James Clifford (historian)

James Clifford ( born 1945 ) is an American historian who was known in particular his work on the method of ethnology and is therefore referred to as meta- ethnologist. He is also Professor History of Consciousness ( history of consciousness ) at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Clifford had with his concept of Writing Culture a significant influence on the epistemological reorientation of Ethnology at the end of the last century. Writing Culture describes a process of information reduction. This process of first impression in the field of research on first notes and subsequent reduction of the experienced some printed pages entails, according to Clifford always partial truths, which can be understood as partial truths but also partisan truths. This means that the descriptive research reports with his description not only of his research subject, but (because of the choices he makes ) about themselves It follows, according to Clifford for ethnologists the duty on the choice of linguistic means and the effect to reflect foreign descriptions.

Writings (selection )

• Person and Myth: Maurice Leenhardt in the Melanesian World ( University of California Press, 1982; Duke University Press, 1992 )
• Writing Culture: the Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. with George Marcus ( University of California Press, 1986 )
• The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Harvard University Press, 1988)
• Traveling Theories, Traveling Theorists, ed. with Vivek Dhareshwar ( Inscriptions 5, 1989)
• Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Harvard University Press, 1997)
• On the Edges of Anthropology ( Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003 )