Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century

I really had a hard time conceptualizing my own ethnographic research in sociology concerning a non-federally recognized Native American community in South Carolina (now a book: Native Americans in the Carolina Borderlands: A Critical Ethnography, Carolinas Press, 2000). The lights came on after reading the Predicament of Cultures by Clifford. His theme of "Borderlands" is so central to the experience of many cultures around the globe--including our own! To understand how people occupy and contend with borderzones between races, classes, cultures, and histories, turn to Clifford's work. His work is essential for the social analyst because we, all of us, are increasingly living within borderlands and, thus, the need for new conceptualizations of the nature of the social/cultural. Clifford is one of the leading figures within the growing movement toward new, critical, and alternative forms of ethnography. Routes is about travel and how we might conceptualize culture when it is "put into motion." A must-read for all ethnographers, as well as those concerned with postmodernity and postcolonialism.

The roote/routes of transnational (as well as local) belonging are explored in all their full global/local complexity and poetics. Probing and interesting at many points. I use one of the poems/essays/travelogues, "Honolulu: The Year of the Ram" in my course on the literatures of Hawai'i, as it gives a tourist view of Hawaii and moves way beyond that in its critique of US militarism and the arrogant masculinist gaze of "anthropology." Clifford is, for me, a kind of global and local poet of the postcolonial condition, an honest and caring soul in the muck.