What do you think?
Rate this book
I frutti puri impazziscono: Etnografia, letteratura e arte nel XX secolo
Una serie di saggi che individuano nell'ibridazione delle culture e nella frammentazione delle tradizioni i nuclei di nuove strutture dotate di senso e l'emergere di un futuro tutt'altro che catastrofico.
428 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1988
28 people are currently reading
863 people want to read
About the author
James Clifford
43 books40 followersJames Clifford is a historian and Professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Clifford and Hayden White were among the first faculty directly appointed to the History of Consciousness Ph.D. program in 1978, which was originally the only graduate department at UC-Santa Cruz. The History of Consciousness department continues to be an intellectual center for innovative interdisciplinary and critical scholarship in the U.S. and abroad, largely due to Clifford and White's influence, as well as the work of other prominent faculty who were hired in the 1980’s. Clifford served as Chair to this department from 2004-2007.
Clifford is the author of several widely cited and translated books, including The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (1988) and Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late 20th Century (1997), as well as the editor of Writing Culture: the Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, with George Marcus (1986). Clifford's work has sparked controversy and critical debate in a number of disciplines, such as literature, art history and visual studies, and especially in cultural anthropology, as his literary critiques of written ethnography greatly contributed to the discipline’s important self-critical period of the 1980's and early 1990's.
Clifford's dissertation research was conducted at Harvard University in History (1969-1977), and focused on anthropologist Maurice Leenhardt and Melanesia. However, because of his impact on the discipline of anthropology, Clifford is sometimes mistaken as an anthropologist with graduate training in cultural anthropology. Rather, Clifford's work in anthropology is usually critical and historical in nature, and does not often include fieldwork or extended research at a single field site. A geographical interest in Melanesia continues to influence Clifford's scholarship, and his work on issues related to indigeneity, as well as fields like globalization, museum studies, visual and performance studies, cultural studies, and translation, often as they relate to how the category of the indigenous is produced.
Clifford is the author of several widely cited and translated books, including The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (1988) and Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late 20th Century (1997), as well as the editor of Writing Culture: the Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, with George Marcus (1986). Clifford's work has sparked controversy and critical debate in a number of disciplines, such as literature, art history and visual studies, and especially in cultural anthropology, as his literary critiques of written ethnography greatly contributed to the discipline’s important self-critical period of the 1980's and early 1990's.
Clifford's dissertation research was conducted at Harvard University in History (1969-1977), and focused on anthropologist Maurice Leenhardt and Melanesia. However, because of his impact on the discipline of anthropology, Clifford is sometimes mistaken as an anthropologist with graduate training in cultural anthropology. Rather, Clifford's work in anthropology is usually critical and historical in nature, and does not often include fieldwork or extended research at a single field site. A geographical interest in Melanesia continues to influence Clifford's scholarship, and his work on issues related to indigeneity, as well as fields like globalization, museum studies, visual and performance studies, cultural studies, and translation, often as they relate to how the category of the indigenous is produced.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
May 4, 2014
Clifford is excellent for understanding the construct of culture between the first and third world. For anyone studying art that traverses cultural and temporal lines, this is a must read.
November 9, 2007
The beginning of "the Pure Products Go Crazy" and the first strains of "Summer Babe" by Pavement both marked thresholds that I knew I was crossing as I was crossing them.
February 5, 2025
first obtained and read this book around the time it came out, and again when my university classes made me read it a few years later. recently obtained a fresh copy of this book and re-read. this is my quick review:
just finished a frankly amazing book that treats many of the issues surrounding the topic of repatriation fairly extensively. james clifford's "the predicament of culture: twentieth-century ethnography, literature, and art" from 1988, a collection of essays about art collecting and about the colonial context of that collecting is an exceedingly relevant and up-to-date exploration, despite having been written some 30-35 years ago.
there was a huge vogue in indigenous, native, "tribal," and african work/ culture in the early 20th century, which vogue governments and museums fed via missions to plunder these places. given that the colonial age wasn't beginning to end until around 1950, that's a good long time to be plundering. this is a very complicated topic but clifford tackles it deftly. if you are interested in the intersection of art and culture, I can unequivocally recommend this book to you (but with one proviso given below). clifford is an extremely engaging writer. this is actually some of the best academic prose I've come across, especially in the realm of art.
though a small proviso is in order: I can't imagine that the book would be easy/ sensible reading if you are completely new to surrealism (a topic that forms much of the book's "plot"). also if you are completely unfamiliar with cultural anthropology, this is probably not the best book to start out with. as it presupposes a bit of familiarity with some of cultural anthropology's basic conceptual tools and many of surrealism's keynotes and leitmotifs, I think most of the book will simply go over your head and you'd be left wondering what the point of the author's efforts were if you don't have already a familiarity with these two topics.
