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Literature, Writing & Anthropology: A Further Reading List

Compiled by Shannon Dugan Iverson & Darren Byler

Literature, Writing & Anthropology: A Theme List from the Archive

Compiled by Shannon Dugan Iverson & Darren Byler

POTATO ONTOLOGY: SURVIVING POSTSOCIALISM IN RUSSIA

The Humanitarian Politics of Testimony: Subjectification through Trauma in the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict

Didier Fassin

Essays in Cultural Anthropology have sought to make sense of health and illness both at the level of individual experience and perception and at the level of institutionalized systems. Often, the goal is social theoretical analysis of the significance of modern medicine.

Over the years Cultural Anthropology has published a wide range of essays by linguistic and cultural anthropologists in the language ideology framework. This framework explores how social differences—divisions of gender, class, race, and other culturally significant distinctions—are produced, indexed, and rationalized through language. Ideology can be located in linguistic practice, in metalinguistic discourse, and in metapragmatics.

As security becomes an increasingly explicit preoccupation within capitalist practice, state ideology, and claims to personal safety, the following section retraces some of the ways in which Cultural Anthropology has explored the topic of "security."

Since its inception, Cultural Anthropology has published a wide range of essays that investigate the production and utilization of history, as well as the history of anthropology as a discipline. Dealing with regions from the Caucasus to Polynesia, and issues ranging from identity formation and museums to narrative and media, much of this collection of essays is united around a concern with how a people construct a specific space and time through their interpretation of the past. For example, see essays by George Marcus (1988), Matti Bunzl (2003), and Christina Schwenkel (2003).

Cultural Anthropology's contribution to studies of the Caucasus represent the emergent nature of understandings with regard to this region. Situated betwixt larger sovereign regions and entities—Russia in the North, Turkey in the South and West, and the greater Near East to the Southeast—the Caucasus has been the subject of imaginary tales, speculation, and shifting alliances. It is in fact a diverse area, split by various peoples, issues, and interests.

Over the years, Cultural Anthropology has published a wide range of essays that deal with the related themes of narrative, discourse, and rhetoric. Addressing subjects as seemingly far-flung as conspiracy theories, folklore, discursive regimes, and the constitution of publics, this body of work investigates the relation between modes of story-telling and the politics of everyday life and interrogates the changing social and technological conditions that mediate linguistic communication.