Fiction of Culture and The New History in an Old Museum. Media & bookseller inquiries regarding review copies, events, and interviews can be directed to the publicity department at publicity@uwpress.wisc.edu or (608) 263-0734. (If you want to examine a book for possible course use, please see our Course Books page. If you want to examine a book for possible rights licensing, please see Rights & Permissions.)

December 2006 LC: 2006008623 GN 448 pp. 6 x 9 13 b/w photos, 2 illus. Cloth $24.95 s ISBN 978-0-299-21920-8 ADD TO CART

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