James Clifford: Indigenous Presence and the Shapes of History

"Indigenous Presence and the Shapes of History"

a talk by James Clifford

James Clifford is Professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. An historian, his work has inspired critical debate in cultural anthropology and across many fields, including literature, art history, cultural studies, and visual and performance studies. He is the author of several widely cited and translated books, among them The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art(Harvard University Press, 1988) and Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Harvard University Press, 1997). He also co-edited Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (University of California Press, 1986), a seminal text that contributed to anthropology’s self-examination in the 1980s and early 1990s. His first scholarship traced the colonial history of the discipline through the life of Maurice Leenhardt, a missionary and anthropologist at the École Practique des Hautes Études. His work on indigeneity has critically informed discussions of how the category of the indigenous is produced.

For further information please contact Adriana Dingman at adriana.d@austin.utexas.edu