ABSTRACT
The publication of Clifford and Marcus’s edited collection, Writing Culture: the Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (1986), has come to be regarded as something of a watershed in anthropological thought. The outcome of a series of advanced seminars held in Santa Fe, New Mexico, its collective voice highlighted and responded positively to a crisis in anthropology that was inseparably epistemological and political. Eschewing the holistic persuasions of traditional anthropologists and recognising that their representations are fundamentally the products of asymmetrical power relations, it exhorted us to develop new forms of representation which could include the multiple voices of those being represented. Also rejecting its traditionally authoritative, realist and objectivist style it asked us to think of and explore anthropology itself as an institutionally, historically and politically situated writing genre. Together with its companion volume, Anthropology as Cultural Critique (Marcus and Fischer 1986), the collection instigated a wider debate about ‘writing culture’ which was celebrated as ‘a new experimental moment in ethnographic writing’ (ibid.).
