legacies of derrida

7/28/2019 Legacies of Derrida

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Legacies of Derrida:Anthropology

Rosalind C. Morris

Department of Anthropology, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027;email: [email protected]

Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2007. 36:35589

The Annual Review of Anthropology is online atanthro.annualreviews.org

This articles doi:10.1146/annurev.anthro.36.081406.094357

Copyright c 2007 by Annual Reviews.All rights reserved

0084-6570/07/1021-0355$20.00

Key Words

deconstruction, poststructuralism, language, writing, differance, g

Abstract

This article considers the legacies of Jacques Derrida in and Anglo-American sociocultural anthropology. It begins with a surv

of Derridas own engagement withthemes that have historically befoundational to the field: (a) the critique of sign theory and, withthe questions of language and law in L evi-Straussian structuralis

(b) the question of the unconscious; (c) the critique of the performtive and its consequences for the idea of ritual; (d) the rereading

Marcel Mausss concept of the gift, and of economy more generaand (e) the analysis of the metaphysical basis of law, in both religio

and ostensibly secular formations. It then considers the state of tfield at the time when it was being infused with different formspoststructuralism and explores the competing claims made by th

discourses in relation to deconstruction. Finally, after tracing tconvergences and divergences between Derridean deconstructiand theory in sociocultural anthropology, it treats two main exa

ples of works produced against and under the influence of Derridthought, respectively.

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INTRODUCTION

The first essay Jacques Derrida delivered inthe United States, Structure, Sign, and Playin the Discourse of the Human Sciences, of-

fered a critique of Claude Levi-Strausss the-ory of language and undertook a radical re-

thinkingof the oppositionbetween nature andculture in structuralist ethnology (Macksey& Donato 1970, Powell 2006). Derrida had

already published Force and Signification(1978b [1963]), which denounced, by way

of a footnote, Alfred Kroebers (1948) den-igration of structure as a merely fashion-able term in social theory (Derrida 1978b,

p. 301). He had invoked both Marcel MaussandMauriceLeinhardt as well.From thestart,

then, Derridas work solicited anthropology,

despite being articulated from within philoso-phy. What are the legacies of that solicitation?

And what shall they yet become?

BEGINNING WITH WRITINGAND THE ENDS OF MAN

Of Grammatology was published in 1967, al-

though an essay by that name had appearedin 1965. It commenced by remarking the

ethnocentrism which, everywhere and always,ha[s] controlled the concept of writing andby promising an analysis of the declared

Rousseauism of a modern anthropologist,namely Levi-Strauss. Of Grammatology tra-versed hallowed ground for anthropology,

taking on the topics that have been consti-tutive of the discipline since its inception: the

relationship between nature and culture, theorigin of language, the relationship betweenlanguage and law, the incest taboo, the emer-

gence of script, the question of history andmemory in societies with and without script,

and the problem of ethnocentrism.Initially, however, the call to anthropology

went largely ignored. This was in no small

part because the critique proffered by Derridawas concerned less with the question of how

to reform the discipline (about which he hadnothingtosay)thanwithwhetheritcouldever

be extricated from the metaphysics on whiits residual humanism was founded. His 19

(1982b) essay, The Ends of Man, was partularlyimportantinthisregard.Intheattem

by Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger to brewith the Western tradition of metaphysics

through the displacement of the conceptman by that of consciousness (Hegel); by suplanting the idea of rational humanity w

that of transcendental humanity (Husseor by rejecting the metaphysical we-mein favor of the proximity to essential bei

(Heidegger)Derrida finds the repeated sulation of an old concept (Zaner 1972, p. 38

This concept, Man, is an a priori one, nther empirically observable nor logically dducible. Hence, its continued invocation

and by philosophy and anthropology neeexplanation. Almost as much as his gene

disavowal of metaphysics (and his infamoudifficult style), it was Derridas rejectionHusserls attempt to replace an empiri

anthropology with a phenomenological terrogation of the world as consciously i

tended that seemed to foreclose a broader dciplinary engagement of his thought in aby anthropology. These two epistemologi

commitments, empiricism and phenomen

ogy, have been central if not foundationalthe methodology of fieldwork, even when ntheorized as such.

If anthropologists are now comforta

with the idea that their object of studynot unitary, if they increasingly conceive

the discipline as an investigation of partular social formations at particular histocal junctures, in relation to both their ow

anteriority and the extralocal processes which they are brought into relation w

others, the discipline has not yet done aperhaps cannot ever do without the idof the human as the basis of its comp

itavism. For this reason, one may have admit that there is no properly Derride

anthropology, and even that Derrida davowed anthropology per se (although thwould have to be tempered by the recog

tion that he not only read and affirmed som

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of the insights of anthropologists, but also

engaged with them in his seminars in Parisand in conferences (see, for example, de Vries& Weber2001).However, this statementdoes

not mean that no anthropologists exist whosework has not been shaped by their reading of

Derrida or that Derridas scholarship has notmade any significant impact on the field. Thepurpose of this article is to trace the trajectory

of Derridas influence and to understand how,when, and against what resistances his thought

provoked new kinds of questions and newkinds of analyses within the discipline. My fo-cus here is on the North American, English-

speaking academy. Different stories couldbe told of Derridas impact in England or

Germany, where, in fact, he has had far less in-

fluence, or in Quebec, where the relationshipto French philosophy is not dependent on the

market decisions affecting translation. Therelative lack of reference to Derrida in French

anthropological circles has already been re-marked, if not deeply analyzed (Marcus 1999,p. 421). However, those stories await another

narrator and a different set of references. Andgiven these parameters, it should be clear that

the present reading of Derridas legacies foranthropology is a reading of his thoughts

movement into English, and hence one mustconsider it against the backdrop of the prob-lem of translation, a problem at once linguis-tic, economic, and temporal, insofar as trans-

lation and more specifically publications oftranslations take time.

Tedlock (1980) undertook one of the firstsignificant assessments of Derridas thoughtfor a major American anthropological venue

in a multi-book review covering, in additionto Of Grammatology, works by Culler (1977),

Hawkes (1977), Sebeok (1977), and Sperber(1975). Tedlock understands Derrida, whomhe describes as a sort of theological coun-

terpart to Marx (Tedlock 1980, p. 827), tobe proposing a reversal of the received con-

ception of language in which speech occupiesa temporally and metaphysically prior statusvis-a-vis writing. It is a flawed but not un-

common misreading of Derridas argument.

Derrida does not simply reverse the orderof the speech/writing binary; he describes

the process by which that very differentiationemerges, and he gives to the more encom-

passing category within which the oppositionbetween script and speech arises the name of

arche-writing.Like many, Tedlock finds confusing the

distinction between writing in the narrow

sense (of script) and writing in the broadersense adumbrated by Derrida, where it in-cludes all processes of trace-formation, de-

ferral, and delay, the crossing of presencewith absence, etc. This confusion leads him

to an ironic affirmation of Derridas relevancefor anthropology in the battling of what heperceives to be the linguists error, namely

the reduction of spoken language to notation(Tedlock 1980, p. 828). In the end, Tedlock

concludes by rejecting Derridas concept ofwriting in favor of a vocality to which he at-tributes the capacities and qualities of natural-

ness, spontaneity, and plenitude. He therebyaffirms everything that Derrida questions.

Cultural anthropology in the Anglo-American context has since undergone enor-mous transformations, becoming both more

accommodating, in some areas,and more hos-

tile, in others, to Derridas writings. This splitis itself the mark of an irrevocable change, onewhich may be construed, in both of its dimen-sions, as being part of Derridas legacy in and

for what may well be the last of the humansciences (Bruner 1986). To understand this

legacy requires both an account of his majortheoretical interventions and a survey of thediscursive space within which they were made.

The latter requires that one consider the com-peting forms of poststructuralism, as well as

the critiques to which they were subject, andthe anthropological work that was ultimatelyinspired by deconstructionism. Space limita-

tions demand brevity. Therefore,what followshere is a provisional schematization of those

strands of deconstructionist thought that havebeen particularly significant forthefield of an-thropology. They are (a) the critique of sign

theory and, with it, the questions of language

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and law in Levi-Straussian structuralism;

(b) the question of the unconscious; (c) thecritique of the performative and its conse-quences fortheidea of ritual; (d) therereading

of Marcel Mausss concept of the gift, and ofeconomy more generally; and (e) the analy-

sis of the metaphysical basis of law, in bothreligious and ostensibly secular formations.I begin with the analysis of anthropological

structuralism.

