Lisa Philip Valentine & Regna Darnell (eds.), Theorizing the Americanist tradition. Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Pp. 397. Hb $29.95.

Abstract

A recurring theme in late twentieth century anthropology has been the need to reinvent questions, subject matter, theoretical underpinnings, methods, and ethics central to our research. While all disciplines have their own historical narratives, those told about anthropology are especially fractured along lines of continuity and transformation. Narratives of rupture gained an upper hand during the final decades of the twentieth century, undoubtedly as part of an effort to construct a disciplinary future not so inevitably shaped by forces of a colonial past. But one consequence of imaginative reinvention can be forgetfulness that merges with hubris when we fail to acknowledge how old legacies contribute to current work. Narratives of connection are emerging again, reclaiming a legacy grounded in critical ethnography that engages the lives of real people, partly as a reaction to the detachment of text-based “cultural studies.”