Culture & truth: the remaking of social analysis

Abstract

Culture and Truth argues for a new approach to thinking and writing about culture. Exposing the inadequacies of old conceptions of static, monolithic cultures, and of detached, objective observers, Renato Rosaldo argues that new ethnographic writing must come to terms with the dynamic nature of social reality - with history, spontaneity, and human emotions. To move forward, anthropologists and other observers of culture must describe human lives in their rich variety, as ever-changing, mysterious and unpredictable rather than rigid and fixed. In remaking social analysis, their work must therefore acknowledge and celebrate diversity, narrative, emotion, and the unavoidability of subjectivity. Rosaldo's vision of social analysis concentrates on borders - the lines along which different groups work and live with divergent understandings. Drawing upon his own background as a Chicano as well as upon the works of three Chicano writers, Rosaldo claims that cultures by their very nature are heterogenous and always working in the realm of borders.