L EVI-STRAUSS, LANGUAGE,AND THE LAW OF CULTURE

Like his predecessor, Levy-Bruhl (1923[1922]), Levi-Strauss posits a categorical op-

position between cultures with and without

writing, and hence, with and without his-tory. Writing is, for him, associated with vio-

lence, forgetting, and political hierarchy. It isthe instrument of colonization and the means

for disseminating an economic logic whosemost salient characteristics are its abstractionof value, its simultaneous devaluation of util-

ity, and its tendency to waste. The moral ap-peal of such an ostensibly antiethnocentric

model masks, says Derrida, a profound eth-nocentrism built on metaphysical presupposi-

tions (1976, p. 114). Although acknowledgingthe violence of writing, Derrida nonethelessquestions the conceptual basis on which the

structuralist bifurcation of the world rests(p. 106). This leads him to interrogatethe Saussurian model on which Levi-Strauss

draws.Saussure refers to writing as a secondary

development,areproductionofspeech.Inthisanalysis,writing is alienatedfroman originallyspontaneous and immediate communication,

but it compensates for this loss with perma-nence and a capacity for abstraction. Saussure

understands writing to be a historical develop-ment; thus, language for him is independentof writing. However, as Derrida notes, writ-

ing provides the model for his analysis of lan-guage. Derrida (1976, p. 43) then claims to re-

veal what Saussure saw without seeing: thatspeech implies writing. In what sense? Saus-

sure defines the sign as a unity of two dimesions: the sensiblesound-image (signifier) a

the intelligible concept (signified). It is unmtivated and acquires its meaning only throu

differential relations with all other signs. BDerrida reminds us, this is not because the

is a substantive difference between them; tsigns themselves are comprised of two ements, signifiers and signifieds, both of wh

are produced through differential relations.other words, claims Derrida, language is rivby absence or alterity (Spivak 1976, p. xxxi

It is comprised not of figures or reprodutions of an absent presence, but of traces

a notion he derives largely from Freud (sbelow). There is no original presence frowhich other signs have been differentiat

Or, at least, one cannot posit such an oriinary presence without making a metaphy

cal movesomething thatthe human scien(however qualitatively oriented) had claimto have disavowed.

Derridas notion of writing as that whiconditions the possibility of speech is link

to a recognition that the discernment of sigespecially words, presumes the perceptionspaces or intervals, such that one word can

separated out from another upon hearing a

reading (Derrida 1976, p. 39). The foreigness of a language, one recalls, is experiencas the incapacity to differentiate words frothestream of sound that greets theear. Inso

as the discernment of the interval is a spaing, there is a graphic or graphematic e

ment even in spoken language. To recognthesegraphic elements, however, theymustconceptualized through opposition to oth

such elements, and hence through gesturthat entail abstraction as well as iteratio

Both of these gesturesconvergein thepractof citation, by which a word or mark is quotand thereby taken out of context. In Limi

Inc. (Derrida 1995c) such decontextualiztion is read as the possibility that haunts e

ery performative utterance, and indeed eveillocutionary act. As such, it forms the basisDerridas critique of both Austins and Sear

language theories. Austins (1975 [196

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understanding of the performative (that state-

ment which calls into being what it names)excludes citation as something abnormal andthreatening to the ideal situation in which

the performative would otherwise exercise itsforce; it is this exclusion and redesignation

of a structuring possibility as mere exceptionthat Derrida interrogates and that he readsin ethico-political terms as the secret ground

of normativization in speech act theory, andmuch political ritual as well.

Derrida designates the spacing and nec-essary amenability to (de)contextualizationin language with the neologism differance.

The term is intended to invoke the sensesof deferral and differing, as well as that of

detour (Derrida 1982a, Spivak 1976). It is a

process without end. As he repeatedly insists,the totality that the structuralists hypothesize

to provisionally fix the meaning of terms(whether myths or signs) can never be actu-

alized except by imagining oneself to havearrived on the other side of time and history(Derrida 1978d, pp. 28991; 1982b). But the

processes of differing and deferral extend in-finitely. Thespacing is also a temporization.

This argument about the differance oflanguage is at best tangential to a consid-

eration of the empirical development of(narrowly conceived) writing forms, whetherhieroglyphic, ideographic, or alphabetic, tosay nothing of their possible relationship to

different kinds of social organization. Indeed,Derrida (1976, p. 78) himself acknowledges

that his analysis may have to be repressedfor positive science to develop, and he cites,approvingly, the anthropological research on

prealphabetic scripts. Some anthropologistshave arrived, quite independently and without

any reference to Derrida, at the conclusionthat, contra Walter Ong (1958, 1982) andJack Goody (1977), there is no necessary

relationship between the development offorms of script and conceptual abstraction

(Swearingen 1986, p. 153). If one rejects thecategorical opposition between speech andwriting as an opposition between immediacy

and abstraction, however, one must also reject

the bifurcation of humanity into the literateand the unlettered, the historical and the ahis-

torical. Again, Derridas logico-philosophicalapproach finds support in the research of

historical linguistic anthropologists such asSwearingen, who, on very different, empirical

grounds, notes the extremely heterogeneousdistribution of knowledge of scripts evenwithin supposedly literate societies and who,

on this basis, rejects the efforts to classifysocieties as literate or oral (1986). This kindof historicism nonetheless stops short of

the more radical claim made by Derrida,especially in relation to Levi-Strauss, namely

that nonscriptural forms of social phenomenaalso partake of the structure of writing.

What, then, does it mean to say that a

seemingly oral culture has writing? Thisquestion seems newly relevant, as a popular

audience emerges to embrace Everetts (2005)claim that the Piraha of northwestern Brazilspeak a language (of the Muran language fam-

ily) defined by near total immediacy: a lan-guage that lacks numbers, abstract terms of

quantity, colors, and the perfect tenseaswell as the capacity for writing. Everett be-lieves that the grammar of the Piraha not

only lacks but is incapable of supporting long-

term memory and historical consciousness,or any imaginative aesthetic (Colapinto 2007,Everett 2005, Stranlaw 2006). His claims areuncannily reminiscent of those made by Levi-

Strauss about the Nambikwara and will beaddressed further below. Here, I want to

consider Derridas analysis of Levi-Strausssaccount of the Nabikwara in the WritingLesson ofTristes Tropiquesto make clear what

is at stake in Derridas claim that orality doesnot lack the qualities generally reserved for

conventionally understood writing systems.Reading Levi-Strauss to excavate what has

been repressed within his discourse, Derrida

notes that the Nambikwara prohibit the useof proper names, thereby inscribing the idea

of the proper name within classificatory lan-guage (one cannot prohibit anything exceptthrough the application of a general rule).

They express much concern over genealogy



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and possess an elaborate mneumotechnics by

which to recall their pasts. Insofar as an anx-iety over genealogy (and thus property) hastypically been associated with the historical

development of writing in the narrow sense(Derrida 1976, p. 124), Derrida wonders in

what sense Levi-Strauss can claim that theNambikwara have no writing. They evenhave a name for writing, and they recognize

the power that accrues to one who possessesit. Within their own world, they mark out

their landscape with paths and signs, whichthey can refer to (or quote) in narratives ofdaily activity.

These contradictions to the idea of writ-ings absence lead Derrida to argue that we

must think of the development of writing in

the colloquial sense (of script) not as a depar-ture from a prior orality, but in relation to

other forms of iterability within the history ofwriting, understood now in its most capacious

sense. The incest taboo, which L evi-Straussand so many anthropologists correlate withhuman existence, demonstrates this logic; it

works by prohibition (which is to say the appli-cation of a general rule), and hence by classi-

fication, and by both conceiving and demand-ing substitution (of one object of desire for

another). Indeed, the incest taboo becomesone among many names for language here.And as with all law, it is inseparable from vio-lence.SoDerridarefusestheromanticismthat

would efface the violence of the Nambikwarasworld, especially violence between men and

women.Derrida is unconcerned about how one

might retell the story of the Nambikwara

more adequately, but anthropologists might,and indeed must, ask what such a critique de-

mands. Many anthropologists have, of course,attempted to describe the mute texts of pu-tatively oral cultures, in the diverse idioms

of symbolic landscape (Munn 1973, Stewart& Strathern 2003), the hidden transcripts

of everyday practice (Scott 1990), the struc-turing structures of domestic architecture(Bourdieu 1977), etc. But these acknowledg-

ments of a literacy that exceeds the ques-

tion of alphabetic or scriptural competenare often still saturated with the belief th

those populations without writing possessauthenticity and a proximity to nature (an i

mediacy) that mark their historical priorand their vulnerability to corruption. If e

ceptions exist to this implicit teleology, suas Pierre Clastress Chronicle of the Guaya

Indians (1998 [1972]), which argues that t

Guayaki are not primordially innocent of cilization but have lost agriculture (and sedetary life), they are rareand Clastres hims

ultimately returned to the romanticism ocertain primitivist anarchism (Clastres 19

[1974], 1994 [1980]; Lefort 2000 [1987]).

TRACE AND ITERATION:A CRITIQUE OF THECONCEPTS OF CULTURE ANDRITUAL AS REPRODUCTION

Having considered in such detail the pticular readings to which Derrida submted Levi-Strausss work, it is now possible

move more briskly to other strands of hthought. These remain continuous with t

analyses of the early works, although they anew terms and objects, deepening or cl

ifying aspects of the argument about wring. Among the most significant for anthrpology is Derridas development of Freu

concept of the unconscious. Given the ill pute in which Freudian thought is generaheld in anthropologyusually on the groun

that the Oedipal formation is a historicizaband culturally relative structure for conce

ing filiation and sexual differencethis aspof Derridas thought was perhaps doomedresistance.

