The vertigo of anthropology: review of Writing culture, by James Clifford and George Marcus

Abstract

Representation. This is certainly one of the keywords of the anthropological debate from the 1980s on, marked by an ontological turn within the human sciences and philosophy, and that was reflected at the time, in anthropology, in its best form, perhaps, in the publication of Writing Culture, 1986. The questions posed at the time, and which echo to this day, concerned the capacity and legitimacy that ethnography had to represent the other and, at the same time, whether such a task was desirable and/or even possible.