Frazer as (1) a slightly later Bachofen (both retranslated Pausanias, Frazer correcting Bachofen's version) or (2) a considerably earlier Benjamin.Much as Benjamin's imaginative excursions among modernity's ''ruins'' (via the work of litterateurs) recalled the ''ancient labyrinths that Pausanias had entered,'' so did Frazer's forays among primitivity's ''ruins'' (via the work of ethnographers).Boon engages the affinities adhering Bachofen, Frazer, and Benjamin to Pausanias (and to each other) to signal endless ironies of transhistorical cross-cultural rereadings.By reading Pausanias through Frazer, Boon posits a number of disciplinary questions: What might Frazer's disciplinary multiplicity mean, even today, for meaning-in-cultures? Can Frazer, Boon asks, help reinvigorate anthropology's appeal among other fashions of critical consciousness?The method by which Frazer achieved such refraction of matter into sensibility is his style, which has often been misunderstood.Frazer's odd and ample corpus, Boon notes, helps challenge any dogmatic separation of interpretive pursuits: anthropology, history, literature, classics, and so on.Boon suggests that we read Frazer in order to revisit and question some of the existing binarisms in anthropology, such as Frazer (bookish)/ Malinowski (fieldworker); Frazer (derivative)/Tylor (''first''); British (empirical)/French (intellectualist); Boasian/Durkheimian.Richard Martin brings about the painful point of interdisciplinary dialogue.Despite the fact that a lot has been said and written about the desire for fertile intellectual exchanges between the disciplines, Martin argues, in the case of anthropology and the classics, true interdisciplinarity and cross-fertilization remain on the level of desire and discourse.Martin goes to the epistemological hearts of the two disciplines and recognizes that despite the fact that the study of myth is central to both classics and anthropology, any dialogue between the two has been almost completely absent, with a few exceptions that Martin underscores.Sally Humphreys' work on anthropology and the classics and her groundbreaking work on women in antiquity remain largely unknown within anthropology, as does the work by the late John Winkler.Humphreys' work, in particular, remains the best overview of the ways in which scholars of Greek and Roman culture used and abused anthropological ideas, as she takes account of more recent work and renews the call for a more self-aware critique of methodologies in classics, aided by anthropology.Visiting specific epistemological issues, Martin goes further to problematize anthropology's identification with fieldwork and the problems involved, and he suggests that we look at Albert Lord's project on Homeric poetry and fieldwork Neni Panourgia ´and George E. Marcus (Dr.Tom), Schein references the distinctly gendered homeland desire of Hmong media in belying and participating in the construction of a complicated erotic subjectification.Yet even as the Hmong sense of collectivity spans the globe, augmented by media messages, those same media messages may also play a role in refashioning the most intimate of interiorities.Transnational erotics, such as exist in Hmong media, remixes sex and space, revealing that physical distance and proximity are complexly intertwined in the contours of homeland desire.The papers by Antonis Liakos and Kath Weston engage in a metacritique of their respective disciplines and epistemologies, interrogating the categorical questions that have been posited by history and anthropology, respectively, and the implicit and explicit hierarchizations of these categorical ascriptions.Who can speak for and about history and anthropology?What is a historical fact and what constitutes the object and subject of anthropology and history?What are the limits and delimitations of interiority and exteriority in the process of interminable construction of a discipline?What do we have in mind when we talk of history and how has this understanding of ''History'' been formed through interdisciplinary discussions between history and anthropology? asks Liakos.The term history is a linguistic and cultural indicator of diverse ways of understanding social temporality.The conception of history and the meaning given to the term depend on the historicity each culture produces-something belied by the fact that in some cultures a corresponding term for history is lacking, since the concept of history and more generally the understanding of chronology belong to entirely different categories of social experience.What in Western tradition we call history exists as the ''spring and autumn annals'' or the ''Tso tradition'' in China, as ''Rikkokushi'' or the ''six national Histories'' in Japanese culture, as ''Itihasa'' in Hindu culture, as short histories in Arab and Islamic tradition, as the Bible in Jewish tradition, and as eschatology in Christian tradition.What we call history is strictly woven into each cultural environment, Liakos argues, placed between medicine and rhetoric, at the crossroads of two semiotic systems, investigation and representation.The type of writing that we call history is a product of modernity, a plant of Western culture, transplanted all over the world, obscuring and substituting for other forms of History.In this way, an epistemic rupture took place, which transformed all other histories into the prehistory of History.Since ethnographic narrativization is already a part of the methodologies used in revelations and explanations of ''unseen'' or ''hidden'' discourses, cultures, power relations, and so on, how is vision discursively embedded within anthropological or ethnographic narratives?We are at a historical juncture where the critique offered by interpretive anthropology, with its insistence on meanings, at a time when in the public sphere and political culture meaning has come to mean mendacity, and where the phenomenology of terms is invoked as a handmaiden to deception-we are at a juncture where this critique needs to be reintroduced.