critique of anthropology 1988

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THE A NTHROPOL OGIS T A S HEROTHREE EXPONENTS OF POST-MODERNISTANTHROPOLOGY

Review Article

Bruce Kapferer, University College London

&bullet; Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives: the Anthropologist as Author (Poli-ty Press: Cambridge, 1988)

&bullet; Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: a Stu-dy in Terror and Healing (The University of Chicago Press: Chicagoand London, 1987.)

&bullet; James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: 20th-century Ethnogra-phy, Literature, and Art (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass.,1988)

All the books discussed here are distinguished examples of a new spirit of cri-ticism and writing in anthropology. Each is powerfully influenced by Euro-pean philosophical arguments, arguments which have received new form andvitality in crossing the Atlantic. The three books examined manifest a NorthAmerican post-modernism which is rapidly becoming a dominant anthropo-logical genre, one in which writing style and the process of descriptive au-thentication hitherto kept in the background are made central and examined.Whilst each book is distinctive, in various ways they are strikingly similar.Often they cross refer, Geertz and Clifford especially. In a sense, they are ina debate with each other as well as with much of conventional anthropology.All raise critical issues vital in the practice of anthropology. For me the mostchallenging book is Taussig. I devote the major part of this review to a dis-cussion of it. The two others are more methodological and less ethnographicthan is Taussig, though as we shall see, Cliffords work is in fact an ethno-graphy, an ethnography of anthropology. I start with Geertz, whose work setsthe scene and close with a discussion of Clifford. The latter is more conven-tional in style and theme than Taussig, but remarkably similar in the structu-ring of its text and argument. Taussig has a political concern which I findparticularly exciting and relevant, Geertz and Clifford are far more bland. But

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Geertz, like some grand master, sets the scene, and in certain ways Taussigand particularly Clifford are his children. I close with Clifford because he isa clear development out of Geertz and his book represents the most extensi-ve evaluation of the state of the art. Clifford also clarifies the deconstruction-ist purpose behind the new critical ethnography and, I think, avoids some ofthe pitfalls in the approach which Taussigs important book encounters.GEERTZS BRIEF LIVESGeertz book is short and typically highly compressed. Many of its argumentsare already well-known and it is for this reason that I discuss it somewhat brie-fly. However, Geertz is a good beginning. He has always been the anthropo-logist most explicitly concerned with authorship and modes of writing andethnographic presentation. His many monographs can be seen as experimentsin styles of ethnographic argument. It is Geertz who has often registered sharpdisagreement with ruling analytical orthodoxies in anthropology. He haschampioned particular European influences in philosophical and sociologicalconcern, most notably Schutz and Weber. These more fluid and open-endedapproaches contrast with the more rigid paradigms of anthropological thoughtand practice which have hitherto been dominant. Geertz has scorned the tightanalytical frames which characterize much anthropology in Europe and it isthe breaking free from such approaches which is characteristic of the threebooks discussed here, and of the new post-modern anthropology in general.

In Works and Lives Geertz organizes his argument tightly around the issueof ethnographic writing, the ploys of style whereby the ethnographic accountachieves its authenticity, the coding of the authors ideological commitmentand so on. The book is an overall statement on Geertz methodological andconceptual orientation and misgivings. He achieves this through a critique ofsome of the acknowledged greats in the formation of modern anthropology(Levi-Strauss, Evans-Pritchard, Malinowski, Benedict) as well as some, asyet, less recognised figures (Dwyer, Crapanzano, Rabinow, Read). I stressthat Geertz in his interpretational assessment of other anthropologists appe-ars, in my reading at least, to reveal both the historical phases of his own in-tellectual development and the reasons behind his current view as to thedirection of anthropology.He does in his critique what he states anthropologists do in their ethnogra-

phies, exfoliate dimensions of themselves through the medium of the other.I might add that Geertz own various ethnographic studies are oriented in asimilar direction to those anthropologists whom he critically confronts. Thesprawling, inchoate, cover everything style of The Religion of Java is in the


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tradition of Malinowskis writings on the Trobriands. A structural formalismand a concern for organizing principles not greatly distant from an Evans-Prit-chard is discernable in Agricultural Involution and, more recently, in Nega-ra. A Ruth Benedict kind of sweeping comparativism is evident in IslamObserved or in Geertzs celebrated study of the Balinese cockfight.

Geertz is opposed to chronologically linear interpretations of intellectualdevelopment. Ideas or intellectual directions with vastly distinct orientationalimplications can take root in similar circumstances. Levi-Strausss formalismand Ruth Benedicts comparison, with its concern to elucidate contrasting ex-periential realities, took root in similar conditions of global conflict and cri-sis. Both scholars developed their ideas in the exciting ferment of East Coastintellectual society. Both, in differing degree, discovered their anthropologi-cal direction influenced by the work of Boas and the wonderful complexitiesof American Indian worlds. Geertz starts his lapidary sketches of major an-thropologists whose names categorize or mark specific styles of anthropolo-gical writing with Levi-Strauss. He closes with Ruth Benedict.

Benedicts direction rather than that of a Lkvi-Strauss is clearly preferredby Geertz-her generalizing relativism, with its concern to uncover the di-mensions of diverse and autonomous subjective worlds. Benedict leads theway into certain aspects of present-day anthropological debate and dilemma.Despite the fact that Benedicts Chrysanthemum and the Sword was writtento inform the United States Government in the context of its post-conquestadministration of Japan, Benedicts work acutely decenters any Americansense of cultural superiority. Geertz approves of Benedicts directness and herown sense of critically involved commitment. She takes anthropology bey-ond the distanced formalism of Levi-Strauss. Benedict essentializes culturewhile Levi-Strauss essentializes structure-and thereby universalizes cultu-re in structure and dehistorizes humanity in a way long disliked by Geertz.Levi-Strauss formalism obscures the dynamics of human agency and the po-wer of human beings to construct and thus to change their worlds of experien-ce. Benedicts vision is born in a consciousness of the forces and powers atwork at a particular historical moment. She, I think, in Geertz view, confrontsthe world we live. Lvi-Strauss flees from it.

Geertz overvalues Benedict and undervalues the decentering work of Levi-Strauss and others. All the figures he discusses in their different ways aimedto decentre certain dominant Western conceptions of humanity. Levi-Strauss,though he may be intellectualist, formalist, and misguided, has done morethan most to reveal the vital importance of non-western worlds in penetrating


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to an authentic understanding of humanity. Levi- Strauss is oriented to dis-placing the arrogant authority of western philosophy and western reason, de-spite the fact that his analyses may subtly and paradoxically restore theposition of western thought. Evans-Pritchard, whose intellectual sketch fol-lows upon that of L6vi-Strauss-guilt by contingency, a Geertzian structura-list conceit?-was profoundly antagonistic to western notions of order, powerand authority. His study of the Sanusi is deeply anti-colonialist. Yet Geertzspresentation highlights Evans-Pritchards colonialist, Boys Own imperialistside, no doubt a powerful element of Evans-Pritchards consciousness but anaspect against which he struggled. This struggle is evident throughout hisworks.

