Overview

In Memory against Culture, the renowned anthropologist Johannes Fabian assesses the contemporary practice of anthropology and its emerging shape as a global discipline. In twelve essays ranging from theoretical reflections to re-examinations of past ethnographic work, Fabian addresses central theoretical debates within the discipline and throughout the social sciences-about language and time, history and memory, and ethnography and recognition. Together the essays illuminate Fabian's pluralist vision of an anthropology that always makes the other present by opening itself to conversational and transnational practices, refusing epistemological claims that privilege any one voice, language, or point of view. Fabian returns to his landmark book Time and the Other to consider how the role of the other in anthropological inquiry has been transformed over the past two decades. He explores the place of linguistics in contemporary language-centered anthropology, and he ponders how studies of material culture imbue objects with ""otherness."" Meditating on the place of memory and forgetting in ethnography, he draws from his own ethnographic work in the Congo to ask why Africa, the site of so much early anthropological study, continues to be forgotten in the wake of colonization. Arguing for the importance of remembering Africa, Fabian focuses on the relationship between thought and memory in the Swahili language. In so doing, he suggests new methods for investigating memory practices across cultures. Turning to the practice of ethnography, he examines the role of the Internet and the place of field notes and other memoranda in ethnographic writing. At once wide-ranging and incisive, Memory against Culture is a significant reflection on the state of the field by one of its most thoughtful and engaged practitioners.

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9780822340775

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Reviews

In these easy-reading conversational essays, studded with jewels of ethnographic provocation, Johannes Fabian continues his language-centered anthropological meditations on denials of recognition, the study of popular culture as recognition of Africa's vigor and contemporaneity, and the pragmatics of speech: 'Who can talk straight when even using Belgian rather than French ways of counting ( septante-deux not soixante-douze ) could be denounced as anti-revolutionary?' Fabian's focus on terms of encounter, the work of commentary, and Internet archiving as ethnographic collaboratories disturbs our pious conventions. -Michael M. J. Fischer, author of Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice and Mute Dreams, Blind Owls, and Dispersed Knowledges Fabian's work continues to invite the direction of critical thought towards aspects of ethnographic inquiry, to the co-production of knowledge, and to broader theoretical concerns in anthropology. This collection simultaneously serves to remind us of his intellectual contributions to anthropology, and to see these contributions as continuing and growing. -- Katie Glaskin Anthropological Forum

In these easy-reading conversational essays, studded with jewels of ethnographic provocation, Johannes Fabian continues his language-centered anthropological meditations on denials of recognition, the study of popular culture as recognition of Africa's vigor and contemporaneity, and the pragmatics of speech: 'Who can talk straight when even using Belgian rather than French ways of counting ( septante-deux not soixante-douze ) could be denounced as anti-revolutionary?' Fabian's focus on terms of encounter, the work of commentary, and Internet archiving as ethnographic collaboratories disturbs our pious conventions. --Michael M. J. Fischer, author of Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice and Mute Dreams, Blind Owls, and Dispersed Knowledges

Author Information

Johannes Fabian is Professor Emeritus of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam and a member of the Amsterdam School of Social Research. He is the author of many books, including Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa; Moments of Freedom: Anthropology and Popular Culture; Remembering the Present: Painting and Popular History in Zaire; Language and Colonial Power: The Appropriation of Swahili in the Former Belgian Congo, 1880–1938; and Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object.

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