anthropology is dead long live anthropology

Anthropology Is Dead, Long Live Anthro(a)pology: Poststructuralism, Literary Studies, andAnthropology's "Nervous Present"Author(s): David Chioni MooreReviewed work(s):Source: Journal of Anthropological Research, Vol. 50, No. 4 (Winter, 1994), pp. 345-365Published by: University of New MexicoStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3630558 .Accessed: 03/04/2012 02:14

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FIRST PRIZE IN ESSAY CONTEST ON THE "FUTURE OF ANTHROPOLOGY"

ANTHROPOLOGY IS DEAD, LONG LIVE ANTHRO(A)POLOGY: POSTSTRUCTURALISM, LITERARY STUDIES, AND ANTHROPOLOGY'S

"NERVOUS PRESENT"1

David Chioni Moore Literature Program, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708-0670

THE POSTSTRUCTURALIST CHALLENGE TO ANTHROPOLOGY

IT DOES NOT TAKE LONG for an anthropological outsider (such as myself, a literary theorist) circa 1994 to figure out that anthropology is today in a state of crisis, a crisis notable commentators have termed variously "epistemological worrying," "genuine malaise," an "unprecedented wave of challenges," "morbid fascination," "grumpiness, even virulence," or, perhaps most accu- rately, "the nervous present."2 Indeed, this anthropological declaration of crisis seems a minor industry or subgenre in its own right, and though perceived crises are a continuous feature of all disciplines, anthropology's current state is magnified because it is apparently at once political and epistemological. The political crisis stems from the recognition that anthropology, long seen as the champion of those Others no other academics would touch, had been at the same time implicated in colonial domination and its modern transformations for as long as it had existed. Anthropological insiders as well as outsiders (e.g., Leiris 1950; Asad 1973; Said 1989; and, tackling post-Writ- ing Culture ethnography, D. Scott 1992) have been instrumental in making this charge.

The second and perhaps related epistemological crisis has different roots, and stems largely from the realization that anthropologists produce not truth but texts (cf. Crapanzano 1986:51; and many more), texts inescapably fictional in the sense of "a thing made," and texts hence eminently deconstructible. To understand this crisis it is necessary first to recall, in a story by now familiar, that at certain times and places past, anthropology viewed itself as an objective science of a knowable world,3 and though that perception was generally qualified in some way, the notion that anthropologists could ideally produce a full and accurate account of a people under study greatly motivated and justi- fied the profession. Though anthropology had always been open to charges that it was not in fact "scientific," it always possessed two reliable defenses: either it would attempt greater scientificity, or it would assert a specifically anthropological mode of knowledge based on interpretation. Anthropology's

(Journal of Anthropological Research, vol. 50, 1994)

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346 JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH

"interpretive" mode, characterized canonically by the Clifford Geertz of the 1970s (e.g., 1973), though mistrusted for its "softer" or subjectivist undertones, was seen as an improvement over the scientific one because it seemed less naive or simplistic, while it preserved the reassuring notion of a transcendental real and thus staved off the horrors of a thoroughgoing, unmoored constructivism. Under interpretivism, the Real, to use a literary formulation, would be "inaccessible to us except in textual form," and our approach to it would pass necessarily through its narrativization, or "prior textualization" (Jameson 1981:35).

By the early to middle 1980s, however, it had become clear to many both inside and outside that anthropology's twin epistemological dikes-scientific and interpretive-which had long held back the sea of chaos from ethnography's however artificial terra firma, were crumbling away, "lying in ruins around us" (in Scholes's phrase, 1985:133), subject to the incessant wave actions of a heterogeneity of thinkers and thoughts. The attack on the science dike could usefully be traced from Kuhn (1962), to Feyerabend (1975), on to Bruno Latour (Latour and Woolgar 1979; Latour 1987) and beyond, while the attacks on the interpretive dike, more directly reflected and refer- enced in the anthropological literature, stemmed more from Continental poststructuralists such as Derrida and Foucault, with their "il n'y a pas de hors-texte," "games of truth," and "tout est ddj~ interpretation."4 The many powerful followers and elaborators of these theorists, most notably scholars associated with the seminal volume Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986), have been chief among those bringing these challenges to the anthropological establishment. Ironically, anthropology itself was a major precursor to the discourses that came to unsettle its own field, from the classic cultural relativism of early and mid-century ethnography to the more epistemologi- cally subversive linguistic relativism of Sapir and Whorf (e.g., Whorf 1956). At any rate, in the aftermath of all of these attacks, broadly termed antifoundational or poststructuralist, and in response also to substantial critiques made of the profession's authority from within, little theoretical ground seemed to be left for anthropology, and when the various political objections were added in, the general and indeed fruitful questions for anthropologists became, and are, What are we to do? What do we study? And how?