Geertz is brilliant in demonstrating how the writing style of an ethnogra-phy, its rhetoric of form, contains its authority or its own means of validation.Lvi-Strauss s Tristes Tropiques, the most self-conscious of his books, reve-als an argument for the erasing of experience and glossing disconnectedevents in the interest of presenting a scientific sense of a continuous, inter-related paradigmatic whole. Levi-Strauss very style of writing carries thestructuralist message. It is the disguised device which rhetorically supportsa structuralist theory, winning acceptance of the structuralist point even be-fore the point is demonstrated. Geertz employs the rhetoric of textual formand writing to counter the structuralist argument. Works and Lives is laid outin a structuralist syntagmatic form. But he shows that the different lives heexplores can indeed be different, disjunct and in intellectual conflict. They donot comprise-as by extension, anthropology does not comprise-variationsupon a single theme. In his discussion of Benedict, Geertz almost seems toadopt her style of writing and direct conviction. By such a device he objecti-vizes style, and, perhaps, communicates his own sense of a personal identitywith Benedicts project.

Geertz is alert to the general historical contexts of discourse in which hisLives are located. The sketch approach he adopts and the particular direc-tion he imposes in his textual construction (formalist to non-formalist, struc-ture to culture, institution to agent, Old World to New World) is sometimesoverly disjunctive and fragmentary. Placing Evans-Pritchard before a discus-sion of Malinowski certainly upsets a conventional anthropological under-standing of what develops out of what. But it obscures a strong sense of thedegree of Malinowskis empiricism and positivism. Both these were ingrai-ned in Malinowskis stress on the centrality of the individual, upon the pri-macy of experience and in his views on the act of description and the capacity


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of the anthropologist to present a complete, total, world. The hallmark ofEvans-Pritchard&horbar;especially in his later works-was his powerful disagreem-ent with this Malinowskian vision and his disagreement, too, with the Durk-heimian scientism which wooed so many of his contemporaries in Britishanthropology. It is the Evans-Pritchard ofNuerReligion which announces thedirection of his approach. Such a direction is ingrained in his other work,though perhaps ambiguous, sometimes confused, and often uncertain. Evans-Pritchards concern to unravel cultural worlds in their own terms, an alive-ness to the study of practices, and a sensitivity to the fact that anthropologicalexplanatory constructions destroy the rich texture of lived realities, accordstrongly with Geertz own direction.One of the fascinations in reading this book is the elaboration of Geertz

own critical perspective. He challenges the past of anthropology and alsoquestions modern directions, often those closely connected to his perspecti-ve. This is not necessarily a move by the master to rein in his children andmaintain command of a discourse he was so instrumental in creating. The pre-sent day mood in critical anthropology often seems filled with an air of crisisand despair. Geertz is cautious about such a perspective. His book is positivein tone, broadening in vision, and communicates an excitement with an everemerging and diverse discipline.TAUSSIG AND THE POLITICS OF EXPERIENCE INCOLOMBIAIn Shamanism, Colonialism, and The Wild Man, Michael Taussig translatesan abstract discourse on method into ethnographic practice. With Taussig, apotentially radical deconstructionist method is joined with an empirical andpolitically radical commitment to understanding processes of power, resistan-ce and suffering. The style of writing is often in keeping with the violence ofthe subject. I open with an attempt to communicate some of the excitementand importance of this volume. I close with a critical evaluation which indi-cates the challenge and importance of Taussig work but also some of the trapswhich may await some anthropologists eager to fly the colours of deconstruc-tionism.

Colombia is the scene of Taussigs description. Themes familiar to readersof The Devil and Commodity Fetishism are continued in this work but withan ethnographic elaboration found lacking in the the earlier book. Taussigpresents a vivid, ever-changing, kaleidoscopic vision of agonistic worlds. Thedeath spaces of human degradation, torture and destruction wrought in the


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fury of colonial conquest and capitalist penetration are recounted in their sa-vagery and wretchedness. This history is the subterranean force in magic, sor-cery and shamanism which are active in the disjoint and shifting vertices ofmodem daily life. But the import of the historical and modem journey uponwhich Taussig takes his reader stretches beyond the limitations of space andtime which tend to confine the significance of modern ethnography concer-ning the nature of historically formed human experience and the direction ofits passionate course. Taussig directs his critical gaze at the conventional ca-tegories of anthropological description. His object is to break free from manyof the restraining bonds of routine anthropological thought. The objectivist,distanced and dispassionate style of so much anthropological writing is dis-carded. Taussigs intention is to dissolve that line which may separate art fromscience,. He favours the aesthetic power of the dramatist, poet, and novelistin an effort to pierce to those depths of meaning and truth which are too of-ten obscured rather than revealed in the concepts and categories of Westernsocial science. In common with the aims of post-modernist, deconstruc-tionist text-makers, Taussig presents us with a descriptive form which is anti-hegemonic. The text is so presented as to disrupt itself. The events of historyand ethnographic record swirl and shift, no one perspective necessarily occu-pying a dominant place. The ambition, perhaps, is to free the reader from thetyranny of the text and from the domination of the author.

The colonial imagination and the logic of terrorTaussigs journey starts at the turn of the century, with the Putamayo Indiansof Colombia. Roger Casements prosaic and restrained report of the Putamayoterror is the text which frames Taussigs account. His own literary model forthe retelling is Conrads Heart of Darkness. Coppolas film adaptation ofConrad to the imperialist horror in Vietnam, Apocalypse Now, gives a bettersense of the spirit of Taussigs recounting of the events-the journey to Bran-dos murky abode where all meaning is annihilated, Eliots worlds end. Taus-sig presents accounts of the torture and murder of the Putamayo Indians at thefrontier of the expansion of the capitalist world. The Putamayo are forced toextract rubber from their forests, and the horrors they experience may be seenas integral to their being alienated from control of their own labour and ulti-mately from life itself. This is a terror repeated worldwide. Therefore, onemay transpose the Putamayo with other groups in Amazonia today, or withthose peoples exterminated in the capitalist progress in North America, in Af-rica (e.g. the German genocide of the Herero in Namibia), in Australia (the


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enslavement or blackbirding of Pacific Islanders by Queensland planters,the organized genocidal slaughter of the Tasmanians), and so on to every partof the globe. The self-alienating experience of such terror is everywhere avai-lable to us to day. Taussig displays some of the universal possibilities of tor-ture through the modem experience of the journalist Timmerman inArgentina, experiences which are undoubtedly being repeated nearly everyw-here at this moment. Taussigs explicit historical parallel with the Putamayois the horror of the Belgian Congo.

The colonialist outrages in South America and in Africa attracted the cri-tical attention of two towering figures of the time: Roger Casement, lawyer,a rational pragmatist but also a passionate fighter for human liberation, andJoseph Conrad, who engages his own experience to his writers craft in pe-netrating the heart of the worlds of those caught in the dramas and dilemmasof colonialism and capitalist expansion at the frontier. Perhaps Taussig seeshis own project to be in keeping with the ambivalences and contradictions ofthese men, to embody their spirit and also to transcend their creative and li-berating direction.

Taussig reopens Casements question concerning the reason behind thetorture and brutal slaughter of the Putamayo. Casements appeal to a commonsense political economy (i.e. that the torture functioned to create labour) isfound by Taussig to be inadequate. He makes the important observation thatat the frontier labour is not a detachable commodity from the being of theworker as it is in the capitalist-industrial heartlands. At the frontier, it is notmerely labour which is fetishised but the labourer as well. Thus the torture ofthe Putamayo is not a mere means for the creation of labour. Potential labourwas routinely killed, which would seem to defeat the object of an intention togenerate its supply. Rationalist perspectives of whatever ilk-utilitarian orhistorical materialist fail in achieving a full understanding. Taussig deve-lops an argument which explores the imagination at the frontier, the absurddestructive horror conjured in the imagination of Conrads Kurtz in his remo-te trading post. The imagination at the frontier constitutes a fantasized con-struction of self and other-one in which colonist and Indian synergicallyinteract to create a totally imagined reality. This reality is no less real for allits construction and has a life and destructive force all of its own.

