Exotics at Home: Anthropologies, Others, and American Modernity
(Part of the Women in Culture and Society Series)
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Book Overview
In this pathbreaking study, Micaela di Leonardo reveals the face of power within the mask of cultural difference. From the 1893 World's Fair to Body Shop advertisements, di Leonardo focuses on the intimate and shifting relations between popular portrayals of exotic Others and the practice of anthropology. In so doing, she casts new light on gender, race, and the public sphere in America's past and present. "An impressive work of scholarship that is mordantly witty, passionately argued, and takes no prisoners."--Lesley Gill, News Politics " Micaela] di Leonardo eloquently argues for the importance of empirical, interdisciplinary social science in addressing the tragedy that is urban America at the end of the century."--Jonathan Spencer, Times Literary Supplement "In her quirky new contribution to the American culture brawl, feminist anthropologist Micaela di Leonardo explains how anthropologists, 'technicians of the sacred, ' have distorted American popular debate and social life."--Rachel Mattson, Voice Literary Supplement "At the end of di Leonardo's analyses one is struck by her rare combination of rigor and passion. Simply, she] is a marvelous iconoclast."--Matthew T. McGuire, Boston Book Review
Format:Paperback
Language:English
ISBN:0226472647
ISBN13:9780226472645
Release Date:March 2000
Publisher:University of Chicago Press
Length:464 Pages
Weight:1.40 lbs.
Dimensions:1.0" x 6.1" x 9.0"
Customer Reviews
1 rating
US popular culture suffers from its own exotic imagination
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 26 years ago
In this savvy book about American culture, anthropologist di Leonardo dissects the foibles of our "exotic" sensibility--that is, the ways in which we so pleasurably work to define others as different from ourselves. Employing such disparate evidence as Gary Larson cartoons, shops that trade in so-called ethnic goods, fortune tellers, and popular notions of gender, di Leonardo also critiques the role that American anthropologists from Margaret Mead to Clifford Geertz and the popular press have played in promoting the cultural myth of "difference" which ultimately serves to separate us all, one from the other. di Leonardo's meditation on Margaret Mead alone is worth the cost of admission, but be assured the book is about so much more as it takes the entire discipline of anthropology to task. It's about time we had a smart, complex book like this that serves as a cultural reckoning. Makes Torgovnick's "Gone Primitive" look like a first-grade primer.
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