Eric Gable
Biographic Data
| ID | 3601909 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Eric Gable |
| GIVEN NAMES | Eric |
| FAMILY NAME | Gable |
| SIGNATURE | GABLE E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Mary Washington |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 60 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 358 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 60 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1992 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2018 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
After authenticity at an American heritage site
This chapter explores what happens to a heritage site "after authenticity"—where the pursuit of an elusive authenticity remains a goal even as it generates public statements intended to call into question the epistemology of authenticity. It suggests that the vernacular concept of authenticity changes very little, that it shows a remarkable resilience, in a sense, because it is under threat. The chapter examines how Colonial Williamsburg tries to…
When The Monuments Came Down, Where Was Anthropology
The anthropology of guilt and rapport: Moral mutuality in ethnographic fieldwork
In this article I use Clifford Geertz's backhanded defense of Malinowski's seeming emotional hypocrisy-his dislike of the natives whose point of view he wished to understand-to argue that while empathy or at least sympathy are integral components of the intimacies of fieldwork, they are also the catalyst for the darker and usually far less openly discussed emotions that are associated with these feelings-guilt, anger, and disgust-that are also at…
Forget Culture, Remember Memory?
Anthropology and Egalitarianism: Ethnographic Encounters from Monticello to Guinea-Bissau
Contributing interestingly to what has become a fairly unusual anthropological genre, Gable (Univ. of Mary Washington) draws on the diversity of fieldwork experience that comes only with time and maturity in the discipline to produce a volume that seeks to explain anthropological knowledge and understandings for not just other anthropologists, but anyone interested in how one can attempt to understand other cultures and people. Any given anthropo…
Anthropology and Egalitarianism: Ethnographic Encounters from Monticello to Guinea-Bissau
Supping with Savages 2. Standing in a Line 3. Jefferson's Ardor 4. The Colonialist's Dress Code 5. Taking Pictures in the Field, or the Anthropologist's Dress Code 6. Beyond Belief 7. The Sex Life of Savages Conclusion: Tending to Nature, Tending to Culture, or Is Anthropology History? Notes on Sources References Index
Worldliness in Out of the Way Places
This paper looks at such youthful cosmopolitan aspirations among Manjaco of Guinea-Bissau and Lauje in Sulawesi. It is often argued that these attempts at worldliness reflect claims for equal rights of membership in an unequal global society. Yet, an aspiration to worldliness also entails their assertion that we are, or at least should be, like them. This paper suggests that Manjaco and Lauje might seem to want to look like us but they talk very …
Conclusion: Guinea-Bissau Yesterday… and Tomorrow
I had the pleasure of commenting on the articles in this issue when they were first presented as papers at the 2006 annual meeting of the African Studies Association, and the remarks that follow remain true to the character of those comments while acknowledging that the original papers have been reworked and updated. These provocative articles, coupled with my experiences doing ethnographic research in Guinea-Bissau—first among Manjaco in the vil…
Anthropology and Culture
Beyond belief? Play, scepticism, and religion in a West African village
Memory, History, Nation: Contested Pasts
Book Review| January 01 2006 Memory, History, Nation: Contested Pasts Memory, History, Nation: Contested Pasts edited by KATHARINE HODGKIN and SUSANNAH RADSTONE. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2006; xv + 254 pp., illustrations, index; paperbound, $29.95. ERIC GABLE ERIC GABLE University of Mary Washington Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar The Public Historian (2006) 28 (4): 93–95. https://doi.org/10…
Persons of Stature and the Passing Parade: Egalitarian Dilemmas at Monticello and Colonial Williamsburg
The Funeral and Modernity in Manjaco
This article asks what it means when Manjaco urban migrants embody and perform cosmopolitanism during funeral ceremonies in rural homelands in Guinea–Bissau. The format of the funeral allows for assertions of individuality that are routinely portrayed as destructive, but destructiveness is imagined as an enduring, by no means recent, feature of social life, whether traditional or cosmopolitan. Manjaco returnees are not compelled to disguise their…
