Book Reviews

منو

" Book Reviews "
Maurer, WM

Document Type	:	AL
Record Number	:	917816
Doc. No	:	LA3w92705t
Title & Author	:	Book Reviews [Article]\ Maurer, WM
Date	:	2003
Title of Periodical	:	UC Irvine
Abstract	:	David Murray presents an ethnography ofcontemporary urban Martinique that caststhe problem of Caribbean colonial identity asone of irreducible paradoxes. That ‘problem’exists for Murray’s interlocutors as well as foranthropological analysis; it is both data andtheory. Rather than attempting to subsumeMartinican conversations about, and practicesof, self-understanding under one theoreticalrubric, or attempting to provide analyticalclosure to the ethnographic project, orgrounding ‘identity’ in any one social categorysuch as gender or race, Murray insteadborrows the Martinican writer EdouardGlissant’s concepts of ‘density’ and ‘opacity’,allowing him to leave unresolved the paradoxesof Caribbean social worlds. Glissant’saim was to query the ethnographic impulseto fix and freeze ‘the tangled nature oflived experience’ (Glissant, in Murray, p. 15).Murray carries this forward by arguing thatthe overdetermined density of social relationshipsand performances demands a mode ofanalysis open to an opacity or unclarity thatwould necessarily lie in the way of ‘a positionof transparent analysis’ (p. 15). Leave complexity,contradiction, and paradox where theyfall; any attempt to ground analysis in fixedand transparent certitudes is likely to lackverisimilitude.