"Para-Sites," the penultimate volume in the Late Editions series, explores how social actors located within centers of power and privilege develop and express a critical consciousness of their own situations. Departing from the usual focus of ethnography and cultural analysis on the socially marginalized, these pieces probe subjects who are undeniably complicit with powerful institutional engines of contemporary change. In each case, the possibility of alternative thinking or practices is in complex relation to the subject's source of empowerment.
These cases challenge the condition of...

Ten innovative interviews explore how producers of documentary media filmmakers, journalists, and artists located in societies considered marginal to the high-tech global centers respond to local and international audiences in creating their works.
We meet a South African playwright who is shaping a distinctive form of activist journalism; a New Guinean producer who manages several media careers; Polish and German filmmakers developing critical documentaries on compromised new orders; a Columbian artist who provides powerful representations of endemic violence in her society; and writers...

From the frontiers of cyberspace to Tibetans in exile, from computer bulletin boards to faxes, film, and videotape, the ongoing and often startling evolution of media continues to generate fresh new avenues for cultural criticism, political activism, and self-reflection. How is contemporary life affected by this stunning proliferation of information technologies? How does the Internet influence, and perhaps alter, users' experience of community and their sense of self? In what way are giant media conglomerates implicated in these far-reaching developments?
"Connected, " the third volume...

What is it like to be a scientist at the end of the twentieth century? How have shifts in power and in assumptions about knowledge affected scientific practice? Who are the people behind the new technologies, and how do they address the difficult moral and professional issues during a time of global change? "Techno-Scientific Imaginaries" explores these and other important questions at the approach of the new millennium.
In these penetrating essays, twenty-four distinguished contributors from a broad range of fields present the voices of the scientists themselves through interviews,...

What is it like to be a scientist at the end of the twentieth century? How have shifts in power and in assumptions about knowledge affected scientific practice? Who are the people behind the new technologies, and how do they address the difficult moral and professional issues during a time of global change? "Techno-Scientific Imaginaries" explores these and other important questions at the approach of the new millennium.
In these penetrating essays, twenty-four distinguished contributors from a broad range of fields present the voices of the scientists themselves through interviews,...

Encompassing a range of disciplines notably anthropology,
politics, history, comparative literature, and
philosophy the unprecedented annual publication "Late "
"Editions" exposes unsettling dilemmas and unprecedented
challenges facing cultural studies on the brink of the
twenty-first century. Successive volumes will appear
annually until the year 2000, each engaging the predicaments
of particular institutions, nations, and persons at this
point of social, cultural, and political change. The
project will test the limits of scholarly conventions by
finding new...

Using cultural anthropology to analyze debates that reverberate throughout the human sciences, George E. Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer look closely at cultural anthropology's past accomplishments, its current predicaments, its future direction, and the insights it has to offer other fields of study. The result is a provocative work that is important for scholars interested in a critical approach to social science, art, literature, and history, as well as anthropology. This second edition considers new challenges to the field which have arisen since the book's original publication.

As we approach the end of the century, cultural, institutional, and even geopolitical change becomes the norm rather than the exception. "Late Editions," edited by George E. Marcus, is a series of annuals designed to probe these changes not through the familiar academic conventions of analysis but instead through in-depth, informed conversations and interviews with individuals at the sites of these transformations. The casts of other volumes in the series include artists, oncologists, Siberian medical leaders, warhead designers, and computer junkies, all of whom take the opportunity presented...

Like the McCarthy era of the 1950s, there is a strong current of paranoid social thought as the end of the century approaches. Conspiracy theories abound, not only in extremist ideologies and groups, but in commerce, science, and economics-arenas where a paranoid style is least expected. A curiosity about paranoia at its most reasonable is at the root of this volume.
Some pieces develop conversations that reveal the post-Cold War situations of countries such as Italy, Russia, Slovenia, and the United States where conspiratorial explanations of national dramas seem to make sense. Other...

The final volume in the series devoted to documenting the diverse social and cultural transitions of the fin-de-siecle, this work offers a look back at the inception and progress of the series. The contributors reflect on how the shifting context for the production and reception of the series has been a reliable barometer of the profound ways in which traditional forms of knowledge about society are changing.