The West and the Rest in TechniColor

Abstract

AFTER MUCH THEORY, CONTEMPLATING A SUBJECT AS SEEMINGLY SPECIFIC and concrete as the National Geographic comes as a relief-almost a guilty pleasure. An august institution, the Geographic is important in itself and to its readers, who imagine it as authoritative, scientific, and quasiofficial, more like an encylopedia than a magazine. It is timely to examine it now that renegotiations of fields of study-replete with geographic metaphors of boundaries, margins, centers, and bipolar opposites-confirm the rhetorical importance of geography in articulating current thought.1 Geographical rhetoric over the last two decades has helped usher such disparate disciplines as literature, history, sociology, communication, and anthropology into a vivid, energetic global village. Though this erasure of disciplinary boundaries has not always been welcomed, particularly by anthropologists, few would deny that eclectic approaches have brought fresh perspectives from such scholars as James Clifford, whose Predicament of Culture employs literature, history, ethnography, art, museum display, and tribal arts to demonstrate that authoritative accounts of other