Library Catalog
Amazon cover image
Image from Amazon.com

Verging on Extra-Vagance : Anthropology, History, Religion, Literature, Arts . . . Showbiz / James A. Boon.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, [2021]Copyright date: ©1999Description: 1 online resource (368 p.) : 16 halftonesContent type:
Media type:
Carrier type:
ISBN:
  • 9780691231150
Subject(s): DDC classification:
  • 301/.01
Other classification:
  • online - DeGruyter
Online resources:
Contents:
Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Preface -- Rehearsals. An Endlessly Extra-Vagant Scholar: Kenneth Burke -- A Similar Genre: Opera -- Plus Melville, Cavell, Commodity-Life; Showbiz -- PART ONE: RITUALS, REREADING, RHETORICAL TURNS -- Chapter One. Re Menses: Rereading Ruth Benedict, Ultraobjectively -- Chapter Two Of Foreskins: (Un)Circumcision, Religious Histories, Difficult Description (Montaigne/Remondino) -- Chapter Three About a Footnote: Between-the-Wars Bali; Its Relics Regained -- Interlude: Essay-etudes and Tristimania -- PART TWO: MULTIMEDIATIONS: COINCIDENCE, MEMORY, MAGICS -- Chapter Four Cosmopolitan Moments: As-if Confessions of an Ethnographer- Tourist (Echoey "Cosmomes") -- Chapter Five Why Museums Make Me Sad (Eccentric Musings) -- Chapter Six Litterytoor 'n' Anthropolygee: An Experimental Wedding of Incongruous Styles from Mark Twain and Marcel Mauss -- PART THREE: CROSS-OVER STUDIES, SERIOCOMIC CRITIQUE -- A Little Polemic, Quizzically -- Chapter Seven Against Coping Across Cultures: Self-help Semiotics Rebuffed -- Chapter Eight Errant Anthropology, with Apologies to Chaucer -- Chapter Nine Margins and Hierarchies and Rhetorics That Subjugate -- Chapter Ten Evermore Derrida, Always the Same (What Gives?) -- Chapter Eleven Taking Torgovnick as She Takes Others -- Chapter Twelve Rerun (1980s): Mary Douglas's Grid/Group Grilled -- Chapter Thirteen Update (1990s): Coca-Cola Consumes Baudrillard, and a Balinese (Putu) Consumes Coca-Cola -- Encores and Envoi. Burke, Cavell, etc., Unforgotten -- Acknowledgments and Credits -- Notes -- References -- Index
Summary: In this book, James Boon ranges through history and around the globe in a series of provocative reflections on the limitations, attractions, and ambiguities of cultural interpretation. The book reflects the unusual keyword of its title, extra-vagance, a term Thoreau used to refer to thought that skirts traditional boundaries. Boon follows Thoreau's lead by broaching subjects as diverse as Balinese ritual, Montaigne, Chaucer, Tarzan, Perry Mason, opera, and the ideas of Jacques Derrida, Ruth Benedict, Kenneth Burke, and Mary Douglas. He makes creative and often playful leaps among eclectic texts and rituals that do not hold single, fixed meanings, but numerous, changing, and exceedingly specific ones. Boon opens by exploring links between ritual and reading, focusing on commentaries about the seclusion of menstruating women in Native American culture, trance dances in Bali, and circumcision (or lack of it) in contrasting religions. He considers the ironies of "first-person ethnography" by telling stories from his own fieldwork, reflecting on ethnological museums, and making seriocomic connections between Mark Twain and Marcel Mauss. In expansive discussions that touch on Manhattan and Sri Lanka, the Louvre and the "World of Coca-Cola" museum, willfully obscure academic theory and shamelessly commercial show business, Boon underlines the inadequacies of simple ideologies and pat generalizations. The book is a profound and eloquent exploration of cultural comparison by one of America's most original and innovative anthropologists.
Holdings
Item type Current library Call number URL Status Notes Barcode
eBook eBook Biblioteca "Angelicum" Pont. Univ. S.Tommaso d'Aquino Nuvola online online - DeGruyter (Browse shelf(Opens below)) Online access Not for loan (Accesso limitato) Accesso per gli utenti autorizzati / Access for authorized users (dgr)9780691231150

Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Preface -- Rehearsals. An Endlessly Extra-Vagant Scholar: Kenneth Burke -- A Similar Genre: Opera -- Plus Melville, Cavell, Commodity-Life; Showbiz -- PART ONE: RITUALS, REREADING, RHETORICAL TURNS -- Chapter One. Re Menses: Rereading Ruth Benedict, Ultraobjectively -- Chapter Two Of Foreskins: (Un)Circumcision, Religious Histories, Difficult Description (Montaigne/Remondino) -- Chapter Three About a Footnote: Between-the-Wars Bali; Its Relics Regained -- Interlude: Essay-etudes and Tristimania -- PART TWO: MULTIMEDIATIONS: COINCIDENCE, MEMORY, MAGICS -- Chapter Four Cosmopolitan Moments: As-if Confessions of an Ethnographer- Tourist (Echoey "Cosmomes") -- Chapter Five Why Museums Make Me Sad (Eccentric Musings) -- Chapter Six Litterytoor 'n' Anthropolygee: An Experimental Wedding of Incongruous Styles from Mark Twain and Marcel Mauss -- PART THREE: CROSS-OVER STUDIES, SERIOCOMIC CRITIQUE -- A Little Polemic, Quizzically -- Chapter Seven Against Coping Across Cultures: Self-help Semiotics Rebuffed -- Chapter Eight Errant Anthropology, with Apologies to Chaucer -- Chapter Nine Margins and Hierarchies and Rhetorics That Subjugate -- Chapter Ten Evermore Derrida, Always the Same (What Gives?) -- Chapter Eleven Taking Torgovnick as She Takes Others -- Chapter Twelve Rerun (1980s): Mary Douglas's Grid/Group Grilled -- Chapter Thirteen Update (1990s): Coca-Cola Consumes Baudrillard, and a Balinese (Putu) Consumes Coca-Cola -- Encores and Envoi. Burke, Cavell, etc., Unforgotten -- Acknowledgments and Credits -- Notes -- References -- Index

restricted access online access with authorization star

http://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_16ec

In this book, James Boon ranges through history and around the globe in a series of provocative reflections on the limitations, attractions, and ambiguities of cultural interpretation. The book reflects the unusual keyword of its title, extra-vagance, a term Thoreau used to refer to thought that skirts traditional boundaries. Boon follows Thoreau's lead by broaching subjects as diverse as Balinese ritual, Montaigne, Chaucer, Tarzan, Perry Mason, opera, and the ideas of Jacques Derrida, Ruth Benedict, Kenneth Burke, and Mary Douglas. He makes creative and often playful leaps among eclectic texts and rituals that do not hold single, fixed meanings, but numerous, changing, and exceedingly specific ones. Boon opens by exploring links between ritual and reading, focusing on commentaries about the seclusion of menstruating women in Native American culture, trance dances in Bali, and circumcision (or lack of it) in contrasting religions. He considers the ironies of "first-person ethnography" by telling stories from his own fieldwork, reflecting on ethnological museums, and making seriocomic connections between Mark Twain and Marcel Mauss. In expansive discussions that touch on Manhattan and Sri Lanka, the Louvre and the "World of Coca-Cola" museum, willfully obscure academic theory and shamelessly commercial show business, Boon underlines the inadequacies of simple ideologies and pat generalizations. The book is a profound and eloquent exploration of cultural comparison by one of America's most original and innovative anthropologists.

Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.

In English.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 30. Aug 2021)