I stress the merit of Taussigs approach here. The absurd and the fantasticintegral to the culturally creative thrust of humanity does not appear from outof the blue, as some functionalist and structuralist anthropologies would haveit. In contrast to the assumptions of many materialist analyses, the imaginings


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of human beings are not mere representations, the relatively passive reflec-tions of a more solid base. In Taussigs historical dialectic an imagination for-med in history also becomes the force in the forging and momentum of history.

The appropriation and destruction of the Putamayo, their reified transfor-mation into objects of a particular kind in the imagination of their exploiters,is integral to the power of the Putamayo in the lives of modern Colombians.The Putamayo mythologized are agents in present-day magic and sorcery.The consciousness of illness and misfortune among Colombians has inscri-bed within it the history of the Putamayo devastation. This is seen too in therituals and festivals of the catholic Church. Healing and Christian worship areare redemptive, a Christian concept frequently employed by Taussig in hisdescription-a redemption of a personal and more general historical suffe-ring. The past in the present of Taussigs description has a strong Jungian fla-vour to it, as if the profusion of magical practice and its mystical forming inmodern Colombia can be partly understood as a vast welling up of an histo-rical collective unconscious. The Putamayo are an historically constituted ar-chetype, an archetype perhaps for capitalist depredations and their modemrepercussions in general.

In the tumbling flow of his discourse and in the montage of his presenta-tion, Taussig shows the reader how contradictory forces are bound together.This is marvelously imaged in the absurdity of those Indians with chairs boundto their backs carrying their colonial masters over the Andes. Back to back,dominant and subordinate are in sweaty unity. Here is a paradox. This prac-tice created by the force of the dominant yet reveals the dependence of thedominant upon the strength of the colonially subdued. Dehumanized humanbeings used as beasts of burden harbour a power which is generated in the actof domination itself.

Taussig extends this point in his discussion of the Wild Man and the sha-man. These mysterious figures draw their power from the constructions andconditions of apparent powerlessness. Constituted in the historically produ-ced inequities, for example, of race and class, the shaman and the Wild Manare contradictions of the dominant orders of their experience. They are notsubsumed in a hierarchy of domination. They are not encompassed and thisis the meaning of their disorder, especially that of the Wild Man. Shamanand Wild Man engage images of resistance. This is the order of their disor-der. They exist as virtually autonomous figures and as confounders of tota-lizing ideologies and institutions and of their agents (anthropologists among


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them). The Wild Man and the shaman stand as ultimate critics of an otherwi-se totalizing and dehumanizing world. The bulk of the book is taken up withdriving this point home. Shamans and their practice, probably for the reasonsdiscussed, take up the greater part of Taussigs description.

Taussig presents numerous examples of shamanic work, most especiallywild nights on yage, their hallucinogenic potion. On yage the body, the verybeing, is shatteringly decentered. Taussig graphically describes how the com-posure of the body is destroyed in the yage-induced shitting and vomitting.

There is here, I think, an intended symbolic identity between the shamanand the anthropological deconstructionist. The latter, like the folk equivalent,is concerned to attack dehumanizing orders, to heal their destructive work,and to decentre those totalizing images of reality which wreak so much ha-voc in the world and with which so much anthropological theory has beenpartner. Taussig so organizes his text as to present himself as the simultane-ous embodiment of shaman and deconstructionist priest. He, a Castenada forthe Eighties, uses his knowledge in experience of shamanic mystery as bothan ongoing metaphor and validation of the deconstructionist enterprise.

These, then, are some of the broad parameters of the book. The work,though rambling and tedious at times, flashes with numerous insights. Butconventional reviewers bouquets aside, a harder look at Taussigs argumentis demanded.

Deconstructionlsm, style and metropolitan radicalismShamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man is already being acclaimed as animportant text in the deconstructionist movement of post-modernism. Thetrendy left of centre City Limits, the magazine for Whats On in the intellec-tual and pop scene of London, recently carried a laudatory review. Here, itsstated, at long last, is a readable anthropology for the cognoscenti. Just as be-fore, in the Victorian era, for instance, when anthropology was a mere fled-gling, the extraordinary at the periphery, the strange and the wild is beingavidly, perhaps voyeuristically, discussed in the salons and parlours of thoseconsumers and shapers of fashion in the metropolitan worlds of the centre.Such popularity alone should never undermine the potential value of a work.Quite the contrary, it may point to the very real merit of a work and correctthe poor judgement of scholars who are frequently conservative, stuffy, andall too ready to cling to corrupt paradigms upon which their reputations de-pend. But we live in a world in which deconstructionism, as Malcolm Brad-bury has so wittily observed, is the new dominant ideology among would-be


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radicals of the left and, I might add, of the right. Those who live in modemBritain could possibly recognize Mrs. Thatcher as the high priestess of prac-tical deconstructionism. In effect, she has realized deconstructionism as ahandy totalizing instrument, as a tool of alienating domination for whichchange and individual agency are the watchwords of expanding state con-trol. Paradoxically, and as a kind of inverted confirmation of his thesis, Taus-sigs arguments and style of presentation could be more a refraction of theambiguities and dilemmas confronting those in the centre than those at theperiphery. It is just conceivable that once again, like so many anthropologistsbefore him, Taussig has imaginatively realized the crises and collective guiltof metropolitan society in Colombia, in the Other. The fashionable metropo-litan world finds its own redemption in a fantasized periphery, the harsh strug-gle at the edge is once more appropriated and transformed to the interests ofthe metropole eager as always for the authentication of its own world view.

So just how threatening of metropolitan attitudes and specifically of con-ventional metropolitan anthropology is Shamanism, Colonialism, and theWild Man? In keeping with the ethos of modern deconstructionism, Taussigpositions himself in the structure of his discourse. He is hotly opposed to tra-ditional academic methods for authorizing and validating texts. He assertsthat the quotation used to head a book or chapter is used to authenticate an ar-gument. The possibility that it may be there because it pithily condenses thestructure of an argument to come is not considered.

Taussigs version of deconstructionist positioning seems to function in hisown work in precisely the way which he condemns, maybe even more so. Hisacknowledgements, like those in many scholarly works, lend opening autho-rity and legitimacy to his text. Indeed, he presents his credentials as a radicalthinker. Unblushingly, the reader is told that he was part of the Sydney pushof the late Fifties and early Sixties. The push, whose membership and sig-nificance seems to be on the increase as the period recedes from memory, wasa loose assortment of self-identified marginal intellectuals of most politicalpersuasions. Further confirmation of positioned identity is revealed in his stu-dent participation in the 1968 LSE student protests. Such personal, subjecti-ve claims as to the radicalism of the author is supported further in the textitself. Illustrious names, objectified figures of radical intellectual westernthought-Benjamin, Adomo, Foucault, Artaud, Brecht-emblazon and jost-le for pride of significance in the text. Are such claims justified? How muchis mere presentation rather than substance?


