Culture, Power, Place

Anthropology has traditionally relied on a spatially localised society or culture as its object of study. The essays in "Culture, Power, Place" demonstrate how in recent years this anthropological convention and its attendant assumptions about identity and cultural difference have undergone a series of important challenges. In light of increasing mass migration and the transnational cultural flows of a late capitalist, postcolonial world, the contributors to this volume examine shifts in anthropological thought regarding issues of identity, place, power, and resistance. This collection of both new and well-known essays begins by critically exploring the concepts of locality and community; first, as they have had an impact on contemporary global understandings of displacement and mobility, and, second, as they have had a part in defining identity and subjectivity itself.With sites of discussion ranging from a democratic Spain to a Puerto Rican barrio in North Philadelphia, from Burundian Hutu refugees in Tanzania to Asian landscapes in rural California, from the silk factories of Hangzhou to the long-sought-after home of the Palestinians, these essays examine the interplay between changing schemes of categorisation and the discourses of difference on which these concepts are based. The effect of the placeless mass media on our understanding of place and the forces that make certain identities viable in the world and others not are also discussed, as are the intertwining of place-making, identity, and resistance as they interact with the meaning and consumption of signs.Contesting the classical idea of culture as the shared, the agreed upon, and the orderly, the contributors consider the complex and sometimes ironic political processes through which cultural forms are imposed, invented, reworked, and transformed. An important intervention in the discipline of anthropology, "Culture, Power, Place" will be read by students and scholars in the fields of anthropology, history, postcolonial and cultural studies, geography, sociology, and history. The contributors include: George E. Bisharat, John Borneman, Rosemary J. Coombe, Mary M. Crain, James Ferguson, Akhil Gupta, Kristin Koptiuch, Karen Leonard, Richard Maddox, Lisa H. Malkki, John Durham Peters, and Lisa Rofel.