Un/common Cultures

Kamala Visweswaran is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Asian Studies at the University of Texas, Austin. She is the author of Fictions of Feminist Ethnography.

“Visweswaran proves herself an exceptional scholar and forward thinker in her analysis of works by philosophers, intellectuals and scholars. She diagnoses the symptoms of the disease that affects cultural, gender and race related issues and provides potential solutions to curing them. An extraordinary work by an extraordinarily gifted author with a passion for her subject.” - Danielle Mulholland, M/C Reviews “Visweswaran’s project is challenging and important in confronting the ways in which cultural difference has been, and is, used as a substitute for broader issues of inequality, exclusion, and racial discrimination. . . . Un/Common Cultures provides a crucial and welcome challenge to the discipline’s airbrushed colonial heritages and selective amnesia, and a broader provocation to rethink the consequences of culture-thought and culture-talk in the contemporary world.” - Claire Alexander, Ethnic and Racial Studies “Un/common Cultures is a profound and important book, a major intervention in cultural studies, anthropology, and feminist and South Asian studies. It has all the hallmarks of Kamala Visweswaran’s work-impeccable scholarship and a keen sense of purpose that is both activist and intellectual.”-R. Radhakrishnan, author of History, the Human, and the World Between “In Un/common Cultures Kamala Visweswaran provides an acute, historically informed diagnosis of the relative weakness of the culture concept so central to American anthropology, and a provocative and fascinating explanation of why, during the past two decades, other fields and interdisciplinary arenas have developed more cogent critiques of culture. This first-rate book will be read widely and generate much discussion.”-George E. Marcus, co-author of Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary “Visweswaran proves herself an exceptional scholar and forward thinker in her analysis of works by philosophers, intellectuals and scholars. She diagnoses the symptoms of the disease that affects cultural, gender and race related issues and provides potential solutions to curing them. An extraordinary work by an extraordinarily gifted author with a passion for her subject.” - Danielle Mulholland (M/C Reviews) “Visweswaran’s project is challenging and important in confronting the ways in which cultural difference has been, and is, used as a substitute for broader issues of inequality, exclusion, and racial discrimination. . . . Un/Common Cultures provides a crucial and welcome challenge to the discipline’s airbrushed colonial heritages and selective amnesia, and a broader provocation to rethink the consequences of culture-thought and culture-talk in the contemporary world.” - Claire Alexander (Ethnic and Racial Studies)

• Acknowledgments ixIntroduction. Un/common Cultures: Racism and the Rearticulation of Cultural Differenceq 11. Wild West Anthropology and the Disciplining of Gender 182. Race and the Culture of Anthropology 523. The Interventions of Culture: Claude LÉvi Strauss and the Internationalization of the Modern Concept of Race 744. On Louis Dumont: Is There a Structural Analysis of Racism? 1035. India in South Africa: Counter-genealogies for a Subaltern Sociology 1316. Legacies of Culture, Languages of the State 1647. Gendered States: Culture as a Site of South Asian Human-Rights Work 189Epilogue. The Traffic in Social Movements: Narmada, Bhopal, Texas 213Notes 227Bibliography 283Index 319