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Verging on Extra-Vagance: Anthropology, History, Religion, Literature, Arts ... Showbiz. James A. Boon. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. 361 pp.
James Boon has created a particularly ornate monument to our postmodern fascination with the disabilities of language and meaning, the difficulties or (im)possibilities of reference and of translation. A spectacular chase scene, a Roman circus exhibition of language in pursuit of its other, this is a book that certainly "deserves contestation and ironic response," as Boon remarks about "[a]ny notion of `living museum' " (p. 126). Perhaps the most basic obligation of a reviewer is to say what the book is about, and that is rather tricky in this case. In a Seinfeldian sense, it is a book about nothing. That is to say, it is mainly about itself-its own highly mannered style, which is its most striking feature. To an important extent, the medium is the message, the form is the content, and, of course, readers are meant to see that one can't separate the form and the contentthat Boon's unhinged style in itself signifies/constructs a fresh approach to truth and representation, a sort of permanently busted epistemology that constitutes a refutation of the putative stolid old, but perhaps at this point a bit straw-filled, sense of objectivity and scientism in anthropology. The book is seemingly about everything the author has read or thought or felt. While it is unfair to compare Boon to the great classical essayists who have toured de force their libraries (Montaigne) and memories (Augustine), he can almost be...