Scott Michaelsen – författare

Posing a powerful challenge to dominant trends in cultural analysis, this book covers the whole history of the concept of culture, providing the broadest study of this notion to date. Johnson and Michaelsen examine the principal methodological strategies or metaphors of anthropology in the past two decades (embodied in works by Edward Said, James Clifford, George Marcus, V. Y. Mudimbe, and others) and argues that they do not manage to escape anthropology's grounding in representational practices. To the extent that it remains a practice of representation, anthropology, however complex, critical, or self-reflexive, cannot avoid objectifying its others.Extending beyond a critique of anthropology, the book reads the twinned notions of the human and culture across the long history of the human sciences broadly conceived, including anthropology, cultural studies, history, literature, and philosophy. Although there is no chance, they argue, for a "new" anthropology that would not repeat the old anthropology's problem of disciplining the other, they also recognize that there may be no way out of anthropology. We are always writing, thinking, and living in anthropology's wake, within its specific compass or horizon. Moreover, they demonstrate, we have been doing so for a very long time, since at least the beginning of the institution of philosophy in Plato and Aristotle.

Posing a powerful challenge to dominant trends in cultural analysis, this book covers the whole history of the concept of culture, providing the broadest study of this notion to date. Johnson and Michaelsen examine the principal methodological strategies or metaphors of anthropology in the past two decades (embodied in works by Edward Said, James Clifford, George Marcus, V. Y. Mudimbe, and others) and argues that they do not manage to escape anthropology's grounding in representational practices. To the extent that it remains a practice of representation, anthropology, however complex, critical, or self-reflexive, cannot avoid objectifying its others.Extending beyond a critique of anthropology, the book reads the twinned notions of the human and culture across the long history of the human sciences broadly conceived, including anthropology, cultural studies, history, literature, and philosophy. Although there is no chance, they argue, for a "new" anthropology that would not repeat the old anthropology's problem of disciplining the other, they also recognize that there may be no way out of anthropology. We are always writing, thinking, and living in anthropology's wake, within its specific compass or horizon. Moreover, they demonstrate, we have been doing so for a very long time, since at least the beginning of the institution of philosophy in Plato and Aristotle.

Explores issues related to race and religion in Lovecraft criticism.Today, H. P. Lovecraft is both more popular and controversial than ever: the influence of his "Cthulhu mythos" is everywhere in popular culture, his cosmic pessimism has reemerged as a major theme in contemporary philosophy, and his racism continues to spark controversy in the media. The Love of Ruins takes a fresh look at a figure widely acknowledged as the father of modern horror or "weird" fiction. In these pages, Lovecraft emerges not as the atheist and nihilist he is often claimed to be, but as a kind of "psychonaut" and mystic whose stories, through their own imaginative rigor, expose the intellectual bankruptcy of their author's racism. The Love of Ruins is itself written in the form of letters, in order to do homage to Lovecraft's love of the form of the personal letter (he wrote more than 100,000), and to emulate Lovecraft's lifetime practice of thinking-as-corresponding.

Las fronteras están casi siempre resguardadas por patrullas, murallas rejas, uniformes, binoculares y también por múltiples discursos paranoides sobre contagio racial o nacional. Teoría de la frontera se ocupa de fronteras como estas, pero también de las "blandas", producidas dentro de los discursos más liberales, como los nacionalismos aparentemente benévolos, los estudios étnicos o el multiculturalismo.Pensar la frontera, sitio de encuentro de relatos geopolíticos, literarios, historiográficos y antropológicos, supone combinar lo geográfico, lo simbólico y lo disciplinario en un proceso de desterritorialización del concepto de frontera y sus investigaciones. Los ensayos de este volumen realizan una profunda crítica de la esencialización de las culturas de la frontera y de una concepción de la diversidad como si fuera un dato biocultural que habría que preservar. En cambio, acentúan la construcción histórica y simbólica de las fronteras, sus procesos y disputas, sus criterios y dilemas.Los desplazamientos se convierten así en un laboratorio de la contingencia, un contexto de elaboración de diversidades, de tránsitos y flujos, antes que hitos, líneas y monolitos. Colaboran en este volumen, además de los compiladores: Russ Castronovo, Elaine K. Chang, Louis Kaplan, Alejandro Lugo, Benjamin Alire Sáenz y Patricia Seed.