Culture Still Matters: Notes from the Field [1 ed.] 9789004381339, 9789004375574

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Culture Still Matters: Notes from the Field

Social, Economic and Political Studies of the Middle East and Asia Founding Editor C.A.O. Van Nieuwenhuijze Editor Dale F. Eickelman Advisory Board Fariba Adelkhah (SciencesPo/​ceri, Paris) Roger Owen (Harvard University) Armando Salvatore (McGill University)

VOLUME 121

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/​seps

Culture Still Matters: Notes from the Field By

Daniel Martin Varisco

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: Dan Varisco, valley of al-​Ahjur, Yemen Arab Republic, 1978 (photo taken by Najwa Adra). The Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data is available online at http://​catalog.loc.gov LC record available at http://​lccn.loc.gov/2018959638​

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill.” See and download: brill.com/​brill-​typeface. ISSN 1385-​3 376 ISBN 978-​9 0-​0 4-37557-​4 (hardback) ISBN 978-​9 0-​0 4-38133-​9 (e-​book) Copyright 2019 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-​free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Anthropologists are like lenses placed over the world’s eyes to improve human perceptions of others and ourselves. Anthropologists are part of the ongoing project of enlightenment, articulating a vision of human life and values that constitutes the beginnings of a world culture. Michael Blim

As long as there are human beings living on the planet, we will, in principle at least, have an object of study. And after that, who cares? John Comaroff

∵

Contents Acknowledgements ix Foreword xi Bryan S. Turner Foreword xvi Anouar Majid Prologue: A Fable xxi Introduction 1 1 Looking for and at Culture 3 2 In an Anthropological Mode 6 3 Anthropology Up against the Wall 12 4 Being in the Field 18 5 Writing for Cultural Concepts 22 1

Culture is Not a Text 25 1 Text as Pretext Out of Context 28 2 Texting Out of Context 39 3 Culture beyond Texts 47 4 So What is Culture? 53

2 On Not Reading against Culture 58 1 Culture vs Discourse 71 2 Writing against Culture 82 3

On to the Logic of Being There 92 1 Why Being There Matters 97 2 Reflecting after Yemen 102 3 Flies in the Ointment 107 4 Sick and Tired 111 5 A Matter of Fact 113 6 Picturing Fieldwork 116 7 Final Refractions 122

viii Contents 4 Beyond the End of Anthropology 128 1 Modern or Postmodern? 135 2 Back to the Tool Box 143 Bibliography 149 Index 172

Acknowledgements Earlier versions of three chapters in this book were originally presented as papers and two have been expanded from earlier published versions. The Introduction was delivered at the Culture, Power, Boundaries seminar at the Columbia University Faculty Club in 2013. A version of Chapter One was presented in 2009 at the Department of Anthropology, the University of Toronto. Earlier examples of Chapter Two were delivered at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in 2001 and later at a seminar at the Department of Anthropology, soas, London University, in October, 2002. This was eventually published in Culture, Theory and Critique 45(2):93–​112, 2004. Chapter three was presented at the 1998 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association meeting and published in an earlier form in Anthropology of the Middle East 1(2):35–​62, 2006. Chapter Four was written specifically for this book, although certainly not as an end in itself. Over the course of preparing the original papers and subsequent rewriting, I am grateful to input from a variety of individuals, including Magnus Bernhardsson, Steven Caton, Matthew Cook, Sayed El Aswad, Marcelo Fiorini, Andrew Foster, Andre Gingrich, Sid Greenfield, Ivan Kalmar, the late Chris Leonard, Herb Lewis, Anouar Majid, Christopher Matthews, Larry Michalak, Doug Raybeck, Gerald Sider, Richard Tapper, Bryan Turner and Shelagh Weir. As in the past and for certain in the future, I reserve special appreciation for the critical reflections from my wife and fellow anthropological sojourner, Najwa Adra. I am grateful to the two scholars who have each written a preface to this work. As an anthropologist, I  am pleased to have the views of the eminent sociologist, Bryan Turner, and the well-​traveled literary scholar, Anouar Majid. Both are friends as well as colleagues, sharing a desire to cut through the fog of academic hand-​wringing and build on the valuable lessons of past research. Academic labels can readily become the proverbial albatross of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, as though our field of training limits the range of our research. It is not my desire to do “a hellish thing” in my critique of those who disparage anthropological theories about culture and ethnographic fieldwork, but I do share my colleague’s concern with advancing knowledge rather than Whiggishly (in the Butterfield sense) denigrating our academic ancestors. Like many of my fellow anthropologists, I know full well that my field experience was only possible because of the extraordinary hospitality of the people of al-​Ahjur in the central highlands of North Yemen, where I was privileged to spend over a year in 1978–​79. The debt I owe to them, especially the family that took us in, can never be repaid by the writing of an ethnographic tome.

x Acknowledgements In the field I not only discovered a world that no book I had read could have adequately described; I learned things about myself that cannot be captured in writing. As an anthropologist I have no doubt that culture still matters, but the culture that matters most to me even in writing this book is the one that welcomed me as a stranger almost four decades ago.

Foreword Bodies of Culture: In Response to Daniel Varisco Professor Varisco has given us a sparkling account of the importance of fieldwork in particular and anthropology in general against a back-​cloth of both professional and public concern about the merits of anthropology. Is it a science? Does it have any relevance in the modern world? His answers are presented in the form of an autobiographical reflection on his own fieldwork in the Yemen in the 1970s. In my response, I shall also adopt a mode of reflection that also has strong autobiographical overtones. Daniel Varisco and I share similar concerns about the discipline of anthropology, the study of cultures, and appropriate methodologies and therefore it is a pleasure to engage with his work. For obvious reasons, I am more concerned with the future of sociology than with the possible demise of anthropology. They do however confront rather similar issues. In a recent article I ask the question ‘Sociology in the usa and beyond –​A half-​century decline?’i While our careers have been very different –​I have never been to the Yemen and have no understanding of archaeology –​in some respects we have moved along parallel tracks. We have both engaged critically with the legacy of Edward Said and Cultural Studies; we share a common interest in the study of Muslim communities –​albeit at different ends of the world; and we are both disturbed by the idea that reading texts can ever be a substitute for ‘being there.’ But to declare my position directly, it is only worth defending anthropology or sociology if these disciplines can ultimately engage with the real issues that face modern societies in terms of practical economics or political issues. I have with colleagues devoted the last seventeen years or so in editing the journal Citizenship Studies because I am concerned with the slow erosion of social rights and the contraction of the public domain. Analysing discourses about citizenship in news reports will never be enough to bring about progressive social change. In the last analysis, the social sciences are valuable insofar as they give us an insight into the issues that make our lives difficult and troublesome. I do not expect those insights to offer easy solutions, but they have to have some relevance. It does not follow that I have no interest in social theory or in the history of our disciplines. I am also the founding editor, with John O’Neill of the Journal of Classical Sociology. One of my academic heroes is Albert O.Hirschman who was a critic of mainstream quantitative (Chicago) economics, read widely i Turner, 2012.

xii Foreword in classical political economy and engaged in practical reforms in Latin America. Hirschman –​a friend and colleague of Clifford Geertz –​spent five years in Columbia acquiring ‘experience-​near knowledge’.ii But to begin at the beginning, in the 1960s and 1970s European sociology was steeped in Marxist thought and was primarily influenced by a stream of French sociologists such as Louis Althusser, Nicos Poulantzas, Jean-​Claude Passeron and others. Sociological interest in culture was to some extent a reaction against the reductionism of Marxist political economy, which treated culture (along with religion, art and intellectual life) as merely reflections of a more fundamental reality, namely the economy and its political effects. Journals such as Theory, Culture & Society emerged to offer alternative ways of dealing with social theory and proposed that sociology should take culture seriously. However cultural sociology was eventually over-​run by Cultural Studies whose foundations were more closely linked to comparative literature, continental philosophy, film studies, and art history. “For a period, Centers for Cultural Studies sprang up to create interdisciplinary work between the humanities and social sciences, until the field was eventually reimperialized by English departments,” notes Michael Fischer, “losing not only its ethnographic and social science edge, but its fledgling efforts to work in languages other than English, ironically the language of most writing about postcolonialism…”iii The attraction of Edward Said’s Orientalism was that it made literary criticism central to the anthropology and sociology of the post-​colonial world and gave sociologists a tool for attacking traditional scholarship. This drift away from the sociology of culture was compounded by the rise in quick succession of a series of fashionable paradigms perhaps most notably by post-​modernism, and by the growing influence of French philosophy: Jean-​Francois Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze. At the time, these developments were exciting and offered a counter-​point to the positivism and empiricism of American sociology and political science. In the United Kingdom, the connections between British anthropology and colonialism were relatively obvious and provided an easy target for Young Turks who wanted to perfect their arsenal against establishment targets such as the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. The classical heritage of sociology –​Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Simmel –​was subsequently dismissed as a defence of patriarchal authoritarian regimes. In epistemology, sociologists borrowed from Richard Rorty to embrace perspective as the basis of all knowledge, social constructionism more or less took over, and hence ii Adelman, 2013. iii Fischer (2007:28–​29).

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fieldwork was a distraction from the real work of deconstructing ‘discourses.’ If conventional sociology was under attack from Cultural Studies, it found a more deadly foe in Mrs Thatcher who famously declared that ‘there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.’ In a few sentences, the Prime Minister had dismissed the topic of sociological research as a mere chimera. To some extent, social constructionists would have agreed with her. As a young scholar I was also caught up in these intellectual movements and published on Orientalism and other fashionable topics such as post-​ modernism and globalization. There was for me a turning point, when, as the external examiner of a Cultural Studies Masters programme, I read a 40,000 word thesis on the meaning of the label on Smirnoff vodka bottles. Were these students getting, in any meaningful sense, an education, and how could I justify my role in assessing their work? It was hard to justify funding research that had no conceivable relevance to the serious political problems facing Britain in the late twentieth century. At the time there was criticism of anthropology in parliamentary debates in the House of Commons over the value of ‘blue-​ lagoon amthropology.’ Another turning point was the origins of the sociology of the body. From my sociology of religion and later from teaching medical sociology, I had concluded that sociology had a strangely disembodied understanding of ‘the social actor’ and yet in reading for example Erving Goffman it was obvious that some notion of the body was always implicit in sociological research. I wanted to make it explicit. In 1984 I published The Body and Society and I was one of the founders of the journal Body & Society that came out in 1995. I always thought that the importance of the body was of obvious interest to anthropologists –​ how could you study rituals without bodies? Mary Douglas had famously developed the idea of pollution, which involved ideas about entry and exit from the body. In trying to understand whether the body in Douglas’s work was a phenomenological or symbolic body, I interviewed her at Lancaster University in northern England and concluded the discussion in a bar where she gave an account of the significance of drink. I concluded that she was primarily –​ indeed only –​interested in the body as a system of meanings. Because in my medical sociology I had supervised a number of doctoral theses on cancer patients, the notion that the body was only a symbolic system did not do justice to the suffering of the patients who were being interviewed by my students. Of course as sociologists and anthropologists, we must recognise that the body can be read as a text. Think only of the symbolic significance of left-​handedness, but there is more to it than symbols. For another example, we might think of ageing. No one would deny that age has symbolic

xiv Foreword significance, but there are also real consequences to ageing that have on the one hand outcomes in terms of social rights and on the other physical decline. The basic mistake in the idea of the social construction of phenomena is that social constructions are real in their consequences. From this type of research, I became interested in the idea of human vulnerability and scarcity. ‘Vulnerability’ and ‘scarcity’ have been seen to be socially constructed and scarcity in particular is interpreted as a cultural construction of neo-​liberalism. However let us take an example from Daniel Varisco’s work on property rights and water systems in the Yemen. Throughout much of the Middle East and Africa, water is scarce not as a discourse but as a resource. We can grant that its scarcity is in part produced by corrupt and ineffective governments, but it is (to use a word much disliked by postmodernists) essentially scarce. One cannot understand the scarcity of water, the vulnerability of bodies, or the political effects of cultural systems without empirical research. Let us take a personal example from Daniel Varsico’s work in the Yemen. To be sure, one can go a long way in looking at vulnerability as a discourse. It has tell-​tale origins in the Latin vulnus or wound. Now open infested wounds attract flies and the results are disgusting, but the fact of flies –​their quiddity -​in Yemen and elsewhere cannot be grasped by simply noting their discursive significance. Learning to swat flies effectively is a practice that becomes part of the habitus of the inhabitants. I introduce ‘practice’ here to say that the sociology of ballet for example requires us to pay attention to bodily practices and that a ballet performance is more than a textual occurrence. The description of a ballet performance in terms of Eshkol-​Wachman Movement notation is not the whole story. Dance is always a system of practices that have symbolic significance, but to say that is to by-​pass its phenomenological reality. So culture, what ever else it might be, is an ensemble of practical activities carried along in embodied human forms. Bodies matter, because they are more than rhetoric. These examples from sociology over the last half century are intended to add further fuel to Daniel Varisco’s defence of the ethnographic method as a defining practice of anthropology. We both fear that the enthusiasm for reading texts will eventually expunge the notion that one can collect new and important information about societies by living in them, observing events and recording them. These methods are not and never will be perfect, but they generate information and insights that can in principle be verified by others. We both believe that observation in the interests of comparative sociology and anthropology is both possible and important. Let us take another example. In recent work there has been much brilliant scholarly work showing that ‘religion’ is a western invention. ‘Religion’ in Japan was the consequence of American trade intervention and the demand for freedom of ‘religion’ (Josephson,

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2012). In particular ‘Hinduism’ is an invention of British census-​taking in colonial India with its need to classify social groups. It does not follow that one cannot undertake empirical research on ‘religion’ in modern day Japan such as studying Buddhist funeral practices or worship at Shinto shrines. In describing the results, one might cautiously need to use quotation marks around words that have their origins in rather specific western, indeed Protestant traditions. In this area of research, Max Weber’s The Religion of China is often dismissed as Orientalism. One wonders whether his critics have read Weber. For example Chinese language has no special word for “religion”. There was first: “doctrine” –​of a school of literati; second “rites” –​without distinguishing whether they were religious or conventional in nature. The official Chinese name for Confucianism was “doctrine of the literati” ju chiao.iv Weber did not however focus on an exposition of texts. He wanted rather to understand the forces that have produced the modern world. In the Coda of Reading Orientalism Daniel Varisco asked a confessional question –​‘Representing the East may have been Said’s career, but why must it continue to occupy the careers of so many others, including, mea culpa, a brief swathe of my own?’ Orientalism certainly had an impact on how I viewed my own work and made me search for and question my own presuppositions. In response to my self-​doubt about the Orientalism in my Weber and Islam, I was to spend over four years in Singapore trying to come to terms with at least one Asian society. The result however was not to spend my time analysing Singaporean ‘discourses’ which I could have done on-​line, but to try to understand the nature of Singaporean social reality and how Muslims were part of that.v It would be an academic tragedy if one unintended consequence of the deconstructive turn in the legacy of Edward Said as professor comparative literature was that anthropologists gave up their ethnographic methodology and sociologists gave up on the possibility of comparative research. If that were the outcome, young anthropologists would never need to venture out to Yemen or anywhere else –​it could all be found on-​line. Bryan S. Turner

iv Weber, 1951:144. v Kamaludeen, Pereira and Turner, 2010.

