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2007-2008 Fellows

James Clifford

University of California, Santa Cruz
Department of History of Consciousness

Raised in New York City and Vermont, James Clifford attended Haverford College and Stanford before receiving his PhD in Social and Intellectual History from Harvard in 1977. For the past 28 years he has taught in the interdisciplinary History of Consciousness PhD program at U. C. Santa Cruz. His work has focused on a historical and methodological critique of anthropology, ethnography, and exoticism more generally, including travel, collecting and museographic practices.

Project Summary

Traditional Futures: Indigenous Cultural Politics Today. The book project explores the relatively recent emergence of “indigenous” politics—articulated on local, national, regional and transnational scales. Through case studies from Native California, Melanesia and Alaska, it attempts to develop a comparative ethnographic and historical approach to complex transformations and contestations around identity, culture and history.