Between and among the boundaries of culture: Bridging text and lived experience in the third timespace

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Abstract
The anthropological notion of Culture is founded on the presupposition of a radical difference between self and other, here and there, Eurocenter and Third World. This conceptual foundation has increasingly been under challenge, as the Eurocenter is being forcibly relativized by national liberation movements from without and ‘new’ social movements from within. The relativisitc notion of cultures that are autonomous and bounded is now contested by a notion of historically grounded multiple subject positions. A jumble of cultural-political practices and forms of resistance have emerged that have variously been named hybrid, border, or diasporic. The most creative and dynamic of these resistances are located on the borders of essentialism and conjuncturalism. They refuse the binarism of identity politics versus post-modernist fragmentation, opting instead for what Sandoval terms ‘differential consciousness’. We name this terrain of practice and theory, this zone of shifting and mobile resistances that refuse fixity yet practice their own arbitrary provisional closures, the third timespace. The third study of third timespaces aims to displace the canonical anthropological notion of Culture as well as to nudge Cultural Studies away from its text — a Western-centered focus. Such an undertaking will require a revision of the ethnographic distinctions between ‘home’ and ‘the field’. Fieldwork becomes ‘homework’, as differences between the ethnographer and the subject under study are broken down, as the ethnographer is incorporated into the text, and as theory and text reflect and participate in the multiply-positioned and fluctuating realities of quotidian life.