Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

THE POWER TO FRUSTRATE GOOD INTENTIONS: Or, The Revenge of the Aborigines

THE POWER TO FRUSTRATE GOOD INTENTIONS: Or, The Revenge of the Aborigines Inga Clendinnen We are all subtly dominated by tacit presuppositions. —W. E. H. Stanner, 1958 A Synopsis In what follows, I take a mole’s view of a large postcolonial problem: the difficulties in the way of keeping cultural differences steadily “in mind”—and the cascading consequences of failure. The Setting Toward the end of the 1950s, the anthropologist Joseph Casagrande was moved to assemble a collection of essays, written by ranking anthropologists and focusing not on scientific theories or findings but on their own personal relationships with particularly valued informants. In the Company of Man appeared in 1960, and both the title and the tone of the introduction suggest Casagrande had been fired by Edward Steichen’s “Family of Man” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1955. (The MoMA collection of photographs was then published Common Knowledge 11:3 Copyright 2005 by Duke University Press as a large, beautiful, and remarkably fast-breeding coffee-table book.)1 Those radiant photographs assumed that behind trivial variations in color, customs, and costumes, we are brothers (and sisters, parents, children) under the skin. Here is Casagrande’s description of an anthropologist’s incorporation into the life of “his” tribe: “With luck and in good http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Common Knowledge Duke University Press

THE POWER TO FRUSTRATE GOOD INTENTIONS: Or, The Revenge of the Aborigines

Common Knowledge , Volume 11 (3) – Oct 1, 2005

Loading next page...
 
/lp/duke-university-press/the-power-to-frustrate-good-intentions-or-the-revenge-of-the-ImvQuR4I2c

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
Copyright 2005 by Duke University Press
ISSN
0961-754X
eISSN
1538-4578
DOI
10.1215/0961754X-11-3-410
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Inga Clendinnen We are all subtly dominated by tacit presuppositions. —W. E. H. Stanner, 1958 A Synopsis In what follows, I take a mole’s view of a large postcolonial problem: the difficulties in the way of keeping cultural differences steadily “in mind”—and the cascading consequences of failure. The Setting Toward the end of the 1950s, the anthropologist Joseph Casagrande was moved to assemble a collection of essays, written by ranking anthropologists and focusing not on scientific theories or findings but on their own personal relationships with particularly valued informants. In the Company of Man appeared in 1960, and both the title and the tone of the introduction suggest Casagrande had been fired by Edward Steichen’s “Family of Man” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1955. (The MoMA collection of photographs was then published Common Knowledge 11:3 Copyright 2005 by Duke University Press as a large, beautiful, and remarkably fast-breeding coffee-table book.)1 Those radiant photographs assumed that behind trivial variations in color, customs, and costumes, we are brothers (and sisters, parents, children) under the skin. Here is Casagrande’s description of an anthropologist’s incorporation into the life of “his” tribe: “With luck and in good

Journal

Common KnowledgeDuke University Press

Published: Oct 1, 2005

There are no references for this article.