Ortner (2006) sums up the anxiety abothe unconscious as an anxiety about the p

litical. She calls, instead, for a recognitionthe intentionality, subjectivity, and agencyindividual actors, lest one efface the politi

capacities of individuals, who [try to] act the world even as they are acted upon

110). This is not the place to examine tconcepts of subjectivity and agency posit

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by Ortner, or these concepts affinity with the

discourses of possessive individualism. But wecannot overlook the degree to which this neo-humanism functions as an alibi under which

to conflate very different concepts of the un-conscious: that of Levi-Strauss, for whom the

unconscious is composedof universal forms ofthought, and that of Freud, for whom the un-conscious provides the structure in which in-

dividuation can occur, but which ensures thatthe individual psyche is always split and over-

flowing of its boundaries.Freud treats the psyche as an always par-

ticular structure of mediation within which

exposures to the phenomenal world preciselyescape immediate reflection (and hence ex-

perience), passing both by and through con-

sciousness to a domain where they constitutea reserve. The detour and the delay that afflict

the psyche is, in Freuds analysis, a mechanismfor deferring what would otherwise endanger

it (Freud 1955 [1920]; Derrida 1982a, p. 18l;1978c, p. 201). The resurfacing of the tracesproduced in this process, often in response to

other stimuli and trace formations, is that onwhich consciousness reflects. Memory is thus

the effect of a resistance, but it is also an open-ing to those events or stimulations that might

otherwise harm the psyche. Derrida speaks ofthis process in the idiom of the trace, whichis the function of a breaching, stating that itis the differential between the various breach-

ings that produces memory (1978c, p. 203).Here, Derrida emphasizes the quality of de-

ferral and reserve in a manner that foreclosesthe possibility of simple or transparent recall.It is an analysis that demands a rethinking of

all those discourses and institutions ostensi-bly dedicated to memory: the museum, the

archive, and indeed, any movement devotedto the reclamation of genealogical relation(Derrida 1995a).

An understanding of memory as differanceand as trace constitutes a major challenge to

any concept of culture that presumes it iseither a repository of collective memory orthe unconscious structure that determines or

enableson the analogy of script and en-

actment, score and performanceindividualor even collective actions and possibilities.

Anthropologists who have worked on ques-tions of recovered memoryas a collective phe-

nomenon associated with accusations of childabuse or with alien abduction, for example,

have had to confront thequestionof memoryslack of transparencyto an original event,and itis notincidental that a certain Derridean read-

ing of Freud makes its appearance in thosetexts as much as in any others (e.g., Battaglia2005; Lepselter 1997, 2005). But the vast cot-

tage industry on collective memory, partic-ularly in periods of political normalization

or transitions out of totalitarianismmanyinfluenced by Maurice Halbwachss Collec-

tive Memory (1950)might well benefit from

Derridas insights. Too often the problem ofanalysis in these works is imagined as that of

recovery: of lost artifacts, deceased witnesses,or corrupted testimonies. When faced withincoherence or discontinuity in the record or

the recall of otherwise interrupted histories,this kind of approach often leads one to hy-

pothesize either dissimulation or ignorance(whether as trauma or as ideological mystifi-cation), both of whichmaybe sustained within

social constructivist accounts of invented tra-

ditions (Hobsbawm & Ranger 1982). Ironi-cally, given their subject matter, these modelsshare an implicit concept of at least collectiveintentionality. What is represented as a distur-

bance of historical consciousness produced byeconomic hardship or political violence, for

example, is then conceived as a blockage ofwhat would otherwise have been the contin-uous production and reproduction of mean-

ingful worlds.However, if culture cannot be construed as

a repository of collective memory, it cannotbeconceived as that which is merely reproducedthrough the performative logic of ritual either.

At least this is the implication of Derridas dis-course on the performative, from Signature

Event Context (1995d [1972]) forward. Inthis essay, Derrida asserts the simultaneousiterability of all cultural marks and the irre-

ducibility of such iterations to a question of



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reproduction (of repetition without differ-

ence). This much has already been noted,but the implications of this analysis for thequestion of intentionality, and hence for

those kinds of culturalism oriented by theidea of agency, have not yet been plumbed.

They emerge most clearly in Derridas de-bate with the Austinian theorists of illo-cution, and especially Searle (1977; also

Felman 1983; Norris 1987, pp. 17293;Spivak 1980).

Derrida begins by questioning the conceptof written communication as that which trans-mits meaning between senders and receivers.

If we begin with theassumption, which AustinandSearle both acknowledge andDerrida em-

phasizes, that such communication can take

place in the absence of the receiver (who maybe physically distant, or not even yet born) but

also the sender, we are left with the impres-sion that writing takes place only when it is

assumed that such an absence is not only pos-sible but likely or even inevitable. Otherwise,why write? Of course, one writes to oneself as

welland Searle adduces the grocery list asan example of such writing to oneself, using it

to claim that writing is not determined by ab-sence, and indeed that it is contained in and by

the self-presence of the sender, whose inten-tions determine the fact of communication.Although he gives up the idea that proxim-ity obviates the need for writing, Searle over-

looks the conditioning possibilities for com-municating at all. Derrida remarks that the

very fact of communication between persons,even those seated next to each other, implies adistance and difference between them. They

are not fully self-present. The same can besaid in the situation hypothesized by Searle,

namely of writing a grocery list for oneself.To speak to oneself, in whatever form, is toexpress the fact that the individual psyche is

itself internally divided. Lest this be thoughtof as a mode of psychosis, one should note, as

Spivak does (1980, p. 32), that Derrida treatsthisfactnotasthegroundsfornihilismbutasarecognition that lack of self-presence is what

enables communication and hence sociality.

It is a positive fact, a necessary conditionbeing-with-others.

As for intention, Derrida holds onto tconcept while rethinking it as the expressi

of a desire (a structural fact realized in inviduals) for a communicative relationship

which meanings would indeed be received ainterpreted as their senders intended thembe (Spivak 1980, p. 30). This notion seem

initially, to bearsomesimilarity to Haberma(1981) concept of the ideal speech situatiobut a conscious ideal (of shared meanings)

not the same as an unconscious desire, andthe difference between these concepts a ve

different kind of analytic emerges. If intetionality is the expression of a desire for thwhich cannot be assumed, then we have t

basis of an anthropology of positive or pductive misunderstanding as much as an a

thropology of shared meanings. One particlarly potent example of this comes in Siege

The Rope of God(2000), where he describes t

conflicting and simultaneous intentions of male and male speakers in a situation (Atj

after the collapse of the pepper economwhere domesticrelations are sustainedby mtranslation: Women offer men what they u

derstand as indulgence, whereas men belie

themselves to be receiving deferral.This is a different kind of failure th

that which Derrida asserts is the universusceptibility of all speech acts conceived

their illocutionary dimension (as acts coceived in terms of their effect on the wo

rather than their semantic content), but itnot unrelated to it. Siegels point is that teffectivity of the communication is partly

dependent of meaning, and it may rely prcisely on the existence of a gap between i

tended and received meaning. The conceof the performative comes apart under suscrutiny, and the implications are nowhe

more profound than in the analysis of thanthropological fetish, ritualand especia

that category of ritual that accords a cetral place to spells and speech acts aimedthe transformation of the world through pr

cesses of authorized naming. The examp

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of the performative most familiar to anthro-

pologists are undoubtedly those associatedwith life-cycle rituals: events in which theidentity or status of a person is publicly re-

designated (birth, initiation, marriage, anddeath). Insofar as these rituals were conceived,

in classical anthropology, as the instrumen-tation for the production and reproductionof social structure, and insofar as they work

by dissociating individual persons from moreperduring structures (permitting both indi-

vidual transformation and social continuity),Derridas analysis bears serious consideration.

This is especially true when we extend the

category of ritual beyond rites de passage, asvan Gennep (1960 [1909]) termed them and

Turner (1969) analyzed them, to include all

those gestures treated under the heading ofthe everyday: habitual forms that encum-

ber subjects and rise to consciousness onlyin the moment that they are neglected, vi-

olated, or formally altered (Bourdieu 1977).This kind of reiteration or habit is often pre-sumed to constitute the ground of cultural

continuity. Turner, of course, saw the space ofritual as the possible locus for generating new

combinatory logics and thus unprecedentedmeanings within the symbolic field, but such

invention was itself exceptional in his anal-ysis and was most likely to emerge from thestaged space of ritual death. Moreover, the in-novation is often rendered, in his reading, like

the failure of the quotation in Austins anal-ysis: as the exception whose exclusion from

the normative ideal of the ritual, or the per-formative, is necessary for the ritual (as so-cial reproduction) to operate felicitously. At

best, we can perhaps say that there is an intu-ition in Turners workthat,despite its contain-

ment within a structural-functional paradigm,isavailableforarereadingsuchasDerridaper-forms on Levi-Strauss. It is the intuition that

ritual, like all language, overflows itself and issubject to that most absolute of events, death,

from which it attempts to derive its powerand over which it attempts, with even greatereffort, to exercise a containing masterythe

mastery of metaphor (Derrida 2005, p. 152).

