Navigators of the Contemporary

“At face value Navigators of the Contemporary makes a spirited defense of the central ground of cultural anthropology—namely ethnography. But David Westbrook’s compelling book covers a much wider intellectual landscape. Ethnography of the present situation—a re-functioned ethnography as he calls it—proposes for intellectual work generally a series of staged encounters that, when properly navigated, negotiated, evoked, and analyzed, can challenge us to rethink what it means to be critical, political, and imaginative. An ethnographic sensibility allows us to remap, to provide a rather different cartography of modernity, the university, and the intellectual life appropriate to what he calls the contemporary conditions. It is at once provocative, disarming, witty, and infuriating. It is a bit of a feast and a fire-side chat. Above all the book demands a reasoned response—a discussion—and conversation, says Westbrook, stands at the heart of ethnography. Go read it.”

“This book is the most convincing rendering of how to be a good anthropologist that I know of. It links the anthropological clearly to the broader intellectual enterprise. It offers up—after a long drought—a vision of anthropology very much of the sort that, in the heyday of Lévi-Strauss, Edmund Leach, and Mary Douglas, attracted me to it as a student. The extraordinary clarity and accessibility of Westbrook’s prose and reasoning are testaments in their very performance to the virtues of his ambitiously broad vision of ethnography. Both stylistically and intellectually, this is a fresh and lovely breeze.”--James D. Faubion, Rice University