ABOUT THIS BOOK

The terms "center" and "periphery" are particularly relevant to anthropologists, since traditionally they look outward from institutional "centers"-universities, museums, government bureaus-to learn about people on the "peripheries." Yet anthropology itself, as compared with economics, politics, or history, occupies a space somewhat on the margins of academe. Still, anthropologists, who control esoteric knowledge about the vast range of human variation, often find themselves in a theoretically central position, able to critique the "universal" truths promoted by other disciplines.

Central Sites, Peripheral Visions presents five case studies that explore the dilemmas, moral as well as political, that emerge out of this unique position. From David Koester's analysis of how ethnographic descriptions of Iceland marginalized that country's population, to Kath Weston's account of an offshore penal colony where officials mixed prison work with ethnographic pursuits; from Brad Evans's reflections on the "bohemianism" of both the Harlem vogue and American anthropology, to Arthur J. Ray's study of anthropologists who serve as expert witnesses in legal cases, the essays in the eleventh volume of the History of Anthropology Series reflect on anthropology's always problematic status as centrally peripheral, or peripherally central.

Finally, George W. Stocking, Jr., in a contribution that is almost a book in its own right, traces the professional trajectory of American anthropologist Robert Gelston Armstrong, who was unceremoniously expelled from his place of privilege because of his communist sympathies in the 1950s. By taking up Armstrong's unfinished business decades later, Stocking engages in an extended meditation on the relationship between center and periphery and offers "a kind of posthumous reparation," a page in the history of the discipline for a distant colleague who might otherwise have remained in the footnotes.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Richard Handler is professor of anthropology at the University of Virginia. He is author of Critics Against Culture and Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec, and coauthor of Jane Austen and the Fiction of Culture and The New History in an Old Museum.

REVIEWS

"A deeply considered reflection on a set of core dynamics in anthropology. Through the prism of seemingly peripheral figures like Robert Gelston Armstrong and ostensibly marginal sites like Iceland and the Andaman Islands, anthropology's center appears in a wholly new light."—Matti Bunzl, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

"Four substantive, edgy essays are matched with George Stocking's tour de force depiction of an 'ordinary' mid-century anthropologist persecuted as a Communist by the FBI. The multiple avenues of exploration opened in this work will be traveled for some time to come."—Michael Lambek, University of Toronto

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents
Contributors	000
Anthropology on the Periphery of the Center
	Richard Handler	000
The Power of Insult: Ethnographic Publication and Emergent Nationalism in the Sixteenth Century
	David Koester	000
Escape from the Andamans: Tracking, Offshore Incarceration and Ethnology in the Back of Beyond
	Kath Weston	000
Where Was Boas During the Renaissance in Harlem? Diffusion, Race, and the Culture Paradigm in the History of Anthropology
	Brad Evans	000
Unfinished Business: Robert Gelston Armstrong, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the History of Anthropology at Chicago and in Nigeria
	George W. Stocking, Jr. 000
Kroeber and the California Claims. Historical Particularism and Cultural Ecology in Court
	Arthur J. Ray	000
Index	000

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