Exotics at Home
Anthropologies, Others, and American Modernity
9780226472645
9780226472638
Exotics at Home
Anthropologies, Others, and American Modernity
In this pathbreaking study, Micaela di Leonardo reveals the face of power within the mask of cultural difference. From the 1893 World’s Fair to Body Shop advertisements, di Leonardo focuses on the intimate and shifting relations between popular portrayals of exotic Others and the practice of anthropology. In so doing, she casts new light on gender, race, and the public sphere in America’s past and present.
"An impressive work of scholarship that is mordantly witty, passionately argued, and takes no prisoners."—Lesley Gill, News Politics
"[Micaela] di Leonardo eloquently argues for the importance of empirical, interdisciplinary social science in addressing the tragedy that is urban America at the end of the century."—Jonathan Spencer, Times Literary Supplement
"In her quirky new contribution to the American culture brawl, feminist anthropologist Micaela di Leonardo explains how anthropologists, ’technicians of the sacred,’ have distorted American popular debate and social life."—Rachel Mattson, Voice Literary Supplement
"At the end of di Leonardo’s analyses one is struck by her rare combination of rigor and passion. Simply, [she] is a marvelous iconoclast."—Matthew T. McGuire, Boston Book Review
"An impressive work of scholarship that is mordantly witty, passionately argued, and takes no prisoners."—Lesley Gill, News Politics
"[Micaela] di Leonardo eloquently argues for the importance of empirical, interdisciplinary social science in addressing the tragedy that is urban America at the end of the century."—Jonathan Spencer, Times Literary Supplement
"In her quirky new contribution to the American culture brawl, feminist anthropologist Micaela di Leonardo explains how anthropologists, ’technicians of the sacred,’ have distorted American popular debate and social life."—Rachel Mattson, Voice Literary Supplement
"At the end of di Leonardo’s analyses one is struck by her rare combination of rigor and passion. Simply, [she] is a marvelous iconoclast."—Matthew T. McGuire, Boston Book Review
464 pages | 446p., 4 halftones, 11 line drawings | 6 x 9 | © 1998
Anthropology: Cultural and Social Anthropology
History: American History
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Foreword, by Catharine R. Stimpson
Acknowledgments
Prologue: Hidden in Plain Sight
1. Anthropology and American Morality Plays
2. The Three Bears, The Great Goddess, and the American
Temperament: Anthropology without Anthropologists
3. Wild Women Don’t Have the Blues: The American Pragmatics of the Primitive Woman
4. The Dusky Maiden and the Postwar American Imperium
5. Every Woman Her Own Anthropologist: Gender, Revanchism, and the Fissioning Public Sphere
6. Patterns of Culture Wars: Place, Modernity, and the Contemporary Political Economy of Difference
Notes
Index
Foreword, by Catharine R. Stimpson
Acknowledgments
Prologue: Hidden in Plain Sight
1. Anthropology and American Morality Plays
2. The Three Bears, The Great Goddess, and the American
Temperament: Anthropology without Anthropologists
3. Wild Women Don’t Have the Blues: The American Pragmatics of the Primitive Woman
4. The Dusky Maiden and the Postwar American Imperium
5. Every Woman Her Own Anthropologist: Gender, Revanchism, and the Fissioning Public Sphere
6. Patterns of Culture Wars: Place, Modernity, and the Contemporary Political Economy of Difference
Notes
Index