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Para-Sites: A Casebook against Cynical Reason

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 upon the socially marginalized and disadvantaged, these pieces probe subjects who are fully inside and undeniably complicit with powerful institutional engines of contemporary change. The more privileged, professional subjects of this volume are not the classic "others" of anthropological ethnography, but instead the "counterparts" of the academic intellectuals and scholars who undertake their investigations using the Late Editions series' signature interview format.

Portrayed, for example, are the predicaments of South African artists after apartheid, the weekly documenting by a Mexican television producer of stories found in the landscape of Nuevo Leon, and the artistic projects of a doctor who has treated AIDS patients and refugees from war and famine. Their stories challenge the condition of cynicism that has been the favored mode of characterizing the mind-set of intellectuals, professionals, and experts, comfortable in their lives of middle-class consumption and work. In their effort to establish para-sites of critical awareness parallel to the various levels of political and economic power at which they function, these subjects suggest that those who lead ordinary lives of modest power and privilege might not be parasites in relation to the systems they serve. Instead, they may be creating unique and independent critical perspectives.

"...some of the subjects of this year's volume are self-defined artists and producers of cultural forms - filmmaking, photography, fashion, installations, performances, alternative community. Others are professionals or functionaries within important institutions of state and economy who are attempting to come to terms with changing practices, opportunities, and self-definitions. We are less interested in their literal output - the substance of a critique or line of thought (these always seem ambivalent and conflicted in any case) - than in the ways and means by which they construct alternative space itself inside or in relation to major sites in the exercises of social power to which they are straightforwardly or ambiguously committed. This creation of alternative space - figurative in one sense but always with a physical, material dimension as well - is a distinctive kind of cultural work in each case, with unpredictable consequences for the subject and for that part of the institutional order in which he or she operates."

- George Marcus

2. Kim Fortun, Jeff Petry, and Mike Fortun. Expatriating Culture, Writing Thailand

3. Jennifer A. Law. Performing on a Fault Line.

4. Olga Vainshtein. Fashioning Women: The Dressmaker as Cultural Producer in Soviet Russia.

5. Alexei Elfimov. Academics and the Production of an Intellectual Discourse of Modernity in Russia.

6. Marie Theresa Hernandez. Technology, Television, and Myth: Reportajes de Alvarado and the Story of Nuevo Leon.

7. Kim and Mike Fortun. The Work of Markets: Filming within Indian Mediascapes, 1997.

8. Ron Burnett. Museum in a Hat.

9. Gudrun Klein. La Laiterie, Strasbourg, France: "From the Singular to the Manifold".

10. Michael M. J. Fischer. If Derrida Is the Gomez-Pena of Philosophy, What Are the Genres of Social Science?

11. Robbie E. Davis-Floyd. Commercializing Outer Space: The SATWG Stories.