Turners sense of rituals exceptionality,broadly shared in anthropology, contains

within itself the contradiction that Derridadiscerns in Austins theory. It rests on an act

of decontextualization, which also, and simul-taneously, provides the context within which

the event can be read as ritual per se. If theboundary between event and context is un-derstoodas an undecidableone,however, then

the boundedness of ritual must also be ques-tioned. This does not mean that people donot perceive theseevents as exceptionalthey

certainly do. But instead of assuming that thisexceptionality is an internal attribute of rit-

ual, one can then pose the question of howand by which operations the appearance of aboundary is produced, as well as how and un-

der which circumstances the event rises to thelevel of ritual. This is not merely a ques-

tion of delineating the gestures that separateoff one day or act from the others, but of ask-ing how the thematization of such gestures

as ritual makes them available to legitimatelocal power, or to subject them to colonial

repression, for example. An anthropologicalinvestigation of this process, understood viaDerrida, would ask how a variety of differ-

ent acts can be classified as being of the type,

ritual, when, at other times and in othercircumstances, they would be innocuous ordifferently named. Pemberton (1994) has, forexample, deftly read the history of ritual dis-

course in Indonesian and especially Javanesepolitics as a process of classifying a wide vari-

ety of practices that, when signified as ritual,can become the basis for mystifying powerand sublating it in the idea of culture. He

shows that thedesignation of particular eventsas rites and of rites as ritual is not an inno-

cent terminological practice but one redolentwith the interests of dominant classes, and hemakes clear that the linking of ritual with cul-

ture works to efface such interests in the ideaof order.

The second corollary of this erasure ofthe boundary between event and context isthat the intended effects of the ritual can

never be understood as achieving completion.



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The ritual, always dependent on the context

from which it is separated out, is in fact in-sufficient to produce what it names. Such areading of ritual has, perhaps, been most ef-

fectively extended into the domain of gen-der studies, where it has led to a recognition

that the effect of rites of gender assignmentor marriage, for example, is less the accom-plishment of a new categorical status than

the demand that individuals continually reit-erate theforms withinwhich that status would

be socially legible (Butler 1993; Morris 1995,2006). What Butler terms stylized repeti-tions (she does not use the Derridean lexi-

con in her earlier work, but relies mainly onFoucault and Althusser) can be understood in

terms of the always deferred nature of writing

(in its broader sense). On this basis, some au-thors have seen in such rites an opportunity

for liberation from social norms. However, itis not enough to say that failure is as much

a possibility as is felicitous performance, andhence that ritual is an occasion from whichto disavow the ideal (Kulik 2000). Every iter-

ation must, by definition, fail to achieve thefictive ideal of the performative.

In the end, the question of iterabilityrather than reproduction without

differenceentails an absolutely radical chal-lenge for anthropology. The culture concepthas never not been tied, at least provisionally,to the idea of social reproductionthrough

child-rearing practices, formal institutionsof education, life-cycle rituals, architectural

form, mythologization, political ritual, etc.As Derrida himself remarks, in one of hislast books, Rogues(2005 [2003]), the rhetoric

of reproduction is acquiring new force inthe age of genetic engineering and cloning.

These technologies often express the fantasyof absolute repetition. Derridas call for aninterrogation of every desire for reproduction

without difference seems especially salutary,given that this logic is not confined to the

realm of biotechnology but extends intothe political as wellas, for example, whenthe mimicry of Western political forms is

demanded as the condition of receiving

foreign aid. The implications of this doubtechnologyof both biological and cultu

(as well as national-cultural) self-extensionultimately entail the exclusion of differen

And it is not surprising that much of timpetus for developing genomic technolog

comes from social, religious, and politiprojects that aim to map racial identitiestime, in terms of descent from a putativ

pure origin that they seek to preserve restore (see Abu El-Haj 2007).

But the drive to reproduction has eno

mous force in thelives of individuals and comunities. What is this force that drives t

drive to reproduction, even if mere reprodution would mean death? WithDerrida, we chold on to Freuds observation that it is t

failure of pure reproduction that ensures cutural life. To think thestructure of this stran

death-dealing but also life-giving circle isthink the gift.

THE GIFT AND THEGHOSTWRITING OF CAPITAL

Nowhere is Derridas work more depende

on the contributions of anthropology thanhis theorizationof thegift. In its most distill

form, the gift is the figure of the impossibfor Derrida (1992, p. 7), an impossibility sociated with the tautological nature of eco

omy in general. Drawing on Greek etymoogy, Derrida asserts that the word economimplies both the value of home and the ob

gation to distribute, circulate, and exchan(1992, p. 6). These are attributes of eco

omy in its most general sense, including tostensible (and seemingly oxymoronic) geconomies described by Mauss. For Mau

of course, the gift is a figure of totality (Mau1969 [1925], pp. 1, 3). Moreover, this tot

ity transcends the division of society into tspheres of economy, polity, and religion (salso Sahlins 1976). Gifts are that which mu

be given and circulated, but whose movemedoes not constitute an alienation for the giv

(something of theperson remains in andof tgift, says Mauss). They must also be return

364 Morris


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but in a manner that prohibits the appear-

ance of their simply being rejected.Hence, thereturn must also make visible a difference;instantaneity and perfect commensuration are

prohibited by it. Time, as Derrida remarks inall his writings on the topic, is an irreducible

element of the gift.Mauss himself speculates that the gift is

the origin of contractual relations and the

means by which communities terminate war-fare (Mauss 1969 [1925], p. 80). His argument

has been applied to capitalism as well, and in-deed it expresses something of the ideologyof liberalism. Whether this explains the re-

turn to Mauss and the proliferation of stud-ies of the gift (of which Derridas reading

must be counted as one) during the 1980s

and afterward (e.g.,Appadurai 1986;Godelier1999 [1996]; Humphrey & Hugh-Jones 1992;

Munn 1986; Strathern 1988; Weiner 1976,1992), as Janet Roitman (2003, pp. 21213)

remarks, remains to be analyzed. In mostof these writings, the productivity of debt[is] . . . understood in terms of a primary re-

lation that puts debtor-creditor relations atthe very base of social relations (Roitman

2003, p. 212). They take off from Mausss ob-servation that sovereignty exists only when

the gift (and debt) is refused (Mauss 1969,p. 71). Mausss own analysis leads him toposit sovereignty as an interruption of social-ity, then, not that from which the gift extracts

people by substituting exchange relations forwarfare. In other words, one is always already

in debtwhich is to say, in need of the social.Derrida takes Mauss at his word and goes

further to emphasizethe contradictions inher-

ent in the gift, as a figure, and not merely ingift-givingasasociologicalfactatoddswithits

own ideology. Rereading Levi-Strausss anal-ysis of Mauss, he observes how the resolutionof these contradictions is invariably achieved

in structuralist anthropology by invoking in-digenous terms and concepts for a mysterious

force within the thing (Derrida 1992 [1991],p. 77), most famously the hau of the Maori.These lexical units supplement (in Derridas

sense) the ambivalence of the Indo-European

words for the gift, which often imply both giv-ing and receiving (Derrida 1992, p. 79; Mauss

1969). In place of this transcendental signifier,which always remains untranslated, Derrida

speaks of the impossible and, in the relatedwork, The Gift of Death (1995b [1992]), de-

fines the gift as that which cannot be recog-nized without being annulled. It is the secretrather than the metaphysical origin of social-

ity (1995b, pp. 2930). The secret, it mustbe noted, is not the secreted thing but thefabricated discourse of a withholding, behind

which there may be absence or presence.Undoubtedly, the analysis of the gift has

been the most congenial of all Derridaswritings for anthropologists, appearing, inso many ways, as an exculpation rather than

a critique of Mauss, especially in relation toLevi-Strausss reading. Maurer attributes the

appeal of Derrida in economic anthropologyto the fact that the problem of money is,invariably, a problem of representation,

revolv[ing] around questions of identity,trust, and faith in the stability of that which

is evident to the senses, . . . [but] backed bynothing at all (Maurer 2006, p. 28; also 2005,pp. 15758). The Platonic problem of sensi-

bility versus intelligibility returns here, and it

is largely in these terms that Derridas revisionof Marx has also been read. In Specters of Marx(1994 [1993]), Derrida brings to the foreMarxs analysis of the value form as a spec-

tralized and spectralizing entity, one basedon abstraction and the temporary effacement

or suspension of the sensuously perceptibledifference in material actuality. This abstrac-tion is premised on an anticipation of use and

a simultaneous deferral of consumptionconsumption being the end point of the

exchange relation and of abstraction itself(Derrida 1994, pp. 14863). Exchange bothpresumes a social relation and seems indis-

pensable for the production of that relation.Thus, in an analysis that is as Kantian (or even

Aristotelian) as it is Marxian, he emphasizesthe logical priority of the category of value,vis-a-vis the empirical determination of either

use or exchange value (see also Keenan 1997).



