THE POETICS AND POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION

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THE POETICS AND POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION
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The Crisis of Representation
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Critical Theory Crisis of Representation

• The anthropology of gender and feminist theory
• Marxist Post-Structuralist concerns with power
  differentiated society
• Postmodernism as incredulity (challenge) toward
  metanarratives of modernity
• self-other
• universality of development

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Some Features of Postmodernism

• Focus on language and textuality
• Postmodernism as incredulity (challenging) toward
  metanarratives of modernity a systematic
  skepticism
• Postmodernists are suspicious of authoritative
  definitions and singular narratives of any
  trajectory of events
• celebrates the multiple, incompatible,
  heterogeneous, fragmented, contradictory nature
  of postmodern society
• No linguistic normality we can only produce
  pastiche (heteroglossia), partial truths

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Hasan The Culture of Postmodernism
Modernism
Postmodernism Purpose play
Design chance Hierarchy anarchy art
object, finished work process, performance,
creation,
totalization decreation, deconstruction
Presence absence Centering dispersal
genre, boundary text, intertext
Semantics rhetoric lisible (readerly) scripti
ble (writerly) Narrative anti-narrative
grande histoire petite histoire master
code idiolect origin, cause difference-diffe
rence, trace Determinacy indeterminacy
Transcendence immanence
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Marxism, Post-Structuralism

• concern with power/differentiated societies
• disagreed with the existentialists' claim that
  each man is what he makes himself
• individual is shaped by sociological,
  psychological and linguistic structures over
  which he/she has no control
• development of knowledge was intertwined with the
  mechanisms of (political) power
• could be uncovered by using particular methods of
  investigation
• deconstruction archaeology the order of
  things
• Writing culture as configuration of
  knowledge/power

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Anthropology of Gender Feminist Anthropology

• Filling in the gaps
• ethnographic data concerning women -- the
  reports of male informants transmitted through
  male ethnographers
• explore the importance of female activities
• grounded studies that place gender at the center
  of analysis
• gender is an important analytical concept
• used to refer to both the male and the female,
  the cultural construction of these categories,
  and the relationship between them

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The Solution Textual Activism

• the breaking down of inherited genre distinctions
  
• Decenter ethnographic authority
• Partial truths holism
• Avoid essentialism
• REFLEXIVITY
• POLYPHONY
• Historicize the ethnographic present people
  without history
• Undo bounded group fluidity permeability
• Translation is not transparent
• Attention to power

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The problems of representation

• Reflexivity intersubjective knowledge
• Made Invisible solution make visible
• The hegemony of the text/representation
• identify aesthetic elements, narrative
  structures, epistemology of self-other
• ethnographic authority the text
• The political
• Made invisible solution make visible
• Limited scope on the culture/society