Verging on Extra-Vagance Anthropology, History, Religion, Literature, Arts . . . Showbiz / James A. Boon.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Boon, James A.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Culture--Philosophy.

Anthropology--Philosophy.

Culture.

Anthropology.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (368 p.) : 16 halftones

Place of Publication:

Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 1999.

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

In this book, James Boon ranges through history and around the globe in a series of provocative reflections on the limitations, attractions, and ambiguities of cultural interpretation. The book reflects the unusual keyword of its title, extra-vagance, a term Thoreau used to refer to thought that skirts traditional boundaries. Boon follows Thoreau's lead by broaching subjects as diverse as Balinese ritual, Montaigne, Chaucer, Tarzan, Perry Mason, opera, and the ideas of Jacques Derrida, Ruth Benedict, Kenneth Burke, and Mary Douglas. He makes creative and often playful leaps among eclectic texts and rituals that do not hold single, fixed meanings, but numerous, changing, and exceedingly specific ones. Boon opens by exploring 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. He considers the ironies of "first-person ethnography" by telling stories from his own fieldwork, reflecting on ethnological museums, and making seriocomic connections between Mark Twain and Marcel Mauss. In expansive discussions that touch on Manhattan and Sri Lanka, the Louvre and the "World of Coca-Cola" museum, willfully obscure academic theory and shamelessly commercial show business, Boon underlines the inadequacies of simple ideologies and pat generalizations. The book is a profound and eloquent exploration of cultural comparison by one of America's most original and innovative anthropologists.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface

Rehearsals. An Endlessly Extra-Vagant Scholar: Kenneth Burke

A Similar Genre: Opera

Plus Melville, Cavell, Commodity-Life; Showbiz

PART ONE: RITUALS, REREADING, RHETORICAL TURNS

Chapter One. Re Menses: Rereading Ruth Benedict, Ultraobjectively

Chapter Two Of Foreskins: (Un)Circumcision, Religious Histories, Difficult Description (Montaigne/Remondino)

Chapter Three About a Footnote: Between-the-Wars Bali; Its Relics Regained

Interlude: Essay-etudes and Tristimania

PART TWO: MULTIMEDIATIONS: COINCIDENCE, MEMORY, MAGICS

Chapter Four Cosmopolitan Moments: As-if Confessions of an Ethnographer- Tourist (Echoey "Cosmomes")

Chapter Five Why Museums Make Me Sad (Eccentric Musings)

Chapter Six Litterytoor 'n' Anthropolygee: An Experimental Wedding of Incongruous Styles from Mark Twain and Marcel Mauss

PART THREE: CROSS-OVER STUDIES, SERIOCOMIC CRITIQUE

A Little Polemic, Quizzically

Chapter Seven Against Coping Across Cultures: Self-help Semiotics Rebuffed

Chapter Eight Errant Anthropology, with Apologies to Chaucer

Chapter Nine Margins and Hierarchies and Rhetorics That Subjugate

Chapter Ten Evermore Derrida, Always the Same (What Gives?)

Chapter Eleven Taking Torgovnick as She Takes Others

Chapter Twelve Rerun (1980s): Mary Douglas's Grid/Group Grilled

Chapter Thirteen Update (1990s): Coca-Cola Consumes Baudrillard, and a Balinese (Putu) Consumes Coca-Cola

Encores and Envoi. Burke, Cavell, etc., Unforgotten

Acknowledgments and Credits

Notes

References

Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [315]-356) and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780691016313

0691016313

9780691231150

069123115X

OCLC:

1251448378