James Clifford

James Clifford is an American historian and cultural critic whose work on the writing and authority of ethnography became foundational to the reflexive turn in anthropology. As co-editor, with George Marcus, of Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (1986), he argued that ethnographic texts are literary constructions shaped by narrative conventions and rhetorical choices, not transparent, objective transcriptions of another culture, so that the anthropologist's own authority to represent another people needed to be examined as critically as the culture being described. Clifford's related essays on travel, diaspora, and cultural contact, later collected in works such as The Predicament of Culture (1988), extended this critique into a broader argument that cultures are not bounded, static wholes but are constantly produced through movement, exchange, and contact, reshaping how anthropologists conceived of culture itself as an object of study.