[SYMPOSIUM] BOOKCLUB #02 Abu-Lughod: Writing against Culture. 11 Dec, 2015, 6pm.

Abu-Lughod: Writing against Culture

[SYMPOSIUM] BOOK CLUB
#2 Abu-Lughod: Writing against Culture

Friday, 11 December 2015, 6:00pm – 8:30pm
The Field, 385 Queens Road, London SE14 5HD
Chaired by OmarJoseph Nasser-Khoury
Rail/Overground: New Cross Gate, Queens Road Peckham
Free, please book your place

We’ve selected Writing against Culture (1991) by Lila Abu-Lughod for our second reading. This discussion will be chaired by OmarJoseph Nasser-Khoury.

DOWNLOAD: Abu-Lughod, Lila (2006/1991). Writing against Culture. In Anthropology in Theory: Issues in Epistemology, Henrietta Moore and Todd Sanders ed. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 466–479.

Omar Joseph Nasser Khoury [2011] Silk Thread Martyrs. Ccollection of 22 garments, each unique. Embroidered, fabric, coloured and dyed by hand using natural materials (indigo, tea).
Omar Joseph Nasser Khoury [2011] Silk Thread Martyrs. Ccollection of 22 garments, each unique. Embroidered, fabric, coloured and dyed by hand using natural materials (indigo, tea).

In this academic text, Lila Abu-Lughod unpacks the pitfalls of anthropological methods of research and analysis, which often construct generalised and over-simplified assumptions based on cultural difference.

Abu-Lughod proposed three different strategies of “writing against culture” to counter ethnographic accounts of the time, which presented culture as something that is static, discrete, homogeneous and coherent, ignoring the cross-over between societies, social and cultural change, subjectivity and everyday contradictions.

Suggested further reading