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The object of the analysis in Specters

is, first, money, and second, financialcapitalunderstood as self-(re)producingmoney. The specter he identifies is thus that

by which money seems to generate its ownexcessits surplus. As Spivak has observed,

this argument is dangerously close to repro-ducing the bourgeois economics that Marxhimself eschewed, and she takes Derrida to

task for not considering either the place ofindustrial capital in general or the fact that, in

the extraction of surplus value from laborersunder the current economic dispensation[in which, some scholars say, circulation has

supplanted production as the locus of value-production (Baudrillard 1981, Goux 1973)],

the disenfranchised poor and especially

women become increasingly and specificallysubject to the operations of transnational

capital. These are the particular bodies beingspectralized that disappear in the abstrac-

tions of reproductive rights, populationcontrol, and post-Fordist homeworking,among others (Cheah 2007; Ong 1999; Rofel

1999; Wright 1999, 2001). Such processes,Spivak reminds us, are enabled not merely

by law but by the specific collusions of inter-national treaty organizations, transnational

capital, and the aspirants of national capitalin the global south (Spivak 1995).

One cannot help but observe that it is inthe relative effacement of labor in the anal-

ysis of capital that Derridas limitations as athinker of gender become most transparent.

There is a great deal in Derridas writingsabout matters of sexual differencefrom theerotic play of the The Post Card(1987a), to the

question of heritability within the Abrahamictradition in Circumfession (1993a), to theprob-

lematizing of the fraternal in The Politics of Friendship (1997), and the rethinking of thefeminine chora as a dimension of writing

in Khora (1993b). But the concern with sex-ual difference never generates an analysis of

the labor of women, as opposed to the (con-ceptual or structural) labor of the feminine.A full assessment of Derridas thought would

have to account for this, just as it would have

to account for the fact that, despite the enomous conceptual investment madeby Derr

in the idea of auto-immunity, he almost nevmentions AIDS or pharmaceutical capital (a

other significant factor in the realignmentstate sovereignty under neoliberalism)ev

as a figure of catastrophe. This spectraling, of women and those afflicted with HImust necessarily haunt anthropologists w

are otherwise moved by Derridas effort toclaim from Marxs ghost, as from religion, taspiration to justice.

Perhaps, one could say, it is less capital acertainly not capitalism, than Marxs comm

ment to the messianic that concerns Derriin Specters of Marx, and in this way it rmains a book about the gift, and thus abo

economy writ large. What Derrida hoon to from Marx is the messianic affirm

tion that nonetheless resists metaphysicreligious determination (1994, p. 89). Tdemands a relentless auto-critique and wi

ingness to break with the party and prduce events. The orientation and recept

ity to the event need not actually posit event or reveal it, in the Christian idioit must simply think the possibility of t

event (1995b, p. 49). Under the influence

Levinas, Derrida construes this openness the event as a form of radical responsibilto the Other, and it is for this reason that hmeditation on Marx and Marxism leads h

to insist on the necessity of thinking the plitical and the religious together. His effo

to redeem from Marx a messianicity withomessianism is at one with his effort to redeefrom religion (and also from Hegel) a religi

without determinate content (Derrida 200[1996]; Smith 1998).

It is nonetheless significant that one the most popular of Derridas texts, even aperhaps especially among anthropology s

dents, is the one that comes closest to bing a metaphysical textand it is questio

able whether the invocation of a messianity without metaphysics is sufficient to escathe charges of theological mystification, or

least determinate religiosity. Caputo (199

366 Morris


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for example, reads Derridas response to

Marxism as a fifth messianism, one that locatesMarxism in the tradition of the historicallydetermined monotheistic messianisms, in-

cluding Judaism, Christianity, and Islam(p.140). In his attempt to purge Marxist mes-

sianism of its inherently violent tendencies,however, Derrida largely passes over Marxssociologically significant questions. Anthro-

pologists can and should lament the fact thatSpecters of Marx fails to address the histori-

cal organization of productive relations or thefact that financialization does not do awaywith the industrial system, especially given

Derridas interest in the mechanical and theautomatic as principles within language that

are differently mobilized by religious and

technological developments. And this omis-sion may confirm some skeptics sense that

Derrida is, in the end, not merely Eurocen-tric in his references but ethnocentric in out-

look (Caputo 1997, Rorty 1995); there is pre-cious little about the global south in this book,and althoughquestions of migrants,especially

in France, occasionally surface, they are sec-ondary. The category of the messianic, meta-

physical or not, is thought entirely withinthe Abrahamic tradition; there is no mention,

for example, of the alternative messianismsoffered by an at least ostensibly antimeta-physical Buddhismand nothing about thosetraditions that lack the messianic altogether.

Moreover, the ghost of Soviet socialism,whose demise is the original incitement for

the book, inspires as much melancholy as hor-ror; neither the grotesqueries of the gulag northe criminal usurpation of the social dividend

aided and abetted by U.S.-backed financialinstitutions after 1989 receives much careful

analysis, although these might also have beenthought in terms of a negative messianism.

NO JUSTICE: ECONOMY ANDLAW, OR THE QUESTION OF

THE POLITICAL

One of the most significant shifts in contem-porary thought attributable to Derridas in-

terventions is the turn from normative analy-

ses of the political to considerations of ethics.Again, because Derrida believes that all de-terminate political regimes rest on forms of

exclusion, and tend inevitably to violence, hiscritical project seeks to adumbrate an ethics

of openness, or nonexclusion. In his readingof the violence in the Middle East, for exam-ple, he questions those efforts to appropri-

ate Jerusalem that rest on theexclusionof thePalestinians (Derrida 2002b). In his analysis of

the discourse on rogue states, he observesthe predicament of the North African immi-grants in France and questions the hypocrisy

of hospitality when it is construed as a relationof reciprocity bound by law, and hence as a de-mand for mirroring (Derrida 2005 [2003]).

In these readings, law is inhabited bythe logic of the double bind. It is both that

which contains and reduces or even inhibitsjustice, and that through which humanbeings must nonetheless attempt to pursue

justice. Economy is the domain of law, thename of a demand for commensuration and

normativization. The relationship betweenlaw and language, law and force, particularlyas it is analyzed in Derridas reading of Walter

Benjamin and Hannah Arendt, has been ex-

tremely productive for many anthropologists,particularly those working in contexts af-flicted by state violence and its phantomaticother, criminality, and terrorism (Aretxaga

2003, 2005a; Sanchez 2001; Siegel 1998).In many cases, however, the invocation of

Derridas reading of Benjamin does not re-mark the differencebetween Benjamins (1979[1921]) original argument, that law is severed

from justice in the moment that the policetake on themselves the work of decision, ad-

ministering violence to annul violence, andDerridas. And it must be noted that Derrida(1991) rejects the metaphysical fantasy of di-

vine violence at the end of Benjamins essay,while also respecting the insight that justice

and law must always be heterogeneous to eachother. It is thus ironic that it is the question ofjustice on which Derrida is so often accused

of lacking political realism and relevance.



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Eagleton (2003) recoils before a hallu-

cinated court case in which Derrida is onthe jury, unable to decide anything becauseethical decisions are, in Eagletons represen-

tation of Derridas thought, utterly impos-sible, . . . outside norms, forms of knowledge

and modes of conceptualization. Similarly,Das (2007, p. 9) worries that the critique ofpresence by which Derrida unsettles the no-

tion of signature can be deployed by the in-stitutions of power, and specifically the state,

to negate the authenticity of testimony fromthose whose injuries it refuses to acknowl-edge (especially when it has caused them).

Perhaps we can acknowledge the improba-bility that any state would deploy a critique

of presence as a means of evading the testi-

monyof complainants against state violencealthough Clifford (1988) has given us a sober-

ing account of what can happen in a courtof law operating on positivist presumptions

when expert witnesses deploy a crude formof social constructionism to argue the case ofindigenous complainants while also repudi-

ating the ideas of tradition and cultural au-thenticity. Povinelli (2002), althoughcertainly

nota Derridean, has nonetheless defended thepossibility that one can undertake a critique of

the archive and its ideology of authenticity, aswell as the politics of recognition, while alsointervening in the field of law in the inter-est of minoritized communities. There is no

need to point the stick of political exigency tostave off the demands of Derridean reading

(Beardsworth 1996).

CONTEXTS OF RECEPTIONAND DISSEMINATION

How, then, has this form of reading beenengaged within anthropology? Derridas de-

constructionism entered a disciplinary spacethat was coming under pressure from differ-ent schools of criticism, many of which took,

as their point of departure, the premises ofstructuralism. Its changing fortunes in and

for the discipline must thus be understoodagainst this backdrop of more general foment.

