Description
Book SynopsisExploring links between ritual and reading, focusing on commentaries about the seclusion of menstruating women in Native American culture, trance dances in Bali, and circumcision (or lack of it) in contrasting religions, this work considers the ironies of "first-person ethnography" by telling stories from the author's own fieldwork.
Trade Review"James Boon is one of this country's most exciting theorists and practitioners of cultural comparativism. The book is an exemplary work on, and of, cultural translation and the hazards thereof. It is marvelously conceived, brilliantly executed, and almost astonishing in the range of its erudition."
—Marc Manganaro, Rutgers University"At a moment when much of 'cultural studies' proceeds without a broadly comparativist framework and in opposition to anthropological relativism, Boon embraces both. This is important and gutsy-and it is done with a genuine sense of pleasure and even beauty. There is really nothing else quite like this work."
—Daniel A. Segal, Pitzer CollegeTable of ContentsList of IllustrationsPreface: AnThoreaupology: An InvitationRehearsals3An Endlessly Extra-Vagant Scholar: Kenneth Burke3A Similar Genre: Opera9Plus Melville, Cavell, Commodity-Life; Showbiz14Pt. 1Rituals, Rereading, Rhetorical Turns21Ch. 1Re Menses: Rereading Ruth Benedict, Ultraobjectively23Ch. 2Of Foreskins: (Un)Circumcision, Religious Histories, Difficult Description (Montaigne/Remondino)43Ch. 3About a Footnote: Between-the-Wars Bali: Its Relics Regained73Interlude: Essay-etudes and Tristimania97Pt. 2Multimediations: Coincidence, Memory, Magics101Ch. 4Cosmopolitan Moments: As-if Confessions of an Ethnographer-Tourist (Echoey "Cosmomes")103Ch. 5Why Museums Make Me Sad (Eccentric Musings)124Ch. 6Litterytoor 'n' Anthropolygee: An Experimental Wedding of Incongruous Styles from Mark Twain and Marcel Mauss143Pt. 3Cross-over Studies, Seriocomic Critique167A Little Polemic, Quizzically169Ch. 7Against Coping Across Cultures: Self-help Semiotics Rebuffed176Ch. 8Errant Anthropology, with Apologies to Chaucer191Ch. 9Margins and Hierarchies and Rhetorics That Subjugate198Ch. 10Evermore Derrida, Always the Same (What Gives?)211Ch. 11Taking Torgovnick as She Takes Others221Ch. 12Rerun (1980s): Mary Douglas's Grid/Group Grilled230Ch. 13Update (1990s): Coca-Cola Consumes Baudrillard, and a Balinese (Putu) Consumes Coca-Cola249Encores and Envoi: Burke, Cavell, etc., Unforgotten263Acknowledgments and Credits279Notes283References315Index357