In the pages which follow, I will explore these "what now" questions from but one perspective-that of literary studies-for at the same time as anthropology encountered poststructuralism and seemed to lose its nerve, literary studies encountered the same theoretical object and came out braver than ever. Though literary studies too was once largely a self-described objectivist enterprise (this may surprise some anthropologists), in marked contrast to anthropology the loss of objectivism left literary studies emboldened rather than unsure, and it has expanded indeed at anthropology's expense. So-called cultural studies has been of late the hottest topic at litcrit confer- ences nationwide. Arjun Appadurai (1991:195), for one, notes the "seizure of

ANTHROPOLOGY AND LITERARY STUDIES 347

the high ground" and "the many-sided hijack of culture" by literary studies; and while literary studies' job market overall grew a reasonable 15 percent from 1985 to 1990, the academic subcategory of "Minority" Literature (in- cluding the "sub-sub" categories of Post-Colonial, Third World, American- Marginal, and African-American)-right square on anthropology's traditional terrain-experienced a stunning 636percent job growth during that time, the bulk of the profession's expansion overall (Modem Language Association 1991a). What has the literary academy, despite its internal battles and crises, done to emerge transformed and perhaps triumphant under poststructuralism, and has irrelevance (or "loss of the referent") been the price of its success, as is commonly supposed?

To help answer these questions, I will look at two separate but related aspects of this phenomenon: poststructuralist literary theory and current literary-critical practice. The discussion of poststructuralist theory will take up the recent and contested position that poststructural theory itself has no consequences for scholarly practice, or at least not any of the dire paralyzing or unmooring consequences that many have attributed to it. In such a fashion it shall be argued that anthropology should cut its (pure-) theory-angst (its politics-angst, and that which literary studies seems to lack, is another question) and learn to love, at least in theory, interpretation. This essay's subsequent comparative exploration of current literary-critical practice, no less extensive, will engage more points than can be usefully summarized here.

One problem must be addressed beforehand, however, though not for the last time. Few academic communities are as aware of the mechanics of colo- nialism as the ethnographic one, and thus it will not have escaped the anthropological reader's attention that there are some vague colonial undertones in what is here undertaken. A worst-case scenario would look like this: for some time now the health and numbers of anthropological faculty have been in decline, in many cases to the profit of the health, wealth, and economic size of departments of literature. Highly processed literary theories have been exported like so many Caterpillar tractors or Chevrolets to the distant shores of the restive and unsophisticated human sciences, whose anxious inhabit- ants have been seen paying heavy prices to drive them, despite the fact that they neither received wages for their construction nor can maneuver them well on local roads. Since maintenance is neglected, when the theories break down, they cannot be fixed. Unsurprisingly, payments for theory imports have been only partially met by the sale of unprocessed raw materials-ethnographic, historical, and social description-and a chronic intellectual trade deficit has today resulted. The principal consequence of this trade imbalance has been, as expected, not improved local output but an indigenous economy in disarray; the danger, of course, is that any attempt to remedy this situation based on imitation of the colonizing powers generally results not in autonomy but in a reinforcement of the imperial relationship. Nonetheless, for lack of any better solution (an Albanian-style isolationism having been ruled out), a


deeper understanding of the colonial powers is at a minimum indicated. And so caveat lector. These points will be revisited towards the end of this essay.

HOW I STOPPED WORRYING AND LEARNED TO LOVE INTERPRETATION

I will deal first with the poststructuralist theories which seem so hobbling to ethnography. The working view of these theories will be as follows: poststructuralism5 contends that there are no transcendental truths, no ab- solute grounds on which one can stand to make a judgment, no metanarratives. The world is all bias, cant, instability, and power. To cite the classic older Nietzschean formulation ([1873]1954:46-47), truth is nought but

a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms-in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are ....

In poststructuralist theory this essentially fictional nature of truth extends quite naturally into the fictional nature of things, and as Shapin and Schaffer (1985) and Bruno Latour have differently argued, "even" "scientists" (on whom many once relied for models of objectivity) literally invent the objects which they purport to have discovered. There exists no shortage of anthropological evidence for a constructivist or relativist ontology, the canonical instance being the Karam word yakt, which refers to most birds and all bats, but not to what Westerners would call the cassowary "bird" (Bulmer 1967; see also Lakoff 1987). When applied to concepts more crucial to anthropologists than polypeptides or cassowaries, such as "culture," the notion of a contructivist or nonessentialist ontology has had unsettling effects. In a body of once-oppositional literature that has rapidly become classic, writers such as Marcus and Cushman (1982) have demonstrated that anthropology's "objective" rendering of other cultures is in fact largely the product of a literary genre called ethnographic realism, composed of a complex set of masking tropes (e.g., the representation of the native point of view, the marking of fieldwork) which combine to produce what Roland Barthes (1968) described as "the effect of the real."

In the wake of this realization that ethnographies were fictions, many solutions or "ways out" were suggested in the relevant literature, among which were dialogic, polyphonic, self-reflexive, and other experimental writing styles, as well as "rhetorical analyses" of ethnographic texts which would "clear the way for a discussion of claims and evidence" (Marcus and Cushman 1982:56n). Not surprisingly, none of the products of this scramble for alternatives could survive a continued postmodern interrogation. The dialogic ethnography ad-


vocated by among others Clifford (1983, and 1986:15) as "rendering negoti- ated realities as multi-subjective, power-laden, and incongruent" was argued to be, like the realistic genres it was supposed to replace, "monologue mas- querading as dialogue" (Tyler, quoted in Kahn 1989:15).6 "Polyphonic" ethnography was of course susceptible to a similar critique. Similarly, rhetorical analyses of ethnographic accounts would get one nowhere under a rigorously applied poststructuralist critique, since the rhetorical analyses themselves would be again interested and fictional meta-accounts of the initial account, themselves susceptible to yet more rhetorical analysis. Rhetorical analysis is no way to escape rhetoric. Reflexivity, finally, would also require an infinite regress, since if one accepted reflexivity in the first place, one would be obliged to admit that one's "up-front" account of "where I stand in writing this acknowledged fiction" would itself be a fiction, and so on, and so on.7

