Publication date:
21 January 2003Length of book:
161 pagesPublisher
AltaMira PressISBN-13: 9780759103351
The Time at Darwin's Reef is primarily a book of storytelling through mixed genres—verse, prose, and painting. Brady's work is designed to draw out key dimensions of the poetics of anthropology and history embedded in creative writing—in the mix and on the margins of verse and prose, painting and writing, fiction and fact—to revisit the sometimes academically resistant idea that there is more than one way to say (and therefore to see) things. This is a poetic exploration of themes encountered in the academy's attempts to explicate reality, including travel through various cultures, times, and circumstances. The goal of this unique book is both analytic and aesthetic. It is also humanistic: a commentary on the human condition, of being and not being in a cross-cultural world. It will be of immediate interest to poets and writers who wish to explore anthropological poetics, to ethnographers and teachers of ethnographic method, and to instructors and students in creative and experimental writing.
As good and compelling as many of the individual pieces that make up this collection are, I am most impressed by the way it both unfolds and achieves coherence as a work of anthropology. Here a skillful poetics of text-making builds context as certain and as powerfully as any classic ethnography, while yet being a virtuoso performance of all of those tendencies in the aftermath of the 1980s 'Writing Culture' critique that have come to define the preoccupations of anthropology.