Gallery Bundu: A story about an African past - Paul Stoller
Horatio Alger and the Tourist's Quest for Authenticity, or, Optimism, Pessimism, and Middle‐Class American Personhood
Horatio Alger and the Tourist's Quest for Authenticity, or, Optimism, Pessimism, and Middle-Class American Personhood
What heritage does and does not do to identity: Some Answers From an Ethnographic Perspective
This paper explores how caretakers of slave-era heritage sites objectify and enact what Robert Bellah and his co-authors call 'communities of memory' in a racially polarized United States and how the public interpret their efforts at creating what amounts to official history. It highlights the often-vexed encounter between those who are in charge of conveying public representations of slavery and race in the antebellum era in the United States an…
Manjaco Rulers After a Revolution
This article juxtaposes a series of vignettes that feature the attitudes of the Manjaco of post-revolutionary Guinea-Bissau to traditional rulers with a similar series of vignettes E. E. Evans-Pritchard used to paint a portrait of Azande attitudes towards aristocrats. It poses the question: if what Evans-Prichard wrote about the Azande reflects the desires and preoccupations of a typical colonialist anthropology, what might the way we write about…
Celebrating Ethnicity and Nation: American Festive Culture from the Revolution to the Early 20th Century
Celebrating Ethnicity and Nation: American Festive Culture from the Revolution to the Early 20th Century. Jurgen Heideking. Genevieve Fabre. and Kai Dreisbach. eds. New York: Berghahn Books, 2001. 316 pp
Beyond belief? Play, scepticism, and religion in a West African village
L'A. explore un aspect peu etudie du changement religieux dans ce qu'il a ete convenu d'appeler des pratiques traditionnelles africaines incorporant le scepticisme. Chez les Manjaco, les jeunes imitent de maniere ludique les usages religieux locaux et ne se privent pas de critiquer les ritualisations et les croyances de leurs aines. Cette jeunesse sceptique est a l'avant-garde de la revolution religieuse au village, incitant la communaute dans so…
Cosmopolitanism (review)
Reviewed by: Cosmopolitanism Eric Gable Cosmopolitanism. Edited by Carol Breckenridge, Sheldon Pollock, Homi Bhabha, Dipesh Chakrabarty. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002. Cosmopolitanism is emerging as a hot topic in the humanities and social sciences because it is the cultural analogue to globalization. If globalization entails the unprecedented movement of people from the country to the city, from the Southern hemisphere to the No…
Beyond Aesthetics: Art and the Technologies of Enchantment
Beyond Aesthetics: Art and the Technologies of Enchantment. Christopher Pinney and Nicholas Thomas (eds.). Berg: Oxford and New York. 2001
An Anthropologist's (New?) Dress Code: Some Brief Comments on a Comparative Cosmopolitanism
Association for Africanist Anthropology: Back to the Village, Off to The City: Ethnographics of African Cosmopolitans (Part I)
Art, Innovation, and Politics in Eighteenth Century Benin
Art, Innovation, and Politics in Eighteenth Century Benin. Ben‐Amos. Paula Girshick. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. 1999
After Authenticity at an American Heritage Site
SThis essay explores what happens to a heritage site "after authenticity." The site is Colonial Williamsburg, one of the most ambitious reconstruction projects ever undertaken and a place intended to be experienced as an objective correlate of an American national "identity." Because it makes such claims, throughout its history the site has been subject to critiques by those wishing to undermine its authority to speak as the voice of an all-encom…
On the Uses of Relativism: Fact, conjecture, and black and white histories at Colonial Williamsburg
At Colonial Williamsburg, the idea that histories are interpretations that change in relation to changing social circumstances competes with a notion of history as "just the facts." The first approach, historical relativism, is more frequently enunciated in presentations of African-American history than in presentations of the history of the founding fathers. The museum thus asserts that black history is "conjectural," but it continues to present…
The Decolonization of Consciousness: Local skeptics and the "will to be modern" in a West African village