Foreword Sorts of Culture It’s hard to know how to start introducing Professor Dan Varisco’s book; it is appearing at the juncture of many and diverse changes, all leading us to join the madman in the author’s fable and wonder whether we have, in fact, lost all our senses while being totally entranced by the spectacle of scholars issuing statements about other people and nations. The book, obviously, deals with the contested concept of culture, as it migrated from the careful (but far from perfect) hands of Western anthropologists to the fluid and slippery precincts of English departments and Cultural Studies programs. The academic tug-​o-​ war over the term and what it means for the future of various academic fields is interesting and is addressed magisterially in this book, but the book also works on a different register. As I read Culture Still Matters, I was seized by a feeling of nostalgia, not only for the world that the author knew and no longer exists now, but also –​and this came as a surprise as it gradually dawned over me –​for the academic disputes that defined a whole generation of scholars and research in the last decades of the 20th century. We may have been wrong on any front the reader chooses to hang on (philosophical, epistemological, ideological, whatever), but, looking back, it seems that we, at least, cared. As the author points out emphatically in the cases of culture and methodology, ideas did matter. I read Varisco’s book as I moved across continents and nations for work and kept up with twitter feeds over what’s happening in the world. Think of the young author, when he was a doctoral student working on his dissertation, arriving, with his wife, in 1978, to the highlands of Yemen to study the local farmers’ agricultural system, struggling to learn their local dialect of Arabic, waging an endless war on pesky flies that blanketed his humble dwellings, suffering from loneliness, and being rescued from a potentially deadly high fever at the very last minute –​all for the sake of a dissertation. There were no cell phones, no Internet, and no way to stay connected with the world through social media. This was the real meaning of travel –​it’s work, travail in French. This is what it entailed to know different people and try to understand them. Ethnographers call it “being there” because the journey is done for a predetermined purpose  –​doing research and publishing its findings  –​but the truth is that it is a journey into the unknown, at best one of discovery with lessons and repercussions that transcend the immediate milieu and the actors involved.

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Varisco himself reminds us that such journeys have been undertaken since the remotest times of antiquity, many leaving accounts that helped us know (and appreciate) that someone else besides us was also inhabiting this earth of ours. That bias informed such accounts is inevitable (no human interaction is completely free of bias), but, regardless of what a few privileged academics say, the long-​term effect of travel narratives is to humanize the so-​called Other and equalize the condition of humans across the globe. Edward Tylor’s Primitive Culture, published in 1871, at a time when Charles Darwin was reminding his readers of their animal pedigree, was not out to dominate or annihilate the natives. Unlike his fellow Victorian Matthew Arnold, his concept of culture was capacious and included anything human beings do to make sense of their lives The Quaker pacifist was simply reminding us of our common humanity, not singling out writers and artists as champions of cultural activity. To be sure, not all knowledge is pursued for benevolent purposes. A good historian or cultural critic must proceed from the assumption that most encounters are violent and include domination and defeat; but in the hands of scholars like Edward Said, this inevitable and unfortunate aspect of history turns into a wholesale condemnation of the West and its Orientalists, turning Western scholars into accomplices for their governments’ imperial or colonial policies. We know by now that the West has an insatiable appetite for wallowing in this faux guilt, as if Westerners, by merely proclaiming their culpability, could ever renounce all their privileges –​beginning with their cushy academic jobs –​and surrender to the indigenous peoples of the world whose lands their ancestors occupied and exploited. Relying on the Foucauldian concept of discourse (a slightly mistranslated term, in my opinion, since a common word in the French context gets inflated in English translation and assumes larger meanings), progressive scholars like Said and Lila Abu-​Lughod reduced records of fieldwork experiences to unreliable narratives that continually reaffirm the power of the West and its institutions. The human relations that develop in fieldwork and the accounts that are published afterwards were all seen as the work of the devil. To the dismay of Varisco, confused anthropologists joined the literary critics and other cultural studies types to strengthen the impression that the painstaking efforts of fieldworkers lead to mere self-​ serving texts. Once again, they make such statements sound like profound revelations unearthing the bad faith of researchers and scholars. Yet these Europhobes are only stating the glaringly obvious. Who doesn’t engage in work that is not self-​serving? Here’s another strange case of faux guilt. Even the most self-​abnegating missionaries and mystics are engaged in personal salvation. As the clichéd business slogan would have it, it’s a win-​win situation at best. And what’s wrong with that?

xviii Foreword The other naïve assumption anti-​hegemonic scholars make is to assume that Europe or the West, unlike other civilizations that the world has known, are not supposed to conquer weaker nations and impose their ways on them. Wishful thinking is one thing, but reality is another. Darwin and Sigmund Freud reminded us of our dark, biological nature, but these scholars believe that ideas alone can turn humans into angels. Ideas do have an impact, but unless we are undone to be reborn again as a different species, we can only do so much with what we have. Why should the French and Spanish be any nobler than the Bedouin hordes who conquered and subjected my native Morocco to their ways? The ways of nature may be tempered or tweaked by our knowledge but biology  –​unless a cyborgian or robotic order intervenes decisively–​will always triumph over consciousness. This is the hand we have been dealt; we can only do so much to stay it. The high moral ground literary and postcolonial critics claimed in recent decades is an unfair distortion of the heroic work many anthropologists have done since the groundbreaking work of Tylor. Sifting through the daily practices of foreign people in remote places, these anthropologists undermined the edifice of racism and challenged the West’s self-​congratulatory beliefs about its superior humanity. Reading towering figures like Edward Said, one could get the impression that only the West (an entity, Varisco reminds us, that is unproblematically essentialized in his studies) has indulged in such fantasies of greatness. Even if one could describe European scholarship as Eurocentric, that’s not much of an indictment. Wrestling with our subjectivity may signal some kind of virtue, but stepping out of one’s cultural background (like having an out-​of-​body experience) is not humanly possible. After all, the Cartesian method is built on the centrality of the mind, which is no tabula rasa by the time philosophical queries begin to haunt it. Centuries before René Descartes, the great medieval Muslim scholar (or anti-​philosopher, as some might accurately describe him) Al Ghazali concluded that the only way to escape one’s socially determined consciousness is by receiving a revelation. There is no going back to a pre-​conscious, pre-​social stage of one’s existence. Only supernatural experiences –​if one is susceptible to believe in them-​-​can take one out of the here-​and-​now. With his almost lyrical prose, Varisco hints at the mystical dimensions of human interactions because he knows so well that no account is ever conclusive or final. Even as he makes a case for reclaiming the concept of culture, he understands that it is only a conduit to other people and traditions, a way to make sense of what we do; it is, by no means, an end in itself. The word is a signifier of experiences so complex that they can only be forever elusive. In a way, the complex case of culture is not different from that of money. We may talk

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about dollars, but what we have in mind is value, an arbitrary concept. We may contest the notion of value but we know that we need money, or some form of currency, to manage our complex social lives. The same is true of culture, or any other concept chosen to replace it. It allows us to talk about ourselves as Americans with dollars or Moroccans with dirhams, not just as nondescript human beings. To the extent that meaning is produced by language, it will remain unstable. True fieldwork, as Varisco sees it, reaffirms this truth because it is always a work in progress. It, therefore, serves as a salutary buffer against the dogmatic pronouncements of armchair specialists. If Varisco’s book merely dealt with these issues alone, it would already be a landmark contribution to the study of culture as it lays uneasily among academic fields. It brings closure to a discussion that has become –​shall we say? –​too academic by shifting attention from the subject at hand (unfamiliar nations and tribes whom we seek to know) to the views of professors vying for attention and dominance in their fields. But then, there is nothing wrong with this, since our guild-​like professions encourage –​in fact, demand –​such approaches and attitudes. One needs to be extremely daring and have a huge appetite for risk-​taking to dismiss professional requirements for advancement. Only certain artists will endure poverty and venture boldly into such realms. We theorize from ivory towers; we cannot speak against our own powers. We –​ cultural and postcolonial critics –​are subalterns of a different kind. Varisco may have said the final word on the academic debate over who owns the right to “culture,” but he has also started a new conversation about the future of scholarship in an increasingly digital world, a world of ghosts and shadows, where information trumps knowledge, and fake news replace painstaking philosophical meditations. In a world of virtually no attention span, what are we to make of the fieldworker laboring patiently to learn the ways of others? How are we to think of the “stranger,” that iconic figure of transgression and disruption, the person who upsets status quos and introduces change to communities? How are we to know each other in the age of Facebook when refugees fleeing their infernal conditions all carry their indispensable marker of existence –​a cellphone? How are we to know others in any meaningful way when travel is a mass-​marketed commodity available to anyone with a few hundred euros, and exploring cultures means snapping endless photographs of a city’s buildings and scenes? Varisco’s journey in 1978 now sounds like an event from a vanished past, just as one thinks of the travels of Ibn Battuta or Marco Polo or the discoveries of Christopher Columbus. Because of cheap and abundant transportation services, traveling has now become a banal activity that requires almost no effort. I read this book while traveling in United States, France, Spain and Morocco

xx Foreword and started writing this Foreword in New  York City and finished writing it Portland, Maine. What does it mean to have a culture these days when people with access to the Internet seem to live on the same time, erasing not only the thickness of cultural traditions, but even the old mighty firewall of time zones? We are all live on some cosmic show and the Other, if he or she exists at all, is some extraterrestrial creature in a Hollywood movie. The Bedouins of Arabia are now global investors; cave bound terrorists in Afghanistan are using high-​ tech weaponry. In such a world, what is culture? This is the other question that Professor Varisco’s book raises and which should draw our attention for the next few decades. Anouar Majid

Prologue: A Fable (with no apologies to Friedrich Nietzsche, who was, after all, only an author function) Have you not heard of the mad reflexivist who interpreted a literary text in the bright morning hours, ran to the nearest academic market place of ideas, and cried incessantly: “I seek Culture! I seek Culture!” As many of those who did believe in Culture as something useful were standing around just then, he provoked much hand wringing. Has Culture been lost? asked one. Did it lose its way due to colonialist ideology? asked another. Or is it hidden from human understanding? Is Culture something to fear? Has Culture left us for good? Gone Diasporic? Thus they ignored the truth he was attempting to tell to power. The madman jumped into the midst of their professional meeting and pierced them with his catachrestic rhetoric. “Whither is Culture?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have killed Culture –​you and I. All of us are its murderers. But how did we do this? Did we not fill up the academic journals with meaningless drivel? Did we not unchain this profession from empirical science? See how our discipline is moving way from all notion of objective research? Are we not plunging methodologically? Backward, sideward, forward, in postmodern free fall? Have all truth claims not become false? Do we not need to write reflexively, morning, noon and night? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying the culture concept? How shall we comfort ourselves, the culturally studious murderers of all metanarratives? What was holistic and skeptical of all that the world has yet owned up to has bled to death under our cutting-​edge jargon; who will dare wipe this spilled ink off us? All encompassing metanarratives must meet their fate. Is not the academic foolishness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become rhetorical cyborgs simply to appear worthy of the deed? There has never been a more damaging blow to serious scholarship; and whoever does anthropology after us –​for the sake of this deed he and she will belong to a shallower history than all the discipline has been accused of before. Here the madman fell silent. As he threw his Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography on the ground, the binding broke and the pages were scattered, but the fragments continued to dampen enthusiasm for fieldwork. “I have come too early,” he said then; “the end of anthropology is not yet come. But this academic suicide is still on its way, still wondering what could possibly replace it.” On the same day the madman forced his way into

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several workshops and there struck up his requiem aeternam culturo. Called to account for the damage done, he is said to have replied: “What after all are these academic disciplines now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of a hegemonic culture concept?”

Introduction

There is more activity interpreting interpretations than interpreting things themselves, and more books about books than about the other subjects: we do nothing but comment on one another.1 Michel de Montaigne

…

We anthropologists, when we do bother to look back, sometimes lean on canned histories about complicity with colonialism and other real and imagined disciplinary failings.2 Orin Starn

∵ I begin with a disciplinal confession: my intellectual life started out on a path to be an archaeologist, the kind of scholar who looks for material evidence that sheds light on texts or else digs into the millennia for the context of past cultural history. When I entered college in 1969 my life goal was to be a biblical archaeologist, fleshing out the curious patriarchal customs that the King James translators authorized in my childishly inquisitive mind alongside the dusty National Geographic articles on Bible history I found in my grandmother’s attic. My graduate training continued at a dedicated archaeological pace, until one day in a course on stone tool analysis I decided that bones with flesh still intact might be more interesting to the anthropologist in me than the flakes left behind in Neolithic burials. I came of age, ethnographically and psychologically, in a rural mountainous region of Yemen, living among proud highland farmers and studying the cultural ecology of their water resource use and agriculture. Having “been there” in the fieldwork sense, I have often since found myself immersed in texts, whether the “medieval” Yemeni agricultural treatises I translate with unreserved passion or influential critical theory texts, such as Edward Said’s Orientalism. Like all of

1 Montaigne (2012:232). 2 Starn (2015:1).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004381339_002

2 introduction us who serve as supposedly postmodern prisoners of academized guild talk, I am enmeshed in texts that beg to be critically assessed, including my own. In addition to a confession, I need to add a caveat before any intellectually driven battle lines are formed. Anthropology, at least in the four-​field holistic approach of my formal training, does not, has not, and should not “own” the study of “culture,” a concept that is ubiquitous inside and outside of academic circles.3 But I fully share the fear of sociologist Bryan Turner, who observes that “it appears that ‘culture’ may eventually disappear from the anthropological lexicon, leaving open the deeper question ‘Does anthropology still exist?’ ”4 To the extent that many contemporary ethnographers thinly disguise their distaste for “thick description” field research, replacing the quest for approximating “native points of view” with a literary-​derived textual praxis, such anthropology has little to offer that is different from all the other disciplines that text message each other on culture as scholarship. The ethnographic experience of “being there,” I maintain, offers a unique lens for defining and refining the cultural concepts we necessarily use, even by default. Being in some “there” is not the only lens, nor is it always in focus, but it does provide an angle for privileging the lived experience of contexts over the rhetoric inherent in texts, including those written by ethnographers. Anthropology still exists, despite the naysayers; it will not be written off unless we anthropologists fail to go beyond writhing about the writing. In recent years anthropologists have been guilty of writing almost exclusively for, and often against, themselves. Gone are the days when major publishers offered books written by anthropologists for a general audience. Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa, in constant print since 1928, is the most famous and successful foray bringing anthropology into the public consciousness, but the hoax-​hunting critique of her youthful work by Derek Freeman in the 1980s tarnished this classic study. There have been other books that have brought anthropology to a wide audience: The Mind of Primitive Man (1911) and Anthropology and Modern Life (1928) by Franz Boas, Bronislaw Malinowski’s Sex and Repression in Savage Society (1927), Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture (1934), Ashley Montagu’s Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race (1942), Clyde Kluckhohn’s Mirror for Man (1944), and Marvin Harris’s Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches: The Riddles of Culture (1974). The last anthropologist known far and wide outside his discipline was Clifford Geertz, whose essays continue to resonate far beyond his academic enclave at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. If we wonder why the general public and our fellow scholars have such a limited idea of what anthropology is up to these days, we have 3 Consider the comment of Bauman and Briggs (2003:296): “Culture is now a social fact that shapes contemporary social life. Anthropologists would be naïve to think that since they made it, they have the power to decide how –​or if –​it will be used.” 4 Turner (2008:260).

