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Culture/Power/Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology. AKHIL GUPTA and JAMES FERGUSON, eds. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1997; 361 pp.
In our relentless search for theoretical guidance in understanding "culture," the central conceptual cornerstone of our discipline, cultural anthropologists have long looked to other analytic realms and disciplines for insight. By counterpoising "culture" to ecology, personality, history, or now, "power" and "place," we have tried to not only define the nebulous contours of what culture is by exploring what it is not, but sought, more importantly, to understand how culture is produced, reproduced, and transformed. As part of this pursuit, contemporary anthropologists have turned first to history (think, for example, of the important volume Culture/power/ history edited by Nicholas Dirks, Sherry Ortner, and Geoff Eley), and more recently to geography for assistance. The widespread appeal of geography's conceptual apparatus is revealed in the plethora of spatial metaphors -- landscapes, spaces, places, maps, displacement, global, local, to name just a few - in recent titles in anthropology.
Culture/power/place is a landmark contribution to this current theoretical trajectory in cultural anthropology. The anthology reprints, in revised versions, the ground-breaking theoretical essays (by Lisa Malkki, John Borneman, James Ferguson, Lisa Rofel, Akhil Gupta, and Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson) which first appeared in a 1992 special issue of the journal Cultural Anthropology dedicated to the theme of space and place in anthropology. Since their initial publication these essays, especially those by Malkki, Gupta, and Gupta and Ferguson, have become pivotal to current rethinkings of the relationship between culture and nation, territoriality, identity, difference, transnational processes, and power. The additional seven essays in the volume (some of which, like Kristin Koptiuch's, are also reprinted versions of published articles) complement, enhance, and complicate the themes raised in these earlier essays (all of the pieces were originally presented at three panels for the American Anthropological Association annual meetings). The volume therefore has a theoretical coherence and depth rarely found in edited collections, for which the editors, Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, should be commended.
Two themes organize the format and contributions of the volume: issues of...