Culture, Power, and Truth: A Virtual Interview with Renato Rosaldo

Abstract

After obtaining his doctorate from Harvard University, anthropologist Renato Rosaldo has been a professor at Stanford University for more than three decades. Culture, Power, and Truth is a virtual interview with Professor Rosaldo and thus one in a new series of interviews carried out by e-mail that will appear in Amerasia Journal.Although Rosaldo has not published directly on Asian Americans per se, this seemed like a perfect opportunity to explore how his special synthesis of history, ethnography, literature, and social criticism might inform Asian Americanists, as we engage more fully with the Americas as a whole. Since his work is at once comparative, cross-disciplinary, creative, and politically engaged, we in Asian American Studies would do well to study how Rosaldo's work as an organic intellectual body has evolved.