TY  - BOOK
AU  - Boon,James A.
TI  - Verging on Extra-Vagance: Anthropology, History, Religion, Literature, Arts . . . Showbiz 
SN  - 9780691231150
U1  - 301/.01 
PY  - 2021///]
CY  - Princeton, NJ : 
PB  - Princeton University Press, 
KW  - SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / General
KW  - bisacsh
KW  - Apollonian and Dionysian values
KW  - Buginese
KW  - Calvin and Calvinism
KW  - Christian rites and contexts
KW  - Dolly as a leading motive
KW  - Dutch scholarship
KW  - France and the French
KW  - Grandville
KW  - Hollywood
KW  - Indic rites and contexts
KW  - Islamic rites and contexts
KW  - Japanese friends and culture
KW  - Jewish rites and contexts
KW  - alchemy
KW  - amusement industry
KW  - aphorism
KW  - births, actual and metaphorical
KW  - bricolage
KW  - carnivalization
KW  - circumcisions
KW  - comedy and theory
KW  - cyberspace
KW  - deconstruction
KW  - desire and theory
KW  - dialectics
KW  - elective affinities
KW  - ethnography as a genre
KW  - extra-Vagance
KW  - feminist topics
KW  - genitality as a category
KW  - hermeneutics
KW  - hybrids and hybridities
KW  - iconography and art history
KW  - journalistic accounts
KW  - lists and copiousness
KW  - margins and marginality
KW  - marriage institutions
KW  - melancholia
KW  - modernism and modernity
KW  - motives and leading motives
KW  - museums
KW  - mystic positions
KW  - neoplatonism
KW  - novels as a genre
KW  - palimpsests
KW  - polemical critique
KW  - postmodernist positions
KW  - race and racisms
KW  - renunciation
KW  - sacrifice
KW  - seriocomic interpretation
N1  - 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
N2  - 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
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691231150?locatt=mode:legacy
UR  - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9780691231150
UR  - https://www.degruyter.com/cover/covers/9780691231150.jpg
ER  -