Thus one can sympathize, finally, with Joel Kahn (1989:11) when he asks of his fellow anthropologists, "Is there no exit?" The answer is, in one sense, "No, there is not," not as long as one wishes to continue thinking at all, for as Nietzsche tells us, "we have to cease to think if we refuse to do it in the prison-house of language."8 Though in point of fact people do escape from prisons, this offers little surcease to the academic, for it has always been her option to cease to think (in the sense of to cogitate) and thereby escape, however temporarily, that language which imprisons us. People regularly achieve this transcendence in many ways, via ashrams, free jazz, triathlons, peyote, virtual reality, and so forth, but as academic programs, the limita- tions of such extralinguistic approaches are surely apparent.

Now, it has been said in an anthropological context, and in response to the prospect (if not specter) of an all-unmooring poststructuralism, that if all one can ever produce is fiction, then one might as well stop being an anthropologist and become a novelist. It has also been said that it is surely unacceptable if the best one can hope for under a Nietzschean linguistic regime is to be the highest-status flunky in the prison. I wish to argue, however, that in no sense should the escapeless postmodernist "imprisonment" or "all-fiction" conclu- sions (or metaphors) be particularly troubling or paralyzing, since no shortage of positive things has happened and will continue to happen in the linguistic prison and as a result of fictions. Take, for example, Isaac Newton's now-discredited fiction, or story, that force equals mass times acceleration, which imprisoned Western science for centuries. Newton was "wrong," of course, but that did not stop his fiction from being useful to bridge builders and architects throughout the West. Nor did Newtonian bridges and build- ings suddenly fall in 1905 with the advent of the (in this sense) inconsequen- tial theory of special relativity. Microbes, similarly, were cerebral inventions of Pasteur, phenomena fictionalized differently by other cultures, and phenomena which will eventually be fictionalized differently by our own. But as Latour has written ([1984]1988), the combination of Pasteur's temporary, contingent, yet useful microbial fiction with the efforts of thousands of zeal-


ous nineteenth-century French hygienists produced concrete health care advances which have rescued lives the world around. And, as Latour argues, it is possible to account for this in a strictly antifoundational way.

Closer to anthropology, one notes that "gender" as an ontological category has been shown to be a thoroughly social construction by numerous cultural and feminist theorists, from de Beauvoir's classic statement ([1949]1952:301) that "one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman," to Judith Butler's more recent assertion (1990:33) that "gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being." Yet still, the thorough ontological discreditation of "woman" does not prevent now-fictional gender from remaining, in the words of the historian Joan Scott (1988:28), "a useful category for historical analysis." The point of these examples is that the poststructuralist or postmodernist kicking of the ontological props out from under all nouns, or all writing, does not in any way unmoor us or remove the power or uses to which noun-fictions can be put. To take one last example, consider the unambiguous word "knife," which can no doubt be shown-at least in the world of professional cutlers-to be "contested, temporal, and emergent" (which is what Joel Kahn [1989:13] says of "culture"). Yet every day people accomplish things using this discredited word, and as long as this is the case, there is no reason to stop using it. The point is by now belabored, and it is this: as a matter of strict theory or ontology, poststructuralist critique threatens no one and no anthropological concept in particular because it attacks them all with equal vigor. Nobody, and no alternative writing strategy, can "get out." Poststructuralism doesn't kick the props out from under older or even classic nouns or concepts because in fact there were never any props there to begin with. Thus, qua theory, poststructuralist critique is like saying that all of the articles in last month's Critical Inquiry would disintegrate if dropped in a volcano: it provides no basis on which to differentiate one text from another, which is to say that in this respect it has no consequences.

Though this no-consequences argument may seem simply nihilistic, it is not, as the following three points should make clear. First, a poststructuralist critique would not therefore imply that fictional (contested, contingent, temporal) concepts such as "tree," "dog," "scenarios" (Ortner), "habitus" (Bourdieu), "cosmological dramas" (Sahlins), or just "culture" have no power and can be put to no use, or misuse.' Second, poststructuralist critique does not suggest that all concepts will therefore be equal (this may be termed the egalitarian fallacy), since a variety of highly compelling political, social, and economic arguments (themselves contingent, but perhaps stable for long pe- riods and across broad populations) will be put forth to differentiate them, as they always have (cf. Smith 1988, esp. 150-84). Third and finally, poststructuralism would not argue that theory, writing, or representation has no consequences in the broader sense, since the practice of theory (and the


terminology is important) is undeniably powerful today as a rhetoric of critique, a means of gaining institutional power, and more. The point is, finally, that anthropology should stop worrying about metaphysical foundations (or lack thereof) and should learn to love interpretation, at least in theory, because that's all there ever is, and it's not such a bad thing at that. If something seems fishy about the no-consequences argument sketched out here- an argument often termed pragmatist-then I refer the reader to the various writings of Stanley Fish (e.g., 1980, 1989), Richard Rorty, and to the Fish- inflected waters of W.J.T. Mitchell's edited volume Against Theory (1985), which have been lurking in the depths of these paragraphs all along.10 This closes the discussion of the purely theoretical (if such a thing can be said to exist) aspect of, and, insofar as it is purely theoretical, largely unfounded crisis in, anthropology.

