Description
Book SynopsisChallenges the routine ways in which anthropologists have thought about the complexity and quantity of their materials, focusing on a problem normally thought of as commonplace; that of scale and proportion. This book reveals unexpected replications in modes of thought and in the presentation of ambiguous images.
Trade ReviewStrathern's central insight is that much unexplored ground lies between difference and identity, between the many and the one: that is to say, that there are alternatives to the apparently insoluble dichotomies of society and the individual, holism and atomism, comparison and ethnography. This book is provocative and pathbreaking, both as a search for an escape from these antinomies, and as a critique of the intellectual practices which give rise to them. -- Simon Harrison, University of Ulster at Coleraine * Man, Vol. 27, Sept. 1992 *
On its initial publication in 1991, Partial Connections provided a bracing, subtle, and brilliantly wrought complex of forays into questions at the center of anthropology, among them history, comparison, representation, and the productively partial character of our shared enterprise. On rereading more than ten years later, it speaks with even greater clarity and insight to anthropological practice. Fresh, brilliant, and deeply rewarding, this is a contemporary classic. -- Donald Brenneis, University of California, Santa Cruz
Strathern's Partial Connections, perhaps her most theoretically exhilarating and accessible work to date, offers a potent antidote to any disenchanting effects of the comparative project in anthropology...More than a spectacular collection of provocative throught bites, Partial Connections has far-reaching implications for the way we think about the future of anthropology, and about problems of authoring and athorizing criteria for comparison...This is essential reading for serious students of cultural criticism and, quite simply, a brilliant piece of anthropological discourse -- Debbora Battaglia, Mount Holyoke College * American Anthropologist, Vol. 95, 1993 *
Table of ContentsPart 1 Writing Anthropology Chapter 2 Ethnography as Evocation Chapter 3 Complex society; incomplete knowledge Chapter 4 Feminist critique Chapter 5 Intrusions and comparisons Part 6 Partial Connections Chapter 7 Full of trees, full of flutes Chapter 8 Center and periphery Chapter 9 Historical critique Chapter 10 Prosthetic extensions