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There is no reason to doubt Taussigs own radical urgency, and there isevery reason to support a shift in the style of much ethnographic writing anda major overhaul of anthropological categories, conventional explanationsand so on. Yet whilst Taussigs style is fresh, the radicalism of the argumentsgenerally fall far below the format and style of their presentation. Separatedfrom their medium the message of the ideas is often decidedly old hat. Newideas go far if excitingly presented. Maybe old ones can achieve new vitali-ty. Taussigs hall of mirrors text, his montage of images approach to thebuilding of his argument, is full of wonderful potential. His style points upthe issues and problems at stake. But ultimately, in this book, at least, the sty-le does more to inhibit rather than expand understanding.

Chaos and a new positivismThe very construction of the text resists sustained analysis. Taussig may verywell be against rigor or analysis, seeing it as dictatorial and imprisoning. Ho-wever, his method of presentation could produce the very conservatism, stul-tified thinking, and tyranny his textual organization is designed to avoid.Taussigs montage runs the risk of decentering itself. He likens the contrary,contradictory, sometimes Rabelaisian presentation of ethnography to the roleof humour and laughter in the healing work of shamans. Humour, the play ofthe trickster, can, as so many others have realized, cut to the quick, dig outthe roots of personal malaise, and expose epistemological confusion. Modemphilosophers of science would share such an opinion, and the anthropologi-cal ethnographic record is filled with instances of the creative, explosive, andregenerative possibilities of humour. But humour, as practitioners of the artwell-recognize, can be as reactionary and conservative as it may be radical.The deep ambiguities of the comic and of humour are such that it can just aseasily obscure as it may clarify. This is the joke that humour can play. It is adangerous thing to play with and can turn against itself, defeating its purpo-se.

One danger which Taussigs presentation manifests is evidenced in his of-ten cumbersome descriptions and obscure theorizing. Much of the ethnogra-phy-frequently extended citations from others texts or from his ownnotebooks-is much like a Malinowskian apt illustration. The analysis doesnot build or extend through the ethnography. The descriptions are too oftenexhaustingly long, boring, and pointless. The facts are made to speak forthemselves. This is the very kind of empiricism which a deconstructing, de-centering perspective might seek to avoid.


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Indeed, in this book such empiricism supports a positivism. Abstract theo-retical rhetoric is wedged between extended stretches of description. Discon-nected from the world being woven around them they are transformed intoassertions. These are often moralistic, akin to a religious revivalism, so muchso that one senses that to demur might risk a moral condemmnation of themost extreme kind. This does not strike me as the kind of threatening and ul-timately liberating debate which deconstructionism promises. We are boundin a moralism.

Thus Taussig summarily dismisses Victor Turners approach to ritual. Howcould we possibly approve of Turners concept of communitas when Taus-sig links it with fascist among other evil sentiments? Impregnating peoplewith unity may fit well with certain fantasies of maleness and fascism(p.442). This kind of assertion abounds in the book. It destroys thought. Gi-ven much of his ethnography, I find Taussigs unsympathetic glance at Tur-ner difficult to comprehend. So many of the figures which Taussig portraysfit Turners categories of the liminal-the muchachos, the Wild Man, the sha-man. If Taussig had considered matters a little more deeply he may have seenthat for Turner communitas and liminality are processes or ritual methodsof cultural and social deconstruction and decentering. In fact Turner and Taus-sig are potentially very close to each other in spirit, even down to a nascentanarchism. Communitas for Turner was similar to that perfect mutual socia-lity which existed independent of imposed social and political orders or thestate developed in the thought of political anarchists like Bakunin and Kro-potkin. Taussig too seems to cleave to an anarchism, though it is highly indi-vidualistic, anarchic in the populist and more conservative sense and distantfrom the revolutionary political anarchism of this century and the last. Anyand every kind of order smacks of restriction to Taussig and denies indivi-dual freedom. Taussigs assertion of his own intellectual distinction, impor-tant in an academic world where distinction has commodity value, isoverdrawn. The use of terms like soppy to distinguish Turner from himselfdisguises a great underlying similarity. The distinction is in Taussigs rheto-ric, an illusion of writing style, a performativ~an instance of the magicalpower of words.

Moreover, stylistically, Turner is in many respects a forerunner to Taus-sig. The writing of both is discursive, ebullient, often stream of consciou-sness in style. Turner, as Taussig, had literary ambitions, and he seasoned hiswork with literary allusions, as now only the best anthropologists should. Tur-ner, and now Taussig, but even more imaginatively, heaped metaphor upon


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metaphor. The reader sometimes flounders in a virtual sea of tropes. Theirimplication is that the restricted writing of conventional ethnography is thecontradiction of its claims of exactness and precision. For them, lived reali-ties, as in speech, are wonderfully nuanced. Only by piling up the images andmetaphors can the anthropologist capture the impression, the sense of rea-lity. While I have some sympathy with this view, obviously the kind of wri-ting both Taussig and Turner favour risks an obscurantism all of its own, theobscurantism of bad art.

The method Is the realityReality is only manifest in the reality of its illusions. This seems to be Taus-sigs justification for his ethnographic presentation. Despite his apparent an-tagonism to empiricism, I feel that the very manner of Taussigs approachdisplays both an empiricist and a positivist bent. Like those he criticizes, Taus-sig betrays a methodologism. He unites his posited view of the world with hismethod for describing it. The method is the reality. Whatever reality mightbe, it becomes grasped in the method and fashioned to the shape of the me-thod. Thus, the reality of Colombia presents itself as a swirling storm of shif-ting perspectives, of alternative attitudes, of contradictory and disjoint modesof thought and action. Everything is uncertain. Quite unexpectedly as in a dre-am or in a drunken stupor new mysterious shapes can emerge out of nowhe-re. There is no determinate meaning, rather an epistemic murk, to useTaussigs phrase. Beneath meaning there is no meaning. But this view is in-tegral to a deconstructionist method.

The arrogance of positivism in the social sciences was that its adherentsrefused the ideological constitution of their method, and claimed the unmoti-vated, disinterestedness of their theories. In short, they claimed objectivity.The subject-object dualism, always a problem for Western social science, isnot overcome here. There is merely a switch in places. The subjective, the va-lue of an ego-centered personal experiencing (fetishized in anthropology asthe technique of participant observation), is removed from its repressedscientific positioning and valorized. While I may agree that what is reali-zed as objective is always reached through a subject a point most scientistswould accept as trivially true-this means that all understanding must be ideo-logical. Indeed, if this is so, then I would say that anthropological under-standing must primarily involve the exploration of the ideological. Not onlymust we explore the worlds of others in their ideological formation but we


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must also be constantly aware of our own ideological positioning and the wayit intrudes upon our understanding.

Taussigs method refuses its own ideologically constitutive possibility.This is why it could be labelled the new positivism. It is thoroughly concei-vable that it refracts a crisis in western social science. Taussigs attacks ontheory mirror the pragmatic and conservative reaction felt throughout the wes-tern world and refract the despair among social scientists themselves. As I in-dicated earlier, Taussigs fragmented and fragmenting deconstructionistreality may be more the illusion of metropolitan experience than anythingelse. Taussigs overdetermined concern with image and style in the presenta-tion of his work certainly generates the dominating presence of a metropoli-tan world.

The metamorphosis of totalizing systemsThe failure of positivists to recognize their own ideological constitution sys-tematically led them into failure and frustration. The same is also a possibili-ty with Taussig. His deconstructionism and decentering is a virtual methodfor the avoidance of ideological introspection. This is why he produces littleextension in understanding, often realizing as original merely the inverse ofthat he opposes. So disorder is valued against order. He does not see thathis revaluation may be conditioned within similar ideological presupposi-tions. His own ideas and many of those he opposes are, I would suggest, emer-gent within a western Judaeo-Christian tradition. His romance of thePutamayo and the shaman has powerful resonances with a Rousseauesqueprimitivism. What is at base is ultimately pristine and resistant to the ordersthat are imposed upon it.