Lamont (1987) attemptsto explain thedomnance of Derridas thought within the Am

ican academy as a function of its fit withihighly structured cultural system, achiev

partly through the targeting of his work to tFrench intelligentsia and the American m

ket through journals and research groucomprised of his students, as well as a stratgic affiliation with members of the priva

elite universities that had been the centersliterary criticism. She further suggests thDerridas style garnered him cultural ca

tal, simply because its inaccessibility signifiphilosophical erudition and therefore ge

erated prestige, or what Bourdieu (198would call distinction. Whether Derrever assumed dominance is a matter open

dispute, and certainly this is not the case in thuman sciences. However, in addition to h

erroneous descriptions of Derridas concetual interventions, and her improbable idetification of his thought with that of oth

Marxist dialecticians (Lamont 1987, pp. 5995), Lamonts analysis remains incapable

grasping the tensions with and resistanceshis writing, or the complex and often antaonistic relationship it had with other for

of poststructuralism. In this respect, howev

she is not alone. Derrida has even been dscribed as participating with Foucault in a sgle line of attack on those conceptionsthe public sphere based on the presumpti

of a transparently communicating, metaphyically grounded individual self (Reddy 199

The matter deserves more careful scrutinyIn the same year that Derrida deliver

Structure, Sign, and Play, Foucault, o

of Derridas teachers, published Les Mots

les Choses (The Order of Things: An Archae

ogy of the Human Sciences). There, Fouca(1994 [1966]) attributed to anthropologyconstituent role in modern thought b

one in which the Kantian question, Whis man? produced a confusion of the tra

scendental and the empirical (1994, pp. 3443). Anthropology was, for Foucault, tsleep of philosophy, a redoubled dogmati

[Derrida (1978b) would also use this rheto

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of somnolence when describing structuralism

(p. 4)]. Like Derrida, he questioned theanthropological desire to find in empirical ac-tuality the basis for a metaphysical pursuit of

the foundation of all knowledge. And, likeDerrida, he too observed the emergent dom-

ination of the human sciences by models de-rived from language and linguistics. [WhenSchildkraut (2004, p. 319) observes the pre-

ponderant concern with inscription in the an-thropology of the body, citing Foucault and

Derrida as examples, she both corroboratestheir observations and misrecognizes them asthe objects of those observations.]

According to Foucault, the human sci-ences have historically been organized in

binary pairs: conflict and rule, function and

norm, and finally, sign and signification. Aslanguage-based models assumed a dominant

place in social theory, these pairs came tobe dominated by their second terms (rule,

norm, signification) (Foucault 1994, p. 357).As this occurred, the sciences of man becamecomplicit with the positing of alterity as

criminal, nonnormative, or insignificant(Foucault 1994, p. 350). Moreover, it became

the task of the human sciences to understandthe relationship between the two terms in

each set. The dominance of psychoanalysisand ethnology in the twentieth century canbe explained, Foucault asserts, because theyconstrued this relationship in terms of the

unconscious (1994, p. 373).In an argument over their respective read-

ings of Descartes and the history of mad-ness, Derrida accused Foucault of complic-ity with the same metaphysics he derided

(1978a). And Foucault retorted by accusingDerrida of reducing discourse to traces and

of eliding events, but also of consolidatingthe sovereignty of the pedagogue, whose mas-tery consists merely in reading (Foucault 1979

[1972]; Spivak 1976, pp. lxilxii). It was a crit-icism that appealed to anthropologists, and

thus, although there were detractors, and am-bivalence even among his creditors, Foucaultcame to dominate the American anthropolog-

ical scene as the bearer of a self-consciously

politicized poststructuralism (see, for exam-ple, Comaroff 1985, Dreyfus & Rabinow

1982, Stoler 1995). Derrida himself rejectedthe term poststructuralism (2005, p. 174), but

his work was often classed as part of the samephenomenon.

What was Foucaults appeal, and why didit lead to a relative resistance to Derrida? Tobegin, his privileged metaphors of genealogy

and archaeology had an obvious resonance forpractitioners whose work often entailed thediagrammatic study of kinship and the exca-

vation of ruins. But it was perhaps the affinitybetween Foucaults concept of episteme and

American anthropologys concept of culture,tempered under the influence of structural-ism, that conditioned the disciplines relative

receptivity to his thought. And even if, asMarcus & Cushman (1982) argue, Foucaults

concepts of episteme and discourse seemremote from the kind of empirical minutiaethat anthropologists usually investigate, the

sweep of his conclusions has proved nodeterrent to many.

Foucaults lure was enhanced by his focuson the body as the ground of both norma-tivity and transgression. The analytic of the

body emerged from a reading of modern gov-

ernmentality as a form of (bio)power operat-ing through the microscopic management oflife (Foucault 1984 [1975]). These ideas foundfertile ground in a field already confronting

the legacies of colonialism but still method-ologically oriented toward the description of

everyday life. Moreover, it addressed itself rel-atively overtly to the forms of liberationismthat dominated the United States at the time.

It was less the memory of Bandung or Afro-Asian Peoples Solidarity and the idea of non-

alignment that swayed radical politics in theUnited States in the 1970s, than civil rights,antistatism, and the various agendas of femi-

nism and queer liberation (in which the poli-tics of pleasure were often as salient as those

of social justice). Within anthropology, ofcourse, there was more concern about theplight of the Third World, albeit as much as a

space of loss as a locus of future-building. Still,



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Clifford Geertz was espousing an anthro-

pological analysis of the new nations (1963,1971), and Dell Hymes was gathering thosewho wanted to rethink the disciplines impe-

rial roots (1972; see also Asad 1973, Gough1968; Fabian 1983, and Stocking 1991).

By the 1980s, popular culture and anthro-pological theory seemed to converge arounda desire for a discursive foundation within

which to conceive a corporealized politicsof emancipation. Derridas passing reference

to Vietnam in The Ends of Man (1982b,p. 114) and his argument that ethnology isone of the compromised efforts to produce

auto-critique through the false exit of anencounter with the Wests outside (1982b,

pp. 13435) undoubtedly appeared inade-

quate or even contrary to this task. Mean-while, leftist critics, such as Terry Eagleton,

accused him of defeatism after the failure ofthe student uprisings in May 1968 (Eagleton

1983, p. 143; 1986).And, if not Foucault, then Bourdieu.With-

out the Nietzschean element of transgression

central to Foucaults thought, Bourdieus con-ceptof practice (1977) offered anthropologists

both the lure of structure and the temptationof corporeality, conceived as part of a dialectic

in which experience (bedrock of phenomenol-ogy and the idea of participant observation) isthe essence of historicity (Ortner 1984). Allthis was cast within a rather conventional dis-

course of class, but with the recognition thatthe conspicuous display of cultural knowl-

edge (and notmerely consumption)now func-tions as thebasisof recognition.Like Foucaultand many of the other left poststructuralists,

Bourdieu (1984) takes issue with Derrida andthe Derridean critique of his own work, also

on the grounds that Derrida effaces the exi-gencies of political actuality.

ENEMIES AND FAUX AMIS

For many anthropologists, Derrida was sim-ply one of many taking a stab at an antiquated

science. Marcus & Cushman (1982, pp. 5657) place him alongside not only Foucault,

but also Roland Barthes, Edward Said, a

Raymond Williams. Geertz (2002) lacategorizes Derrida as part of an elusive aequivocal movement (among other mov

ments, including feminism, anti-imperialisindigenous rights, and gay liberation), who

members included Foucault, Lacan, Deleuand Guattari. Marshall Sahlins (199eschewing the idea of invented tradition

(Hobsbawm & Ranger 1982) denounafterological anthropologists for being tonly people without culture and witho

a desire for it (p. 404). He borrows twitticism from Jacqueline Mraz and uses it

an umbrella term for all forms of postmoernism, poststructuralism, postcolonialiand the likeincluding those influenced

Derrida (but see Derrida 2005, p. 174).In those parts of the discipline still und

the sway of structuralism, the critiques Levi-Strauss made little impact. Thus, example, in the more than 1400 pages

the two-volume Echanges et Communicati(Pouillon & Maranda 1970), featuring

different authors including French, Engliand American writers such as Pierre Boudieu, Louis Dumont, Luc de Heusch, E

Evans-Pritchard, Raymond Firth, Ja

Goody, Edmund Leach, Julian Pitt-RiveMarshall Sahlins, Evon Vogt, James PeacoDavid Schneider, and Thomas Sebeok, onone mention is made of Derrida. Hu

Nutini (1970) briefly acknowledges Derridimportance in situating Levi-Strauss with

the French intellectual traditionbut onafter remarking the likely resistance, amoAnglo-Americans, to his difficult langua

and the quasi-metaphysical tone of targument (p. 544).

The accusation of obscurantism hachieved the status of a clich e (Hicks 198p. 964; also Doja 2006). Derridas (200

p. 113) response to such criticisms, that hwork is no more difficult than that of

philosophical predecessorsPlato, KaHegel, Heidegger, Husserlis hard dispute, but perhaps inadequately consoli

for the defenders of transparency.