just finished a frankly amazing book that treats many of the issues surrounding the topic of repatriation fairly extensively. james clifford's "the predicament of culture: twentieth-century ethnography, literature, and art" from 1988, a collection of essays about art collecting and about the colonial context of that collecting is an exceedingly relevant and up-to-date exploration, despite having been written some 30-35 years ago.
there was a huge vogue in indigenous, native, "tribal," and african work/ culture in the early 20th century, which vogue governments and museums fed via missions to plunder these places. given that the colonial age wasn't beginning to end until around 1950, that's a good long time to be plundering. this is a very complicated topic but clifford tackles it deftly. if you are interested in the intersection of art and culture, I can unequivocally recommend this book to you (but with one proviso given below). clifford is an extremely engaging writer. this is actually some of the best academic prose I've come across, especially in the realm of art.
though a small proviso is in order: I can't imagine that the book would be easy/ sensible reading if you are completely new to surrealism (a topic that forms much of the book's "plot"). also if you are completely unfamiliar with cultural anthropology, this is probably not the best book to start out with. as it presupposes a bit of familiarity with some of cultural anthropology's basic conceptual tools and many of surrealism's keynotes and leitmotifs, I think most of the book will simply go over your head and you'd be left wondering what the point of the author's efforts were if you don't have already a familiarity with these two topics.
January 30, 2014
What I like about this book besides its marriage of anthropology, history, and literary studies is its form. Clifford argues that collage is a more representative form of culture than a linear, cohesive narrative. And then he does it.
March 30, 2026
"The pure products of America go crazy," wrote the doctor and poet William Carlos Williams. "The pure products of America \ go crazy-- \ mountain folk from Kentucky \ or the ribbed north end of
Jersey \ with its isolate lakes and \ valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves \ old names \ and promiscuity \between \devil-may-care men who have taken \ to railroading \ out of sheer lust of adventure--"
He means authentic people, real people, the people from whom culture springs forth, regardless of government and institutions. And then the troubled narrator of the poem locks eyes with a servant girl, Elsie, whose "great ungainly hips and flopping breasts" somehow "expressing with broken \ brain the truth about us--" and by *us,* he means White Americans, but anyways, his encounter with Elsie in a wealthy doctor's home reminds him that we are "degraded prisoners \ destined \ to hunger until we eat filth \ while the imagination strains \ after deer \ going by fields of goldenrod in
\ the stifling heat of September."
There's much to say about the poem, but let's focus on exactly why James Clifford, an ethnographer, shows us this poem to begin his book. Here, Williams' "mix of curiosity, fear, and desire," upon encountering the exotic, probably the subject of countless undergraduate theses on ethnicity and sexuality, is also the subject of this collection of essays.
Curiosity, fear, and desire -- how should we feel about those strange people across the ocean from us, whom in Madrid, Tokyo, London, New York, are suddenly rooted, making the world a form of Bakhtin's hyperglossia (hyperglossia means many voices from different social contexts all speaking together). I am the child of immigrant parents and I have observed like many others how people need culture, the invisible beast. Not just any culture will do, they want their *own* culture, because the "fiction of culture" strengthens the "fiction" of a single coherent self. Maybe in our postmodern world it is because we sorely need meaning --- we crave it, we are willing to die for it --- that we dread the disruption to the meaning-making machine posed by other cultures, alien moral norms, alien arts, alien ideals of beauty, even as coastal liberals try their best, admirably, to treat psychological openness, tolerance, and empathy as Kantian ideals in themselves. There's no easy solution, but this is the truth, and if you don't believe me, try speaking Chinese on the phone in the subway or eating with your hands in a restaurant in DC and look at how people look at you.
But let's backtrack from Trump's America and remember that Clifford is writing out of a 1980s where the genuine liberal conscience of the academy is wrestling with all the thorny issues emerging out of a couple centuries of brutality and domination subjected by e.g the English, Spanish, and Dutch upon the rest of the world. At this point it is worth noting that this book is an "ETHNOGRAPHY," wherein if anthropology is how humans* study themselves, systematically, scientifically, then "ethnography" is a kind of self-aware version of anthropology, where humans from one culture study humans of other cultures through qualitative observation (*graduate students and professors). Underneath this all is the implication that we shouldn't, like colonizers, (just?) study other cultures to master their people and extract resources from them, but rather, like curators, see how other cultures show us what is possible but unrealized in our own culture, and furthermore, the whole museum art-culture scene of the 1980s was kind of f*cked up because they overlook that the native people who make these colorful masks or skirts or jewelry are actually still alive and among us, having intermarried or simply survived on their own, like how the African diaspora religion of Santeria blended Roman Catholic saints with Yoruba deities in Cuba to ensure the survival of at least part of their culture.