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ourselves to blame. Psychology Today started in 1967 and has long been a staple on newsstands; the British version of Anthropology Today began in 1985 but is almost unknown in America, while the American Anthropology Now only started up in 2009 and is virtually out of sight outside and inside the discipline. This is not to say that engaging texts written by contemporary anthropologists do not exist or that ethnographers are incapable by default of writing for a general audience. Several ethnographers contributed to Why America’s Top Pundits are Wrong, taking on the clash-​of-​civilization thesis of Samuel Huntington and journalist Thomas Friedman’s privileged Lexus ride through an olive grove.5 But books like this are produced by academic publishers and not generally available in a Barnes and Nobles. Beyond books for the public, one of the most important ways for anthropologist to communicate is as public intellectuals. This can be for op-​ed pages of newspapers, exemplified in the work of William Beeman, or on the internet, especially blogging.6 Among the blogs now available are several on the website of Anthropology News (http://​www.anthropology-​news.org/​). The blogosphere is not only a forum where anthropologists can make a mark, but opens up an entire new field for dissemination of research. 1

Looking for and at Culture Everyone knows what cultural anthropology is about: it’s about culture. The trouble is that no one is quite sure what culture is.7 Clifford Geertz

So pretty soon everyone will have a culture; only the anthropologists will doubt it.8 Marshall Sahlins

The four chapters here are not meant as journalism, watered down for mass market paperback consumption, nor are they gilded with inaccessible 5 Besteman and Gusterson (2005). This was followed up by a new set of critical articles in Gusterson and Besteman (2010). See also MacClancy (2002). A critical assessment of the views of culture in the work of Huntington, Fukuyama and Friedman is also provided by Hannerz (2016). 6 See Sabloff (2011:414) for a commentary on the need for anthropologists to write beyond the audience of their discipline. Several anthropologists have been blogging during the last decades, most notably Gabriele Marranci, (http://​marranci.com/​), Dienkekes’Anthropology Blog (http://​dienekes.blogspot.com), Savage Minds (Savageminds.org), my own Tabsir: Insight on Islam and the Middle East (www.tabsir.net), and many more each year. 7 Geertz (2000:11). 8 Sahlins (1999b:402).

4 introduction disciplinal jargon. If you have an idea that anthropology is not about finding Noah’s ark or the latest sighting of exotic Amazon tribes, but realize this is an academic discipline that many universities offer as a serious major, this book is for you. If you think that anthropology ceased to engage with the world with the passing of Margaret Mead and stopped being interesting to read after the last essay of Clifford Geertz, this book is for you. If you find it worthwhile to write against culture and rail against ethnographic authority, this book is for you as well, although you may hate it. For my colleagues who think that anthropology continues to play a critical role in helping to appreciate and understand the diversity of our species, this book is for us all. We anthropologists, over the course of our undisciplined history, have been the merchants of exotica and the purveyors of erotica, with Indiana Jones serving as our media mascot in the public’s eyes. But anthropologists have also been among the most vocal in speaking socially significant truths to the powers that be. I do not pretend to speak for the diverse crowd trained in the four fields of American anthropology, and certainly not for the welcome variety of colleagues practicing anthropology across the globe. I am speaking out against much of the overwrought hand wringing on the practice of ethnography and the rhetorical writing against culture in the past several decades. This is admittedly an American fad, with much borrowing of European critical icons (usually in translation) and almost no awareness of what anthropologist and sociologists write in German, Dutch, French, Italian, Spanish and other non-​English languages. I offer my personal thoughts on the American state of the discipline for anyone who understands that being an intellectual is an open project, neither an ivory towering guild nor a dead-​end den of self-​serving navel-​gazing deconstruction. In what follows I am writing against the entrenched textualized-​to-​a-​fault writing against the various culture concepts and ethnographic methods that have been evolving inside and outside anthropology for well over a century. Over two and half decades ago Adam Kuper began his anthropological accounting for the culture concept with the following tease: “American academics are waging culture wars. (Not many dead.)”9 True enough, there are not 9 Kuper (2000:1). There have been many attempts to collect the various definitions proposed by anthropologists to explain culture, often in the context of writing the history of anthropology, e.g., Borofsky et al. (2001) and Moore (2009). The most ambitious was the anthology of Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1963), originally published in 1952 and more or less updated by Kaplan and Manners (1972). For a comparison of anthropological approaches with those of European theorists, see Goody (1994) and Ulin (1988). Fischer (2009:1–​49) presents a brief overview of major currents leading to modern use of culture as an anthropological concept. For seminal articles on theorizing the culture concept, see Brumann (1999) and Schneider (1976).

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many culturally decomposed bodies of Ph.D.s littering the halls of the major anthropology programs; nor has the American Anthropological Association raised a white flag and sued for peace with academics in other culture areas. The “culture wars” have certainly not abated in the public sphere, especially among Tea Partisan politicians and right-​wing media pundits. Skirmishes also persist in academic circles, debating the merit or even the right to exist of particular culture concepts across academic fields. Nor is such warfare brand new, since battle lines drawn in the 1980s and 1990s continued the salvos of the “rationality debates” among social scientists and philosophers in the 1960s and 1970s.10 Pragmatically, the “culture” we see is by common default the “culture” we already know or at least we think we know. This point is hardly novel, as any reader of Montaigne’s essay On Cannibals knows. But critical caveats aside, there is something in human behavior worth studying and the idea of a culture concept has long been a useful heuristic tool for making better sense of who we are. The idea of culture that infused modern anthropology began over fourteen decades ago with the publication of Edward Tylor’s seminal Primitive Culture, an anecdotal survey of human society at a time when the data were sparse and heavily tainted with Western bias, both facts duly recognized by Tylor.11 Ironically his book on culture appeared in 1871, the same year as Darwin’s The Descent of Man placed humanity as different from earlier primates by degree rather than by biblical kind. Both of these books inaugurated the transition from a dogmatic and heavily Christianized biblical view of history to what we can readily recognize as the early steps of a modern scientific view. Neither Tylor nor Darwin can be read today as gospel truth, but their combined work was a critical step in defining a worldview that could be justified with empirical evidence and consensual rational speculation rather than dutifully digested as dogma. Life no longer began in a fabled Eden, woman was not the byproduct of a male rib, Noah’s flood 10

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Springs (2008:935). For a prime example of the latter, see Emmet and MacIntyre (1970). The field of Cultural Studies has been challenged of late, as noted by Bérebé (2009). For an older sociological critique of the ideological textualization inherent in Cultural Studies, see Wood (1998). Tylor’s 1871 book circulated widely outside the English-​speaking world. It was translated into German in 1873, French by 1878 and Russian and Polish before 1906. The year 1871 was also the start of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. For those who think that Tylor’s view of culture has little to offer to contemporary theory, it is useful to read the argument by Handwerker (2002) melding cultural diversity, culture theory and ethnographic method. Fischer (2007:45, note 4) notes that Tylor’s work coincided with public debates in Britain involving sufferage, “marriage reform, penal codes, and whether religion and its dogmas could still be sustained as the basis for scientific investigation.”

6 introduction did not level up to the top of Mt. Everest, languages did not break out overnight at the tower of Babel: history as we know it today was being privileged over a theology that was increasingly at odds with observable evidence. Before any attempt to define “culture,” there is a more fundamental question that must be addressed: what does it mean to be human? I am not referring to which fossil ancestor on the family tree had a large enough brain or upright behavior (in both senses) to gain entry into the genus Homo. Nor will I debate the epistemological muddle of whether or not the term “culture” should only be reserved for our current species.12 Over the several million years in our evolution there have been numerous species, but in recorded history we know of only one: the self defined wise sapiens with the big brain and intellectual acumen to reshape much of the natural surroundings of planet Earth, not without a deleterious degree of destruction.13 No matter what the dna, skin color, or any other observable anatomical feature, we are in theory one scattered breeding population of over seven billion individuals. Yet, despite the findings of modern scientific investigation, it is safe to say that most people on the earth still cling to earlier outmoded ideas about how human life started and what its ultimate purpose might or should be. In 2009, on the two-​hundredth anniversary of Darwin’s birth, opinion polls indicated that almost half of those surveyed in the United States accepted the biblical scenario of creation in one form or another rather than the scientific evidence for human evolution. This disconnect, alarming as it is from an academic point of view, makes it all the more relevant for anthropologists to speak out about how we define ourselves and what we study. 2

In an Anthropological Mode Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and the fact of his having thus risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed there, may give him hopes for a still higher destiny in the distant future. But we are not here concerned with hopes or fears, only with the truth as far as our reason allows us to discover it. I have given the evidence to the best of my ability; and we must acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy

12 13

For an intriguing comparison of chimpanzee and human cultures, see Boesch (2008). The multiple volumes by Frans de Waal are especially relevant and readable on this issue. There are numerous books available on human evolution, but a good start is Tattersall (2012). For an insightful study of the relevance of primate studies for understanding the evolution of human culture, see Read (2012).

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which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-​like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system –​with all these exalted powers –​Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.14 Charles Darwin

Finally, while culture is essentially limited to man and is the only order of phenomena so limited, it is as much a part of nature as any other phenomenal order or level, and, in spite of its highly special properties, it must always be construed as within nature.15 Alfred L. Kroeber

In the chapters that follow I view ideas about culture and verbal attacks against particular culture concepts via an anthropological mode, aware of the contributions made since the days of the founder Edward Tylor. Tylor’s vision of anthropology in 1871 was wide ranging, as heralded by his book’s subtitle: “Research into the Development of Ethnology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art, and Custom.” In his mind there could be no missing links for the study of culture; it encompassed everything humans were capable of thinking and doing rather than the hubris of a “civilized” few. The enthusiastic spirit of a pioneer aside, here was a call for looking at humanity in a new holistic way. Thanks to Darwin, “man” was no longer just a little lower than the angels, nor was humanity at the mercy of an unchained Devil. The prehistoric past could be posited as prologue to the evolution of society through stages of material progress. Yet Tylor, no less than Darwin, was a product of his time. In his later Anthropology, he believes that “some races have marched on in civilization while others have stood still or fallen back,” a clear bias that his own “civilization” was more advanced.16 Tylor had limited access to credible data about human diversity and human biology, and his assumptions about social progress were simplistic and unsustainable.17 Whether or not it was Tylor’s pedagogical 14 15 16

17

Darwin (1871(1):405). Kroeber (1952:10). Tylor (1895:74). This is clear when he concludes that the white race was “gifted with the powers of knowing and ruling which give them sway over the world” (p. 113). However, he also acknowledges that “it must be admitted that our knowledge of the manner and causes of race-​variation among mankind is still very imperfect” (p. 85). As Dozier (1955:190) observes, “It is important to keep constantly before us the fact that anthropological studies were in their infancy when Morgan and Tylor wrote. The intellectual climate of their day made imperative the classification of phenomena into uniform, orderly sequences. Most important was the fact that studies of nonliterate societies were

8 introduction goal, anthropology has not replaced philosophy, religious studies, linguistics or art as viable disciplines in their own right, but the study of what was previously called ethnology and custom has never been the same. In American anthropology, due in large part to the influence of Franz Boas at Columbia University, the holistic approach to the study of humanity stimulated the growth of a four-​field approach: anthropology as biological (human evolution), cultural, linguistic and archaeological. In Britain the focus has been on “social anthropology” as a distinct field separated from the other sciences and social sciences. A century ago Bronislaw Malinowski advocated a scientific approach based on extensive fieldwork to the ways in which a society functions and is maintained. One of the early leaders of British anthropology, Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-​Brown, rejected the American emphasis on culture and argued for analysis of the structural aspects of social systems. France and Germany have their own trajectories, as do the emerging views of anthropology in countries that used to be on the receiving end of anthropological research. The history of anthropology should not haunt progressive change within the discipline, since the voices of our “ ‘dead forefathers’ hover relentlessly in our etic.”18 As is true for any contemporary discipline, there are in fact many anthropologies; no one paradigm has held lasting precedence.19 The anthropological mode I  follow is one of open borders between disciplines. Indeed it was so

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lacking for large areas of the world, and those that existed were of questionable validity. In view of these limitations, their impressions of ‘primitives’ and their essentially untenable scientific and speculative assumptions become less grievous.” Cantero (2017:309). There are quite a few accounts of the history of these anthropologies, although most focus on the English-​speaking variety. The most recent survey is by Eriksen and Nielsen (2013). The journal History and Anthropology has been published since 1984 by Taylor and Francis. One of the most prolific historians of the discipline is George W. Stocking, starting with his essays in Race, Culture, and Evolution (1968) through a dozen more volumes until Glimpses into My Own Black Box: An Exercise in Self-​Deconstruction (2010). The earliest histories (which are more of a prehistory) of the field are provided by Juul Dieserud (1908) and Alfred C. Haddon (1910) and further developed by Penniman (1974). It is best to avoid the materialist-​minded polemic of Harris’s The Rise of Anthropological Theory (1968). John H. Moore (1974) describes the conflict between the idealogical concept of culture of the Boasian school and the more material-​minded followers of Lewis Henry Morgan. For specific studies of the history of anthropological theory, see Erickson and Murphy (2013) and Layton (1997). For American anthropology, see Darnell (2001), Patterson (2001) and Silverman (2005); British anthropology, see Barth (2005), Goody (1995), Kucklick (1991) and Kuper (1983); and, for European anthropology, see Gingrich (2005), Parkin (2005) and Vermeulen and Roldán (1995). Biographical portraits of several major anthropologists of the past are presented in Silverman (2004). The reflections on 70 years in anthropology by Walter Goldschmidt (2000) is well worth reading. Other useful short accounts include Goodenough (2002), Hallowell (1965), Mintz (2000) and Ortner (1984).

