| Abstrakt: |
This essay investigates the position of culture as both a shifting political practice and an object of scientific study in the twentieth century. It begins with an earlier, foundational moment in the history of cultural performance, the Jamaican Christmas revolt of 1831, and uses this event to introduce and highlight a broader historical and political turn in the study of culture in the work of twentieth-century ethnographers Franz Boas and Zora Neale Hurston. As anthropology charted its course for the new century, its practitioners struggled to capture authentic moments of cultural practice without giving in to a Eurocentric approach to observation and study. While both Hurston and Boas struggled with the challenges of being insider-outsiders in the cultures they examined, they also used their (albeit privileged) positions as cultural outliers to explode myths of cultural unity and to illustrate the political power of encounter and cultural performance to resist and dismantle colonial hierarchies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
