By James Clifford
The situation of tradition is a serious ethnography of the West in its altering relatives with different societies. examining cultural practices equivalent to anthropology, trip writing, gathering, and museum monitors of tribal artwork, Clifford exhibits authoritative bills of alternative methods of lifestyles to be contingent fictions, now actively contested in postcolonial contexts. His critique increases questions of worldwide value: Who has the authority to talk for any group's identification and authenticity? What are the basic parts and limits of a tradition? How do self and "the other" conflict within the encounters of ethnography, commute, and sleek interethnic kinfolk? In discussions of ethnography, surrealism, museums, and emergent tribal arts, Clifford probes the late-twentieth century difficulty of dwelling at the same time inside of, among, and after tradition.
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Extra resources for The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art
Example text
If one were inclined to follow the former, philosophy would “cease to be an argumentative discipline, and grow closer to poetry” (1967: 34). ” with a resounding “Yes,” and that we would come to look upon a post-philosophical culture as just as possible, and just as desirable, as a post-religious culture. We might come to see philosophy as a cultural disease which has been cured, just as many contemporary writers (notably Freudians) see religion as a cultural disease of which men are gradually being cured.
This must not be considered as a pointless attempt to turn Barthes into a kind of neopragmatist; rather, it allows one to see him as a 44 Romanticism and Pragmatism Bloomian and Rortyan strong poet shaping, in a truly idiosyncratic and creative manner, a postmetaphysical culture. It is crucial to understand that in a poeticized culture, literary criticism is the presiding intellectual discipline. Liberal ironists think of literary critics as moral advisers because the latter have read many books and are therefore acquainted with many different vocabularies.
Yet, only this radically detranscendentalized poeticized culture would be a genuinely humanist culture. Even more so than Schiller, Rorty urges one to realize how pragmatism, humanism, postmetaphysics, and anti-authoritarianism hang together. Espen Hammer describes Rorty’s idea(l) of a poeticized culture thus: Rorty’s peculiar humanistic vision and ideal was that of a culture that has finally completed the long and complicated process of enlightenment Rorty’s Notion of a Poeticized Culture 33 and achieved what he thought of as maturity.