ANTHROPOLOGY AND LITERARY STUDIES: TWO DIVERGENT RESPONSES TO POSTSTRUCTURALISM

The theory-work now complete, this section will examine, with anthropology in mind, the recent history of literary studies, which has thrived in these poststructuralist days. How has its current apparent power been purchased? And at what price? Though one might object that even if one did know the answers to such questions, it would be of little use to anthropologists (since anthropology and literary studies are so different-texts versus people, or something along those lines), the comparison will illuminate, not only because the text/thing distinction collapses in the light of poststructuralist insights, but because of many practical crossovers as well. Anthropologists make use of myths and songs, for example, while many literati are immersed in publishing practices, Zeitgeisten, and writing communities. In addition, anthropology and literary studies share three significant (and perhaps surprising) historical parallels: a legacy of (an always contested) objectivism, a recent loss of the central conceptual category, and a recent deprivileging of the canonical objects of study.

We begin with the first. For many decades-from the late 1920s to sometime in the 1960s-the predominant Anglo-American "New Critical" concep- tion of literary studies was that it was an objective, nearly scientific activity performed on timeless, isolatable, unitary objects uncontaminated by the con- texts of their production and unaffected by the status of their observer: the parallel with the contemporaneous anthropology is clearly strong. A brief survey of some of the major figures in the criticism of that time will illustrate the point. W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, for example, in 1949 ech- oed the long-held objectivist anthropological principle that the researcher should be in no way a part of the meaning of the object of study. Their essay "The Affective Fallacy"-one of the most celebrated of twentieth-century criticism-argued that the effect a poem had on its beholder was not to be


confused with "the poem itself." Notably for this paper's audience, "The Af- fective Fallacy" closed with a footnote to Bronislaw Malinowski and the assertion that, in anthropology generally, "the field worker among the Zunis or the Navahos finds no informant so informative as the poet or the member of the tribe who can quote its myths. In short, though cultures have changed and will change, poems remain and explain" (Wimsatt and Beardsley [1949] 1971:1031).

In a similar objectivist and unifying fashion, John Crowe Ransom ([1934] 1971:883) contended that a poem consisted of a "paraphrasable core" and "a context of lively local details," a formulation strikingly similar to the attempts of contemporaneous anthropologists to "paraphrase" or distill the "core meaning" of a culture in an ethnographic text and to marginalize as necessary the lively local details. Ransom ([1934] 1971:887, emphasis added) continued that the goal of the critic was "to examine and define the poem with respect to its structure and its texture ... [and] the final desideratum is an ontological in- sight, nothing less." R.P. Blackmur in the 1930s also beat an objectivist drum with his call to scholars to be bias-free and faithful to the object of study "itself." In his important "A Critic's Job of Work," Blackmur ([1935] 1971:897) detailed the defects of various pieces of criticism which were polluted by what he termed "ulterior purposes," that is, the critics had brought Marxist or moral or psychological biases to their analyses, while the true critic (or, read: "anthropologist") brought none.

Closer to the present, E.D. Hirsch (the author of 1988's best-selling West- ernist Dictionary of Cultural Literacy) made his major contribution to literary theory in an early essay revealingly entitled "Objective Interpretation" (1967), which argued that the meaning of a poem inheres in the poem, is unaffected by the context of its epoch, is unchanging over time, and is independent of the position of the reader. A most extreme example comes from Sigurd Burckhardt, who at the end of his career wrote an essay detailing his vision of a truly scientific literary method which would seek the "intrinsic interpretation" of a poem's "infallible" unity and entailed, amazingly enough, an ex- pressly pre-Heisenbergian model of classical physics: "This interpretive method was intrinsic in that it was entirely subservient to the phenomena and at the same time entirely faithful to the belief in their utter lawfulness and con- sistency .... For the physicist the classical age may be obsolete; for the literary critic it has barely begun" (Burckhardt [1968] 1971:1203, emphasis added). In what to later poststructuralist eyes was an amazing blunder, for decades objectivism indeed ruled the literary-critical day.

A second parallel between the postmodern predicaments of both literary studies and anthropology has been the radical destablization of, over the past decade, their major motivating concepts of "culture" and "literature." There is no need to go over the troubles of anthropology's Culture concept given this journal's audience, but a glimpse at the similar travails of literature's "Litera-


ture" may be illuminating. I quote from the first page of Terry Eagleton's widely read Literary Theory: An Introduction:

What is literature? ... English literature includes Shakespeare, Webster, Marvell and Milton; but it also stretches to the essays of Francis Ba- con, the sermons of John Donne, Bunyan's spiritual autobiography and whatever it was that Sir Thomas Browne wrote. It might even at a pinch be taken to encompass Hobbes's Leviathan or Clarendon's History of the Rebellion. French seventeenth-century literature contains, along with Corneille and Racine, La Rochefoucauld's maxims, Bossuet's funeral speeches, Boileau's treatise on poetry, Madame de Sdvingnd's letters to her daughter and the philosophy of Descartes and Pascal. Nineteenth- century English literature usually includes Lamb (though not Bentham), Macaulay (but not Marx), Mill (but not Darwin or Herbert Spencer). A distinction between "fact" and "fiction," then, seems unlikely to get us very far.... (Eagleton 1983:1)

On subsequent pages Eagleton goes on to dismantle every other definition one might put forth for Literature-that which is creative, ambiguous, "fine writing," self-referential, estranging, and so on-and in the end he concludes that Literature is not an objective concept at all but is instead constructed by a historically variable set of value judgments (Eagleton 1983:16). Despite recent traditionalist outcries to the contrary, Literature, in literary studies at least, is for the most part as unstable a construct as Culture is in anthropology today. So much, then, for the motivating concepts of literary studies and anthropology.

