Signifying Identities: Anthropological Perspectives on Boundaries and Contested Identities

by Cohen,Anthony; Cohen,Anthony

• ISBN13: 9780415192385
• ISBN10: 0415192382
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 1999-12-13
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Signifying Identitiesexamines the ways in which relations between national, ethnic, religious and gender groups are underpinned by each group's perceptions of their distinctive identities and of the nature of the boundaries which divide them. Questions of frontier and identity are theorized with reference to the Maori, Australian aborigines and Celtic groups. The theoretical arguments and ethnographic perspectives presented in these essays place this collection at the cutting edge of contemporary anthropological scholarship on identity, with respect to the study of ethnicity, nationalism, localism, gender and indigenous people.

Author Biography

Anthony P. Cohen is Professor of Social Anthropology, and Provost of Law and Social Sciences at the University of Edinburgh.

Table of Contents

Notes on contributors	vii
Acknowledgements	viii
Introduction: Discriminating relations -- identity, boundary and authenticity	1	(1)
Anthony P. Cohen
Beginnings	1	(1)
Boundary, identity, authenticity	2	(2)
Discriminating relations	4	(2)
The volume	6	(9)
PART I Boundary	15	(60)
Boundaries and connections	17	(20)
Fredrik Barth
Boundaries and distinctions	17	(2)
On the sources and uses of concepts	19	(1)
The need for cognitive theory	20	(2)
The image of group boundaries	22	(1)
Other images of social groups	23	(2)
Methodology	25	(2)
When people draw boundaries	27	(3)
Cognition, social structure and change	30	(4)
An analytical concept of boundaries	34	(3)
Maori and modernity: Ruatara's dying	37	(22)
Anne Salmond
Reflections	52	(7)
Violence and the work of time	59	(16)
Veena Das
The ethnographic context	59	(2)
Precarious thresholds	61	(5)
A sketch or a fragment	66	(1)
Silence at the edges of speech	67	(8)
PART II Identity	75	(95)
Aboriginality, authenticity and the Settler world	77	(40)
Robert Paine
Introduction	77	(2)
Authenticity	79	(2)
The imagining and bestowal of Aboriginality	81	(8)
Self-bestowal of Aboriginality: problems and responses	89	(9)
Frontiers	98	(6)
Post-Settler society?	104	(13)
Peripheral widsom	117	(28)
James W. Fernandez
Introduction: centering the argument and getting it straight	117	(3)
Boundaries and bees: on the coincidences of the human condition?	120	(3)
Border ballads: the Celtic fringe and other popular geographies	123	(8)
Centres and peripheries and the dynamic of the categorical in social understanding	131	(4)
Conclusion: peripheral wisdom -- national news and news from nowhere	135	(10)
Peripheral vision: nationalism, national identity and the objective correlative in Scotland	145	(25)
Anthony P. Cohen
Introduction: rights, values and peripherality in Scottishness	145	(5)
The problem of the objective correlative	150	(4)
Personal nationalism and the national interest	154	(9)
Peripheral vision	163	(7)
Index	170