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Queer activism and anthropology are both fundamentally concerned with the concept of difference. Yet they are so in fundamentally different ways. The Italian queer activists in this book value difference as something that must be produced, in opposition to the identity politics they find around them. Conversely, anthropologists find difference in the world around them, and seek to produce an identity between anthropological theory and the ethnographic material it elucidates. This book describes problems faced by an activist "politics of difference," and issues concerning the identity of anthropological reflection itself—connecting two conceptions of difference whilst simultaneously holding them apart.
“The book offers a fascinating and insightful discussion on how queer activism’s anti-identitarian character itself constitutes a form of identity, a way for activists to agree on something…It is a valuable and provocative contribution to anthropology which raises important challenges for the discipline and for researchers, principally as regards the way in which they conceive of identity and difference both intellectually and in relation to their objects of research.” • Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
“After Difference situates itself firmly in the current debate on the nature of anthropological theory, providing a lucid critique of different theoretical paradigms and advancing a clear argument against conflating anthropological theory and ethnography.” • Modern Italian Studies
“[This book] serves as an argument for the explicit recognition of the multiplicity of potential differences between anthropology and ethnography and explains how these can exist in tandem, while some equivocal notion of anthropology endures.” • Anthropology News
“Genuinely remarkable… There’s almost nothing quite this lucidly philosophical, conceptually and politically provocative, and deeply ethnographic in recent work… An intellectual treat with few competitors.” · Michael Herzfeld, Harvard University
Paolo Heywood is an assistant professor at Durham University.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
PART I
Chapter 1. Equivocal Locations
Chapter 2. The Anthropology of (Double) Morality
PART II
Chapter 3. Agreeing to Disagree
Chapter 4. Different Differences
PART III
Chapter 5. Why Will Recursivity Run Out of Steam?
Chapter 6. Making Difference
Conclusion
References
Index