In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-Way Place / Edition 1

by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

Overview

In this highly original and much-anticipated ethnography, Anna Tsing challenges not only anthropologists and feminists but all those who study culture to reconsider some of their dearest assumptions. By choosing to locate her study among Meratus Dayaks, a marginal and marginalized group in the deep rainforest of South Kalimantan, Indonesia, Tsing deliberately sets into motion the familiar and stubborn urban fantasies of self and other. Unusual encounters with her remarkably creative and unconventional Meratus friends and teachers, however, provide the opportunity to rethink notions of tradition, community, culture, power, and gender—and the doing of anthropology. Tsing's masterful weaving of ethnography and theory, as well as her humor and lucidity, allow for an extraordinary reading experience for students, scholars, and anyone interested in the complexities of culture.

Engaging Meratus in wider conversations involving Indonesian bureaucrats, family planners, experts in international development, Javanese soldiers, American and French feminists, Asian-Americans, right-to-life advocates, and Western intellectuals, Tsing looks not for consensus and coherence in Meratus culture but rather allows individual Meratus men and women to return our gaze. Bearing the fruit from the lively contemporary conversations between anthropology and cultural studies, In the Realm of the Diamond Queen will prove to be a model for thinking and writing about gender, power, and the politics of identity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691000510
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	11/21/1993
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at University of California, Santa Cruz. She is coeditor, with Faye Ginsburg, of Uncertain Terms: Negotiating Gender in American Culture (Beacon).

Table of Contents

Preface
Opening: In the Realm of the Diamond Queen	3
Pt. 1	Politics of the Periphery	39
1	Marginal Fictions	51
2	Government Headhunters	72
3	Family Planning	104
Pt. 2	A Science of Travel	121
4	Leadership Landscapes	127
5	Conditions of Living	154
6	On the Boundary of the Skin	178
Pt. 3	Riding the Horse of Gaps	207
7	Alien Romance	213
8	Riding, Writing	230
9	The History of the World	253
Reprise	285
Notes	303
References Cited	311
Index	335

What People are Saying About This

Amitav Ghosh

This is a book that is as rich in human warmth as it is technically innovative.

From the Publisher

"A loosely organized group of mountain people in southeastern Kalimantan ... [is the topic of Tsing's fieldwork in what is] perhaps the most detailed and certainly the most self-conscious examination of marginalization yet to appear."—New York Review of Books

"This is a book that is as rich in human warmth as it is technically innovative."—Amitav Ghosh

New York Review of Books

A loosely organized group of mountain people in southeastern Kalimantan ... [is the topic of Tsing's fieldwork in what is] perhaps the most detailed and certainly the most self-conscious examination of marginalization yet to appear.

Editorial Reviews

A loosely organized group of mountain people in southeastern Kalimantan ... [is the topic of Tsing's fieldwork in what is] perhaps the most detailed and certainly the most self-conscious examination of marginalization yet to appear.

New York Review of Books

"Winner of the 1994 Harry J. Benda Prize, Southeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies"

Honorable Mention for the 1994 Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing, Society for Humanistic Anthropology and American Anthropological Association

One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 1994

From the Publisher