One final parallel between the current predicaments of both literary studies and anthropology comes in the recent deprivileging, not only of their motivating concepts, but also of their principal physical objects of study: the Primi- tive (native, savage, exotic, Other) for anthropology, and the canon of high West- ern poetry, drama, and prose fiction for literary studies. Again, there is no need here to detail the death of the Primitive for an anthropological audience, and indeed with all of the recent media attention given the debate over "Western Civ" in U.S. universities, neither is there much need to rehash the decline in literary studies of "dead white European male" literature-not coincidentally, the Primitive's very mirror (cf. Kuper 1988:5). What is interesting or perhaps ironic to note, however, about these mirrored demises is that the same recent set of anti-imperialist political imperatives has motivated anthropology and literary studies to move in virtually opposite direc- tions: while "move away from the Occident" was the activists' chant in front of the English Department, "move away from the Orient" was in many places the cry in front of Anthropology, or even from its subjects. This has played a great role in anthropology's current perplex, as will be detailed below.


But first, to the question of the apparently divergent fortunes of anthropology and literary studies in recent decades. I'd like to begin this consideration with a parable drawn from a novel by the Chilean writer Jose Donoso. Casa de campo (or A House in the Country [1978] 1984) concerns the hellish summer experiences of the powerful Ventura family. About midway through the narrative, it seems as if the Venturas are in danger of losing their quite consid- erable position and wealth, and they are nearly paralyzed by this prospect. While the Venturas fret over how to regain power, and one of their number nervously speculates that their "whole mission will fail," a dark and oracular figure named Juan Perez steps forward to the family patriarch and informs him that it is not "the possession of so many coveted objects [that] makes Your Graces superior" (Donoso 1984:189). "And in your judgment," asked Silvestre, perhaps a trifle offended, "in what does our superiority consist?" Juan Perez didn't hesitate: "In the absence of doubt."

I must admit I am almost embarrassed to begin an analysis of somebody else's institutional disarray with what appears to be a piece of dime-store psychoanalysis (as well as with an intentional misreading of Casa de campo), but I do want to consider seriously the possibility that in addition to all of the theoretical, political, and institutional causes for an actually quite wealthy anthropology's "nervous present," there is also an anxiety which needs to be addressed pure and simple, as anxiety, in its current professional worry. Of course it is presumptuous of me as an outsider to make such a claim, and it may be counterproductive as well, in the manner of someone who breaks up with their boy- or girlfriend, explaining that "you're too insecure": the enun- ciation of this type of problem only rarely helps to solve it. Nonetheless, it may be that what anthropology needs to cure its current malaise, in addition to the more satisfying general theories of anthropology that so many today seek, is an initial theory of its chronic recent anthro-apology.

To some extent anthropology's anxiety (and literature's confidence) can be traced to the two disciplines' divergent responses to the death of objectivism. In literary studies, as the recent flowering of the profession attests, objectivism's death, though resisted in some circles, was generally greeted with a sigh of relief, as if a burden had been thrown off, a dispensation granted from the grimly rational tasks it had never approached with that much enthu- siasm in the first place. For those among us who make our life's work of verses such as this:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove ...

are rarely disposed towards disciplines in which, to paraphrase Sigurd Burckhardt, "a classical physics has barely begun." Anthropology, on the other


hand, as a three-fourths-invested member of the social sciences community, has been that much more wedded to a whole network of older, broadly "scientific" practices, practices which indeed, despite what is now perceived as their methodological defectiveness, produced remarkable results. As Geertz (1988:4) points out,

Malinowski's theoretical apparatus, once a proud tower indeed, lies largely in ruins, but he remains the ethnographer's ethnographer. The rather passe quality that Mead's psychological, culture-and-personality speculations now seem to have ... doesn't seem to detract very much from the cogency of her observations, unmatched by any of the rest of us, concerning what the Balinese are like. ... People will read The Nuer even if, as it has tended to, segmentary theory hardens into a dogma.

And so because anthropology's investment in scientism and/or an objective real had been so much deeper and more productive than that of literary studies, it became that much more disorienting when science's paradigms were taken away. To recast a metaphor used above, objectivism's death was for anthropology not a burden lifted, but a prop kicked out from underneath.

