Description
Book SynopsisA theoretical argument that anthropology has developed a concept of culture that reproduces some of the essentialisms of racism while making it difficult for the field to adequately address race.
Trade Review“Visweswaran proves herself an exceptional scholar and forward thinker in her analysis of works by philosophers, intellectuals and scholars. She diagnoses the symptoms of the disease that affects cultural, gender and race related issues and provides potential solutions to curing them. An extraordinary work by an extraordinarily gifted author with a passion for her subject.” - Danielle Mulholland,
M/C Reviews“Visweswaran’s project is challenging and important in confronting the ways in which cultural difference has been, and is, used as a substitute for broader issues of inequality, exclusion, and racial discrimination. . . .
Un/Common Cultures provides a crucial and welcome challenge to the discipline’s airbrushed colonial heritages and selective amnesia, and a broader provocation to rethink the consequences of culture-thought and culture-talk in the contemporary world.” - Claire Alexander,
Ethnic and Racial Studies“
Un/common Cultures is a profound and important book, a major intervention in cultural studies, anthropology, and feminist and South Asian studies. It has all the hallmarks of Kamala Visweswaran’s work—impeccable scholarship and a keen sense of purpose that is both activist and intellectual.”—
R. Radhakrishnan, author of
History, the Human, and the World Between“In
Un/common Cultures Kamala Visweswaran provides an acute, historically informed diagnosis of the relative weakness of the culture concept so central to American anthropology, and a provocative and fascinating explanation of why, during the past two decades, other fields and interdisciplinary arenas have developed more cogent critiques of culture. This first-rate book will be read widely and generate much discussion.”—
George E. Marcus, co-author of
Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary“Visweswaran proves herself an exceptional scholar and forward thinker in her analysis of works by philosophers, intellectuals and scholars. She diagnoses the symptoms of the disease that affects cultural, gender and race related issues and provides potential solutions to curing them. An extraordinary work by an extraordinarily gifted author with a passion for her subject.” -- Danielle Mulholland * M/C Reviews *
“Visweswaran’s project is challenging and important in confronting the ways in which cultural difference has been, and is, used as a substitute for broader issues of inequality, exclusion, and racial discrimination. . . .
Un/Common Cultures provides a crucial and welcome challenge to the discipline’s airbrushed colonial heritages and selective amnesia, and a broader provocation to rethink the consequences of culture-thought and culture-talk in the contemporary world.” -- Claire Alexander * Ethnic and Racial Studies *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Introduction. Un/common Cultures: Racism and the Rearticulation of Cultural Differenceq 1
1. Wild West Anthropology and the Disciplining of Gender 18
2. Race and the Culture of Anthropology 52
3. The Interventions of Culture: Claude Lévi Strauss and the Internationalization of the Modern Concept of Race 74
4. On Louis Dumont: Is There a Structural Analysis of Racism? 103
5. India in South Africa: Counter-genealogies for a Subaltern Sociology 131
6. Legacies of Culture, Languages of the State 164
7. Gendered States: Culture as a Site of South Asian Human-Rights Work 189
Epilogue. The Traffic in Social Movements: Narmada, Bhopal, Texas 213
Notes 227
Bibliography 283
Index 319