The deconstructionism of a Taussig, I am suggesting, is not able to graspits own ideological foundation. Indeed, its method is potentially the veryembodiment of the conditions of current Western ideological thought and isthe means for carrying such thought forward. The ideology ingrained in Wes-tern social science categories is not threatened but, like Zande witchcraft oreven Colombian shamanism, maintained and given renewed force in the me-thod. Moreover, Taussigs approach risks becoming a means for critical avoi-dance. Anti-systematic, it can embrace contradictory perspectives. But theseperspectives only touch. They do not necessarily radically subvert each otherbut in the form in which they are presented-discover a way of living toge-ther, albeit uncomfortably.


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Taussig is highly critical of totalizing theoretical orientations or modes ofpresentation. They are hegemonic, tending to fascism. His important pointis that they are restrictive. They distort the world, perpetrate a violence uponit and, similar to the Putamayo experience, dismember and mutilate it so thatthe world is made to conform to totalizing categories. I, and I suspect manyother anthropologists, could not agree more. Ideology, and theory in socialscience is certainly ideological, is totalistic. But Taussigs position is no lesstotalizing than those he criticizes. Indeed, his preferred orientation could bethe ultimate totalizing system.

Systems of order, those which cohere around certain organizing and ori-enting principles or logics, are likely to be relatively inefficient totalizing sys-tems. They should be continually in crisis, constantly threatened in themovement of historically formed conditions of which they are a part. Theworld is forever extending beyond their grasp. This may be the key to under-standing the dynamic of such totalizing ideological orders and the process oftheir endurance through transformation in history. Put another way, it is thestruggle by human beings to grasp the meaning of experience, perhaps theexistential condition of the very humanity of human beings, which is the im-petus for the dynamic and transformation in history. It is this, I suggest, cou-pled with the routine failure of totalistic ideologies, especially those whichstrain to internal coherence, to totalize in fact, which is the key to under-standing their change and metamorphoses.

Thus Taussigs approach is indeed the historical metamorphosis of earlierrestrictive and disillusioned totalistic social science perspectives. It is inge-nuous. The deconstructionists have discovered a way of making integral totheir system what was previously constructed as external to other systems,and at the heart of their routine failure. Non-meaning, epistemic murk, isnow at the core; fragmentation, disjunction, chaos is now the final principleof order.

I note that parallel developments, though qualitatively and intellectuallydistinct, are taking place in the corridors of science. Witness the chaos theo-ry of mathematical physics. Once non-meaning, non-integration, and asys-tematic processes are made central then a super totalizing order has beencreated, perhaps a monster.

It is interesting, for the foregoing reasons, that Taussig makes the link be-tween his method and the worlds of magic, shamanism, sorcery and witch-craft. In my view, and I think in Taussigs, these practices operate in deathspaces. These are realms of non-meaning-and here I differ from Taussig-


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but realms so defined in the context of totalistic, internally integral, ideologi-cal systems. Anything and everything imaginable is possible in the death spa-ce of sorcery and magic. They are practices for conceiving the inconceivable.Here is the point. Magic, witchcraft, and sorcery, far from being resistant tototalistic systems, are vital in the imagination of totalistic systems, a methodby which the participants-weak and strong-incorporate what appears to beoutside all meaning and ultimately make it meaningful or else annihilate ordestroy it. I do not think it accidental that Nazis were fascinated in the poten-tial efficacy of the occult. There is a connection, too, between the non-mea-ningful deconstructed world of witchcraft and sorcery and death camps.Recently, Wyschogrod (Spirit in Ashes, 1987) has argued convincingly thatthe Holocaust was made possible in the circumscription of domains of non-meaning in which anything became reasonable. Dreadful violence is the po-tential of deconstruction as it is the possibility of those reified constructedorders of the human imagination. If this is so, if deconstruction is the totali-zed character of the world, and the death camp is the ultimate encompassmentof meaningless reality, then we are confronted indeed with a potentially acu-tely pessimistic, not to say horrendous, world view. Human existence is final-ly amoral. Perhaps, this is why, throughout his deconstructionist discourse,Taussig must make his reader constantly aware of his own morality and theo-retical conviction, that his heart is still in the right place, that he is still withthe struggle and, therefore, is not suffering from romantic disillusion.

In their totalizing theories positivists imperialized their own world view.Taussig does much the same, although I have suggested that it is possibly ona grander scale. A charge against positivism is its insensitivity to the concep-tions of others and to their existential conditions, its insistence on the expla-natoryvalue of its ordered, rationalist perspective. Taussig could be viewedas engaging in similar practice.

The authenticity and autonomy of the shamanI have said that shaman and deconstructionist share an identity in Taussig theanthropologist. It is possible that Taussig has created the shamans he presentsin a deconstructionist mould. While they may have been fashioned within awestern ontology of crisis, they are presented by Taussig as autonomous and,in their chaos, resistant to those forces of order which generated their power.Like so much anthropology before, a deconstructionist anthropology may re-flect itself in the other and, thus, merely use the other to demonstrate the uni-


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versal veracity of a message already imagined before any encounter with theother.None of the evidence Taussig presents convinces beyond that already con-

ventionally available. How autonomous really is the Colombian shaman?Like the practice of healers elsewhere, their chaotic, fragmented vision maybe simultaneously a metaphor of the destructive unreason of the oppressiveorders powerful in the daily life of Colombians, a means for making sensiblethe unreasonable, and a salve for the experienced disjunction and disruptionof daily existence. As Taussig says, shamanic dream, drugged reverie and hu-mour can derive their power because they operate outside the rational logicof coherent conceptual schemes. Apparently autonomous of worlds of rea-son, the shaman and the trickster in dream and joke leap and jump realizingthe unimaginable and disrupting the already imagined. A vast world of expe-rience is brought together, totalized, in a way which may routinely fail or defythe reasonings of ordinary daily life. Shamans may realize the unreasoning ofthe reasonings of daily orders but their deconstruction may still be orientedtowards the constructions of lived existence and ultimately directed to theirmaintenance. Deconstruction as a shamanic way of life is the source of theshamans power. Living with fragmentation the shaman demonstrates a po-wer of control and ultimate transcendence, the strength of which is passed tothose who seek the shamans aid.

Taussig is uncomfortable with this kind of approach because it may reve-al the shaman as essentially conservative, in line with what he judges to be aconservative anthropology. Shamans must be something else. I see no reasonwhy the peoples with whom anthropologists work must finally represent themoral ideals of the anthropologist or their conceptual predilections. But inany case, why should a totalistic and ordered conception of the universe ne-cessarily be conservative in the terms of a radically oriented Western anthro-pologist ? It is everywhere demonstrated that some of the more revolutionary,system-overturning, schemes of the human imagination in themselves mani-fested coherent orders. It was in their very alternative coherence that they suc-cessfully disrupted the orders to which they were opposed. The Sinhaleseexorcists whom I studied were radically opposed to the Portuguese colonialdomination. They were construed as evil, devil-dancers, who contradictedthe Catholic orthodoxy. Sinhalese exorcists worked their threatening art wi-thin Buddhist conceptions of the cosmos and of the state which in its very co-herent contradiction of Christian authority and in its location in the routine of


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Sinhalese daily life was effectively resistant to a very destructive and oppres-sive colonial conquest.

