Dale Carnegie, The Carpenters, and Cambodia

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-1999

Publication Title

Journal of Contemporary Ethnography

Volume

27

Issue

4

First page number:

435

Last page number:

460

Abstract

The problems of politics in the postmodern were never made more clear to me than during a visit to Cambodia and Vietnam in 1990. The following is an autoethnographic tale of my struggles as a white, middle-class, female, political sociologist encountering these remains of the Vietnam War. I write about my problem of locating a stable place for political action in the antifoundationalist epistemology of postmodern thought and within the hyperreality of postmodern media culture. I juxtapose a journal I kept while in Cambodia with my subsequent reflections on this journal to explore the ironies of lines between the “reality” of war and the “unreality” of U.S. postmodern culture. Bringing the materiality of body, place, and time and the fictions and fantasies of desire into sociological writing may be a way of writing the political in a way that pursues social justice.

Keywords

Cambodia; Ethnology; Political participation; Political sociology; Postmodernism; Social justice; Sociology--Political aspects; Vietnam

Disciplines

Philosophy | Politics and Social Change | Sociology

Language

English

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