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One could, perhaps, have imagined a more

sympathetic reading of Derrida in the spaceopened by Geertz, to the extent that Geertzrejected any idea of a humanity prior to lan-

guage, symbolization, and culture. More im-portantly, Geertz seems to have acknowl-

edged an originary but also unlocatable lack,on which basis the human/linguistic being ofhumans could be understood only as an end-

less becoming: We are . . . incomplete or un-finished animals who complete or finish our-

selves through culture (Geertz 1973a [1966],p. 49). However, it was not toward decon-structionthat Geertzs interpretiveanthropol-

ogy would move but toward the hermeneu-tics of Ricoeur and the linguistic philosophy

of Wittgenstein. Geertz never thought of the

originary lack as an aporia. It was preciselythat which could be satisfied in and by culture.

His notion of the supplement, if one may usethat term here, was one of quasi-theological

satisfaction and completion. Indeed, and forthis very reason, he would come under at-tack by many who found in the concept of

culture as a web of meanings, public andshared (Geertz 1973c), a strategy for effacing

the questions of power and difference withinsociety.

Moreover, linguistically oriented anthro-pologists who were, like Derrida, concernedwith questioning the fantasy of transpar-ent representation were as likely to turn to

Peirceansemioticsastheyweretodeconstruc-tion (Daniel 1984; Gell 1998; Keane 1997a,b,

2003; Maurer 2005, 2006; Munn 1986;Silverstein 1976). Derrida (1976) himselfacknowledged that Peirce, and especially his

conceptofsecondness,goesveryfarinthedi-rection that I have called . . . deconstruction

(p. 49). But for many Peirceans, Derridasnotions of undecideability and play seem toolimitless. They insist on an analysis of the

meta-conditions within which such play iscontainedthe religious debates, cultural

discourses, and political contexts in which,to use Foucaults language, the interestedopposition between normativity and alterity

is implemented (Keane 1997a). This concern

is compelling, and anthropologists cannotevade it, but it would be unfair not to

acknowledge that the particular movements,philosophical arguments, and textual ex-

pressions of these containments are also theobject of Derridas critical readingsalbeit

rarely in their institutional manifestations.Perhaps, the deeper if ironic condition

of possible receptivity for Derrida lies not

in the work of the culturalists, or the lin-guistic turn, but in Malinowskis disciplinar-ily foundational conception of fieldwork. Of-

ten read as a nave discourse premised onthe fantasy of immediacy,Malinowskis advo-

cacy of fieldwork was nonetheless attuned tothe problem of meaning in a radical way. Inhis astonishingly perceptive essay, Baloma,

the spirits of the dead in a Trobriand soci-ety (1954 [1916]), he describes the prob-

lem of definition in a cross-cultural encounterwhere the European terms of substance,nature, cause, and origin have no coun-

terparts. The Kiriniwinians with whom hespeaks nonetheless answer to the anthropol-

ogists skeptical questions about the natureof the spirits. Malinowski remarks that theseanswers are as much similes as definitions

(1954, p. 167). That is to say, they refer else-

where and announce themselves as part of achain of signs, none of which can ultimatelybe anchored in the metaphysical touch-stonesof cause or origin. Although he does

not emphasize this point, Malinowskis intu-ition, that the anthropological project is in-

herently a confrontation with this endlesslydivisible quality of language and the impos-sibility of eliciting a metaphysical mirror for

the West, can perhaps return us to a consider-ation of how and what a deconstructionist an-

thropology might bean antipositivism thatdoes not lead to the abandonment of empiri-cism [far from eschewing empiricism, Derrida

confesses to it in Of Grammatology (1976,p. 162)].

The aspiration to find such an openinghas been made before, and other anticipa-tions of Derrida have been discovered in

anthropologys archive. The most obvious



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of these is Bateson, whose definition of in-

formation as any difference that makes adifference (Bateson 2000c [1970], p. 459)and whose use of the concepts of both

schismogenesis and double bind (Bateson2000b [1969], 2000d [1956]) are widely re-

marked for their idiomatic proximity toDerridas translated concepts. Indeed, Sahlins(1993a) accuses contemporary anthropolo-

gists of forgetting these early interventionsin favor of poststructuralist reinventions and

displaying a lapse of anthropological connec-tion and knowledge (p. 851). One does notneed Derrida to observe that apparent resem-

blances may also mask deeper divergences,however.

Derridas (1986, 1998 [1996]) concept of

the double bind has a Freudian genealogy.It refers not only to a problem afflicting

conscious decision-making, but to the inter-nal dynamics of analysis, and of language as

differance (Derrida 1998, p. 33). Derrida de-rives the notion from Freud, and especiallytheFreud ofBeyond the Pleasure Principle (1955

[1920]), for whom binding and unbindingprovide the idiom in which to understand

the psychic relationships to external stim-uli. Borrowing and departing from this un-

derstanding, deconstruction radicalizes twoseemingly contrary impulses: that which seeksthe originary and that which engages in thedecomposition-recomposition of an active or

passive synthesis (Derrida 1998, p. 28). Thisstructure underpins all deconstructive analy-

sis, which aims to disclose the inextricabilityof terms which otherwise appear to be op-posed. It can perhaps be seen most clearly

in the logic of the pharmakon, in which cureand poison are mutually entailed, but it ap-

plies more generally and in some ways consti-tutes a disavowal of analytic closure (Derrida1998, p. 34). The undecidability of analysis

entailed by this logic does not disable the ca-pacity to decide, practically, between alterna-

tives in everyday life, although Derrida is of-ten accused of as much. Rather, it describesthe encumbrance of decision, the provisional-

ity, and hence the ethical burden of decision,

which must be made in the absence of absoludeterminations.

Batesons concept of the double bind is snificantly different. It describes a pathologi

sequenceof circumstances, usually within amilial setting, whereby a maternal figure

other family member) gives contactory msages to a child, but also fails to give the mecommunicative signals that would allow t

child to distinguish and prioritize demanAs a result, the child does not develop an abity to differentiate between orders of meani

and may develop schizophrenia. In Bateso(2000d [1956]) earliest theorization of this d

velopment, he emphasizes the schizophrenconfusion of metaphoric and literal meaing, and the forms of defensive or pa

noid behavior that result from such confusi(pp. 20911). In his later consideration of t

phenomenon, he acknowledges that therean experiential component in the determintion or etiology of schizophrenic sympto

and related behavoral patterns, such as hmor, art, poetry, etc. (2000b [1969], p. 27

The schizophrenic is thus one who cannredeem or transform the collapse of distintions between the literal and the metaphor

In any case, the important point for a cons

eration of the difference between Bateson aDerrida is that for Bateson the indeterminaof the boundary between metaphoricity aliteralism is exceptional, whereas, for Derri

it is intrinsic to all analytic gestures and ideed to all decision-making in the politi

sphere.As for schismogenesis, in Batesons (200

[1935]) conception, it refers to the intern

differentiation of societies into groupssometimes becoming extreme enough

fracture the societieswhich may be eithsymmetrical, as when rivalry producesmutually inciting set of oppositions betwe

subsets of the culture, or complementary,when hierarchies marked by domination a

submission develop between groups (p. 6The groups nonetheless remain relativinternally homogeneous. This is a very lo

way from Derridas concept ofdifferance.

372 Morris


19/37

But Sahlins (1983, p. 4) persists: If cul-

ture must be conceived as always and onlychanging . . . then there can be no such thingas identity, or even sanity, let alone continu-

ity. Differance is not change, of course. Itis divisibility and deferral. And we would do

well to remember that it was Sahlins whodemanded of anthropology that it take ac-count of the event and not merely the per-

sistent structures (1983, p. 534). Although hisconcept of the structure of the conjuncture

(Sahlins 1985) ultimately annuls the eventful-ness of the event, Sahlinss call liberated an-thropology for an entirely new kind of histori-

cism. And Derrida renews the gift.

LESSONS, NOT LEGENDSBeyond the misreadings, the dismissals, and

the disavowals, there is nonetheless a signifi-cant and increasingly compelling body of an-

thropological literature that has taken withinitself some of the reading lessons (not onlythe writing lesson) of Derrida. One cannot

survey all this work or provide an institutionalaccountingof itsemergence,althoughone can

briefly identify some of the dominant con-cerns in these works. It is not insignificant,

however, that much of it has been produced bythose who were students of Siegel at CornellUniversity and who studied at Cornell during

the period when deconstructionism was beingmore widely discussed in humanities circles.Siegel remains the most thoroughly and rig-

orously Derridean anthropologist in the fieldtoday, as is discussed below. Others have, of

course, embraced some of the arguments andimplications of Derridas readings of anthro-pological texts, and these have been appro-

priated and incorporated in a variety of ways.We can note a certain thematic convergence

in these works, however, and this exceeds thequestion of areal focus. All of them share acommitment to reading and rereading local

discourse to find the sources of internal differ-ence and indeed critical possibility. Thus, for

example, Rafael (2005) and Rutherford (2002)emphasize the idea and the work of the for-

eign, as an object of both desire and disavowal,which is simultaneously internal and external

to local identity in various parts of Indonesiaand the Philippines.