Ordered, totalistic conceptions are not by nature oriented in a fascist direc-tion, which is Taussigs strong implication. Fascism lies in the argument ofan order and in the principles underlying its totalististic conception, not in or-der per se. To assert the latter is newspeak, a gallery play, and smacks of aWestern despair and disillusion. It refers to a western consciousness of its ownhistory, a consciousness that Western revolutionary visions of new orders car-ried into practice have inevitably turned sour and manifested oppressive, fas-cist, humanity-destroying qualities. This view cannot be separated fromdevelopments in Western liberalism, part of a revitalized ideology of capita-lism, in which the individual and individualist self-determinant agency is re-valued. Deconstructionism-and perhaps its modern American variant mostof all-may have intimate connection with this revaluation.

Taussigs deconstructionist anthropology seems more often than not to bein the direction of this spirit. In the book the individual shaman, and ultima-tely Taussig as shaman, becomes hero. Virtually Cartesian in its celebrationof the authenticity of experience, the final authority for the decentered direc-tions of the work appears to be founded in the truth of a shamanic dream-world. The individual experience realizes the nature of the world. The worldis nothing other than the individual made the totalistic centre of the universe.

The domination of the anthropologistOne commentator on recent Western metropolitan intellectual developmentshas noted that the critic has now come of age. Once derided and consideredsubordinate to the wonder of the text, the critic now rules over it. It is not thetext or the reality of the text we now wonder at but the artistic mastery of thecritic who now towers in importance over the text and who now must be theobject of our enquiry and of our desire. Shamanism, Colonialism, and the WildMan manifests this apotheosis of the critic, in this case the process of the do-mination of the anthropologist over the worlds he encounters. The book ef-fectively begins with the anthropological distanced awe of the world of thePutamayo destruction. By the close of the description, the anthropologist hassubjectively united with that world which was once only object to him. Butin his apparent unity with the other, may not he be appropriating it? Postivistand empiricist anthropologists may have arrogantly confined worlds withintheir own deterministic vision. Taussig may come dangerously close to achie-


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ving something similar by declaring the authority of his individual experien-ce, an experience already conditioned in a Western consciousness.

Taussig, in common with much of the new ethnographic writing in anthro-pology, seems to be of the opinion that his exploration of his own experien-ce, and the sharing of this with his readers, is the road to an authentic andliberated critical anthropology. I do not disavow this possibility and the con-tributions which do indeed stem from such an attitude. However, rather thanself-exploration, which, as Taussigs own material suggests, may confine onein the prison of ones own fantasies, it may be more fruitful to confront criti-cally the ideological orders from which the anthropologist comes rather thanthe anthropologist alone. The anthropologist is positioned within ideologywhich is no more reducible to the anthropologist than are the ideologies ofthe other reducible to its individual voices. The critique of ones own world,as that of the other, in my view begins with the refraction of one through thelens of the other, and vice versa. This is, I think, a dialectical alternative tothe kind of dialectic which Taussig offers. Certainly, it is a more holistic per-spective than the more fractionalized approach which Taussig offers. But Ithink it directs the anthropologist away from a narcissistic contemplation ofself where, indeed, the anthropologist is realized as hero who captures in theunique anthroplogical experience the diverse realities of a collectivity ofothers. For the worlds of others to realize their critical force, their schemes ofthought and practice must be explored systematically and, further, must begiven equivalent ontological and epistemological status.

CLIFFORDS AL TERNATI VE:A PARALLEL PREDICAMENTThe importance and excitement of Taussigs book disguises a reproductionof the difficulties encountered by conventional anthropology, difficultieswhich the proponents of the new ethnography are striving to escape. Perhapsthe foremost text of the new ethnography is Writing Culture, edited by JamesClifford and George Marcus, a work, incidentally, which Geertz refers to, so-mewhat jaundicedly, as overblown. This important work is likely to be su-perceded by James Cliffords new book. Here many of the ideas present inWriting Culture discover a clarity and force of direction which I think havehitherto been lacking. Clifford emerges strongly as an anthropologist of an-thropology. But more, those worlds, those discursive formations, withinwhich anthropology and ethnographic work are shaped and become shapingare explored and opened to criticism.


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I found the study particularly refreshing in Cliffords preparedness to ex-pose his own position to critical reflection as well as those from which he dis-tances himself. Clifford examines the historical circumstances in which hisown positioning is ideologically constituted. The same intellectual figureswho crowd Taussigs text are to be found in Clifford. But they are presentedneither as demons to be despised nor as deities to be venerated, as in Taussig.They are not instruments of self-presentation or analytical validation or rejec-tion. Clifford, for example, engages with a Bakhtin, a Ricoeur, a Malinows-ki, a Conrad, a Mashpee Indian. In accordance with this deconstructionist ornew ethnographic vision all have worth in the struggle for understanding andreveal what must be problematic in any interpretation or textualizing of ex-perience. With Clifford, the critic-whether anthropologist, philosopher, no-velist, or artist, a person who in the West has somehow come to be imbuedwith a privileged view of reality-is repositioned. Where Taussig progressi-vely retreats from a world as object into a celebration of subjectivism, thusnever escaping the dualism he scorns, Clifford demonstrates a way out of theimpasse. The interpreter and the interpreted, the ethnographer and the etho-graphized, are joined in common cause and unified as at once subject and ob-ject. The central issues are no longer what is the best and most authoritativedescription, method, model, theory or perspective (although these concernsby no means disappear). Rather, the issue is the examination of the groundswithin which a particular or general view of reality achieves its authority orthe circumstances within which a specific problematizing or theorizing gainsintellectual legitimacy and significance. Clifford shows how this redirectionof ethnographic practice is not mere navel gazing-a charge too easily andtoo often made. Like Taussig, Clifford is concerned that his deconstruction-ist and decentering approach looks out critically upon the manifold realitiesof lived experience. Cliffords work is both highly sensitive to the politicalnature of ethnography and oriented to illuminate the political worlds in whichhuman beings live and of which anthropology is so much part.

The books cover brilliantly captures major dimensions of Cliffords pro-ject. Cliffords cover features two images, back to back, of an Igbo masque-rade performer, White Man. (Compare it with Taussigs dust jacket whosemore strident line as well as theme is indicated in the figure of a gun-totingwhite man towering over Indians.) The Igbo performer is disguised, hiddenbeneath the mask of a white colonial official. This official (or anthropolo-gist ?) holds an open notebook, pen poised to inscribe and perhaps to fix theother in his text, like in the frozen grin of his mask (the ambivalent grin of


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imperialist power or the beckoning smile of entrapment of the friendly an-thropologist eager for rapport?). Cliffords own work unpacks the interpreta-tional potential constrained within the cover photograph. One importantconcern is to give voice to those silenced in the text-like the Igbo gaggedby the costume of colonial power, subordinated in the writing of the text. HereCliffords deconstruction shares much with that of Taussig. I underline theimport of this. The restoration to speech of the hitherto subordinate threatensthe authorial power and claims to authenticity of colonial and post-colonialrepresentations, for example, of the other. More important, their speech re-turned, the subordinated are recognized as active in the making of their ownhistory and, most significantly, of the history which is made of them. Theyremain active even where other accounts would see them as obscured or obli-terated, as with the Igbo performer or the Putamayo, and are vital influencesin the constructive and constitutive texts of powerful others.

