Writting against culture

Authors

  • Lila Abu-Lughod Universidade de Columbia na Cidade de Nova York/NY
  • Francisco Cleiton Vieira Silva do Rego Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8852-6212
  • Leandro Durazzo Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21680/2446-5674.2018v5n8ID15615

Keywords:

Writting, Culture, Ethnography

Abstract

In this paper, the anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod discusses and criticizes the propositions announced by the book Writing Culture, edited by James Clifford and Marcus Fisher. The author proposes that anthropologists begin to write against the concept of culture, emphasizing a type of ethnography of the particular that is able to escape the crystallization of differences and generalizations. The article is also a reaction to the absence of feminists and researchers of multiple ethnic and regional origin in the set of chapters published by Clifford and Fisher that in turn inaugurated a whole theoretical movement in anthropology commonly known as postmodern anthropology. Abu-Lughod's text, as influential as the book by Clifford and Fisher, marks an important theoretical and ethnographic moment for the discipline, by emphasizing and showing the positionality of knowledge beyond the partiality enunciated by postmodern authors.

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Author Biographies

Lila Abu-Lughod, Universidade de Columbia na Cidade de Nova York/NY

My work, strongly ethnographic and mostly based in Egypt, has focused on three broad issues: the relationship between cultural forms and power; the politics of knowledge and representation; and the dynamics of gender and the question of women’s rights in the Middle East. My first book, Veiled Sentiments, was about the politics of sentiment and cultural expression in a Bedouin community in Egypt that made an argument about the complexity of culture. My second book, Writing Women’s Worlds, framed as a feminist ethnography, used individual stories to make a larger argument about “writing against culture” (writing against typifications of social structure and cultural form by attending to internal argument, individual lives, and complex social dynamics) as a means of intervening in vexed discourses about a maligned region as well as challenging transnational feminist representations of women in Arab societies. My third ethnography, Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt, a contribution to the anthropology of nations and to media ethnography, explored the tensions between the social inequalities that bedevil nations and the cultural forms that aspire to address them. In a number of edited books, as well as my teaching, I have pursued these themes further to examine questions of gender and modernity in postcolonial theory, of anthropology and global media, and of violence national/cultural memory. Currently, as part of an effort to use anthropology to contribute to larger political debates, I am focusing on critiques of the universalist claims of liberalism and on the ethical and political dilemmas entailed in the international circulation of discourses of human rights in general, and Muslim women’s rights in particular.

Francisco Cleiton Vieira Silva do Rego, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte

Doutorando em Antropologia Social e Bolsista CAPES

Mestre em Antropologia Social

Programa de Pós-Graduação em Antropologia Social

Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte

Membro do Grupo de Pesquisa "Gênero, Corpo e Sexualidade", GCS/UFRN.

Membro Pós-Graduando da Associação Brasileira de Antropologia - ABA.

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Published

23-11-2018

How to Cite

ABU-LUGHOD, L.; REGO, F. C. V. S. do; DURAZZO, L. Writting against culture. Equatorial – Revista do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Antropologia Social, [S. l.], v. 5, n. 8, p. 193–226, 2018. DOI: 10.21680/2446-5674.2018v5n8ID15615. Disponível em: https://periodicos.ufrn.br/equatorial/article/view/15615. Acesso em: 22 jul. 2024.

Issue

Vol. 5 No. 8 (2018): Equatorial

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