Ester Nelly Abuter Ananías - Fachbereich Philosophie und ...

Jutt a Birmele ( California State University, College of Liberal Arts, Long Beach, u sa )
Th e Professional and the Personal : Christina Th ompson’s Come on Shore and We
Will Kill and Eat You All
Rarely does a writer and scholar deal with such a wide ranging array of opposites
in which her own life experience, her narrative perspective and academic work
are deeply imbedded or rather implicated. Th e list of opposites, some of them
diametrically situated, is long. She goes back and forth between the past and the
present, between myth and reality, stereotypes and diff erentiation, and navigates
between generational, class, gender, ethnic, cultural, and geographical opposites. In
the instance of her studies of Maori culture and history, she is an outsider by birth
who becomes an insider by marriage. In the case of her excursion into the history of
North American sett lements, Christina Th ompson’s research again shows her as an
outsider removed through time and perspective, but at the same time she is part of
that history through her awareness of being a descendant of one of the fi rst families
of New England. Th e paper will examine how the personal story of the “encounter”
colors the author’s anthropological study and vice versa, how her marriage and family
life are directed by her academic work. Christina Th ompson is the editor of Harvard
Review.
Email jbirmele@csulb.edu
Section Contemporary Travel Narratives
Panel 84
Date July 31
Time 10 :45
Location l 116