If you grew up reading National Geographic magazines maybe at some point you were gripped by the existential dread of knowing that hundreds of species of speckled, colored birds and frogs with amusing songs and wonderful patterns and feathers were disappearing from the planet, and courageously decided to take shorter showers and buying products with green cartoon leafs on them; your moral sensibility persevered in the face of a worldwide problem. It seems that in a similar way, Western ethnographers were liberals who felt that Anglo colonialism, disease, and extraction, was causing the destruction of a similar, unimaginable wealth of diversity among people in Guinea, Mali, Polynesia, etc. Except instead of birds and frogs, we were talking about people, and doesn't that make you feel ashamed? And I know I sound sarcastic, but you have to admire Clifford, who is a liberal, meaning he is self-aware about how much of the actual historical study of humans from one culture by another is done behind colonial stockades. He writes at length about Martinican poet Aimé Césaire's conception of "Négritude," he questions why the West assumes it has the right to observe and interpret other cultures in the first place? And Clifford critiques social scientists who assume objective analysis of other cultures is possible or desirable. He notes that the very action of observing can never be truly objective, and that all relations are relations of dominance and power between the subject and the object, and to demonstrate, he puts on the cover, two Igbo (Nigerian) tribesmen who are doing what you might call "whiteface," pretending to be Brits.
How do you like that, now that it's being done to you, he seems to be asking? And so that's what makes this a *critical* ethnography rather than just a plain old ethnography.
In his best essay, Clifford writes about Victor Segalen's poetics of displacement. Rather than value "diversity" as some abstract ideal, what Segalen "most prized in the encounter with cultural otherness was the brute shock of the impregnable, the mysterious surfeit of experience over expectation in those moments when one encounters the reality of a phenomenon that will not submit to dissolution into the familiar." Clifford goes on to write about being haunted by the stare of a native woman (again, there is a massive parallel between the straight male's urge towards colonization and the women of other cultures). But finally he seems to return to his liberal conscience and writes about being haunted by the stare of an Igorot man from the Phillipines at the 1904 World's Fair. These men were brought into a "human zoo" intended to showcase them as savages to justify U.S. colonization. His point is like above: how do you like it now that it's being done to you?
Jersey \ with its isolate lakes and \ valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves \ old names \ and promiscuity \between \devil-may-care men who have taken \ to railroading \ out of sheer lust of adventure--"
He means authentic people, real people, the people from whom culture springs forth, regardless of government and institutions. And then the troubled narrator of the poem locks eyes with a servant girl, Elsie, whose "great ungainly hips and flopping breasts" somehow "expressing with broken \ brain the truth about us--" and by *us,* he means White Americans, but anyways, his encounter with Elsie in a wealthy doctor's home reminds him that we are "degraded prisoners \ destined \ to hunger until we eat filth \ while the imagination strains \ after deer \ going by fields of goldenrod in
\ the stifling heat of September."
There's much to say about the poem, but let's focus on exactly why James Clifford, an ethnographer, shows us this poem to begin his book. Here, Williams' "mix of curiosity, fear, and desire," upon encountering the exotic, probably the subject of countless undergraduate theses on ethnicity and sexuality, is also the subject of this collection of essays.
Curiosity, fear, and desire -- how should we feel about those strange people across the ocean from us, whom in Madrid, Tokyo, London, New York, are suddenly rooted, making the world a form of Bakhtin's hyperglossia (hyperglossia means many voices from different social contexts all speaking together). I am the child of immigrant parents and I have observed like many others how people need culture, the invisible beast. Not just any culture will do, they want their *own* culture, because the "fiction of culture" strengthens the "fiction" of a single coherent self. Maybe in our postmodern world it is because we sorely need meaning --- we crave it, we are willing to die for it --- that we dread the disruption to the meaning-making machine posed by other cultures, alien moral norms, alien arts, alien ideals of beauty, even as coastal liberals try their best, admirably, to treat psychological openness, tolerance, and empathy as Kantian ideals in themselves. There's no easy solution, but this is the truth, and if you don't believe me, try speaking Chinese on the phone in the subway or eating with your hands in a restaurant in DC and look at how people look at you.
