Beyond the Structuralist Myth of Ecriture

Unlike a historian an anthropologist drawing on fieldwork cannot – not even in theory – control all the available evidence and render it “truthfully.” A community is not a finite archive. Unlike a psychiatric expert moreover an anthropologist cannot claim to have met alone with the subject – a “culture”. In order to obtain a more in-depth analysis of the anthropological subject the book undertakes a psychoanalytical investigation with the “toolkit” provided by theoreticians of the field in the wake of Jacques Lacan of Clifford Geertz’s Deep Play. Notes on the Balinese Cockfight.