A01=James A. Boon
Anthropologist
Author_James A. Boon
Category=JBCC
Category=JBSL
Category=JHM
Category=NHTB
Circumcision
Clifford Geertz
Coca-Cola
Colonialism
Conformity
Copia (museum)
Critique
Cross-cultural
Culture industry
Deconstruction
Dialogic
Discretion
Earring
Economic geography
Emblem
Emergence
Emile Durkheim
Envoi
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Essay
Ethnography
Ex nihilo
Foreskin
Genre
Gertrude Stein
Henry David Thoreau
Hyperbole
Idiom
Irony
Jacques Derrida
Kenneth Burke
Literature
Louis Dumont
Manifesto
Marcel Mauss
Marcel Proust
Matrilineality
Medieval French literature
Mercantilism
Misogyny
Modernism
Modernity
Narrative
Nursery rhyme
Overreaction
Parody
Printing
Propitiation
Prose
Protestantism
Rhetoric
Robert Louis Stevenson
Scholarship
Sexual Preference (book)
Specimen Days
Suggestion
Symbol
The Erotic
The New York Times Book Review
The Other Hand
The Sound and the Fury
Thought
Torture
Tristes Tropiques
Umberto Eco
Usage
Vladimir Nabokov
Vocabulary
Walter Spies
Writing
Product details
- ISBN 9780691016313
- Weight: 539g
- Dimensions: 197 x 254mm
- Publication Date: 18 Apr 1999
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
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.
James A. Boon is Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. His researches bridge Indonesian studies, Euro-American colonial and intellectual history, and philosophies of synaesthesic arts and experience. His works include From Symbolism to Structuralism, The Anthropological Romance of Bali, Other Tribes, Other Scribes, and Affinities and Extremes.
