Objects and Objections of Ethnography - Tapa dura

Jim Siegel is one of the strongest thinkers in the discipline of anthropology. Academic careers have been made on the basis of one good idea. Each of these essays develops a whole flotilla of good ideas, while placing the methods and objects of anthropology in an entirely new light. An outstanding work. -- -Danilyn Rutherford * University of California, Santa Cruz * To read this book of essays by James Siegel is to embark on that rarest and most exciting of journeys; in the process of moving with him across the varied terrain of his own intellectual career, one's thought is transformed. Objects and Objections of Ethnography comprises old and new essays on classical topics in social anthropology, considered anew as contemporary questions and addressed with uncompromising originality. In places as far flung as Paris and Atjeh, Siegel meditates on the idea of the fetish, the relationship between the living and the dead, and the question of the stranger. Here too are analyses of the state and the politics of recognition, of the discourse of ethnicity, of trauma theory and the sublime, and of the anxieties afflicting museology today. At times startling, sometimes perplexing, always brave, frequently beautiful, and ultimately persuasive, this book is a challenge and a joy to read. In my opinion, no other anthropologist writing today can lay stronger claim to the word 'brilliant.' -- -Rosalind C. Morris * Columbia University *

The essays in this volume, in all their astonishing richness and diversity, focus on the question of the "other." Brimming with whole flotillas of new ideas, they delineate subtle and various ways in which that question can be made the basis of an ethnographic project. In them, the author responds to the invitations extended by a specific location rather than pursuing a codified method. And they examine many different socialities in many different locations-among them the Cornell University campus in the late seventies, the former Musee de l'Homme and the Quai Branly Museum in Paris, the Indonesian province of Aceh in the wake of the tsunami of 2004, and contemporary Indonesia, in the liminal figures of the Jew and the Chinese. The author meticulously traces how the social and cultural responses in each location are astonishingly different-in the form, say, of gorges, faces, garbage, and fetishes. Regrettably, these days anthropologists have a tendency to look for similarities rather than differences, to show how one phenomenon is "just like" another. This book stands determinedly against this trend, both in its ethnographic examinations and in how it takes up such figures as Kant, Derrida, Bataille, Simmel, and Leiris so as to illuminate not only the objects of ethnography but also differences among the perspectives these thinkers represent. This book will put the methods and objects of anthropology in an entirely new light. In addition, it will speak to the concerns of historians, political scientists, and scholars of area studies, literature, and art.