On the Emic Gesture

The question Dulley asks throughout her engagement with Roy Wagner's main essays is whether it is possible for the emic gesture to account for difference within difference without falling into the closure of totalization."How might anthropologists embrace the intellectual potentials of their encounter with ethnographic difference - its powerful spur to think differently - without the tired cliché of 'us' versus 'them'? A Derridean deconstruction of Roy Wagner's works, Dulley shows, can get us there. The upshot is a tour de force of intellectual exegesis."???????? - Martin Holbraad, University College London??? ?? "What Derrida did for Lévi-Strauss, Dulley does for Wagner: providing a transformative reading of anthropological texts that unsettles their assumptions and gently leads them beyond their spoken and unspoken desires. Dulley lays out particularly helpful pathways into Wagner's complex conceptual writing that will be of great use for those interested in his work. She thereby asks key epistemological and methodological questions that are of central importance to the future of ethnography and to the politics of anthropology as a discipline deeply invested in the invention of 'others' to heal itself. This engaging, thoughtful and thought-provoking book opens up the closure of alterity and calls for an engagement with the never-ending and unforeseeable proliferation of difference-within-difference. As such, it makes space for Wagner's anthropology to disseminate beyond its founding gesture. A timely in(ter)vention." - Thomas Hendriks, University of Oxford