During a recent initiation ceremony, the men of Bassarel rewrote customary law. I discuss both the attitudes of the protagonists in the ceremony who likened it to a "Party Congress" and attitudes toward spirits as revealed in ritualized orations. I conclude that a tendency to objectify and manipulate custom, coupled with a pervasive skepticism about spiritual efficacy, reveals a typical West African ethos rather than reflects the ruptures of colo…
A Secret Shared: Field work and the Sinister in a West African Village
The Culture Development Club: Youth, Neo-Tradition, and the Construction of Society in Guinea-Bissau
As members of a youth organization called the "Culture Development Club," young men of the Manjaco ethnic group in Guinea-Bissau respond to and try to manage what they perceive to be community collapse in the face of endemic demographic decline. "The Club" is a postcolonial institution whose history reflects the local appropriation of foreign formats. I suggest, however, that by looking at the various ways youth in the "club" enacted their theori…
Memory, History, Nation: Contested Pasts
Book Review| January 01 2006 Memory, History, Nation: Contested Pasts Memory, History, Nation: Contested Pasts edited by KATHARINE HODGKIN and SUSANNAH RADSTONE. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2006; xv + 254 pp., illustrations, index; paperbound, $29.95. ERIC GABLE ERIC GABLE University of Mary Washington Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar The Public Historian (2006) 28 (4): 93–95. https://doi.org/10…
The Funeral and Modernity in Manjaco
This article asks what it means when Manjaco urban migrants embody and perform cosmopolitanism during funeral ceremonies in rural homelands in Guinea–Bissau. The format of the funeral allows for assertions of individuality that are routinely portrayed as destructive, but destructiveness is imagined as an enduring, by no means recent, feature of social life, whether traditional or cosmopolitan. Manjaco returnees are not compelled to disguise their…
The anthropology of guilt and rapport: Moral mutuality in ethnographic fieldwork
In this article I use Clifford Geertz's backhanded defense of Malinowski's seeming emotional hypocrisy-his dislike of the natives whose point of view he wished to understand-to argue that while empathy or at least sympathy are integral components of the intimacies of fieldwork, they are also the catalyst for the darker and usually far less openly discussed emotions that are associated with these feelings-guilt, anger, and disgust-that are also at…
Public History, Private Memory: Notes from the Ethnography of Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, USA
Colonial Williamsburg, and U.S. history museums generally, claim to transform public history into collective memory. That is, they convey an objective documented history to the public who, absorbing that history, acquires an appropriate collective or national memory. We argue that the emphasis on consumer (visitor) experience at such museums collapses the distance between the reconstructed past (the museum's history lesson) and the visitor's tour…
Women, Ancestors, and Alterity Among the Manjaco of Guinea-Bissau
I explore a classic topic in anthropological studies of African religion-ancestor worship-by interpreting the rituals associated with the installation of a new ancestor figure into Manjaco household shrines. Women-pecifically out-marrying father's sisters-do most of the talking at the image's installation ceremony. And they generally characterize ancestors as selfish, capricious juniors. By exploring the way fathers' sisters assert their version …
An Anthropologist's (New?) Dress Code: Some Brief Comments on a Comparative Cosmopolitanism
The Authority of Documents at Some American History Museums
Journal Article The Authority of Documents at Some American History Museums Get access Eric Gable, Eric Gable associate professor of anthropology University of Virginia Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Richard Handler Richard Handler visiting assistant professor of anthropology Sweet Briar College Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 81…
Colonialist Anthropology at Colonial Williamsburg
Beyond Aesthetics: Art and the Technologies of Enchantment
Beyond Aesthetics: Art and the Technologies of Enchantment. Christopher Pinney and Nicholas Thomas (eds.). Berg: Oxford and New York. 2001
Persons of Stature and the Passing Parade: Egalitarian Dilemmas at Monticello and Colonial Williamsburg
Manjaco Rulers After a Revolution
