Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology 9780822382089

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CULTURE.

POWER.

PLACE

C U L T U R E POW E R P LAC E EXPLORATIONS IN CRITICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

EDITED BY AKHIL GUPTA AND JAMES FERGUSON

DUK£ U .... IV£RSITy PR£SS

DURHAM AND L.ONDON 1997

© 1997 Duke University Press

All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 00 Typeset in Baskerville by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

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Culture, Power, Place: Ethnography at the End of an Era Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson I

PART I: SPACE, CULTURE, IDENTITY Beyond "Culture": Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson 33 National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees Liisa H. Malkki 52 Seeing Bifocally: Media, Place, Culture John Durham Peters 75 State, Territory, and National Identity Formation In the "TWo Berllns, 1945-1995 John Borneman 93 Finding One's Own Place: Asian Landscapes Re-vlsloned In Rural California Karen Leonard I I 8 The Country and the City on the Copperbelt JamesFerguson I37

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CONT£NTS

Rethinking Modernity: Space and Factory Discipline in China Lisa Rojel 155 The Song of the Nonaligned World : Transnational Identities and the Relnscription of Space in Late Capitalism Akhil Gupta 179

PART II: CULTURE. POWER. RESISTANCE Exile to Compatriot: Transformations in the Social Identity of Palestinian Refugees In the West Bank George E. Bisharat 203 Third-Worlding at Home 234

Kristin Koptiuch

The Demonic Place of the "Not There": Trademark Rumors in the Postindustrial Imaginary Rosemary J Coombe 249 Bombs, Bikinis, and the Popes of Rock 'n' Roll: Reflections on Resistance, the Play of Subordinations, and Liberalism in Andalusia and Academia, 1983-1995 Richard Maddox 277 The Remaking of an Andalusian Pilgrimage Tradition: Debates Regarding Visual (Re)presentatlon and the Meanings of "Locality" in a Global Era Mary M. Crain 291 Works Cited Index

313

347

Contributors

359

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This collection of essays originally grew out of three organized sessions presented some years ago at meetings of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) . One, organized by Akhil Gupta and Lisa Rofel, dealt with "The Culture and Politics of Space"; another, organized by Liisa Malkki and James Ferguson, concerned "Themes of Place and Locality in the Collective Identity of Mobile and Displaced Populations"; while a third, organized by Roger Rouse, was titled "Transformers: The Cultural Politics of Bricolage." Early versions of all essays in this collection were originally presented in these sessions, with the exception of Gupta's "The Song of the Nonaligned World" and Gupta and Ferguson's "Culture, Power, Place: Ethnography at the End of an Era," which were written later. The papers by Malkki, Borneman, Ferguson, Rofel, Gupta, and Gupta and Ferguson ("Beyond 'Culture' ") all appeared in a special 1992 issue of Cultural Anthropology (7 [1]) devoted to the theme of space and place in anthropology. They are reprinted here (in substantially revised form) with the kind permission of the AAA. We also thank Michael Watts for contributing a thoughtful commentary to the Cultural Anthropology volume, which we have found stimulating in the continuing development of our own thinking about space and place. It was Arjun Appadurai who first suggested that the themes we had originally developed as AAA sessions might be brought together and who first put us in touch with one another. For that, he has our thanks and appreciation. Akhil Gupta would also like to thank Lisa Rofel for co-organizing the original panel, and Purnima Mankekar, whose critical reading and commentary throughout has contributed much to the project. James Ferguson would like to acknowledge the influence of Liisa Malkki's thinking in shaping his ideas about space, place, and identity. Her acute comments and imaginative discussion contributed greatly to this project. He also thanks Roger Rouse for a long, thoughtful conversation about the themes integrating the volume. We are both grateful to John Peters for a helpful critical reading of both the

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ACKNOWL£DGH£NTS

introductory essay and "Beyond 'Culture' " at a late stage. We thank Ken Wissoker at Duke University Press for his unflagging support and confidence in the project, through what has been a sometimes difficult process. Finally, we are grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for Duke University Press for a host of unusually valuable and constructive suggestions that have helped to make this a better book.

Culture. Power. Place: Ethnography at the End of an Era

AKHIL

GUPTA AND

JAMES

FERGUSON

AFTER "PEOPL..ES AND CUL..TURES"

. It has become usual to assert that the theoretical thread linking twentieth-century American cultural anthropology through its various moods and manifestations has been the concept of culture. In a sense, this is true. Certainly, the Boasian success in establishing the autonomy of the cultural from biological-cum-racial determination set the stage for the most important theoretical developments to follow. But perhaps just as central as the concept of "culture" has been what we might call the concept of "cultures": the idea that a world of human differences is to be conceptualized as a diversity of separate societies, each with its own culture. It was this key conceptual move that made it possible, in the early years of the century, to begin speaking not only of culture but also of "a culture" - a separate, individuated cultural entity, typically associated with "a people," "a tribe," "a nation," and so forth (Stocking 1982:202-3).1 It was this entity ("a culture") that provided the theoretical basis for cross-cultural comparison, as well as the normal frame for ethnographic description (hence accounts of "Hopi culture," fieldwork "among the Ndembu," and so on). This often implicit conceptualization of the world as a mosaic of separate cultures is what made it possible to bound the ethnographic object and to seek generalization from a multiplicity of separate cases. 2 The later development of the idea of "a culture" as forming a system of meaning only reinforced this vision of the world. 3 A culture, whether pictured as a semiotic system to be deciphered (Marshall Sahlins) or as a text to be read (Clifford Geertz), required description

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