BETWEEN AND AMONG THE BOUNDARIES OF CULTURE - BRIDGING TEXT AND LIVEDEXPERIENCE IN THE 3RD TIMESPACE

The anthropological notion of Culture is founded on the presupposition of a radical difference between self and other, here and there, Euroc enter and Third World. This conceptual foundation has increasingly bee n under challenge, as the Eurocenter is being forcibly relativized by national liberation movements from without and 'new' social movements from within. The relativistic notion of cultures that are autonomous a nd bounded is now contested by a notion of historically grounded multi ple subject positions. A jumble of cultural-political practices and fo rms of resistance have emerged that have variously been named hybrid, border, or diasporic. The most creative and dynamic of these resistanc es are located on the borders of essentialism and conjuncturalism. The y refuse the binarism of identity politics versus post-modernist fragm entation, opting instead for what Sandoval terms 'differential conscio usness'. We name this terrain of practice and theory, this zone of shi fting 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 not ion of Culture as well as to nudge Cultural Studies away from its text - a Western-centered focus. Such an undertaking will require a revisi on of the ethnographic distinctions between 'home' and 'the field'. Fi eldwork becomes 'homework', as differences between the ethnographer an d the subject under study are broken down, as the ethnographer is inco rporated into the text, and as theory and text reflect and participate in the multiply-positioned and fluctuating realities of quotidian lif e.