Books by James Clifford

Originally published in 1982, the author's analytical biography of Maurice Leenhardt (1878 - 1954) received wide critical acclaim for its insight into the colonial history of anthropology. In this book, he traces Leenhardt's life from his work as a missionary on the island of New Caledonia (1902 - 1926) to his subsequent return to Paris.

This collection of interviews captures Clifford in exchanges with his critics in Brazil, Hawaii, Japan, the United kingdom, and Portugal, offering a set of provocative reflections on an intellectual career in transformation.

When culture makes itself at home in motion, where does an anthropologist stand? Clifford offers a new view of anthropology. It is, he says, a moving picture of a world that reveals itself en route. In this collage of essays, meditations, poems, and travel reports, Clifford takes travel and translation as openings into a complex modernity.

Clifford offers a critical ethnography of the West in its changing relations with other societies. Analyzing cultural practices such as anthropology, travel writing, collecting, and museum displays of tribal art, Clifford shows authoritative accounts of other ways of life to be contingent fictions, now actively contested in postcolonial contexts.