History of Consciousness
James Clifford
ACADEMIC INTERESTS | COURSES | PUBLICATIONS
History of anthropology, travel, and exoticism; colonial discourse analysis; cultural studies; museum studies.
James Clifford, trained in social and intellectual history at Harvard University during the early 1970s, is best known for his historical and literary critiques of anthropological practice, travel literature, and Western exoticisms broadly conceived. His first book, Person and Myth: Maurice Leenhardt in the Melanesian World (1982), explored the dynamics of cross cultural translation and transformation in an ongoing colonial situation, New Caledonia. This was followed by Writing Culture: the Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (1986) co-edited with George Marcus, a book that has sparked considerable controversy in socio-cultural anthropology and related fields. The Predicament of Culture (1988) wove together Clifford's essays on 20th century ethnography, literature, and art. Widely influential, it has been translated into seven languages. In 1997 Clifford published Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late 20th Century, which explored issues of dwelling and travel in anthropology, travel, tourism, and a range of cultural performances.
The general direction of Clifford's recent work concerns local cultural processes in relation to national pressures and globalization. He is pursuing research on museums, festivals and, most generally, the performance of traditional identities in contexts of regionalization, ethnic resurgence, and touristic commodification.
While the approach is comparative, a central focus is in the Pacific region, and specifically on several Melanesian cases. Clifford is renewing first-hand research in New Caledonia, studying Kanak cultural and political resurgence and particularly the recently-founded "Centre Culturel Jean-Marie Tjibaou" outside Noumea. Tjibaou was a Kanak independence leader, assassinated in 1989, who exerts a powerful, and contested, legacy in the evolving movement for Melanesian sovereignty in this French possession.
Clifford's research involves a systematic analysis of the now quite complex literature on tourism. Many contemporary performances of identity and tradition are enmeshed in touristic demands and rituals, but are not reducible to them. These sorts of complex trade-offs, and negotiations with globalizing pressures, are the nexus of Clifford's research on articulated sites of localism and indigeneity.