Still, it would be a mistake to consider objectivism's death, as I have up until this point, as a purely internal or disciplinary affair, for considerations of audience also loom large. The literary critic's audience had never demanded much in the way of science or "hard knowledge" from criticism. In fact the public at large saw literature as somewhat of a diversion, a source of "beauty" or "higher human values," or sometimes as a component of national culture, if the public saw canonical literature at all. Anthropology, on the other hand, had always been supported by a much wider audience which included political and economic decision makers, granting agencies, generals, and strate- gists, as well as a range of aid and policy actors on the further left-in short, people for whom "objective" knowledge about the exotic Other was at a pre- mium. Edward Said (1989) has been one among many to make this charge. It would be naive then to think that an abandonment of objectivism on the part of anthropology would be greeted with equanimity by its monied interlocutors, whatever their politics, or that the discomfort of an audience would not in some fashion discomfit its paid performers.

Yet another factor to consider in assessing literature's and anthropology's divergent responses to poststructuralism is the specific modalities of the two disciplines' "opposite pull-backs," referred to some paragraphs ago, from their respective subject matters of Canon and Native. The key element to consider here is how these pull-backs have worked to opposite ends with respect to the major demographic changes that have only just begun to occur in the academy. I refer, of course, to the formidable influx (the tip of whose iceberg has only just been seen) into the academy of women, "out" gays, and above all scholars of African, Asian, Latino, and other non-First-World descents. It


is clear that the entry of non-white-straight-European-(. . .)-males into the literary academy has been tailor-made for its movement to diversify the high Western canon towards the literary Other. In contrast, anthropology's move away from studies of the exotic Other impropitiously coincides with, or flows against, the trickling entry of just those Others into its professional ranks (though perhaps these Others are just the people needed to go about study- ing "us"). This demographic situation is further complicated by the again divergent reactions of the two professions to studies of the Other conducted by the Other. The literary establishment has been more than willing to hand over responsibility, nay authority, for noncanonical literatures to the sons and daughters of those traditions; hardly a word of objection is heard about their biased positions, and indeed if any bias-apologies are made in literary studies, they most likely come from the gringos and not the marginals at the seminar. Take, for example, this list of presidents of the official Discussion Groups of the Modem Language Association, as listed in a recent issue of PMLA (Modern Language Association 1992:727-28):

Anglo-Irish Literature Michael Patrick Gillespie Asian-American Literature Sau-ling Wong Chicano Literature Jose David Saldivar Romanian Studies Domnita Dumitrescu Scandinavian Language and Literature Sverre Lyngstad

Or note the authors of the following papers presented at the 1991 MLA Con- vention in San Francisco (Modern Language Association 1991b):

Chicanos in the Bay Area Maria Montes de Oca Ricks in the Early 1900s: Jorge Ulica's Cronicas diabolicas

Hopalong Cassidy and the Shimon Wincelberg Jewish Problem

Ddcolonisation ou des Allaoua Toumi colonisations: Le dilemme linguistique de l'intellectuel colonise

Amharic Sayings: Official versus Yonas Admasu Folk (Interpretation)

In contrast to this, consider the diffident welcome extended by the anthropological establishment to "halfies" (the term is Kirin Narayan's, via Abu- Lughod 1991:161 n.1) who study their own heritage. Though it would be difficult to find any published examples of bias accusations leveled against


(1991:116) writes that his "combination of birthrights has produced an interesting complexity that the less observant might mistake for a dilemma"; Lila Abu-Lughod (1991) devotes an entire article to the "special dilemmas" that halfie anthropologists such as herself face; Arjun Appadurai (1991:200) must confess that he is "a Tamil Brahman male ... turned into homo academicus in the United States"; and finally Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1991:19) feels obli- gated to write that "minorities of all kinds can and do voice their cultural claims, not on the basis of explicit theories of culture but in the name of historical authenticity. They enter the debate not as academics--or not only as academics .... ." What is surprising, though, is that these semi-defenses have not come on the heels of Clifford Geertz confessing he was born in San Francisco, or Sherry Ortner admitting she grew up in, say, the culturally skewing envi- ronment of New Jersey. Their precursory defenses can only not-have-come because the profession has not seriously, consequentially implied that those facts might saddle them with a certain "bias" in their anthropological research." If one were to extrapolate from the recent halfie half-apologetics (which do not, it must be emphasized, get their impetus from the halfies), one might project that were Griaule's celebrated informant Ogotemmeli to shift avoca- tions and submit a paper on the Dogon to be read at a future AAA meeting, there might be murmured allegations amongst his reviewers of his "bias" (or perhaps, "far from my bias"), and they would defer to the "more objective" (or perhaps, "closer to my bias") Griaule on this point. In short, and to return to the overall purpose of this analysis, the influx of historically marginalized peoples into the American academy vexingly goes against both the subject- matter trend and the still-extant though theoretically troubled bias against "native bias" in anthropological research.12 It is no surprise, then, that a nervous present results.