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historically. Franz Boas, the founder of anthropology in America, was trained in the physical sciences. Bronislaw Malinowski, who advocated the ethnographic method of participant observation, had doctoral degrees in Philosophy, Physical Chemistry and Science, the last with an emphasis on economics. As Clyde Kluckhohn noted over half a century ago, “Certain aspects of psychology, medicine and human biology, economics, sociology, and human geography must be fused with anthropology in a general science which must likewise embrace the tools of historical and statistical methods and draw data from history and the other humanities.”20 Even Clifford Geertz, the modern-​day sage of the discipline, started out wanting to be a novelist.21 Holism cannot be bottled up within a single academic discipline. There is an ongoing debate inside anthropology, and hardly within anthropology alone, over whether the discipline is a social science or a humanity. At one point the rift was so rife that Stanford University’s Department of Anthropology split in two, a trial that lasted for nine years. The history of the discipline shows that it is capable of being both.22 To argue otherwise, as Marshall Sahlins suggests, is tantamount to “New whines in old bottles.”23 The most suitable knowledge we as humans learn about ourselves as physically present in this world comes through application of the scientific method, but this does not rule out useful tools of analysis derived from the humanities.24 Writing 20 21 22 23 24

Kluckhohn (1963:9). Geertz (2003:29). Scholte (1974:431). Sahlins (1999b:400). The debate over whether ethnography is scientific or interpretive like art and literature has been engaged within anthropology since the start, often with little comparison to similar debates about the nature of social science in other fields. This has been less an issue for biological anthropologists, but it has engaged critique among archaeologists and cultural anthropologists. For a defense of anthropology as “scientific,” see Kuznar (2008:7), who notes that the basic features of science today include “an empirical focus, explications, logic, theoretical explanation, self-​criticism, and open, public debate.” Kuznar (2008:6) complains about postmodern critics who reject the idea that anthropology could or should be a science: “One may very well ask the critics of science whose science they are criticizing: a science that exists or a construct of their minds?” It is also important that anthropology has never been an independent science. As Boas (1908:10) remarked at the very start of modern American anthropology: “With the increase of our knowledge of the peoples of the world, specialization must increase, and anthropology will become more and more a method that may be applied by a great number of sciences, rather than a science by itself.” Ultimately, however, the supposed clash between science and the humanities is a false dichotomy. As Yolanda Moses (2012:594) reminds her colleagues, “we will need to continue to utilize both the sciences and the humanities to provide the robust conceptual frameworks that will guide out multilayered and multisited research and praxis projects.” Part of the problem with postmodern critique of science is

10 introduction in 1936, Robert Lowie warned that the argument over whether or not anthropology was a “science” rested on a misapprehension:  “Laymen readily hook themselves into believing what no serious natural scientist claims, viz., that all natural science is concerned with Newtonian universals.” For Lowie, “cultural anthropology is simply science grappling objectively with one aspect of the universe and inevitably limited in its determinations only by the nature of its data –​no more uniformly refractory than the astronomer’s –​and the provisional inadequacy of its present techniques.”25 Objectivity, to the serious scientist, is never absolute, but always open to further study and refinement. The goal is not to find some abstract notion of “truth” but to articulate a rational argument for an explanation better suited than idiosyncratic speculation and ideological presumption. In his outgoing address to the American Anthropological Association in 1917, John R. Swanton argued: “The continued vitality of anthropology depends on repeated renewal. And when I say this I do not mean the perpetual addition of new facts to our store but new deductions from those facts, new principles revealed through them, new hypotheses as tentative efforts toward the establishment of these principles. Properly speaking there is, or should be, no such thing as orthodoxy in science.”26 Being objective does not guarantee certainty, but provides a testable openness to form a greater degree of fit with what we pragmatically assume is reality. As Marvin Harris observes, “Science-​bashers condemn science as an obstacle to the making of morally, ethically correct political decisions. But the shoe is on the other foot. It is a lack of scientific knowledge that places our politico-​moral decisions in greatest jeopardy. To claim the moral high ground, one must have reliable knowledge.”27 Rather than engaging in an either-​or,

25

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ignorance of the history of philosophical debate over induction and falsification (Segal 2006:168). Lowie (1960:395). Lowie (1960:13) did not subscribe to “laws” as did some of his predecessors, but rather saw benefit from “fruitful correlations,” especially in the analysis of social structure. As he further notes (Lowie 1937:280), “Scientific procedures are not gadgets preconceived and thrust into reality in the hope of a catch. They evolve and are applied spontaneously as problems arise in the mind of a thinker saturated with his theme; and then no arbitrary boundary will stop his sally into the unknown.” In response to an article complaining about professors in their ivory towers, Lowie (1942:321) commented that it was the business of the scholar “to disseminate knowledge –​not absolute truth, of course, which he can only strive for, but at all events the closest approximation possible at the present stage of research.” Swanton (1917:459). Harris (1999:80). In his popular Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches: The Riddles of Culture, Harris (1974:226–​227) argued that scientific objectivity did not cause the “pathologies of contemporary life,” including racism, sexual discrimination, consumerism, or the Vietnam War.

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chicken-​and-​egged-​on intellectual detour, it is better to turn to the widely noted observation of Eric Wolf that “anthropology is both the most scientific of the humanities and the most humanistic of the sciences.”28 Hubris aside, this is a noble goal. Social science devoid of the logic of the scientific method ceases to be scientific and has little that is sustainable to contribute to understanding the social context. This is not science as a new post-​theological dogma or idealistic 19th century positivism, nor does it assume that there is some sacred truth that any creative individual has or could reveal from some supernatural patron or elevated intellectual perch. While the early development of overly optimistic positivism had its flaws, the important point today is that, as H. Russell Bernard explains, “external reality awaits our discovery through a series of increasingly good approximations to the truth.”29 Robert Borofsky notes that the important thing about science for anthropologists is the practice of science that yields credibility, rather than some absolute dogmatic truth.30 In practice, as exemplified by Galileo to Newton to Darwin to Einstein to Hawking, perceived wisdom is challenged and the ensuing debate is what leads to progress in knowledge. Anthropologist Roy D’Andrade adds, “The testability of statements and the constant testing of statements ward off the very strong tendency of humans to believe what they want to believe.”31 The scientific method aims to establish approximate truth, not some dogmatic, unchanging universal “Truth” as some of its critics naively assume. Learning scientifically about our evolution and our diversity does not establish the meaning of life, an inevitably individual

28 29

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Wolf (1964:88). Not all “anthropology” meets this standard, but this should be the goal for the best that anthropology has to offer. Bernard (2002:3). Those who condemn positivism as an Ivory Tower idealism ignore the fact that positivist social theorists have also been social activists, such as John Stuart Mill’s call for equality of women with men; see Bernard (2002:17). For a spirited defense of positivist social science, see Bernard (1994), Gellner (1985:55–​67), Kuznar (2008) and Reyna (1994). Borofsky (2008:276). Roth (1989:567) observes “One may despair of claims to absolute truth and still believe that it is possible to learn.” Birth (1990:555) warns “If there is no accountability to truth, then there is only accountability to culturally bound prejudice...” See also Brown (2008) and Kuznar (2008) for a discussion of how culture can be studied scientifically. D’Andrade (1995b:404). He adds, “Science works not because it produces unbiased accounts but because its accounts are objective enough to be proved or disproved no matter what anyone wants to be true.” Kuznar (2008:9) makes a similar point: “The important point to remember is that weakening adherence to faulty assumptions and abandoning them is hardly damning of science, it is science.”

12 introduction exercise, but it does challenge the unwieldy foundations of truth claims that require no material evidence or fly in the face of reasonable fact finding. The postmodern critique of metatheories has drawn attention to the ways in which an ideological use of science serves political interests. Previous justifications of distinct human races, surviving in some circles of anthropology until Carlton Coon’s flawed The Origin of Races in 1962, may have passed as “science” in their time, but they have been rejected over time due to progress in scientific research. Similarly the much ballyhooed “Piltdown Man” forgery that fooled some, but not all, anthropologists for several decades was revealed as a hoax by later scientific research rather than the constant blather of creationists. This self-​correcting aspect of the sciences is what makes the scientific method so valuable in making sense of the real world. The common failure of much postmodern critique of “science” is assuming science is as dogmatic as any other approach. As numerous critics have argued, this is a profound misunderstanding of the nature of the modern sciences.32 The history of anthropology is necessarily part of the history of writing about culture. Almost seven decades ago two prominent anthropological icons, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, produced Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions. Their supra-​bibliographic survey begins with a bold claim: that “the idea of culture, in the technical anthropological sense, is one of the key notions of contemporary American thought.”33 I say “bold” because they compare its significance to gravity in physics, germ theory in medicine and evolution in biology. Newton’s apple still falls on the heads of dunces who try to defy the law of gravity, leeches have been replaced by mri s, but biological evolution continues to best explain human origins. Yet in recent years there has been less writing about “culture” as a concept than writ[h]‌ing against the idea that anything like an anthropological concept of culture has value or should be used by scholars. Culture, I argue, still matters. 3

Anthropology Up against the Wall Ethnography, a hybrid activity, thus appears as writing, as collecting, as modernist collage, as imperial power, as subversive critique.34 James Clifford

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See, for example Carrithers (1992:152–​154). Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1963:3). The most eminent successor of this monumental effort has been Clifford Geertz (2000:2), who ironically helped proofread the original text of Kroeber and Kluckhohn while studying at Harvard. Clifford (1988:13).

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Thomas More did not have to wait for ethnographic reports on the Americas to compose his Utopia.35 Michel-​R olph Trouillot

Anthropology never took out a copyright on the concept of culture, although there was a time when scholars in other disciplines had little interest in what non-​Western others did and were quick to dismiss what these others thought as less interesting because they were “primitive” compared to the allegedly superior-​ minded West. The history of anthropology, since the days of Tylor, has witnessed considerable debate over what “culture” means, including critical discussion informed in large part by discoveries made through ethnographic fieldwork.36 Insights from this internal debate hold up rather well compared to some of the biased and high-​brow claims about culture made over the same time period by literary scholars, most notably Victorian Mathew Arnold’s sugar-​coated elitist view of culture. As Michael Fischer reminds us, “The demotic omnibus definition of culture as everything produced by human beings provided a productive foundation for including in social science accounts the cultures of peasants, religious groups, migrants, and a variety of others, contesting the dominance of high culture, and figuring culture as a field of contestation and differential interpretation among social groups.”37 The problem, as noted by Robert LeVine in 1984 and still common today, is that those ignorant of recent anthropology sometimes assume that the culture concept has not progressed beyond such sources as Ruth Benedict’s once popular but long outdated Patterns of Culture from 1934.38 The “predicament” of anthropology’s culture concept, as historian James Clifford contends, results from “a pervasive postcolonial crisis of ethnographic authority.”39 For literary critic Edward Said, it may be that anthropology is 35 36

37 38

39

Trouillot (1991:30). As Sahlins (1999b:404) observes, “In fact, many of the same debates and critiques were at large in the anthropology of sixty years ago, but they had a more scientific cast. They appeared as anodyne and commonplace arguments of an epistemological sort over the discrepancy between cultural norms and actual practices, between the ideal and the real, between cultural patterns and individual behaviours.” Fischer (2007:12). LeVine (1984:67). Criticism of Benedict’s essentialist categorization of cultures was present from the start, as evident in the analysis of her work by Lowie (1937:275–​279). It is important to note that books we recognize as outdated today often served as an inspiration for choosing to become an anthropologist. Talal Asad (in Scott 2006:243) reminisces that it was a copy of Benedict’s Patterns of Culture that excited him about anthropology. Clifford (1988:8). For a critical reply to Clifford, see Bradburd (1998:159–​167), Geertz (2000:114–​118), Handelman (1994), Roth (1989) and Sangren (1992). Clifford apparently never read the ethnography of Raymond Firth (1967:11), who in 1936 argued: “Like most

14 introduction destined to remain on the wrong side of the colonial divide.40 The findings of past ethnographic research are dismissed because ethnographers are judged guilty by association with Western colonial expansion. This judgement is made not by examining the reliability of the data presented, but by doubting the presumed objectivity, hence the claim to authority, of the ethnographer. This is a narrow view of objectivity, assuming that it applies to the individual researcher rather than the collective process of the scientific method in testing analysis. It became relatively easy in the 1980s to Whiggishly cast stones at the major iconic ethnographers, like Franz Boas, Bronislaw Malinowski and E. E. Evans-​Pritchard, because they lived in an age when all had sinned and come short of the glory of postcolonial critique. Anthropologist Paul Rabinow reflects that a positivistic view of science is “radically inappropriate in a field which claims to study humanity.”41 Another anthropologist, Stephen Tyler, goes so far as to claim that “scientific thought is now an archaic mode of consciousness surviving for a while yet in a degraded form.”42 The culture concept as such is said to be conceptually void because it purveys a one-​sided discourse that unfairly analyzes human behavior from a position of superiority. For some anthropologists, like Lila Abu-​Lughod, the very idea of culture should be written against, or at least backed up against the wall where one reads mene mene tekel upharsin. The bulk of the writing against anthropological use of culture as a concept is targeting the abuse of specific culture concepts, as I argue in Chapter Two. Anthropology, however has never been without self-​critique, nor without heated debates over how culture should be defined and studied. Before the turn of the 20th century, Franz Boas redirected the study of culture from the

40 41

42

anthropologists I regard with scepticism the claim of any European writer that he has ‘been accepted by the natives as one of themselves,’“ adding that “too often dogmatic statements about ideas are substituted for detailed evidence of observed behavior.” Neither the simple act of being there nor being accepted as a native were cited by Firth as evidence of his authority. Bernard McGrane’s (1989:125) insistence that the absolute goal of ethnology is “simulated membership in the alien culture it is seeking to comprehend” and that the ethnographer “exercises his utmost effort to become a native” is inane, assuming that anthropologists are all like the popular works of Carlos Castenada. I had no desire to become Yemeni, nor did any of the individuals I knew try to convert me to their local culture. An interest in the native points of view is not the same as going native, which very few trained anthropologists have done. Said (1989:225). Rabinow (1977:5). This was hardly a novel critique. David Bidney (1944:39) referred to the “positivistic fallacy,” observing that “it is as fallacious to assume that an account of what occurs or practiced is a sufficient description of a culture as it is to assume that the ideals professed by members of a society are in themselves the complete culture.” Tyler (1987:200).

