James Clifford

James Clifford

James Clifford (* 1945 ) is an American historian who became known in particular for his work on the method of ethnology and is therefore also known as a meta-ethnologist . He is professor History of Consciousness ( history of consciousness ) at the University of California, Santa Cruz .

With his concept of writing culture, Clifford had a significant influence on the epistemological reorientation of ethnology at the end of the last century. Writing culture describes a process of information reduction. This process of first impression in the field research over the first notes and subsequent reduction of the experienced some printed pages, according to Clifford always leads to partial truths , which as partial truths but also partisan truths can be understood. This means that the descriptive researcher reports not only about the subject of his research with his description, but also (because of the choices he makes) about himself. According to Clifford, this means that ethnologists are obliged to choose their linguistic means and their effects to reflect on external descriptions.

In 2011 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Fonts (selection)

• Person and Myth: Maurice Leenhardt in the Melanesian World ( University of California Press , 1982; Duke University Press, 1992)
• Writing Culture: the Poetics and Politics of Ethnography , ed. With George Marcus (University of California Press, 1986)
• The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art ( Harvard University Press , 1988)
• Traveling Theories, Traveling Theorists , ed. With Vivek Dhareshwar (Inscriptions 5, 1989)
• Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Harvard University Press, 1997)
• On the Edges of Anthropology (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003)

Web links

• Literature by and about James Clifford in the catalog of the German National Library
• James Clifford at the University of California
• A video interview with James Clifford

Individual evidence

1. ↑ For example by Lutz Ellrich: Verschreibe Fremdheit , Frankfurt am Main, 1999, p. 79.
2. ^ ^{A b c} Frank Heidemann: Ethnology. An introduction . Göttingen 2011, pp. 120–123.
3. ^ Clifford: Writing Culture: the Poetics and Politics of Ethnography , 1986.