This article juxtaposes a series of vignettes that feature the attitudes of the Manjaco of post-revolutionary Guinea-Bissau to traditional rulers with a similar series of vignettes E. E. Evans-Pritchard used to paint a portrait of Azande attitudes towards aristocrats. It poses the question: if what Evans-Prichard wrote about the Azande reflects the desires and preoccupations of a typical colonialist anthropology, what might the way we write about…
The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg
Worldliness in Out of the Way Places
This paper looks at such youthful cosmopolitan aspirations among Manjaco of Guinea-Bissau and Lauje in Sulawesi. It is often argued that these attempts at worldliness reflect claims for equal rights of membership in an unequal global society. Yet, an aspiration to worldliness also entails their assertion that we are, or at least should be, like them. This paper suggests that Manjaco and Lauje might seem to want to look like us but they talk very …
Ordinary Life, Festival Days: Aesthetics in the Midwestern County Fair
Ordinary Life, Festival Days: Aesthetics in the Midwestern County Fair. Leslie Prosterman. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995. xi + 220 pp. b/w photographs, notes, index. $24.95 (paper
How Societies Remember. Paul Conner-TON
Appropriate Bodies: Self through the Other in Manjaco and Portuguese Representation, 1946‐1973
Remembering the Present: Painting and Popular History in Zaire
Remembering the Present: Painting and Popular History in Zaire. Johannes Fabian with narrative and paintings by Tshibumba Kanda Matulu Berkeley. University of California Press, 1996
When The Monuments Came Down, Where Was Anthropology
Conclusion: Guinea-Bissau Yesterday… and Tomorrow
I had the pleasure of commenting on the articles in this issue when they were first presented as papers at the 2006 annual meeting of the African Studies Association, and the remarks that follow remain true to the character of those comments while acknowledging that the original papers have been reworked and updated. These provocative articles, coupled with my experiences doing ethnographic research in Guinea-Bissau—first among Manjaco in the vil…
What heritage does and does not do to identity: Some Answers From an Ethnographic Perspective
This paper explores how caretakers of slave-era heritage sites objectify and enact what Robert Bellah and his co-authors call 'communities of memory' in a racially polarized United States and how the public interpret their efforts at creating what amounts to official history. It highlights the often-vexed encounter between those who are in charge of conveying public representations of slavery and race in the antebellum era in the United States an…
Museum Economics and the Community
Museum Economics and the Community. Edited by Susan Pearce. New Research in Museum Studies: An International Series. Volume 2. London and Atlantic Highlands: The Althone Press, 1991. viii + 232 pp., bibliographies and index. $55 (cloth
Objects of Knowledge, New Research in Museum Studies
Objects of Knowledge, New Research in Museum Studies. Edited by Susan Pearce. Volume 1. London and Atlantic Highlands: The Althone Press, 1990. x + 235 pp., bibliographies, and index. $55.00 (cloth
The Love of Art: European Art Museums and Their Public . Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel with Dominique SCHNAPPER
On the Uses of Relativism: Fact, conjecture, and black and white histories at Colonial Williamsburg
At Colonial Williamsburg, the idea that histories are interpretations that change in relation to changing social circumstances competes with a notion of history as "just the facts." The first approach, historical relativism, is more frequently enunciated in presentations of African-American history than in presentations of the history of the founding fathers. The museum thus asserts that black history is "conjectural," but it continues to present…
How Societies Remember. Paul Conner-TON
Ideas and Images: Developing Interpretive History Exhibits
Journal Article Ideas and Images: Developing Interpretive History Exhibits. Ed. by Kenneth L. Ames, Barbara Franco, and L. Thomas Frye. (Nashville: American Association for State and Local History, 1992. viii, 336 pp. Paper, $24.95 (nonmember), $22.45 (member), ISBN 0-942063-20-1.) Get access Eric Gable Eric Gable Sweet Briar College, Sweet Briar, Virginia Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of America…
Colonialist Anthropology at Colonial Williamsburg
Social/Cultural Anthropology: Beyond the Glass Case: The Past, the Heritage and the Public in Britain. Nick Merriman
