Wikipedia

James Clifford (historian)

James Clifford (born 1945) is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work combines perspectives from history, literature, and anthropology.[1]

James Clifford

Biography

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He grew up in New York City and Vermont.[2] James Clifford's completed his PhD at Harvard University in 1977, focusing European intellectual and social history.[3] His dissertation, later turned into his first book Person and Myth (1982), was a study of the missionary-anthropologist Maurice Leenhardt and the colonial history of New Caledonia in French Melanesia.[4][5] Clifford's work has since addressed current problems in Indigenous studies,[6] museum studies,[7] cultural studies,[8] and cross-cultural translation.[9]

James Clifford is the author of several books, including The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (1988),[10] Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late 20th Century (1997),[9] and Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty First Century (2013).[11] He was co-editor (with George Marcus) of the influential collection Writing Culture: the Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (1986).[12] His historical and rhetorical critiques of ethnography contributed to anthropology's self-critical, decolonizing period of the 1980s and early 1990s.[13][14] Since then he has worked in a cultural studies framework that combines cross-cultural scholarship with the Birmingham School tradition.[15][16][4] Since 2000 his writing has focused on processes of globalization and decolonization as they influence contemporary Indigenous lives.[11][17]

In 1978, he became a professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz,[4] teaching there until his retirement in 2011.[18] Clifford served as department chair from 2004[citation needed]–2007, and was the founding director of UCSC's Center for Cultural Studies.[4] He has been a visiting professor in France, England, and Germany,[19][20] and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011.[21]

Published works

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  • Person and Myth: Maurice Leenhardt in the Melanesian World (University of California Press, 1982)
  • Writing Culture: the Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, edited with George Marcus (University of California Press, 1986)
  • The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Harvard University Press, 1988)
  • Traveling Theories, Traveling Theorists, edited with Vivek Dhareshwar (Inscriptions 5, 1989)
  • Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Harvard University Press, 1997)
  • On the Edges of Anthropology (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003)
  • Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty First Century (Harvard University Press, 2013)

References

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  1. ↑ Clifford, James (1994). "Diasporas". Cultural Anthropology. 9 (3): 302–338. ISSN 0886-7356.
  2. ↑ "James Clifford". Stanford Humanities Center. Retrieved 2026-05-27.
  3. ↑ Silverman, Carol (2023), Marzolph, Ulrich (ed.), "James Clifford, On the Edges of Anthropology", Reading matters, Göttingen: Göttingen University Press, pp. 363–366, doi:10.17875/gup2023-2297, ISBN 978-3-86395-584-7, retrieved 2026-05-27{{citation}}: CS1 maint: work parameter with ISBN (link)
  4. 1 2 3 4 Clifford, James; Vanderscoff, Cameron (2013-06-07). "James Clifford: Tradition and Transformation at UC Santa Cruz". Regional History Project, UCSC Library. Archived from the original on 2025-02-16.
  5. ↑ "Person and Myth: Maurice Leenhardt in the Melanesian World". Duke University Press. Retrieved 2026-05-27.
  6. ↑ Rosenthal, Nicolas (June 2015). "Review of Clifford, James, Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century". www.h-net.org. Archived from the original on 2025-07-09. Retrieved 2026-05-27.
  7. ↑ González, Jennifer A. (2025-10-01). "Museums, Decolonization, Realism: An Interview with James Clifford". Journal of Curatorial Studies. 14 (2): 244–256. doi:10.1386/jcs_00136_7. ISSN 2045-5836.
  8. ↑ "James Clifford". UCSC Center for Cultural Studies. Retrieved 2026-05-27.
  9. 1 2 Jasen, Patricia (December 1997). "Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, by James Clifford". Canadian Journal of History. 32 (3): 507–509. doi:10.3138/cjh.32.3.507. ISSN 0008-4107.
  10. ↑ Foster, Hal (1989-02-01). "The Predicament of Culture". Artforum. Retrieved 2026-05-27.
  11. 1 2 Burton, Sarah (2014-02-27). "Book Review: Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century by James Clifford". LSE Review of Books. Retrieved 2026-05-27.
  12. ↑ Larsen, Soren C. (2020), "Clifford, James, and George Marcus", SAGE Research Methods Foundations, London: SAGE Publications, doi:10.4135/9781526421036807162, ISBN 978-1-5264-2103-6, retrieved 2026-05-27{{citation}}: CS1 maint: work parameter with ISBN (link)
  13. ↑ Song, Hoon (2017). "James Clifford and the Ethical Turn in Anthropology". Cultural Critique. 97: 176–200. doi:10.5749/culturalcritique.97.2017.0176.
  14. ↑ Clifford, James (August 2012). "FEELING HISTORICAL". Cultural Anthropology. 27 (3): 417–426. doi:10.1111/j.1548-1360.2012.01151.x.
  15. ↑ Bragdon, Kathleen J. (November 2014). "Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century. By James Clifford (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2013) 377 pp. $39.95". The Journal of Interdisciplinary History. 45 (3): 421–423. doi:10.1162/JINH_r_00732. ISSN 0022-1953.
  16. ↑ Hamilton, Stephanie Laine (2025), Jaidka, Manju; Dhar, Tej N.; Vashisht, Natasha W. (eds.), "Clifford, James (1945–)", Encyclopedic Dictionary of Diasporic Indian English Writing, Singapore: Springer Nature Singapore, pp. 82–83, doi:10.1007/978-981-96-0045-8_53, ISBN 978-981-96-0044-1, retrieved 2026-05-27{{citation}}: CS1 maint: work parameter with ISBN (link)
  17. ↑ Clifford, James (2001). "Indigenous Articulations". The Contemporary Pacific. 13 (2): 468–490. ISSN 1043-898X.
  18. ↑ "Clifford, James, 1945-". National Library of New Zealand. Retrieved 2026-05-27.
  19. ↑ "The Second Life of Heritage". Bard Graduate Center. Retrieved 2026-05-27.
  20. ↑ "James Clifford". Freie Universität Berlin. 2008-01-18. Retrieved 2026-05-27.
  21. ↑ "Professor James Clifford". American Academy of Arts and Sciences. February 2015. Retrieved 16 June 2020.
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