Books by Johannes Fabian

In this volume, the author reflects on anthropological uses of the concept of popular culture. He retraces how his explorations of popular culture in the Shaba region of Zaire, now the Congo, showed that classical culture theory did not account for large aspects of contemporary African life.

Talk about Prayer is an experiment in writing ethnography, a commentary on a conversation with Mama Regine Tshitanda, the leader of a Charismatic prayer group (groupe de priere) in Lubumbashi (Katanga, Democratic Republic of the Congo) and members of her family in 1986. Fabian's research on expressions and practices of popular culture, including popular religion, was conducted during two visits to Katanga in 1985 and 1986. He discusses controversial issues in the study of the Global Charismatic Movement as seen at the time and gives a detailed account of the circumstances and events that led to the recorded meeting and how the ethnographic document on which this book is based was made. Central to the book is the authors understanding of anthropology of religion, in that research should be based on communicative ethnography, an approach that involves confrontation between researchers and interlocutors as well between their views of the world. Talk about Prayer is one such argument for keeping open the debate on a critical stance toward religion.

In this study, inquiry will be directed to the past, and it will, for many reasons, have to reach into a past which is rather remote from present-day Shaba Swahili. The authors principal concern remains with a contemporary situation, namely the role of Swahili in the context of work, industrial, artisanal, and artistic. When it was first formulated, the aim of my project was to describe what might be called the workers culture of Shaba, through analyses of communicative (sociolinguistic) and cognitive (ethnosemantic) aspects of language use.

This book collects published and unpublished work over the last dozen years by one of today's most distinguished and provocative anthopologists. Johannes Fabian is widely known outside of his discipline because his work so often overcomes traditional scholarly boundaries to bring fresh insight to central topics in philosophy, history, and cultural studies.

The Internet allows ethnographers to deposit the textual materials on which they base their writing in virtual archives. This work argues that virtual archives have the potential to shift the emphasis in ethnographic writing from the monograph to commentary. It provides a model of writing in the presence of a virtual archive.

Assesses the contemporary practice of anthropology and its emerging shape as a discipline across the globe. This title explores the place of linguistics in contemporary language-centered anthropology, and ponders how studies of material culture imbue objects with "otherness."

Explorers and ethnographers in Africa during the period of colonial expansion are usually assumed to have been guided by rational aims such as the desire for scientific knowledge, fame, or financial gain. This book shows explorers were far from rational - often meeting their hosts in states influenced by opiates, alcohol, sex, fever, and fatigue.

Time and the Other is a classic work that critically reexamined the relationship between anthropologists and their subjects and reoriented the approach literary critics, philosophers, and historians took to the study of humankind. Johannes Fabian challenges the assumption that anthropologists live in the "e;here and now,"e; that their subjects live in the "e;there and then,"e; and that the "e;other"e; exists in a time not contemporary with our own. He also pinpoints the emergence, transformation, and differentiation of a variety of uses of time in the history of anthropology that set specific parameters between power and inequality. In this edition, a new postscript by the author revisits popular conceptions of the "e;other"e; and the attempt to produce and represent knowledge of other(s).