Ivy (1995) writes of the complex retrojec-tion of a past on which basis the present unity

of Japan could be fantasized, while examininghow Japanese ethnology and culturalismworked by allying the past with an orality that

it had overcome. Similarly, Willford (2006)considers the emergence of an ethnic fetishin Malaysia and the uncanny dynamic that

casts the past as something simultaneouslysurmounted and familiar. Spyers (2008)

reading of the parergonal structure, withinwhich the cassowary was excluded from rep-resentation but ultimately rendered available

for photographic inscription as Aru cameinto modernity, relies on Derridas Truthin Painting (1987b [1978]). And Sanchezs(2001) account of spirit possession and culticpolitics in Venezuela treats them as forms of

inscription in Derridas sense and notes thatthe value of substitution is elevated to fetish

status in times of political crisis. His senseof the phantomaticity of law in this contextowes much to Derrida and echoes Aretxagas

(2005b) readings of Basque and northern

Irish insurgencies vis-a-vis a state experiencedmainly in the form of police violence, a statethat produces its phantomatic others even asit produces itself by bringing violence to bear

on them (Aretxaga 2003).In studies of the archive (e.g., Bracken

1997, Kelly & Morton 2004), and in the anal-yses of religion and media, Derridas inter-ventions are increasingly seen to offer anthro-

pologists a new means of comprehending theproduction of normativity (and not merely

power, even in its dispersed Foucaultiansense). This is partly because it questions acertain post-Weberian tendency in the dis-

cipline to posit religion and media in op-position to each other and to invoke the

mass media, in the sense of mechanical re-production, as a causal factor in the phe-nomenon designated as religious revival.

Derridas argument, that technicity is internal



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to the idea of religion, and that mass me-

diation can be seen only as a developmentwithin a history of mediation more generally,has helped prompt a revision in the ways that

religion is problematized by anthropologists.Thus, for example, Morris (2000) reads the re-

sponse of Thai spirit mediums to new formsof technologized mediation not as that whichrevives a ruptured tradition, but as that which

redoubles a tendency already within that formof mediation which is possession, while also

generating the fantasy and felt loss of a pre-mediatic tradition (see also Mazzarella 2004,p. 357). Much has yet to be done, beyond re-

peating it, with Derridas observation (2002a,2005) that religion, conceived from within

the discourses of the European philosophy, is

already a latinization and that globalizationis also a globalatinization. But this project

is now being undertaken, beginning with areflection on the false opposition between

secularity and the theological (Asad 2003,Csordas 2004, Mahmood 2005).

If these references give the impression of

a veritable school of thought within an-thropology, the impression is exaggerated.

Lamonts vision of the dominant philosophernotwithstanding, few anthropologists not al-

ready predisposed to philosophical rumina-tion have been affected by Derridas insights.To understand more fully what might begained from reading Derrida, and hence what

his legacy could be, one can consider both thework done under his influence and that which

would have been very different had it taken onboard the deconstructionist critique. I beginwith the latter, by considering the current de-

bateaboutthePiraha.Thisdebatehasenteredthe mainstream of popular intellectual culture

in the United States, and I review it here be-cause it reproduces in so many ways the prob-lems that Derrida discerned in Levi-Strausss

account of the Nambikwara, but also becauseit indulges and even promotes the ethnocen-

tric and primitivist sentiments of a publicthat continues to desire the authentic otheras the means to legitimate its own claims to

superiority.

THE WRITING LESSON, ONCEMORE

In April 2007, the New Yorkermagazine pulished a lengthy article on Everetts (200

controversial claims about the Piraha, a comunity in the Amazon who he has describ

as having a language constrained by the striction of communication to the immediate ex

rience of the interlocutors (p. 622, emphasis

original). By this he means that [g]rammand other ways of living are restricted to co

crete, immediate experience(where an expeence is immediate in Piraha if it has been seor recounted as seen by a person alive at t

time of telling), and immediacy of experienis reflected in immediacy of information

encodingone event per utterance (p. 62

Everett defines an utterance as a sentenHe then provides a series of transliteratio

diagrams, and translations to argue that tPiraha lack numbers, numerals, or a conce

of counting; terms for quantification or coland embedding. He asserts that they hathe simplest pronoun inventory known a

even that the entire pronominal inventomay have been borrowed. The language h

no perfect tense and no individual or colletive memory of more than two generatio

past. Moreover, the Piraha people are sato lack fiction, creation myths, and the cpacity to drawexcept crude stick figu

representing the spirit world. They not ondo not but they cannot write, he says (200p. 626).

In a lengthy footnote to his Current A

thropology article (incorrectly referencedin t

New Yorkeras Cultural Anthropology), Everclaims that he does not consider the Pirato be primitive, and moreover, that they ha

both a complex prosodic system and elabrate forms of joking and mendacity (Ever

2005, p. 621). Thesame ethnocentrism, whieverywhere and always, ha[s] controlled tconcept of writing (Derrida 1976, p. 3), is

be found here controlling the concept of laguage per se. The first sign of this ethnoce

trism is to be found in Everetts descripti

374 Morris


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of Piraha in terms of gaps or absences

of the grammatical forms present in otherlanguages (Surrales 2005, p. 639; Tomasello2005, p. 640). This lack is not, however, seen

to be a function of loss or trauma. In Everettsaccount, this community of people has

remained unchanged since the time of theirfirst recording by European colonialists in1784, an improbable timelessnessthat he links

to their resolute monolingualism. In the faceof this claim, we are surprised to discover,

from Everetts own account, that some ofthe Piraha speak Portuguese when negotiat-ing with Brazilian traders (2005, p. 626; also

Surrales 2005, p. 639) and that Their pro-nouns were borrowed from a Tupi-Guarani

language, either Lingua Geral or Kawahiv

(Everett 2005, p. 628). Both of these factsindicate contact with others, and linguis-

tic transformation, including bilingualism,born of such contact. Nonetheless, by the

time Everetts story has been printed in theNew Yorker, the myth of a willful and ex-clusive authenticity has been secured: Un-

like other hunter-gatherer tribes of the Ama-zon, the Piraha have resisted efforts by

missionaries and government agencies toteach them farming, and even that they

have ignored lessons in preserving meatsby salting or smoking (Colapinto 2007,p. 122).

It is not insignificant in this context that

Everett describes Piraha communicativeprac-tice as taking place as much through singing

and whistling as through speaking [a form ofcommunication among the Guarani alreadyremarked by Father Pedro Lozano (1768)

in the mid-eighteenth century]althoughhe himself does not analyze the song-forms

of speech. This is an important observa-tion because it is related to one made byPierre Clastres, in his account of the Guayaki

Indians, a group he describes as having beenGuaranized in the process of being pushed

out of their original territories of agriculturalproduction and into the forest (1998 [1972],p.114).ThePirahaappeartohavesharedwith

other groups in the area the experience of be-

ing Guaranized, to use Clastress term, andthis is not surprising, given the degree of co-

erced mobility at the slave frontier. Euclidesda Cunha (1992), an early Brazilian national-

ist, believed that the Mura (who are not ex-tinct, contrary to the New Yorkers claim) had

been forced into the Brazilian Amazon fromBolivia. Manuela Caneira da Cunha (1992)also speculates that the lowlander Mura and

Piraha may have originally been dislocatedfrom a more mountainous region, althoughshe suggests that they have resided in the

area for much longer (p. 980). In any case,the Mura, at least, were much remarked by

the Portuguese colonialists for their emphaticmilitarism, their command of the riverinetrade, and then, their apparently sudden ca-

pitulation to colonial authority. Hecht (un-published observations, 2007) attributes this

latter fact to the combined effects of disease,warfare, enslavement, and, subsequently, theMuras loss of their missionary interlocutors

(from whom they had sought protection andassistance in conflicts with other local tribes).

The latter, Hecht relates (personal communi-cation, 2007), were forced to withdraw fromthe area when the ardently secular Marquis

of Pombal exiled all religious orders (also

Hemming 1987, pp. 2123, 21718).Just how the ancestors of todays Piraha

experienced these violent transformationsis unclear, and Everett claims that they do

not narrate them. But it is not unreason-able to imagine that such depredations, as

were endured by the Mura and the Piraha,would encourage some suspicion of thePortuguese-speaking foreigners in the area,

and perhaps too the secreting of knowledge.However, Everett attributes antipathy to

the Portuguese to a cultural disavowal ofthe knowledge embedded in Portuguese,which is, he says, incommensurate with

Piraha . . . and culturally incompatible be-cause, like all Western languages, it violates

the immediacy-of-experience constraint(2005, p. 634). This domination by the valueof immediacy is also adduced to explain the

Pirahas musical language (2005, p. 626).



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Clastres notes that the whistling language

of the Guayakai was spoken in contexts de-manding secrecy (including ones in which hisoverhearing was not wanted) and hypothe-

sizes that, as a form, this whistled-whisperingdeveloped within ordinarily spoken language

as a means to evade enemies, including notonly the spirits of the dead but also other,ho

legacies of derrida

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