A final factor to consider in diagnosing anthropology's apparent illness and literature's apparent health is the sneaking suspicion that anthropologists must have: that literature is enjoying a false vigor, that its rise has been literally "fictional," literally on paper, textual, built up on referentless foundations, "a heavy French sauce over a bad piece of meat,"'3 a free play of literary signifiers which, like the global stock market run-up of 1982-87, will have its October crash when investors realize that no substance exists at its base. Of course to dispute such a foundationalist assertion would require one to "take on the whole literature," as Latour would say; to rearticulate an entire theory argu- ing for the inescapably textual nature of history; to point to the highly conse- quential political interventions of antifoundationalist literary studies (of which the late-1980s Bloom-Bennett-Cheney countercrusade was the clearest marker); and to recall that

fact and fiction are old acquaintances. . . . Fact comes from facere-to make or do. Fiction comes from fingere-to make or shape .... But in what sense do things done or things made partake of truth or reality? A


thing done has no real existence once it has been done. A thing made, on the other hand, exists until it decays or is destroyed. Fact, finally, has no real existence, while fiction may last for centuries. (Scholes 1981:3)

But all of these arguments have been made more cogently by others elsewhere, and I can only gesture to them here. At the same time I also want to respect anthropology's discomfort with a world thought entirely through "text"-but my reason is not finally theoretic but disciplinarily economic. To borrow one of Geertz's phrases, in academic discourse we are "vexing each other with profit" (quoted in Rabinow 1986:256), and it is my belief that over the past ten years the rise of the term "text" has unbalanced the terms and profits of our interdisciplinary vexations, or trade. "Text," like all academic concepts, is a signifier with a value-a coin, in other words: a coin which has no doubt been the strongest of recent currencies and has spurred a fruitful global commerce, but a coin whose mint is staffed mainly by literati, and a coin whose production requires skills not historically the anthropologist's.14 To privilege this "text" coin or concept among all others in the humanistic academy is therefore to measure that academy's intellectual economy (and to denomi- nate its debts) solely in the currency of the dominant or colonial power. This hegemony of one country's currency is what has been called (for the global dollar) America's "extravagant privilege." It is what results in anthropology's indigenous production problem referred to early on. And it is what brings us to a provisional conclusion.

CONCLUSION: REISSUING THE CURRENCY, RETAKING THE MINT

As little qualified as I am to speculate on the causes of anthropology's nervous present, I am even less qualified to propose any solution to its ills, that is, any comprehensive prescription for its future. I believe that much of what I have said already in regards to its present constitutes a kind of polemic about that future. But I will offer one last closing and, I believe, not trivial observation on that future. I will not repeat my previous contention that anthropology need not have any theory-angst; nor the argument that it would be wrong for it to do anything but embrace, in internal dialogics, its "biased" halfie new- comers; nor the suggestion that anthropology examine its anxiety as anxiety, pure and simple. I will suggest, however, a theory (or story) by which the rise of literature and the fall (too strong a word) of anthropology might be explained. It is a story whose central portion or climax is outlined at the end of the previous section-literature owns the mint, denominating the intellectual economy in its own coin-but whose development and ddnouement, or future, have been neglected until now.

Like most, this story begins with a loss: sometime during the past twenty


years literary studies lost Literature as a motivating concept, "fiction" as an exclusive characteristic of that concept, and its canon as the privileged object of study. But literature realized that its distinctive and productive methodolo- gies ("close reading," mainly-a painstaking attention to the nuances and effects of sequentially written words) could be applied just about anywhere. The result was that an encompassing "text" arose to replace Literature, and the world became that discipline's oyster; nothing was left outside of its domain, and boldly it went forth. Anthropology was similarly afflicted with the loss of Culture as its sure motivating concept, "fact" as a characteristic of that concept, and its "exotic Other" as the privileged object of study. What anthropology must realize is that somewhere in its heterogeneity of historical practices must lurk also a more or less essential core, distinctive and massively productive, a methodological counterpart to "close reading" which in its infinite vari- eties can also be applied to just about anything; that the world can be seen through its lenses and that boldly it can go forth. What literati do most notably is read, but what anthropologists do extraordinarily-with a history, on-site tenacity, and physical commitment no other discipline can match-is watch, live, measure, interpret (participant-observation being the most renowned version of this), not "text," but, well, life, behavior, conflict: and perhaps "practice" is the best and most general term for all that.

Over the past several years, in response to the "crisis," a wide array of next-steps have been proposed in anthropological discourse. Marcus and Fischer (1986) represents perhaps the earliest "post-" proposal; the contribu- tions to the Fox volume (1991b, and taken up in Escobar [1993]) represent more recent, even "post-post-" propositions. Still other scholars have addressed methodological issues such as global/local frames of reference (e.g., Marcus 1989;'s Appadurai 1990), shifting audiences, new modes of writing, technological or other cyber-subjects, and more. And at the same time de- bates have continued as to the current viability or "rehability" of older practices, as in Barbara Tedlock's (1991) reformulation of participant-observation, the fieldwork disputes in Llobera (1986, 1987) and his many critics in Driessen et al. (1987) and Fernandez et al. (1987), and more. It is here, in the passing of postmodern insights through these latter daily practices-for anthropology, like all other disciplines, its set of practices, discursive and otherwise, as much as its epistemologies-that I believe rests an anthropological future. This is, to be sure, not a deep metaphysical solution to anthropology's current perplex, and it is more the announcement of a disciplinary strategy than it is a grappling with actual theorizations of the social. But, in the end, it has been part of my argument that metaphysics holds no necessary solutions.