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pitfalls of unilinear evolution.43 Lecturing to the public in 1914, Robert Lowie stated: “Like the generation of thinkers that preceded ours, we are living in an age of revolt, but the object of our revolt is different from their’s.”44 He was complaining about anthropologists and other scholars, as well as laymen, who were using outmoded anthropological concepts a century ago. By 1938 Edward Sapir suggested that cultural anthropology needed a psychiatrist.45 A major reinvention of the field was proposed during the 1960s, as anthropologists actively engaged with current political issues such as the Vietnam War, civil rights, feminism and Native American rights movements, as well as philosophical critique emerging from post-​War Europe. In the 1960s in Britain a new field emerged out of literary criticism, proudly hailed as “Cultural Studies,” with a focus almost exclusively on the politics of popular culture in the West and the interaction of the West with its colonial others and its poorly treated minorities. The latter focus spurred a sibling text-​ oriented field of “postcolonial studies.” Rejecting ab initio the methodologies of formal disciplines, this rudderless text-​based expansion into the anything-​ but-​level field of the study of culture can best be characterized as a bricolage, “for Cultural Studies in fact has no distinct methodology, no unique statistical, ethnomethodological, or textual analysis to call its own.”46 As E. L. Cerroni-​ Long suggests, the culture of Cultural Studies “is adjusted for postmodern consumption, and is thus a determinedly atheoretical subject,” promoting “the celebratory documentation of identity politics.”47 Some scholars writing under the rubric of cultural or postcolonial studies have made valuable contributions to our understanding of contemporary life and the role of knowledge production. Yet, as I argue in Chapter Four, missing in virtually all texts under the rubric of Cultural Studies is actual ethnographic fieldwork informed by the experience of such activity within the history of anthropology and sociology.48 The tool kit of Cultural Studies is used to tease “culture” out of texts and the media, since the main focus is on understanding literature created by minorities or from cultures outside Europe. Those who have a background in sociology, like Stuart Hall, are rightfully appreciated for drawing attention to issues of race and gender. Many have been influenced by Karl Marx and readily identify 43 44 45 46 47 48

Boas (1896). Robert Lowie (1960:17). He was mainly concerned with the uncritical use of Lewis Henry Morgan’s categorization of universal kinship types. Sapir (1938). Nelson, Treichler and Grossburg (1992:2). Cerroni-​Long (1999:9). When I read an anthropologist (Crapanzano 1990:303) assert “I am not certain what an ethnography is,” I am not surprised by such an avoidance outside the discipline.

16 introduction with the academic left, which only serves to marginalize their influence on the far more right-​leaning realm of political power outside academe. I do not question the value of Cultural Studies nor postcolonial studies as attempts to come to grips with the ongoing prejudices and power politics in the prematurely labeled postmodern world. But most of the published work I have seen is resolutely ignorant of historical contexts in commentary on the current predicament of human relations as globalized out of the West. Part of the problem with “postcolonial” studies starts at the post. While formal colonies controlled politically and economically from a European capital no longer exist, or so it seems, the political and economic power of former colonizers has hardly abated. This is better labeled a form of neocolonialism, the term coined by Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah in 1965, to stress the continuing power dimension. In a devastating critique of the field, Kwame Appiah labeled the cohort that launched postcolonial studies a “comprador intelligentsia, a relatively small, western-​style, western-​trained group of writers and thinkers, who mediate the trade in cultural commodities of world capitalism at the periphery.”49 In a sympathetic review of the field, Leela Gandhi complains that “postcolonialism continues to render non-​Western knowledge and culture as ‘other’ in relation to the normative ‘self’ of Western epistemology and rationality.”50 No academic discipline has argued more over the issue of “othering” than anthropology in its trajectory stretching back almost a century and a half. Yet it is often the ethnographer who is “othered” as a colonial pawn and ethnographic texts that remain unread. More than a century of ethnographic reporting has established beyond any reasonable doubt the uniqueness and inherent value of cultures, despite the homogenizing and marginalization inherent in the hegemonic rise of world capitalism. Yet much of postcolonial theorizing does not evolve from detailed analysis of cultural nuances but rather is engaged in launching rhetorical ideological volleys at political forces that are beyond their reach. Anouar Majid, the founding director of the Center for Global Humanities at the University of New England, takes past postcolonial theory to task for failing to acknowledge the uniqueness of cultures: Enthralled by the triumphant creed of hybridity –​premised on the notion that people, as well as nations, are made up of incommensurable, mobile, unstable parts  –​many postcolonial theorists sought the signs 49 50

Appiah (1991:348). This is in an article about “the shark-​infested waters around the semantic island of the postmodern” (p. 341). Gandhi (1998:x).

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that confirmed this faith, not the ones that complicated it. Novels about the trauma of immigration and exile were transformed into manifestos heralding the emergence of the postmodern. Critics played down the distinctive traits of cultures and celebrated impurity and rootlessness, which appeared as indispensable virtues in a multicultural, multicolored, secular world.51 There is no post, be it for modernity or colonialism, that is not post hoc. This is why it is so important to have more than an ad hoc approach to making sense of the present. A major fault line in most of the literary and Cultural Studies texts I have seen is an almost total avoidance of the role of biology and our evolutionary trajectory. Thus one introductory text poses the nonsensical old-​museum image of culture soothing the savage beast: “Culture understood as what maintains civility in communication is necessary because nature propels humans toward human survival in ways that can lead to violence, domination, and injustice.”52 It is obvious that Hobbes’ monstrous Leviathan has not yet become extinct, despite the liberal credential of some scholars. Yet, as anthropologist Michael Blim reminds us, “We need not live in a Hobbesian world.”53 By not probing what scientific knowledge we have about that “nature,” the author ignores the fact that our evolution has also, in the words of ethologist Frans de Waal, “produced the requisites for morality,” including development of social norms, capacity for empathy and sympathy, mutual aid and conflict resolution.54 Human nature should neither be defined by a biblical all-​have-​sinned scenario nor a simplistic “the genes made me do it” assumption. The beast that needs to be soothed is that of self-​indulgent academic navel-​gazing hermeneutics. Studying an “other” is no easy task. Ethnographic fieldwork in the Malinowskian sense of participant observation requires the ethnographer to work in the local language rather than relying solely on a translator and to live, cheek by jowl if possible, among the people being studied. Most of the early ethnographers were able to enter the field because that field was controlled, at least in theory, by a Western colonial power or a local government beholden to a 51

52 53 54

Anouar Majid (2002:B11). See also Majid (2002:22–​49). In her critique of earlier postcolonial writing, Leela Ghandi (1998:168) writes that “it fails to account for differences, in this case the culturally and historically variegated forms of both colonialism and anti-​colonial struggles.” Ryan (2010:xi). Blim (2005:229). Blim provides a scenario for taming the tendency toward social inequality in modern capitalism. de Waal (1996:39).

18 introduction European or American nation. This was true for the first American ethnographers who focused on the native “other” in their own midst after the pacification and reservation-​internment of “Indian” tribes. Early ethnographers, like the missionaries, usually ended up in colonies controlled by their respective nations. Coming from the metropole did not ensure automatic access, since most field sites were far removed from the political center. Nor should it be assumed that every ethnographer saw eye-​to-​eye with the colonial overseers, who hardly needed and rarely heeded anthropological advice on how to rule. As Ian Lewis forcefully replies to those critics who accused British social anthropologists of justifying colonialism, it was these very anthropologists who “finally destroyed the archaic stereotype of the rustic tribesman as a congenitally incapacitated simpleton, incapable of rational reasoning or civilized living.”55 4

Being in the Field Ethnography is indeed the arena in which notions of a science of anthropology are held accountable in its ability to encompass adequately the detailed reality of motivated, intentional life.56 George E. Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer

Anthropological epistemologies evolve from fieldwork, not from the armchair.57 Don Handleman

55

56 57

Lewis (1985:35). Audrey Richards (1944:291), a student of Malinowski, noted that ethnographers became “students of colonialism” due to its impact on African societies. Henrika Kuklick (1991:182) argues that despite the fact that the Colonial Office became a patron of functionalist anthropologists, they “were not wholly beholden to their new supporters, and did not become their creatures.” As noted by Eric Wolf (2000:70), “The instillation of indirect rule in British Africa owed little to inputs from anthropology, despite anthropologists’ repeated offers to assist in the process.” Wolf (1997:10), while acknowledging the colonial roots of earlier anthropology, states that “one needs to remind oneself that if there were efforts to dominate or destroy ‘the other,’ there were also efforts to comprehend that other. Sometimes this even allowed us better to comprehend ourselves.” Kuper (1983:113) adds that the anthropologist was distrusted by colonial authorities, usually seen as either a “do-​gooder” or “making trouble.” This is not surprising, since some where foreign born, like Malinowski, and many were left-​leaning (Goody 1995:155). Anthropological critiques of capitalist colonialism were also done in the Americas, especially Sidney Mintz on Caribbean sugar plantations (Mintz 1985, Palerm 2017:420–​422). Marcus and Fischer (1986:165). Handleman (1994:376).

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My own case is an example of how much the “ethnographic authority” trope has been overblown. In 1978 my wife, Najwa Adra, and I arrived in North Yemen to start our ethnographic fieldwork with no guarantee that we would be allowed to do research. Although friendly to the United States, Yemen’s protocol for handling foreign researchers was still being developed after emerging from a major civil war. We would not be able to live in a field site until we were cleared through the bureaucratic system. Waving an American passport did not carry the weight it would have done for Margaret Mead in American Samoa five decades before. We were not the first American anthropologists to do ethnography in Yemen, but the Yemeni government was under no obligation to rubber stamp a research permit. No Western power had ever controlled North Yemen, so past colonial privilege was not a factor. When we eventually settled into a community, we were accepted because of how we were perceived as individuals, not because we were American citizens. Indeed, when village residents knew we came from America, some thought we were a bit dim to want to live in rural Yemen, while others were proud of their heritage and eager to share it with us. We were legitimized in large part because of the help we received from a host family, who not only provided a space we could rent but also spent many hours explaining local dialect terms and customs. Our interest in learning about Yemeni culture was reciprocated far more than we could repay, try as we might. In a sense our collective published work and application of our knowledge in several development projects in Yemen are the main ways we have been able to show our appreciation for the year we were welcomed into a highland rural community. Ethnographers are sometimes blamed for desiring to settle in a pristine community, some out-​of-​the-​way place where culture has theoretically been frozen. Our choice of the valley of al-​Ahjur was driven by our research interests, not by the need to document an idyllic image of the past. We arrived shortly after the car road reached into the valley and before there was stable electricity in the nearby villages. Change was in the air and we were able to document a transition involving new economic and cultural trends. But change is not a modern phenomenon, which a detailed probing of the past readily reveals. Nor were we under any allusions that we were seeing Yemen as a kind of cultural whole or that the small part of Yemen we lived in could represent the diverse society within the existing nation state. We studied the particulars not to collect a set of isolated facts but to build on and move beyond so that we could suggest broader patterns. Being in the field was not an end in itself, but there is no better means for observing what people do and hearing what they actually say. Ethnography is more than a method for data gathering; it is very much a presentation of self. The ethnographic data I managed to obtain were due in

20 introduction large part to my knowledge of Yemeni Arabic, not to my nationality.58 Being in the field is never unidimensional. I asked my questions, and everyone around me asked their’s.59 The ethnographic encounter demands dialogue. A perfect example is the daily “qat chew” in the Yemeni valley where I lived. In the late afternoon, with the sun at its height and most of the heavy labor of the day done, several men would gather in a sitting room, called a mafraj in Yemen, to chew the leaves of a stimulant plant called qat.60 Chewing is a misnomer; the Arabic word is best translated as storing the bitter leaves in one cheek that can bulge like a dental trophy. As a stimulant, it often led to spirited conversation, especially if something important had happened earlier in the day. One day the mafraj bulged with the local tribesmen, including the shaykhs (leaders) of two villages meeting to discuss a physical altercation earlier in the fields between two local farmers. I listened intently to the local mediation process in progress, trying to take notes as unobtrusively as possible.61 Then one of the village shaykhs turned and asked me how the situation would be handled in America. I stumbled a rambling answer, forgetting all the civics taught in junior high school. Fortunately, this was a ploy by the shaykh to buy time, not a desire to do it the American way. Ethnographic fieldwork often forces the anthropologist to relive his or her childhood. As far as the local villagers were concerned, I arrived as ignorant as a child and they were right. The fact that the local dialect term for children was jahal (literally, someone ignorant) reminded me constantly how little I knew, a humility check on the underlying arrogance that being an outside observer may surface. Since a major focus of my research was to look at irrigation practices, I spent most of my days in the fields observing and talking with farmers. At first, when I would meet a woman on a path, I chose not to say anything first, not wanting to offend. Soon, however, several women visiting my wife asked her if people in America do not greet in public. “Of course they do,” she confirmed. “So why,” they inquired, “does your husband not greet us when he passes by?” Najwa explained that I was being overly careful not to offend. “Oh,” they responded, “then tell him this is not Saudi Arabia. We greet each other here.” 58 59 60

61

Data relevant to my dissertation topic are recorded in Varisco (1982). For a fuller appreciation of the ethnographic context, see Adra (1982, 1998, 2009) The experience of anthropologists as being as interested in as they are in the people being studied is commonly reported; see Raybeck (1992:7). One of my earliest professional articles was on the significance of chewing qat, which is Catha edulis (Varisco 1986). I have since written about its legality in Islamic law (Varisco 2004a) and its medicinal qualities (Varisco 2012). For a witty discussion of Yemeni qat chewing, see MackIntosh-​Smith (1997:16–​28). This mediation process is discussed by Adra (2011).

