On the Geopragmatics of Anthropological Identification

Allen Chun was Research Fellow in the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan, and is now Chair Professor in the Institute of Social Research and Cultural Studies, National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan. He is the author of two major monographs: Unstructuring Chinese Society: The Fictions of Colonial Practice and the Changing Realities of “Land” in the New Territories of Hong Kong (Routledge, 2000) and Forget Chineseness: On the Geopolitics of Cultural Identification (SUNY Press, 2017).

“Allen Chun's book is a wide-ranging, intelligent, critical and required manifesto for a reconfigured anthropology-cultural studies-social sciences.” • John Hutnyk, Ton Duc Thang University

• PrefaceIntroduction: The Illusion of Anthropological IdentityPART I: ANTHROPOLOGICAL REIFICATIONS FROM ETHNICITY TO IDENTITYChapter 1. Toward Identification: The Unconscious Geopolitics of Ethnicity and Culture in TheoryDisenfranchising Concepts from their Disciplinary MindsetsReframing Ethnicity, Culture and IdentityDiscursive Fictions in the Geopolitics of Modernity, Nation-State, Colonialism, etc.Pragmatic Crises of Context in the Ecology of Social ProcessThe Illusion of Identity and the Groundedness of L’ImaginaireChapter 2. The Diasporic Mind-field in the (Inter)Disciplinary Politics of IdentityDiaspora as Cultural Phenomenon and Conceptual ProblematicDiaspora as Explanatory or Emancipatory Concept in Disciplinary PerspectiveThe Japanese ‘Diaspora’ in Postwar TaiwanDiasporic Identification as Subjective PositioningPART II: BEYOND THE IMAGINED COMMUNITY OF WRITING CULTUREChapter 3. The Predicament of James Clifford in the Anthropological ImaginaryThe New and Newer Ethnography: A Short History of ConsciousnessThe Fate of Geertz: ‘Culture’ and BeyondChapter 4. Writing Theory: Rethinking the Emancipation of the Author from his FunctionTheory, Literarily Speaking: Authorial Subjectivity from Text to ContextTheory as Narrative: The Birth of Society and the Norm from Durkheim to FoucaultThe Limits of Imaginative Discourse within the Boundaries of Disciplinary PracticesUnthinking the Disciplines: Steps toward an Ecology of PracticePART III: CAN THE POSTCOLONIAL SPEAK IN SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY?Chapter 5. Subaltern Studies as Historical Exception / Postcolonialism as Critical TheoryPostcolonial Theories in the ConcreteThe Disciplinary Divide: Why Can’t the Post-colonial Speak in Sociological Theory?Subaltern Studies in the AbstractDecolonizing the Fog of American Identity: Lessons from Chineseness in Critical ReflexivityFrom Historical Exception to Theoretical ExceptionalismChapter 6. Nation as Norm, State as Exception: Unseen Ramifications of a Hyphenated ModernityOn Geoffrey Benjamin’s (2015 [1985]) Deep Sociology of the Nation-StateThe Emergence of the State as Signifying Apparatus in the Practice of Modern InstitutionsGovernmentality in the Critique of Social Theory, or the Return of Postcolonialism2Bibliography