"Observation of practice," then: not simply a retrograde move, nor a re- parochialization of the discipline, a pretending that nothing had been written in Paris between 1966 and 1990-for as H.R. Haldeman said to John Dean in quite a different context in 1973, "once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it is awfully hard to get it back in." "Observation" as flexible but tenacious meth-


odology, and "practice" as transdisciplinary coin. Old-fashioned, perhaps, but then again, no less old-fashioned than would be the accurate description of a

burgeoning literary, even Cultural studies, as the "reading of text." Practice, then, perhaps, will become a coin of the more general academic realm in the coming years. With such a realization in hand, anthropology's only missing ingredient might then be a fashionably French theorist, call him Jacques Bourdieuida (and why not?), gliding from conference to conference and mys- teriously intoning that in anthropology as elsewhere, "il n'y a pas de hors-

practique," or, "there is no outside-of-practice."

NOTES

1. I would like to thank Michael Chorost, Stanley Fish, Robert I. Levy, Richard Fox, Sangeeta Luthra, Fred Myers, William Reddy, and two exacting anonymous read- ers for at once supportive and resistant comments on draft versions. A much earlier incarnation of this paper was presented at the Anthropological Approaches Division meeting of the Modern Language Association annual convention in New York, De- cember 1992; I am grateful also to questioners from that panel. I am of course respon- sible for all shortcomings. This paper is for Julie Byrne.

2. Phrases from, respectively, Marcus and Cushman (1982:64), Said (1989:208), Trouillot (1991:17), Fox (1991a:93), Rabinow (1991:64), and Geertz (1988:11).

3. A concentrated reminder of this former-and now quite foreign-sounding--scientism can be found in the Introduction and Table of Contents of the survey of 1950s' anthropology,Anthropology Today: An Encyclopedic Inventory (Kroeber 1953). Kroeber's short introduction refers to anthropology as a "science" in over half of its paragraphs and calls on "the methods of fundamental natural science," "physics and engineering," "total culture," and the idea of anthropology as a "co-ordinating science" of an infinite number of external disciplines, which can "forge together this vast array of knowledge, to hammer it into a set of coherent interpretations." A similar survey volume by Sol Tax (1964) reveals a substantial difference only shortly thereafter.

4. From Derrida (1967:227) and Foucault (1967, 1980). 5. This essay, against more common anthropological usage, will favor the narrower

"poststructuralism" over the more expansive "postmodernism." Here, the former will refer to a range of (largely French) theoretical programs and stances developed since 1967, while the latter would more broadly signify a longer-lived West-driven global cultural formation. The bibliography on both terms is of course massive. In this paper, I am aware that I am focusing my attentions on poststructuralism's epistemological critique, leaving out its equally powerful critique of the subject. My thanks to William Reddy for pointing this out.

6. The early argument for dialogism is D. Tedlock (1979). For a post-Writing Cul- ture defense of dialogism, see Page (1988) and, less directly but more powerfully, B. Tedlock (1991).

7. For a more thorough critique specifically of anthropological reflexivity, see Watson (1987).

8. This is the famous epigraph to Jameson (1972:i). I am informed that the original quotation is from Nietzsche's late notebooks, later published as The Will to Power, but I have not been able to locate the specific passage. My thanks to Fredric Jameson for


this information. 9. "Culture," of course, has been contested for centuries. Herder, for one, wrote in

the late eighteenth century that "nothing is more vexed than this term" (quoted in Frantzen 1990:xv). For an important semantic history of the term, see Markus (1993), and prior to that, Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952).

10. Robert Pool (1991) characterizes (correctly, I believe) most late-1980s critiques of anthropology's postmodernist turn as coming from one of two returned- foundationalist camps: either the objectivist-positivist or the Marxist-critical. The pragmatist critique presented here, I would suggest, is neither of these things. It rather begins within poststructuralist assumptions and takes them to their own theoretical limits, leaving one in the important domain of pragmatics, or politics. Though written against a backdrop of materialist versus cognitive-linguistic conceptions, one may read Harris (1974), in a sense, as a sort of protopragmatist.

11. For a too-infrequent example of such an intonation, see Asad's (1984) critique of Geertz for theorizing religion without discussing Christianity. It is the case that Franz Boas did address the "native bias" situation with regard to Jewish scholars study- ing Jewish communities; his relationship to Judaism was, however, quite complex. See Glick (1982).

12. An increasingly large body of writing, outside the scope of this paper, deals with the question of non-Western intellectuals and Western knowledge production. See, for example, Said (1990) and the critique of an earlier Said in Ahmad (1992). I do not mean to imply by my discussion that I believe the going literary-studies model of "authentic" scholarly cultural authority is necessarily superior to the "externalist" standard more characteristic of anthropology. In particular, literary studies' privilege of "authentic" authority risks cultural Balkanization ("only blind Protestants can read/teach/understand Milton"), promoting a false essentialism and devaluing the important "bridging" function literature has always offered. This general question is far from settled.

13. Greil Marcus's (1992) phrase, coincidentally remarkably reminiscent of the last paragraph of Elman Service's classic "Mouthtalk" (1969).

14. For more on "text," and literary studies' role in this concept's expansion, see Robbins (1987) and Mowitt (1992).

15. The articulation of the local and the global in Marcus's essay bears interesting re- semblance to the thought of Percy Barnevik, chairman of ABB Asea Brown Boveri, a Swiss-Swedish industrial giant and one of the most transnational companies in the world. Barnevik calls his company "multilocal" and asserts that "we are at home in many places, but we have no home." See Taylor in the Harvard Business Review (1991).

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