James Clifford (historian)

He grew up in New York City and was for thirty-three years Professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz until his retirement in 2011.

He was co-editor (with George Marcus) of the widely influential collection Writing Culture: the Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (1986).

Clifford's work has sparked controversy and critical debate in a number of disciplines, such as literature, art history and visual studies, and especially in cultural anthropology.

His historical and rhetorical critiques of ethnography contributed to Anthropology's important self-critical, decolonizing period of the 1980s and early 1990s.

His dissertation and first book, "Person and Myth" (1982) was a study of the missionary-anthropologist Maurice Leenhardt and the colonial history of New Caledonia in French Melanesia.