pt. I. The culture in poetry and the poetry in culture -- The story of the Jackal Hunter girl -- Fresh lima beans and stories from occupied Cyprus -- Narrative ethnography, elite culture, and the language of the market -- Exogamous relations: travel writing, the incest prohibition, and Hawthorne's Transformation -- The world in a text: how to read Tristes Tropiques -- pt. II. Ethnic selves/ethnic signs: invention of self, space and genealogy in immigrant writing -- Turks as subjects: the ethnographic novels of Paul Geiersbach -- Narrative, genealogy, and the historical consciousness: selfhood in a disintegrating state -- Race and ruins -- Race under representation -- pt. III. Reading culture: anthropology and the textualization of India -- Ghostlier demarcations: textual phantasm and the origins of Japanese nativist ethnology -- The construction of America: the anthropologists as Columbus -- Crushed glass, or, is there a counterpoint to culture?