The author or the mask?Clifford opens his work with a poem, Elsie, written in 1920 by William Car-los Williams, a medical doctor. Elsie is a Mashpee Indian, and here we maynote a striking parallel between Clifford and Taussig in the construction oftheir texts. Both begin with accounts (brief in Clifford) of the abjection ofethnic or tribal minorities in consuming and rapacious metropolitan or impe-rialist worlds. Speechless at the start, the members of such minorities are, atthe close, presented in the active voice. Clifford concludes with the modemstruggle of the Mashpee. Their own constructions of their situation are fore-grounded against the background of a history of changing interpretations ofthe nature of their cultural realities. This is presented through the event of acourt trial in 1976 where the Mashpee sued for control of their tribal land.

The progression in the book from poetic text to court trial underlines a cru-cial methodological point in Cliffords approach, which he develops fromFoucault. This is that texts are constituted not by authors alone but by authorslocated in discursive formations. Clifford may be critical here of the interpre-tative position of a Geertz, with whom he is nonetheless closely allied.Geertzs insistence on a hermeneutic of culture as text does not attend suffi-ciently to the discursive formation within which a text is formulated: the are-nas of noisy speech and action in which different perspectives on the worldclash, displacing and decentering each other. Clifford suggests such a criti-que in discussion of Geertzs analysis of the Balinese cockfight. DespiteGeertzs opposition to the intellectualist formalism of structuralism, his ownethnographic texts-The Balinese cockfight is but one example-are open


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to similar comment for their subjugation of the active role and voice of thesubject. However, I do stress Cliffords acknowledgement of the difficulty ofany scholar, himself included, escaping such a charge.

Clifford critically addresses attempts to give the ethnographized greateractive voice. Favret-Saada, Dwyer, Crapanzano, and Renato Rosaldo are in-stances. He discusses these and others (e.g. Griaule, Malinowski, Turner) ina sequence of excellent chapters On Ethnographic Authority and Powerand Dialogue in Ethnography. These discussions are important for his under-standing of the historical development of ethnographic discourse. In someways they are more penetrating than Geertzs discussion of similar themes inWorks and Lives. Clifford locates himself directly in his critique, whereasGeertz mutes his own presence. Thus Clifford heads his chapter on ethnogra-phic authority with a quote from Rabinow on Clifford. An unnecessary ego-centricity, I immediately thought. But this is an unwarranted judgement. Indoing this Clifford is positioning himself as an object in the history he re-counts and exposing himself to similar inspection. One of the general pointshe arrives at, one shared with Geertz, is that present attempts to give voice-edited texts of tape-recorded interviews, for example--can be made into thevehicle for the ethnographers own views. The ethnographer hides behind themask of the other. This could be more insidious than in the less self-consci-ous ethnography of yore. It can be another mode whereby the other is appro-priated and controlled. Again I am confronted with the image of the IgboWhite Man. While white colonial autonomy effaces the Igbo presence, theIgbo animates that power and gives and takes its life. Part of the fun of themasquerade, I surmise, is that the figure of autonomous power is in fact a merepuppet, a cipher, for a hidden directing force. Indeed, that hidden force didreverse the political tables and asserted its own autonomy. The photographwas taken in 1982.

Cliffords solution to the masking of the ethnographers authority in theguise of the others subjectivity and self presentation is to encourage a modeof description and analysis which gives full vent to the myriad perspectivesengaged in the discursive structuring of accounts. The method is one whichstresses the relative autonomy of orientation, perspective and voice. This isfacilitated by mixing modes of textual presentation-conventional analyticalreasoning, representation of direct experience, excerpts from notebooks, ver-batim speech, montage, dadaism. The autonomy of perspective and the capa-city of one perspective to dislocate the claims to authority of another (thereis that Igbo masquerade again!) is revealed in the clash of perspective and in


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their dialectic. Such methodological orientation gives additional point to Clif-fords focus on anthropology and upon anthropological careers. It is not justan intellectual historians interest in the development of ideas and the con-struction of knowledge.

Anthropologists practice in regions of conjuncture. In their lives and intheir work a great variety of perspectives become acutely problematic. So toodoes the nature of the account and the text, the process of their constructionand the kind of authority or power which is embedded within them. Anthro-pologists and anthropology as conjunctural are thus made into the ethnogra-phic object and become the demonstration, the evidence, for the insights andunderstanding a deconstructionist method and interpretation can attain.

Delusions of radicalism In anthropologyAnthropologists are likely to register a mixed response to Cliffords efforts.Since they are now the objects of an anthropological enquiry they may be ex-pected to feel uncomfortable. This should be so, for most anthropologists arelikely to have differing opinions and diverging reservoirs of knowledge con-cerning their practice. If I am right about the kind of reaction Clifford shouldexpect, then he has realized at least two facets of his deconstructionist pro-ject : rejection of fc ms of description which assert single coherent schemesof interpretation, and the appropriation or claim by the outsider of the insideknowledge of the other. Anthropologists should be made aware of the varie-ty of standpoints they hold even within a single tradition. Cliffords own or-dering of their native world-he would admit that he cannot escape his owndeconstructionist critiqu~-and his assumption of authority as the producerof a text on the subject of anthropological knowledge is little different fromwhat anthropologists conventionally manage in their practice. By thus decon-structing anthropology, Clifford sensitizes anthropologists to the nature oftheir practice.

Anthropologists often present themselves and their work as radical invein. Their sense of cultural otherness, their claim to depict realities at sharpvariance with a Western commonsense, is frequently used to legitimate theirpractice and to underline its epistemological and scientific value. This is anideological motivation behind the divination of its various heroes and heroi-nes-a Malinowski, an Evans-Pritchard, a Mauss, a Boas, a Mead etc.Geertzs very sympathetic treatment in Works and Lives of Ruth Benedict,her decentering of mainstream American culture through her representation


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of Japan, has much to do with an anthropologists self-image as a potentialradical deconstructionist.

Clifford reveals much of the falsity behind such presentation, one alreadywell-suspected within anthropological circles and increasingly the subject ofopen debate. However, he does develop the point further. His two chaptersHistories of the Tribal and the Modem and On Collecting Art and Cultu-re demonstrate the integration of anthropological thought with other westernintellectual developments: the modernist universalism whereby the other isdecontextualized, appropriated to a western history, and reconstructed in theideological terms of a Western humanity. Cliffords discussions of the inter-relation between developing ideas of anthropological practice, western artmovements, collecting, and museum representation are challenging as theyare informative. Many anthropologists would accept that Uvi-Strauss struc-turalism methodologizes as it universalizes dimensions of western thought.Clifford extends this line of argument and shows how its overdetermined sen-se of order is a reaction to a historical moment in a western crisis and frag-mentation. A struggle, perhaps, against the truth of a deconstructionistreality which, in turn, is-the condition of a Western and increasingly globalhistorical experience.One vital aspect of Cliffords deconstruction is the questioning of the

claims of some anthropologists to their distinction, the uniqueness of their vi-sion or anthropological attitude. This claim grew in the context of the profes-sionalizing of the discipline, the drawing of subject boundaries in the politicaldiscourse of western universities. This point is well-accepted and Clifforddoes not discuss it. What he argues is that the routine of anthropological ori-entation and practice, a focus on culture, knowledge of other cultures, field-work, and so on, is a feature of many-travellers, novelists, literary critics,collectors-and is by no means limited to professional anthropologists. Clif-fords reflections are salutory. They are not self-serving, allowing Cliffordentry by a backdoor into a community which often threatens the exclusivityof a private club. By breaking with narrow professional definitions of anthro-pology, Clifford broadens its vision. Anthropology again becomes the explo-ration of the grounds of humanity in its original, general, and philosophicallyfundamental sense.