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Once a week Najwa and I would walk to the local weekly market at Bab al-​ Ahjur on the main road entrance to the valley. This was held on a Wednesday and featured itinerant merchants who brought their wares to market on Toyoto trucks, which had recently replaced the donkeys and camels traditionally used. As I walked through the temporary stalls, it was obvious that I stood out and served as a major object of attraction. I would hear people explaining who Najwa and I lived with and what we appeared to be doing, as unfathomable as the idea of “ethnographic fieldwork” often seemed to them. There was one man in particular who took delight in making fun of me, often coming up from behind and shouting “Kawkaban! Kawkaban!” This was the name of a nearby tourist site, so I  knew what class of otherness he had cast for me. One day, when my language skills had improved considerably to the point of mischief, I snuck up behind him and yelled “Kawkaban! Kawkaban!” He turned and, after a brief moment of shock, we both roared with laughter. Being in the field is hard to describe because it is so much more than collecting information. Najwa and I  were an independent unit, doing our own cooking and cleaning, as well as facing the quotidian demands of simply getting through the day. Routine was shaped mainly by relationships, between ourselves as a newly-​wed couple and as a team of researchers, with our hosts who rented us a room and often provided rides into the capital, with the men, women and children we met in the surrounding villages and with the nostalgia of missed relatives and friends. As guests we went out of our way not to act like obnoxious tourists or over-​eager data crunchers. It was obvious from the start that we would not be able to obtain certain kinds of information. I would have liked to have a detailed cadastral survey of who owned each plot of land, but land ownership was a private matter here. This was an area with a deep suspicion of the central government, especially what Prohibition-​era Americans referred to as tax “revenuers.” No one thought we worked for the government, but this was information that was too sensitive to share or discuss openly. Being there meant being able to be part of the local community, to participate as well as to observe. One day it was rumored that television reception had finally come to the valley. That night there was a knock at our door and I was requested to come and help read the instructions for setting up a recently bought television from the capital. I followed a couple of young boys to the house in question. By the time I had arrived, the television was working fine. This was a relief to me, since I noted that the instructions were only in Japanese. While we were in the valley a rinderpest epidemic broke out in the area. Fortunately I had contacts with the British Veterinary team in the capital and was able to solicit their help in vaccinating the local cows. This was no easy task since a number of the women, who were primarily responsible for feeding

22 introduction and caring for cows, wanted to make sure the needle would not kill their animals. It was not all work, as we attended all kinds of local celebrations, funerals as well as weddings. Being there meant being a part of the life that went on, not the infamous view-​from-​the-​verandah of colonial travelers. Above all else, the success or failure of fieldwork is intensely personal before it can become pervasively political. We lived in a rural community where people were justifiably proud of their own worth. Most of the local residents knew little about America, except that Americans were thought to be religious unlike the godless communists in Russia. Because I spoke Arabic, some people assumed I must be Lebanese or from another Arab country. Once, while I was walking through the market, I heard someone remark that I was Chinese. Othering is indeed universal and it is never one-​way. When village women visited Najwa in our single room while I was reading or writing, I would discretely leave my books and walk outside. Some of the women thought we must be devout religious scholars, since we spent so much time reading. Stories circulated about why we did not have any children, including gossip that we had left our children with our parents. These views were not illogical but quite sincere, reflecting how our presence was interpreted, and we were accepted as individuals, through a local lens. 5

Writing for Cultural Concepts If there is any one word that defines the common ground of the social sciences and humanities it is the word culture.62 Michael Jackson

The field of anthropology, to go by past book titles alone, has already been reclaimed, recaptured, reinvented and sent to the psychiatrist; yet it survives all the apocalyptic endings prophesied. The four chapters presented here are intended to rescue writing about culture from the literary penchant of writing and hand wringing against cultural concepts, whether the biased view of others as inferior by nature or the politically charged disconnect that often accompanies crossing assumed cultural boundaries. I am hardly the first anthropologist to defend what I see as useful in the discipline, and I will certainly not be the last. Over the last four decades much of the crescendo of writing on the state of anthropology has been an exercise in sending accusatory volleys from one theoretical camp to another. As Michel-​Rolph Trouillot suggested over two decades ago, “anthropology’s postmodern situation warrants more sober 62

Jackson (1989:120).

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reflection than petty accusations of egomania across theoretical camps.”63 Some authors seem to think that no one ever thought of their particular critiques before; others are so unaware of the past writings of anthropologists that they fail to learn any lessons from the past. Culture, I argue in the first essay, is not reducible to a text, despite the seductive charm of a metaphor that valorizes what is written over what is lived in context. Nor is the heuristic value of a culture concept null and void because it can be abused. Making sense of what can be observed in the field, whether far off or close to home, infuses anthropology with a purpose that goes beyond adding academic tomes to university library shelves. There are multiple ways of communicating what is observed, but if ethnography is not based on empirical analysis rather than mere impressions, it collapses into a wannabe clone of drive-​by journalism. What makes anthropology scientific is not the truth of its claims, but the rigor of its methods, whether qualitative or quantitative. In 2007 I published Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid, a critical survey of Edward Said’s seminal polemic Orientalism and the unending, at times upending, debate over its merits. Said rightly criticized the ethnocentrism, racism and sexism that dominated much of the previous writing about the so-​called “Orient” and Islam, but his textual attitude was ill served by a lack of familiarity with the diversity within the genre and a tendency to essentialize the Western writer as victim to an assumed hegemonic discourse. Beyond the debate over his Orientalism thesis, Said’s approach to “culture” is too important an issue not to warrant sustained analysis through an anthropological lens. My analysis of this is presented in the second essay. Given Said’s lack of direct engagement with the concept of culture in Orientalism, this text must be read contrapuntally alongside his other works, especially The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983) and Culture and Imperialism (1993) in order to tease out Said’s literary view of “culture.” I believe this can best be done by contrasting Said’s reliance on Matthew Arnold, caveats acknowledged, with the discipline-​defining approach to culture crystalized by Arnold’s Victorian contemporary, Edward Tylor. My interest is not to pile on more critique of Said’s passionately held views by digging through the fill, but to apply an epistemological “archaeology” of the textual representation of culture that has filtered into recent anthropological theory. In 1977, the year before I first went to the field, Paul Rabinow published his acclaimed Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco. The very nature of fieldwork was challenged as a psychological trap, both for the researcher (at least in his own experience) and the objects of study. While accepting ethnographic fieldwork as “what should therefore be the very strength of anthropology,” Rabinow 63

Trouillot (1991:36).

24 introduction was convinced it was wrong to study humanity with “a positivistic view of science.”64 The account he presented is very much about the psyche of the ethnographer and his disappointment both with his mentors and his fieldwork site. There is hardly any mention of the specific ethnographic methods he applied in the field. One line sums up the book’s theme: “That I would journey to Morocco to confront Otherness and myself was typical of my culture (or the parts of it I could accept).”65 This could be said about any traveler; indeed numerous travelogues do exactly this. But these are less reflections on fieldwork than the generic trials of “culture shock.” In the third essay I reflect on Rabinow’s reflections through the lens of my personal field diary, going beyond the culture shock to explain why conceptualizing culture is important. When will it all end, the ends in question being that of anthropology as a viable independent discipline and the survival of the fittest culture concepts? In the final essay I provide a preliminary postmortem on the presumptuous postmodern prediction that anthropology is about to become an extinct academic field. With no more “primitives” around to colonize, even symbolically, and apparently no more viable metanarratives to maintain our Western sense of civilizational superiority, will an apocalyptic pox spell the end of Mr. Tylor’s science? Can Homo anthropologicus successfully mate with Homo sociologicus on the home turf, or is the future of scholarly interchange in disciplined academic discourse (in the pre-​Foucauldian sense) void of meaning? Or is the echo of Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo the solution: I myself have now slain all gods in the fourth act, for the sake of morality. Now, what is to become of the fifth act? From where am I to take the tragic solution? –​Should I begin to think about a comic solution?66 64 65 66

Rabinow (1977:5). Rabinow (1977:161). It is worth noting that Morocco was not Rabinow’s first choice for field study. He accepted Geertz’s suggestion to go to Morroco without any preparation in language or the local cultural background. Nietzsche (1974:197), I recognize, as noted by D’Andrade (1999:99) that my reference to Nietzsche is itself problematic, since “why should a dead white male, flamboyantly promoting the mistreatment of women and justifying the misery of the masses by the presence of a hero, become an ‘in’ figure?” In his critical retort to the gods of postmodern criticism, he adds that Paul De Man and Martin Heidegger were anti-​Semitic Nazi sympathizers and Louis Althusser murdered his wife. See also Harris (1994:74), who discusses the impact of Nietzsche on fascism and Nazism, and Lewis (2014:3), who suggests that postmodern anthropologists are slaves to Nietzsche’s “slave morality” and “herd morality.” As Lindholn (1997:75) notes, “But very un-​Nietzschean indeed is the liberal egalitarianism also taken for granted by postmodernists, who tend to assume without question that we should not judge others or impose domination, distinction and hierarchy on them.”

Chapter 1

Culture is Not a Text But society is not a text that communicates itself to the skilled ­reader. It is people who speak.1 Talal Asad

…

Textual strategies can call attention to the politics of representation, but the issue of otherness itself is not really addressed by the devices of polyphonic textual construction or collaboration with informant-​ writers, as such writers as Clifford and Vincent Crapanzano (1980) sometimes seem to suggest.2 Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson

∵ If there were no culture concept in academic study, we would still have to invent one.3 Making sense of who we are is probably as old as any aspect we suspect makes us fully human. Making stone tools, something to emphasize because these are the main evidence of material culture that survives, stretches back well before our present anatomically modern species evolved some 200,000 years ago. But early hominid ingenuity is not only written in stone. As archaeologist Timothy Taylor suggests, the “first characteristically human artifact” may have been invented by a woman:  the baby-​sling which allowed her to move freely without fear of her child falling off. 4 Making and using such tools implies an 1 Asad (1983:155). 2 Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (1997:46). 3 As Morris Freilich (1989:2) notes, “Professional anthropology found rather than invented culture.” The number of texts tracing the overall history of the concept of “culture” outside of anthropology is vast, stretching across old disciplines and new interdisciplinary studies. The survey by Ramond Williams (1976), originally published in 1958, is a basic starting point, but for this one should consult Smith (2001). Terry Eagleton (2000) provides a Marxist spin on the evolution of the use of culture concepts. 4 Taylor (1996:45–​46). Taylor’s example illustrates his critique of earlier evolutionary scenarios that assumed all meaningful change came from males.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004381339_003

26 ­chapter  intellectual ability that surely was more than utilitarian. The evolution of language is likely to have been influenced by a desire to tell stories and not just to tell hunters where the animals were. Language diversity implies cultural diversity, different ways of saying things to go along with different ideas for making sense of things and acting. But humans are hardly the only social animals which value communication, as the trajectory of the surviving great apes well illustrates. Just as there is no way to identify the first “human,” so there is no viable method for reconstructing the first bundle of intellectual activity that merits being called “culture.” Not knowing exactly how human culture began does not mean we should stop probing such a fascinating question beyond writing fiction. It may be argued that every known society has a de facto culture concept, a framework for making sense of who they are and why they are different from others. Recognition of such diversity is not an entirely new idea. If you read Herodotus, it is clear that not all “barbarians” were the same, even if they were united in not speaking proper Greek. In the early 6th century CE the Roman philosopher Boethius was shrewd enough to note: “The customs and laws of diverse nations do so much differ that the same thing which some commend as laudable, others condemn as deserving punishment.”5 Or consider the brilliant essay “Of Cannibals” by Montaigne, who reflected on the atrocities committed in the exploration of the New World by observing “… I do not find, by what I am told, that there is anything wild and barbarous in this nation, excepting that everyone gives the denomination of barbarism to what is not the custom of his country.”6 Critical awareness of othering is not a modern discovery by any means. The intellectual history of how humans make sense of what it means to be human has made remarkable progress since the days of Boethius or Montaigne, but the important point is that alongside the rampant abuse of “culture” as a political tool there exists awareness and critique of that abuse all along. Western intellectuals became unchained from the Christianized Aristotelian scala natura when the exploration of new worlds discovered life beyond the biblical table of nations. As reports of customs came back to Europe, usually filtered through wild accounts of swashbuckling conquistadors and single-​minded missionaries, speculation grew about how all this could fit into the theological premises of Christianity. Were all these new groups of people descended from Adam or were there perhaps other creations in other gardens? Did everyone literally come from the loins of Noah and his three sons after the deluge? Are 5 Quoted in Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1963:4). 6 Montagne (1811(1):246). This is the English translation by Peter Coste. As Geertz (2000:45) notes, Montaigne’s notion “whatever its problems, and however more delicately expressed, is not likely to go entirely away unless anthropology does.”

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27

all these obvious heathen destined for an eternity in the Christian hell? The result was an entertaining Fardle of Façions, as illustrated in Johann Boemus’ 1520 Renaissance collection of manners and customs. Boemus collected his materials about new worlds and strange peoples not in the modern academic sense, but with the avowed purpose, whether serious or not, of a moral lesson. The colorful phrasing of the earliest English edition is quite to the point: Not for the hongre of gaine, or the ticklyng desire of the peoples vaine brute, and vnskilfulle commendacion: but partly moued with the oportunitie of my laisure, and the wondrefull profits and pleasure, that I conceiued in this kinde of studie my self, and partly that other also delightyng in stories, might with litle labour, finde easely when thei would, the somme of thynges compiled in one Booke, that thei ware wonte with tediousnes to sieke in many. And I haue shocked theim vp together, as well those of aunciente tyme, as of later yeres, the lewde, as well as the vertuous indifferentlie, that vsing them as present examples, and paternes of life, thou maiest with all thine endeuour folowe the vertuous and godlie, and with asmuche warenes eschewe the vicious and vngodly.7 Learning about others did not have the desired impact, as the bloodly religious wars within Europe and the imperialist trampling of exotic others over the ensuing centuries attest. But there were still lessons to be learned from the sheer diversity of human customs. Contemporary concepts of culture have a long prehistory that has received extensive study. Edward Tylor did not elicit his foundational definition of culture in a vacuum; he built upon a range of Enlightenment scholars and German philosophers. Tylor was directly influenced by the German ur-​anthropologist Gustav Klemm, whose massive Allgemeine Culturwissenschaft der Menschheit stretched to ten volumes by 1852.8 Klemm was in turn influenced by his compatriot predecessors Immanuel Kant and Johann Gottfried Herder, who must be included in the birthing process of modern anthropology.9 Although Tylor entitled his book Primitive Culture, his definition hedges between “culture” and “civilization,” the latter term with a historical trajectory from French thought. Historians have been far more comfortable using “civilization,” as Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History 7 Boemus (1555[1888]:14). 8 As quoted by Lowie (1937:12), Klemm defined culture as “customs, information, and skills, domestic and public life in peace and war, religion, science, and art.” 9 See Zammito (2002). For a survey of Kant’s sense of philosophical anthropology, see Fischer (2009:215–​234) and Wilson (2006), who notes that Kant’s focus was on developing critical thinking.