The Surreptitious Speech: Présence Africaine and the Politics of Otherness 1947–1987 . V. Y. Mudimbe
The Authority of Documents at Some American History Museums
Journal Article The Authority of Documents at Some American History Museums Get access Eric Gable, Eric Gable associate professor of anthropology University of Virginia Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Richard Handler Richard Handler visiting assistant professor of anthropology Sweet Briar College Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 81…
Black Critics and Kings: The Hermeneutics of Power in Yoruba Society
How can we account for the power of ritual? This is the guiding question of Black Critics and Kings, which examines how Yoruba forms of ritual and knowledge shape politics, history, and resistance against the state. Focusing on deep knowledge in Yoruba cosmology as an interpretive space for configuring difference, Andrew Apter analyzes ritual empowerment as an essentially critical practice, one that revises authoritative discourses of space, time…
The Representation of the Past: Museums and Heritage in the Post-Modern World. Kevin WALSH
Shared Spaces, Separate Lives
The Valentine Museum. Gregg Kimball and Barbara Batson
Maintaining Boundaries, or 'Mainstreaming' Black History in a White Museum
In this chapter, I explore ethnographically how enduring notions of racial 'identity' continue to make it unlikely that an ongoing attempt by America's largest outdoor living-history museum - Colonial Williamsburg - to tell stories about race relations in the antebellum era will be pedagogically effective. I focus on pedagogic practice among Colonial Williamsburg's 'frontline' because, while the professional historians ostensibly set historiograp…
Inherit the Alamo: Myth and Ritual at an American Shrine. Holly BEACHLEY BREAR
The Decolonization of Consciousness: Local skeptics and the "will to be modern" in a West African village
During a recent initiation ceremony, the men of Bassarel rewrote customary law. I discuss both the attitudes of the protagonists in the ceremony who likened it to a "Party Congress" and attitudes toward spirits as revealed in ritualized orations. I conclude that a tendency to objectify and manipulate custom, coupled with a pervasive skepticism about spiritual efficacy, reveals a typical West African ethos rather than reflects the ruptures of colo…
Iron, Gender, and Power: Rituals of Transformation in African Societies. Eugenia W
Ordinary Life, Festival Days: Aesthetics in the Midwestern County Fair
Ordinary Life, Festival Days: Aesthetics in the Midwestern County Fair. Leslie Prosterman. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995. xi + 220 pp. b/w photographs, notes, index. $24.95 (paper
Women, Ancestors, and Alterity Among the Manjaco of Guinea-Bissau
I explore a classic topic in anthropological studies of African religion-ancestor worship-by interpreting the rituals associated with the installation of a new ancestor figure into Manjaco household shrines. Women-pecifically out-marrying father's sisters-do most of the talking at the image's installation ceremony. And they generally characterize ancestors as selfish, capricious juniors. By exploring the way fathers' sisters assert their version …
After Authenticity at an American Heritage Site
SThis essay explores what happens to a heritage site "after authenticity." The site is Colonial Williamsburg, one of the most ambitious reconstruction projects ever undertaken and a place intended to be experienced as an objective correlate of an American national "identity." Because it makes such claims, throughout its history the site has been subject to critiques by those wishing to undermine its authority to speak as the voice of an all-encom…
Remembering the Present: Painting and Popular History in Zaire
Remembering the Present: Painting and Popular History in Zaire. Johannes Fabian with narrative and paintings by Tshibumba Kanda Matulu Berkeley. University of California Press, 1996
Making a "Public" to Remake the Past at an American Heritage Site
A Secret Shared: Field work and the Sinister in a West African Village
The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg
Appropriate Bodies: Self through the Other in Manjaco and Portuguese Representation, 1946‐1973
History (42 works) · History (32 works) · Sociology (32 works) · Art (27 works) · Archaeology (26 works) · Political science (23 works) · Museums and Cultural Heritage (20 works) · Anthropology (18 works) · Law (18 works) · Philosophy (18 works)