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Encompassing a range of disciplines—notably anthropology,
politics, history, comparative literature, and
philosophy—the unprecedented annual publication Late
Editions exposes unsettling dilemmas and unprecedented
challenges facing cultural studies on the brink of the
twenty-first century. Successive volumes will appear
annually until the year 2000, each engaging the predicaments
of particular institutions, nations, and persons at this
point of social, cultural, and political change. The
project will test the limits of scholarly conventions by
finding new ways to expose cultural formations emerging from
the maturation or exhaustion of once-powerful ideas whose
validity is now deeply in question.

Perilous States, the first volume of Late
Editions, presents conversations between American
scholars, most of whom are anthropologists, and individuals
situated amidst political and social upheaval. Pimarily but
not exclusively from Eastern Europe, the cast includes
Russian writers, Hungarian scientists and academics, Armenian
politicians, Siberian religious and medical leaders, a Gypsy
leader, a Polish poet, a French politician, and a white South
African musician who is a self-styled Zulu. Their voices
unite around themes of democracy, market economy, individual
rights, and the reawakened force of suppressed ethnic and
racial identities.

To obtain fresh perspectives on these cultural and social
transformations, the volumes will consist of in-depth
conversations, relayed in essay form, between scholars and
individuals in other cultures with whom they share
affinities. This novel approach blends the immediacy of
interviews, the objectivity of journalism, and the
intellectual rigor of scholarship.

Contributors to this volume are Marjorie Balzer, Sam
Beck, David B. Coplan, Michael M. J. Fischer, Nia Georges,
Bruce Grant, Douglas R. Holmes, Stella Gregorian, George E.
Marcus, Kathryn Milun, Eleni Papagaroufali, Paul Rabinow,
Julie Taylor, and Tom White.

Originally published in 1982, James Clifford's analytical biography of Maurice Leenhardt (1878–1954)—missionary, anthropologist, founder of French Oceanic studies, historian of religion, and colonial reformer—received wide critical acclaim for its insight into the colonial history of anthropology. Drawing extensively on unpublished letters and journals, Clifford traces Leenhardt's life from his work as a missionary on the island of New Caledonia (1902–1926) to his subsequent return to Paris where he became an academic anthropologist at the École Practique des Hautes Études, where he followed Marcel Mauss and was succeeded in 1951 by Claude Lévi-Strauss. Clifford sees in Leenhardt's career a foreshadowing of contemporary anthropological concerns with reflexivity, cultural hybridity, and colonial and post-colonial entanglements.