28 ­chapter  (1934–​1961) exemplifies and political scientist Samuel Huntington’s more recent The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996) problematizes. To the extent “civilization” refers to an ultimate state in cultural evolution, it has little utility in contemporary anthropological analysis. It is in anthropology, more than any other major discipline, that the separation of a shared human culture from a privileged human civilization has been made. When Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn set out in 1952 to document the range of definitions and conceptual models of culture at the time, their focus was on anthropologists and sociologists after Tylor. Their work stands as useful documentation of how the term was used in the first half of the 20th century, but there has been considerable discussion and refining of culture concepts over the past six decades. Their collection was not meant to be a definitive statement, but rather “for a stock-​taking, for a comparing of notes, for conscious awareness of the range of variation.”10 As Roberta Lenkeit suggests, when their book is read end-​to-​end “the reader is left with the certainty that all anthropologists are talking about the same thing, but they use different words to describe the concept.”11 I do not advocate a formal updating of Kroeber and Kluckhohn’s compilation. However, we need to appreciate what led them to collect the range of definitions then available. Now, as then, it is important to take stock of the ways in which the term “culture” helps frame our analysis. This is the issue that anthropologists grapple with in the field and in writing ethnography. Not surprisingly, no single culture concept has emerged as definitive. Something as broad and as complex as the human experience should not be denoted by a single term; what is worth considering is what our use of the term “culture” can connote. 1

Text as Pretext Out of Context At times ethnography shares its subject matter with literature, but its attitude is distinct.12 Robert H. Lowie

Literary men are writing essays and little books about culture.13 Kroeber and Kluckhohn

10 11 12 13

Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1963:7). Lenkeit (2014:5). Fischer (2007:44, note 2) suggests that it is worthwhile revisiting rather than dismissing this discussion of culture concepts. Lowie (1937:3). Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1963:3)

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The literary men that Kroeber and Kluckhohn had in mind included critics Matthew Arnold and T.  S. Eliot, since their anthology appeared before Raymond Williams’ Culture and Society in 1958. Williams, who later expanded on the literary appropriation of culture in his Keywords (1976) barely touches on the variety of anthropological approaches to culture. He assumes, wrongly, that cultural anthropology only treated culture as material production, even though he references the work of Kroeber and Kluckhohn that provides many examples to the contrary. Ironically, and wrongly, some have attributed Williams with having provided Cultural Studies with an “anthropological” understanding of culture.14 Williams’ emphasis is on the intellectual and artistic aspects that elevate culture to a privileged position, as is clearly evident in Matthew Arnold’s well-​known Culture and Anarchy (first published in 1869). To the extent that culture refers to a matter of taste, it is primarily a taste acquired through literature. The literary construction of the culture concept ignores virtually everything that anthropologists have said about actual cultures studied as well as the variety of cultural concepts documented before and after Kroeber and Kluckhohn’s archive. This is evident in Terry Eagleton’s book entitled Culture, where the focus is on Edmund Burke, Johann Gottfried Herder, T.S. Eliot, Raymond Williams and Oscar Wilde with only a passing reference to Edward Tylor and a reflexivist quote from Claude Levi-​Strauss. Eagleton suggests that the “anthropological sense can be too amorphous” even if it has its uses.15 The problem is that Eagleton relegates anthropological framing to “tribal or premodern” societies rather than modernity, since in premodern times “the practical and the symbolic are likely to be more closely allied than they are in the modern age.”16 This misleading notion of modernity as a time-​evolved evolutionary pinnacle assumes that the many societies that are not “modern” in the civilizational sense either do not exist or are peculiar survivals. Is it really fair to say that a Yemeni tribesmen is more symbolic than a Southhampton dockworker? Are the Amish, who nostalgically cling to a pre-​electric mode of farming, modern or premodern? And if Eagleton flirts with the notion that culture has become 14

15 16

Barker (2003:60) views the work of Williams as “ ‘anthropological’ since it centers on everyday meanings: values (abstract ideals), norms (defnite principles or rules) and material/​symbolic goods.” Williams’ (1958) Culture and Society 1780–​1950 does not mention one anthropologist and treats Arnold in a literary vacuum. Williams (1976) survey of Cultural Studies barely mentions any actual anthropological ethnographers or ethnographic texts. Compare the far more comprehensive analysis of the rise of the culture concept by Michael Fischer (2007). Eagleton (2016:3). Eagleton (2016:6–​7).

30 ­chapter  a “secular version of divine grace,” is there no room for meaningful symbolism in collective life today?17 Anthropologists, until recently, tended to conduct ethnographic fieldwork in societies without written traditions, at least not in the literary sense that developed in Europe. Many of the peoples studied by ethnographers thought their own societies superior to those of the observer, but not because of a textual tradition. Even when fieldwork occurred in societies with a well-​established literary history, such as the Middle East, the early focus was generally on illiterate people and their everyday life. Thus, the methodology of participant observation at first hinged on the fact that the only way to know what was happening culturally was to observe and communicate directly with people, not just read what the literate among them may have written and certainly not what the missionaries said.18 The recent turn to culture as an extension of literary analysis returns us to the mentality of the missionary age, only now the novel replaces the Bible. The primary methodology of modern anthropology, in which the researcher usually resides in a foreign context and uses the locally relevant language to communicate and conduct research, is only a century old.19 The mere fact of “being there” does not guarantee accurate reporting nor mitigate the cultural biases with which we are all indoctrinated. The fact remains that ethnographic fieldwork is the primary method cultural anthropologists have used to gather information. Sidney Mintz does not mince his words when he writes: “My own view is that good fieldwork may be the silver lining to any cloud that hangs over our discipline. Fieldwork has always been what we do –​and what we have learned to do –​best.”20 As is true for all research, it is important to distinguish the value of fieldwork on the basis of its quality. The ethnographer must have competent language skills and be able to relate to the cultural context he or she is participating in. This is what “ethnographic authority” should derive from, not mere presence in an exotic locale. Not being in another cultural “there” 17 18 19

20

Eagleton (2016: 28–​29). For a survey of the scientific and humanities methods of participant observation, see Bernard (2002:322–​364). In 1906 Franz Boas (1906:642) remarked: “It would seem to me that the classical archeologist or the classical philologist must always have an indulgent smile when he hears of serious anthropological studies carried on by investigators, who have neither the time, the inclination, nor the training to familiarize themselves with the language of the people they study.” Boas was instrumental in stressing the need for his students to learn the local language. As James Boon (1982:8) has noted, “The contemporary identity of the anthropological profession centers, rightly I think, on fieldwork –​in act and ideal.”

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limits our knowledge to the fragmentary and often skewed information that has been written down in texts. In 1978 I  arrived in rural Yemen for 18  months of ethnographic fieldwork among highland Yemeni farmers. I did not come with a tabula rasa researcher template, but the limited texts I had read about Yemen paled in the light of what I would soon learn through my observation and interactions in the field. I did not become Yemeni, nor would I claim to know Yemeni culture with the depth of experience of a native. Of course I was an outsider, like every other anthropologist in a new cultural context, but I became “an outsider who knows something of what it is to be an insider.”21 My understanding of why the men, women and children did what they did was enhanced by living with them, listening, talking, sharing and wanting to learn from them. The experience of participating, observing and recording within this local cultural context was neither irretrievably damaged a priori by my previous reading nor can it be reduced in a posteriori hindsight to what I  have since written about my experience. What I write about aspects of Yemeni culture I observed is not that reality, but a representation that is based on actually sharing in that lived cultural context. Such an ethnographic lens allows a researcher to proceed from context to text rather than substitute text for context. In my own case, fieldwork has been essential to understanding earlier Yemeni texts. While in the field I had access to a 14th century Yemeni manuscript describing aspects of the agriculture I was observing on a daily basis.22 After completing my dissertation I came across a 13th century agricultural almanac by an earlier Rasulid sultan. My edition, translation and annotation of this seasonal guide to agriculture and other events would not have been possible without the experience of living with farmers through an entire agricultural year.23 This is a case where being there allowed me to better understand the history of what I was observing in the present. Being an ethnographer aided my later work as a historian reconstructing a historical context centuries before. The issue is not just access to local dialect terms not recorded in lexicons, but the experience of observing a complete annual agricultural cycle.

21 22 23

This phrase is from Roger Keesing (1992:77). Geertz (1974:30) explores the issue of “experience-​near” fieldwork, noting: “In the country of the blind, who are not as unobservant as they appear, the one-​eyed is not king but spectator.” The text was a manuscript owned by the Rasulid sultan al-​Malik al-​Afdal al-​‘Abbas, who died in 1377 CE. The Arabic text is produced in facsimile in Varisco and Smith (1998) and my English translation is forthcoming. Varisco (1994). I thank Dr. David King, the noted historian of Islamic science, for providing me with a copy of this important text.

32 ­chapter  To the extent that written ethnographies misrepresent or distort what is observed, the problem is with the representation and not with the experience of being there itself. As John Borneman and Abdellah Hammoudi warn: “There is no way to draw a clear line between the structure of the textual field and the actual vagaries of fieldwork.”24 Abdellah Hammoudi, for example, contrasts his own experience on the pilgrimage to Mecca with the textual analysis of ritual by Talal Asad. Analyzing texts about rituals, argues Hammoudi, creates serious tensions; he stresses that “ambiguities, contradictions, absurdities, and paradoxes are best described in situational encounters” where the anthropologist can focus on “people’s actions, speeches, views, and theories” before creating an ethnographic text.25 Thus, being in the field allows the ethnographer to better appreciate the texture of the life observed before it can ever be set to text. The contextual attitude needed is one in which we should strive to improve our methods of observation and recording, making them more transparent and collaborative; such analysis would be both informed and transformed by experience, not simply for the goal of creating texts that explore our own experience in the field. In the past four decades a major fault line shifted the attention of many cultural anthropologists to the ways cultures are represented through ethnographic writing rather than the empirical basis for the assumed reality we observe as well as document in texts.26 Thus the influential Writing Culture (1986) anthology of James Clifford and George Marcus is subtitled: “The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography.” The contributors to Writing Culture brought out into the open the growing doubts about the validity of ethnographic writing and stimulated a needed debate on the process of anthropology. The importance of the book is obvious, but like all polemics it is more important for the ensuing debate than its specific content. Ironically, Clifford is a historian who never conducted ethnographic fieldwork. In a later reflection on the Writing Culture text he co-​edited with Clifford, Marcus claims it is unfair to dismiss Clifford’s 24

25 26

Borneman and Hammoudi (2009:13). Although coming from a different perspective, Trouillot (1991:37) argues that the “recent discovery of textuality by North American anthropologists is based on a quite limited notion of the text,” ignoring pre-​text, con-​text and content. The critical turn to anthropology as a textual genre has been resisted since it was first proposed, although such counter critiques have not been as widely read; see, for example, Azoulay (1994:16), who notes that texts, unlike people “do not speak back.” Hammoudi (2009:32). One of the main stimuli was a volume entitled Redefining Anthropology, edited by Dell Hymes in 1969 and published in paperback in 1974. As Bob Scholte (1974:431) has remarked, “Anthropology is never only scientific.” I suspect that most of the earlier major anthropologists of the 20th century would have agreed.

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views on ethnography because he had no ethnographic experience, since other contributors had such experience.27 But this does not excuse the fact that Clifford’s understanding of ethnography is limited to texts produced after the fact of being there. This allowed Clifford to challenge the authority of the ethnographer as writer and to ignore the significance of the fieldwork experience itself or challenge the integrity of the data analysis. Without question, this book marked a milestone in reflective criticism, at least from a male perspective. In her critique of this genre, Ruth Behar observes that “Writing Culture, not surprisingly, both saddened and infuriated many women anthropologists.”28 The not-​surprising adverbial clause here is due to the absence of women from the agenda of the authors and the inference by one of the editors that “a woman writing about culture became a contradiction in terms.” In this sense, Micaela di Leonardo, another feminist critic of the male-​centric tenor of ethnography-​as-​text writers, aptly notes that this group ends up “painting rude mustaches on some of our most sacred Mona Lisa texts.”29 Yet another critic, Lila Abu-​Lughod, derides James Clifford’s claim that women had not produced “unconventional forms of writing”; he simply ignored them.30 But beyond Young Turk males savaging their dead-​white-​men ancestors and leaving women out of the picture, the reduction of ethnography to text needs to be countered. Surely ethnographies have prosaic possibilities beyond the attributed poetic licentiousness of their authors. Nor should it be assumed that most field anthropologists have served as political pawns in a conspiratorial “othering” of the people they study. “Leaving aside its logical problems,” notes Adam Kuper in a critical assessment of the Writing Culture approach, “the postmodernist movement has had a paralyzing effect on the discipline of anthropology.”31 The paralysis consists in dismissing the process of fieldwork as though no method can be labeled socially scientific because no one writing about culture can be 27 28 29 30 31

Marcus (2001:175). Behar (1995:4–​5). Other reviewers were also critical of the earlier volume. Birth (1990:555) concludes: “Thus, not only does Writing Culture’s version of anthropology as cultural critique fail logically and pragmatically, it also fails ethically.” di Leonardo (1991:23). Abu-​Lughod, (1990:17). Trouillot (1991:43, note 16) criticizes Clifford for his “indulgent neglect of feminism.” For another feminist critique of the postmodernist turn in anthropology, see Mascia-​Lees, Sharpe and Cohen (1989). Kuper (2000:223). The impact in sociology, which has a stronger focus on quantitative methods, appears to have been less. For a sociological critique of postmodern theories, see Powell and Owen (2007). In their volume, for example, Derek Layder (2007:5) describes the “barrenness of vision and the paucity of descriptive and explanatory power of postmodernism’s uncompromising anti humanism.”

34 ­chapter  fully objective. Fieldwork is then judged only through the filter of the colonial context in which the earliest field studies were carried out. For James Clifford, experience in the field is dismissed as politically charged “[p]‌recisely because it is hard to pin down.”32 Not having experienced a field context himself, it is not surprising that he would find it hard to pin down when only looking at a self-​serving sample of texts that begins with a French priest in the 18th century. Nancy Scheper-​Hughes warns that this kind of postmodernism, as exemplified in texts like Writing Culture, is “an excuse for political and moral dalliance if ever there was one.”33 Regarding critical issues like social justice, structural violence and environmental degradation, Stuart Kirsch notes that “anthropologists have more to contribute to the solution of these problems than their texts.”34 Even a casual survey of reviews of ethnographic texts, stemming back decades, indicates that there has been critique within the genre all along. The problem is an academic bait-​and-​switch in which the anthropologist as author literarily replaces the people studied by the anthropologist. As Peter Rigby succinctly observes, “the objects of anthropological discourse cease to be real people, the production and reproduction of their social life and communities, their exploitation and suffering, and their attempts to fight back: they become the producers of texts, which it is the anthropologist’s job to ‘interpret.’ ”35 Texts written by anthropologists, and indeed ethnographic films, are the bathwater, which can be replaced or refilled, but critical ablutions should not throw out the baby of observed behavior because the bathwater needs changing. The process of ethnographic fieldwork should not be subsumed as mere writing. There is more at stake in giving an account of real people than composing a poem. Ideally criticism of texts, like the debate over methods and theoretical frames, should enhance collection of data, not challenge the nature of such an effort itself. Almost any ethnography, if carefully read, might serve to show the advantage of actually being in a “there.” As an example I return to an individual who became a sacrificial goat for the denigration of “ethnographic authority.” British anthropologist E. E. Evans-​Pritchard wrote what has often been considered the quintessential ethnographic text, The Nuer (1940), although Evans-​Pritchard characterized it as “sometimes scanty and uneven” due to the difficulties in 32 33 34 35

Clifford (1988:37). Scheper-​Hughes (1995:414). The problem, as noted by Geertz (2010:195) is that postmodernism is “more a mood and an attitude than a connected theory.” Kirsch (2018:3). Rigby (1996:89–​90).

