WRITING CULTURE AT 25: SPECIAL EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

I was in graduate school in 1986 when James Clifford and George Marcus's Writing Culture appeared. It was instantly anthropology's most talked about book, and, in fact, the flagship text for the debates about reflexivity and representation that defined that whole decade in the discipline. You simply had to readand have an opinion aboutWriting Culture unless you wanted to appear as if youd been living under one of Raffles's proverbial antediluvian rocks. Those opinions were quite radically polarized. Neither Marcus nor Clifford ever identified as a postmodernist. That did not keep some critics from branding the two Writing Culture editors as the ringleaders of a sinister postmodern movement. Along with Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer'sAnthropology as Cultural Critique (1986), Clifford's The Predicament of Culture (1988), and other influential new texts, the essays in Writing Culture seemed to threaten the old disciplinary principles of truth, science, and objectivity with the relativizing epistemic murk of newfangled literary theory and other dubious influences.1 Then as now, job interviews at AAA meetings were conducted in those horrible little curtained booths at the convention hotel. You had to be ready to be asked about your views of postmodernism as if it were self-evident what that notoriously slippery and by now antique-sounding term meant, let alone that one had to be for or against it. It sometimes felt as though someone might push the button to the trap door under your chair if you gave the wrong answer. Reprinted by permission of the American Anthropological Association and the University of California Press