Perilous States: Conversations on Culture, Politics, and Nation (Volume 1) (Late Editions: Cultural Studies for the End of the Century)

ISBN: 0226504476

Author: Marcus, George E.

Condition: New

Encompassing a range of disciplines-notably anthropology,politics, history, comparative literature, andphilosophy-the unprecedented annual publication LateEditions exposes unsettling dilemmas and unprecedentedchallenges facing cultural studies on the brink of thetwenty-first century. Successive volumes will appearannually until the year 2000, each engaging the predicamentsof particular institutions, nations, and persons at thispoint of social, cultural, and political change. Theproject will test the limits of scholarly conventions byfinding new ways to expose cultural formations emerging fromthe maturation or exhaustion of once-powerful ideas whosevalidity is now deeply in question.Perilous States, the first volume of LateEditions, presents conversations between Americanscholars, most of whom are anthropologists, and individualssituated amidst political and social upheaval. Pimarily butnot exclusively from Eastern Europe, the cast includesRussian writers, Hungarian scientists and academics, Armenianpoliticians, Siberian religious and medical leaders, a Gypsyleader, a Polish poet, a French politician, and a white SouthAfrican musician who is a self-styled Zulu. Their voicesunite around themes of democracy, market economy, individualrights, and the reawakened force of suppressed ethnic andracial identities.To obtain fresh perspectives on these cultural and socialtransformations, the volumes will consist of in-depthconversations, relayed in essay form, between scholars andindividuals in other cultures with whom they shareaffinities. This novel approach blends the immediacy ofinterviews, the objectivity of journalism, and theintellectual rigor of scholarship.Contributors to this volume are Marjorie Balzer, SamBeck, David B. Coplan, Michael M. J. Fischer, Nia Georges,Bruce Grant, Douglas R. Holmes, Stella Gregorian, George E.Marcus, Kathryn Milun, Eleni Papagaroufali, Paul Rabinow,Julie Taylor, and Tom White.