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Contents

Preface

Introduction: The Illusion of Anthropological Identity

PART I: ANTHROPOLOGICAL REIFICATIONS FROM ETHNICITY TO IDENTITY

Chapter 1. Toward Identification: The Unconscious Geopolitics of Ethnicity and Culture in Theory

  • Disenfranchising Concepts from their Disciplinary Mindsets
  • Reframing Ethnicity, Culture and Identity
  • Discursive Fictions in the Geopolitics of Modernity, Nation-State, Colonialism, etc.
  • Pragmatic Crises of Context in the Ecology of Social Process
  • The Illusion of Identity and the Groundedness of L’Imaginaire

Chapter 2. The Diasporic Mind-field in the (Inter)Disciplinary Politics of Identity

  • Diaspora as Cultural Phenomenon and Conceptual Problematic
  • Diaspora as Explanatory or Emancipatory Concept in Disciplinary Perspective
  • The Japanese ‘Diaspora’ in Postwar Taiwan
  • Diasporic Identification as Subjective Positioning

PART II: BEYOND THE IMAGINED COMMUNITY OF WRITING CULTURE

Chapter 3. The Predicament of James Clifford in the Anthropological Imaginary

  • The New and Newer Ethnography: A Short History of Consciousness
  • The Fate of Geertz: ‘Culture’ and Beyond

Chapter 4. Writing Theory: Rethinking the Emancipation of the Author from his Function

  • Theory, Literarily Speaking: Authorial Subjectivity from Text to Context
  • Theory as Narrative: The Birth of Society and the Norm from Durkheim to Foucault
  • The Limits of Imaginative Discourse within the Boundaries of Disciplinary Practices
  • Unthinking the Disciplines: Steps toward an Ecology of Practice

PART III: CAN THE POSTCOLONIAL SPEAK IN SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY?

Chapter 5. Subaltern Studies as Historical Exception / Postcolonialism as Critical Theory

  • Postcolonial Theories in the Concrete
  • The Disciplinary Divide: Why Can’t the Post-colonial Speak in Sociological Theory?
  • Subaltern Studies in the Abstract
  • Decolonizing the Fog of American Identity: Lessons from Chineseness in Critical Reflexivity
  • From Historical Exception to Theoretical Exceptionalism

Chapter 6. Nation as Norm, State as Exception: Unseen Ramifications of a Hyphenated Modernity

  • On Geoffrey Benjamin’s (2015 [1985]) Deep Sociology of the Nation-State
  • The Emergence of the State as Signifying Apparatus in the Practice of Modern Institutions
  • Governmentality in the Critique of Social Theory, or the Return of Postcolonialism2

Bibliography

On the Geopragmatics of Anthropological Identification

Allen Chun

174 pages, bibliog., index

ISBN  978-1-78920-203-8 Hb Published (April 2019)

eISBN 978-1-78920-204-5 eBook