But let's backtrack from Trump's America and remember that Clifford is writing out of a 1980s where the genuine liberal conscience of the academy is wrestling with all the thorny issues emerging out of a couple centuries of brutality and domination subjected by e.g the English, Spanish, and Dutch upon the rest of the world. At this point it is worth noting that this book is an "ETHNOGRAPHY," wherein if anthropology is how humans* study themselves, systematically, scientifically, then "ethnography" is a kind of self-aware version of anthropology, where humans from one culture study humans of other cultures through qualitative observation (*graduate students and professors). Underneath this all is the implication that we shouldn't, like colonizers, (just?) study other cultures to master their people and extract resources from them, but rather, like curators, see how other cultures show us what is possible but unrealized in our own culture, and furthermore, the whole museum art-culture scene of the 1980s was kind of f*cked up because they overlook that the native people who make these colorful masks or skirts or jewelry are actually still alive and among us, having intermarried or simply survived on their own, like how the African diaspora religion of Santeria blended Roman Catholic saints with Yoruba deities in Cuba to ensure the survival of at least part of their culture.
If you grew up reading National Geographic magazines maybe at some point you were gripped by the existential dread of knowing that hundreds of species of speckled, colored birds and frogs with amusing songs and wonderful patterns and feathers were disappearing from the planet, and courageously decided to take shorter showers and buying products with green cartoon leafs on them; your moral sensibility persevered in the face of a worldwide problem. It seems that in a similar way, Western ethnographers were liberals who felt that Anglo colonialism, disease, and extraction, was causing the destruction of a similar, unimaginable wealth of diversity among people in Guinea, Mali, Polynesia, etc. Except instead of birds and frogs, we were talking about people, and doesn't that make you feel ashamed? And I know I sound sarcastic, but you have to admire Clifford, who is a liberal, meaning he is self-aware about how much of the actual historical study of humans from one culture by another is done behind colonial stockades. He writes at length about Martinican poet Aimé Césaire's conception of "Négritude," he questions why the West assumes it has the right to observe and interpret other cultures in the first place? And Clifford critiques social scientists who assume objective analysis of other cultures is possible or desirable. He notes that the very action of observing can never be truly objective, and that all relations are relations of dominance and power between the subject and the object, and to demonstrate, he puts on the cover, two Igbo (Nigerian) tribesmen who are doing what you might call "whiteface," pretending to be Brits.
How do you like that, now that it's being done to you, he seems to be asking? And so that's what makes this a *critical* ethnography rather than just a plain old ethnography.
In his best essay, Clifford writes about Victor Segalen's poetics of displacement. Rather than value "diversity" as some abstract ideal, what Segalen "most prized in the encounter with cultural otherness was the brute shock of the impregnable, the mysterious surfeit of experience over expectation in those moments when one encounters the reality of a phenomenon that will not submit to dissolution into the familiar." Clifford goes on to write about being haunted by the stare of a native woman (again, there is a massive parallel between the straight male's urge towards colonization and the women of other cultures). But finally he seems to return to his liberal conscience and writes about being haunted by the stare of an Igorot man from the Phillipines at the 1904 World's Fair. These men were brought into a "human zoo" intended to showcase them as savages to justify U.S. colonization. His point is like above: how do you like it now that it's being done to you?
Currently reading
October 24, 2007collecting art and culture
March 11, 2023
It's a particular book... it's actually a selection of essays, themed most vaguely around ethnography but they can pretty much be read by any order. Some of them are historical, some are anthropological, one is a series of postcards and one is a series of interviewers with the Mashpee community in Massachusetts; some depart from literature and go into anthropology. The essays that I most liked were the ones about Orientalism and Aime Cesaire. Clifford believes that ethnography as a discipline changed its shape over the past one hundred years with the birth of professional ethnographers. However, these professionals do not manage to get a good grasp of cultures of other lands as their depictions are often holistic and what they do is essentially pigeonholing their observations. The book also serves a good example of different trends in ethnography and modern anthropology.
October 19, 2012
preso in biblioteca
Ah, il vecchio Clifford!
Questo era un testo a scelta in un esame. Lui mi era piaciuto, volevo capire di più...
Ma al terzo capitolo avevo capito. Avevo capito che non sarei riuscita a finire il libro. No, questo tipo di analisi non mi hanno mai appassionata. Magari sarà per la prossima volta, eh?
Ah, il vecchio Clifford!
Questo era un testo a scelta in un esame. Lui mi era piaciuto, volevo capire di più...
Ma al terzo capitolo avevo capito. Avevo capito che non sarei riuscita a finire il libro. No, questo tipo di analisi non mi hanno mai appassionata. Magari sarà per la prossima volta, eh?
August 17, 2015
Excellent book. Good glimpse of where culture is today and the nature of complexity. His message is bitter/sweet !
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews