It is not that easy to track down, but James Fernandez’s homepage is definitely worth checking out. Fernandez is, of course, an extremely well-known anthropologist with a long history of writing about anthropology, tropes, humanism, metaphor, and much more. The site’s circa-1994 layout has a sort of nostalgic charm to it — as if you’re viewing it in your brand new Mosaic browser, and it features a mix of high academic formality combined with Fernandez’s own impish playfulness. Best of all, it has content. The site includes not only offprints of much of Fernandez’s writings, but also a great deal of the imponderabilia of his everyday life — Christmas cards, pieces for his alumni magazine, and (above all) really, really amazing syllabi. The entire thing is deeply evocative of the life of a professor, from personally chosen favorite pieces to starch-collar descriptions of The Life Course Of The Proprietor. Not everyone will be moved by Fernandez’s mode of ethnographic thought, but as an example how/what a personal website can be, and particularly one for an emeritus professor who was not exactly weaned on tweets, it is certainly worth a look.
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Rex, thanks again for a pointer to another body of interesting and provocative work. _Persuasions and Performances_ was, along with _The Raw and the Cooked_ one of the major inspirations that informed my return to academic writing in “Why don’t we see some real money here? Offerings in Chinese Religion” _Journal of Chinese Religion_ 1990. In that piece the analysis was motivated by the notion that the binary oppositions analyzed by Levi-Strauss could be construed as defining the multi-dimensional manifold in which, according to Fernandez, pronouns are pushed around by metaphors. Now, almost two decades later, I thank you for the memories and the stimulus to look again at Fernandez’s work.