[I-House Academy / I-House Ushiba Fellowship Public Lecture] Traditional Futures: New Indigenous Politics and the Question of Global History

[An edited version of this lecture is available in the IHJ Bulletin, Vol.30, No.2, 2010.]

  • [I-House Academy / I-House Ushiba Fellowship Public Lecture]
  • Speaker: James Clifford
  • (Distinguished Professor, University of California, Santa Cruz; Ushiba Fellow)
  • Moderator: Ota Yoshinobu (Professor, University of Kyushu)
  • Date & Time: Wednesday, June 23, 2010, 7:00 pm-8:30 pm
  • Venue: Iwasaki Koyata Memorial Hall, International House of Japan
  • Admission: 1,000 yen (Students: 500 yen, IHJ Members: Free)
  • Language: English/Japanese (with simultaneous interpretation)
James CliffordJames Clifford is a world-renowned cultural critic and “post-modern” anthropologist whose work has challenged conventional academic norms and methods, contributing to postcolonial critiques of Euro-centric epistemologies. He received his Ph.D. in history from Harvard University, and has taught since 1978 in the interdisciplinary History of Consciousness doctoral program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has also served as a visiting professor of anthropology at University College London and Yale University. Throughout his professional career, Dr. Clifford has published books and essays that are widely translated and frequently cited in many areas of the arts and culture. They include Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Co-edited with George Marcus, University of California Press, 1986), The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Harvard University Press, 1988), and Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Harvard University Press, 1997).

Dr. Clifford is currently engaged in a comparative study of contemporary “indigenous” resurgence. His lecture explores the dialectic of trans-national forces and local cultural politics, reflecting on how the survival and transformation of Native peoples forces us to revise established ways of thinking about “global history.” Where are we all going, together and separately, in the early 21st Century? The question imposes itself today with new urgency, and uncertainty.