The new ethnography and theoretical argumentAt least, this is the potential. As yet, Cliffords deconstruction seems to be incloser keeping with Geertzs notion of the anthropologist as a civilized, high-


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ly intellectual, metropolitan renaissance man. Clifford impresses with hisvast intellectual range within western aesthetic and literary traditions. Yet inall this I could not escape a sense of superficiality. Clifford alights, like somegorgeous butterfly, in the great garden of human possibility which is the fieldof anthropology. But he passes from flower to flower, seldom staying for longto examine thoroughly their possibility. This I found frustrating.

Clifford is wary of that anthropology that searches for the deep structuresof human thought and action or for fundamental essences. This could accountfor the pattern of his flight. While critical of Said, Clifford endorses Saidspowerful critique of orientalism. He extends this into a criticism of culturalessentialism in anthropology, analyses in which cultural coherence and dis-tinctiveness are stressed to the exclusion of important cultural interpenetra-tions and cross-cultural appropriations. The point is well-taken. But somedistinction should be made between essentialist notions like rational choice,modes of production etc., as canons of general anthropological method andtheory, and the essentialism to which the human subjects of anthropologicalenquiry may cleave.We may question the evidence of the anthropological record, noting the

role a particular ideological climate played in the construction of the descrip-tion. Even so, the anthropological record is replete with information whichindeed indicates that many human realities are formed through logical andcoherent cosmological and ideological schemes. As in much modern natio-nalism these coherent ideologies may generate disastrous totalitarian conse-quences. This totalitarian possibility or a moral repugnance at the coherentform of totalitarian destructiveness does not support the theoretical rejectionof such essentialism or support a refusal to search for the inner logic of par-ticular lived human realities. This does not demand a return to a crude relati-vism, or lead to a suggestion that because no logic has been found then theethnographer has somehow failed. Furthermore, an interest in the principleswhich may structure a particular world view does not involve a necessary in-sistence on the kind of rationalism typically found in the west. Also, as We-ber recognized long ago, systems of thought and practice which are builtaround essential, ideologically recognized, principles are not necessarily co-herent or ordered in the conventional sense, for example, of functionalist an-thropology. The Western ideological contexts of individualism andegalitarianism manifest numerous different forms, many of which are in vio-lent contest.


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Cliffords arguments, in common with the general trend in deconstruction-ist anthropology, involve a redirection of the anthropological gaze: a focuson authorship, mode of presentation, and writing style. Theoretical debate andargument over the analytical interpretations which anthropologists place onthe worlds of their encounter are not the prime concern. Clifford and Geertzare not principally engaged in a sociology of knowledge, a thorough concernwith how anthropologists arrive at their knowledge. (This is surprising, giventhe influence of phenomenology in their work, and of such philosophers ofknowledge as Foucault and Ricoeur.) Rather, they are more interested in theway an anthropolgist puts knowledge across and convinces an audience. Con-viction is in the performance and not in the substantive argument and its ideo-logical resonances. It is the focus by Clifford and others on performance andstyle which accounts for a certain thinness of theoretical understanding andlack of rigorous argument.

Geertz, who has written so many important anthropological monographs,in Works and Lives (p.148) goes so far as to question the point of continuingwith the anthropological ethnographic monograph tradition. Undoubtedly, asGeertz suggests, the circumstances of ethnographic writing and the mannerof description must change. But an important aspect of the monograph mustnot be ignored. Its convention is one which demands an increasingly rigorousand systematic exposition of anthropologically encountered worlds. For allthe sense of criticism and self-reflection which exists in anthropology todaythe standard of anthropological monographs and writing is far and away animprovement, I think, on the works of our predecessors not withstanding theircentrality in the construction of anthropological self-images. I am not convin-ced that present circumstances have rendered the anthropological monographobsolete.

Clifford appears to accept this implicitly. The Predicament of Culture is,in fact, a monograph on the society of anthropologists. The final chapter ofthe book approaches the classic ethnographic monograph in shape, albeit indecontructionist style. The diverse ways in which the Mashpee are understoodto constitute their community and identity in the context of their land claimare discussed. The trial of the Mashpee is examined after the manner of aGluckmanesque situational analysis, though not, to my mind, done as well.Again like Gluckman or Victor Turner, Clifford treats the trial as an event wi-thin an open-ended social field, in which various perspectives on theMashpee reality, those of the historian, the sociological expert, the anthropo-logist, the jurist, and the Mashpee themselves, are organized in contest, re-


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vealing the assumptions underlying their definitions and understandings andthe source of their relative discursive power. The whole account expoloresthe issue of identity and the problematic character of conventional descripti-ve labels. In this last chapter Clifford finally participates as an anthropologi-cal ethnographer employing the form of the monograph to substantiate thegeneral points he develops throughout the book. Clifford presents some inte-resting information. However, for all its deconstructionist build-up, Cliffordsethnography simply turns over well-ploughed ground. Indeed, without thepreceding chapters, Cliffords account of the Mashpee trial would pass aspretty conventional general ethnographic description, a description informedby a voluminous sociological literature on ethnicity and ethnic identity.CONCLUSION: ART, BUSINESS AND COMMITMENTGeertz, Taussig and Clifford represent distinct developments within a criticalanthropology. More than Geertz, Clifford and Taussig propose radical newdirections in the ethnographic project of anthropology. One last serious ques-tion should be asked. All the writers are critical of the past in anthropologyand launch the now conventional and thoroughly domesticated anthropologi-cal self-criticism concerning its colonial roots and emergence in the well-springs of western domination. But all are relatively muted on the politicalsignificance of the North American context of their present writing. Howmuch is their argument and programm~their chosen themes, their criticaldiscourse-structured within a world still dominated by American politicaland economic power? Clifford and especially Taussig address this context,but do not recognize its hegemonic force in relation to their own practice, thatsuch power is deeply embedded in the flow and style of their discourse, wri-ting and texts. For all their excitement and insights, the works discussed ex-press a clear continuity with those very Californian sociological concerns ofthe Sixties-symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology and so forth. Thiscould not be more evident than in Geertz plea for moderation in the conclu-sion of Works and Lives:

Half-convinced writers trying to half-convince readers of their (the writers) half-convictions would not on the face of it seem an especially favorable situation forthe production of works of very much power, ones that could, whatever their fai-lings, do what those of Levi-Strauss, Evans-Pritchard, Malinowski, and Benedictclearly did: enlarge the sense of how life can go. Yet that is what must happen ifthe business is to continue; and if either mere digging in (Dont think about ethno-graphy, just do it) or mere flying off (Dont do ethnography, just think about it)


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can be avoided, it should be possible. All that is needed is comparable art. (Worksand Lives, p.139)Here Geertz is leading to a restatement of his point that anthropologists

must be aware of the burden of their authorship. But I still disagree. I am un-comfortable with some of the ideological sentiments which may be seen asembedded in this text. Most of all, I think it is symptomatic of the growinglack of commitment in anthropological circles which the new ethnographyoften expresses, a lack of the very commitment which, despite all the faults,was integral to the vital and often radical understanding that an earlier anthro-pology did bring.


critique of anthropology 1988

Documents

discussion of clifford

james clifford

ethnography of anthropology

mostchallenging book

practice of anthropology

michael taussig

conventional anthropology

university of chicago