35

Culture Is not a Text

living with and interviewing the Nuer.36 Almost half a century later Renato Rosaldo damned both author and text by comparing the early 20th-​century fieldworker with the onerous agenda of a 14th century Catholic inquisitioner.37 A quarter century after Rosaldo’s tar and feathering of Evans-​Pritchard, it is useful to return to both their texts in order to better situate the interpreter of the Nuer in context. Rosaldo’s main point is that Evans-​Pritchard was complicit in the colonial project that subjugated the native peoples of Sudan. It is assumed that the British colonial office would only support him if he could provide details to assist them in their rule. Pointing out flaws in an anthropologist’s methods is fair game, as long as it is remembered when and under what circumstances he conducted his research. Evans-​Pritchard’s work among the Nuer, unlike that of the Azande, was indeed in response to the interests of the colonial administrators, but this does not mean that he condoned the high-​handed policies that disrupted Nuer society and took Nuer lives. In 1937 Evans-​Pritchard wrote that the goal of his experience with colonial administrators was to “humanize policy and administration and to make change less unpleasant to natives than it would otherwise have been.”38 As his early writings demonstrate, he was deeply concerned with the moral issues of colonial .

36

37

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Evans-​Pritchard (1940:9). In addition to the hardship of arriving among the Nuer, he was ignored by most Nuer apart from the youth who he notes did not view him as an “obnoxious” foreigner (Evans-​Pritchard 1940:11). Their disgust, as he indicates, was due to the intervention of the British military, which made his work far more difficult. But on his final trip, the Nuer became “persistent and tireless visitors” (Evans-​Pritchard 1940:14). Rosaldo (1986:78). As Handleman (1994:354) points out, Rosaldo “conflates the power of the textualized, literary gaze with power in the world of living beings.” Salzman (2002:808–​809) challenges Rosaldo’s reflexivist account of fieldwork among the Ilongot as “preposterous.” Geertz (1988:49–​72) later published his own dismissal of the writing style of Evans-​Pritchard, but without challenging the ethnographic data about the Nuer or Azande. Rosaldo did not follow the advice of Karp and Maynard (1983:491) about reading The Nuer: “We can learn from both its achievements and its failures, but we will not learn from the failures until we have mastered the achievements.” For a nuanced account of the work of Evans-​Pritchard in relation to British imperialism, see James (1973). Quoted in Johnson (1982:242). Evans-​Pritchard (1931) published an important work on African sorcery and magic, arguing against the attitude of administrators and missionaries who failed to recognize the local moral basis involved. He noted: “The native does not so much distrust European justice and education as he despairs of the administrator and missionary ever understanding, or attempting to understand, his point of view as expressed in laws and public opinion … The native becomes convinced finally that the European is quite incapable of seeing the difference between right and wrong, between the proper use of a cultural weapon fully sanctioned by public opinion, such as white magic, and a heinous and cold-​blooded murder, such as the crime of black magic or sorcery” (Evans-​Pritchard 1931:22).

36 ­chapter  policy in Sudan. It is reported that his view of the British Governor of the region, C. A. Willis, was one that was spoken of “only in words of four letters.” By pulling phrases out of context, compounded by an American [dis]missing of the nuance of British writing styles, Rosaldo reduces the ethnographic writing of Evans-​Pritchard to a mode that “verges on the comic.”39 The title of Rosaldo’s essay, “From the Door of His Tent,” suggests a scenario from the British comedic Carry On films in which the anthropologist is conflated with a colonial administrator sitting on his comfortable verandah and ordering about the natives. But the purpose of conducting research in the tent, where eventually many Nuer of both sexes congregated, was a pragmatic choice, since the ethnographer was unable to work with specific informants as he had done among the Azande. His tent was not a colonial administrator’s verandah, but a pivotal location to observe everyday life as it occurred in the campsite. The analysis of Nuer culture within both the tent and the text is entirely avoided by Rosaldo, who focuses on his own idiosyncratic reading of the style and ascribed intentionality of the ethnographer. I find it ironic that Rosaldo appeals to Foucault’s “panopticon” as a literary trap for disappearing the “field” beneath the ethnographer’s feet.40 Rosaldo’s panopticon is not very Foucauldian; conflating the debatable notion of “ethnographic authority” with personal views of authorial intentionality is a most egregious un-​Foucauldian faux-​pas. Since Evans-​Pritchard supposedly carried out his field study with “an imperial advantage,” every statement about the Nuer quoted by Rosaldo is assumed to teem with the smug superiority complex attributed to the ethnographer. As a personality, Evans-​Pritchard may not have been a likeable individual, especially to the natives he used to help him

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Rosaldo (1986:90–​91). Rosaldo (1986:92). Anthropologists have borrowed several concepts from the work of Michel Foucault. Paul Rabinow (1984) edited The Foucault Reader. Those anthropologists less than enthralled with the way in which Foucauldian concepts filtered into anthropological writing include D’Andrade (1999:96–​97), Geertz (2010:29–​38) and Sahlins (1999b:410; 2002:40–​41, 67–​68). Others, such as Michael Jackson (1989:171–​179) draw inspiration from Foucault’s analysis of historical epistemes. In a caustic retort to Lila Abu-​Lughod’s invocation of Foucault’s discourse, Sahlin’s (2002:21) describes it as “translating the apparently trivial into the fatefully political by a rhetoric that typically reads like a dictionary of trendy names and concepts, many of them French, a veritable La Ruse of postmodernism.” Similar critiques are found outside the discipline, for example, Berman’s (1988:34) comment that “there is no freedom in Foucault’s world,” and Paglia’s (2013) blistering aside: “The exhausted poststructuralism pervading American universities is abject philistinism masquerading as advanced thought. Everywhere, young scholars labor in bondage to a corrupt and incestuous academic establishment.”

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take his belongings inland to the Nuer. Consider the reflections of Talal Asad, whose main advisor at Oxford was Evans-​Pritchard: I admired him for many things, of course, but I must confess he wasn’t the sort of person I felt very warm toward. He was in many ways a rather prejudiced man, and he reveled in his prejudice. He could say unkind things to make people uncomfortable. There were aspects of him that I thought were really not very likeable.41 It is not my intent to praise Evans-​Pritchard as an “objective” observer, nor to insist that he did not have an exaggerated sense of self, but to turn attention to the content of his writing within the context of his fieldwork. It is a pity Rosaldo did not read beyond The Nuer, to Evans-​Pritchard’s Nuer Religion (1956). The detailed on-​the-​spot description of rituals, interviews with practitioners and ordinary Nuer and exploratory semiotic propositions in Nuer Religion make it as relevant today as when it was written, even given the obvious fact that Nuer culture today is not at all reducible to the ethnographic present of the 1930s discussed by Evans-​Pritchard. This text was influential not because of any colonial medal for service to the crown but from the prestige afforded a professor at Oxford who actually went to live in Sudan, learn Nuer language and observe rituals first hand. This book was written for, and read by, a range of scholars interested in religion as a cross-​cultural phenomenon.42 It opened up intellectual minds that had previously assumed, based on the available missionary and travel texts, that the belief systems of non-​Western “primitives” were too facile and childlike to deserve the title “religion.” In both his earlier writing on the Azande and this work on the Nuer, the value of the ethnography is that it could demonstrate the rationality of the so-​called “native.” The earlier writings of armchair theorist Lucien Lévy-​Bruhl, whose work was discussed at length by Evans-​Pritchard, posited a form of “pre-​logical” or mystical thinking, implying a different mentality between “primitive” and modern Western cultures. Thus, Lévy-​Bruhl broached the famous trope of Brazilian Bororo natives supposedly believing they could be both human and an arara bird at the same time. This was characterized by Lévy-​Bruhl as a violation of the Aristotelian principle of non-​contradiction, suggesting that these natives thought like children and not rational adults. As an armchair theory, Lévy-​Bruhl’s argument was 41 42

Quoted in Scott and Hirschkind (2006:246). Philosophers and historians of religion who respond to Evans-​Pritchard’s analysis of Nuer and Azande religion include Ramsey (1959), Smith (1993) and Winch (1958); see also Springs (2008:936).

38 ­chapter  dismissed out of hand by most anthropologists. While noting that Lévy-​Bruhl exaggerated the differences between so-​called “civilized and primitive modes of thought,” Evans-​Pritchard recognized that the deeper issue was the function that certain kinds of thought serve in any society.43 It was as wrong to exclude the mystical in our own Western culture as it was to exclude the empirical in native societies. Ironically, as J. Z. Smith pointed out some time ago, the problem was not with Bororo mentality but in the translation.44 The problem arose from a 19th century German traveler interpreting the meaning of “is” for a native language that has no equivalent “is” verb. Evans-​Pritchard contributed to this discussion of rationality with his analysis of the Nuer claim that a human twin was a bird. “It seems odd, if not absurd, to a European when he is told that a twin is a bird as though it were an obvious fact,” notes Evans-​Pritchard before providing an explanation of why this is not a contradiction to the Nuer.45 They are not equating flesh-​and-​blood twins with real birds, but rather view both as relating through their animus as a spiritual metaphor to Kwoth, their expression of the ultimate divine power. Had he not been able to discuss this usage in Nuer language and observe the specific ritual acts involved, his analysis would have been mere second-​hand speculation, as had been the case for Lévy-​Bruhl in misunderstanding Bororo spirituality. In his preface to Nuer Religion Evans-​Pritchard refers to the difficulties he faced in analyzing Nuer religion, not because of his accommodation in a tent, but due to the nuances of Nuer terms and the vague English analytical terms available for understanding religion beyond the major monotheisms. As he explains: This difficulty is not easily overcome, because it is not merely a matter of definitions but involves also personal judgement. It would be useless to deny this and rash to ignore it. It may be said that in describing and interpreting a primitive religion it should make no difference whether the writer is an agnostic or a Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu or whatever he may be, but in fact it makes a great deal of difference, for even in a descriptive study judgement can in no way be avoided.46 At the end of his lengthy analysis, Evans-​Pritchard offers reflections on contemporary theories of religion, noting which “have not been sustained by research.”47 43 44 45 46 47

Evans-​Pritchard (1965:91–​92). J. Z. Smith (1993). Evans-​Pritchard (1956:128–​133). Evans-​Pritchard (1956:vii). Evans-​Pritchard (1956:311).

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He is only able to say this because of his ethnographic field research. He concludes that the “Nuer are undoubtedly a primitive people by the usual standards of reckoning, but their religious thought is remarkably sensitive, refined, and intelligent. It is also highly complex.”48 Clearly Evans-​Pritchard did not simply parrot the “usual standards of reckoning” found in his own society. His conclusion resonated with other scholars, not simply because he was there and thus had to be believed, as Rosaldo insists, but because of the quality of his documentation and skill in comparative analysis. If there is an inquisitioner in the mix, it is surely Rosaldo who falsely brands the ethnographer as a positivist heretic. 2

Texting Out of Context There is no fundamental epistemological distinction between ethnography and a multi-​layered novel.49 Chris Barker

Why should modern anthropologists reject their own tradition of ethnographic fieldwork in favor of mimicking textual analysis?50 Borneman and Hammoudi

In response to recent theoretical preoccupation in anthropology with critical scholarship outside the discipline, I  find it necessary to counter the textual attitude, exemplified in Edward Said’s Orientalism, that reads culture as if it were a text, and a modern kind of text at that. Novels, no matter how many layers, are imagined works of fiction; there is nothing imaginary in what happens to flesh and blood people anywhere. As Regna Darnell reminds us, “In writing fiction there is no reality check.”51 Ethnographic texts, whether successful or not in a critic’s eyes, attempt to analyze observable human behavior, not simply represent it in an aesthetic format. I would go further and argue that the metaphorically mesmerizing notion of culture as a “text” is a hermeneutic dead end, no matter how brightly lit up within Cultural Studies, for engaging the real world we live in. Human culture cannot be created in a factory or generated in a test tube, so neither should it be approached only as word play. As

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Evans-​Pritchard (1956:311). Barker (2003:26). Borneman and Hammoudi (2009:9). Darnell (2001:321).

40 ­chapter  Bryan Turner suggests, “Textualism has resulted in a vicious solipsism in which there can be no distinction between fictional writing and social reality.”52 Irrespective of the intentionality or relevance of individual authors, the tools used to analyze and critique literary and philosophical texts are poorly adapted to understanding the evolution and current diversity of human culture. Recognizing the rather obvious fact that texts are enmeshed in a real world does not necessarily imply that the conceptual tools used to analyze texts, especially stemming from Western literary genres, are the best suited for understanding that reality. The concepts of culture used in the social sciences are not like a written text in any form. Take Moby Dick or Heart of Darkness or Cat’s Cradle or the Magna Carta or The Declaration of Independence: all of these share a commonality as texts written down in an original or unchangeable form. Like a photograph or work of art, the form freezes the content. It can be interpreted and re-​interpreted ad abundantiam, but the text itself ceased to be dynamic the moment it was inscribed. An ethnographic text or film of something cultural must inevitably suffer the same fate. It freezes the object of study between the liminal zone of the ethnographic present of the ethnographer’s presence and the writing of the ethnography. But what humans do goes beyond what is being observed and recorded by other humans; culture is a continuous process that can only be partially represented, not fully revealed, in writing. What anthropologists call culture is always in movement; human behavior occurs in flux rather than as a steady state, despite the attempts of strict functionalists to freeze the motion into an interlocking set of social facts. To substitute the representation for the reality is the sine qua non of fiction, but a cardinal sin if used to view humanity through a social science lens. The slick description of ethnography as less a formal “scientific” method and “more like that of a literary critic” was valorized by Clifford Geertz, with a wink and a nod to the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle.53 But at first Geertz 52

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Turner (1994:7). Michel-​Rolph Trouillot (1991:37) writes: “The recent discovery of textuality by North American anthropologists is based on a quite limited notion of the text.” As Paul Roth (1989:557) notes, “once the assumption is made that ethnography is not a science, scientific standards are no longer essential even to the critique of ethnography.” Geertz (1973:9). As Susan Trencher (2002:227, note 10)  notes, “By the time Geertz borrowed Ryle’s ideas, the latter had been widely criticized as: philosophically naïve (claiming to solve the problems of dualism based on an insufficient understanding of it); a nominalist (for reducing the range of ‘facts,’ and preferring description to explanation); and a ‘logical behaviorist’; as well as making his own category mistake (reducing philosophy to logic).” Geertz was influenced by a number of social theorists and philosophers, including Ludwig Wittgenstein (Springs 2008). June Nash (1997:21) notes that Geertz did more than wink:  “By exposing the artifice in ethnographic writing, Clifford Geertz

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was thinking more of the way a historian constructs a reading of a manuscript “foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries” than a Victorian novel.54 In my own historical work on “medieval” Yemeni Arabic manuscripts, I come across some that are in poor shape or missing segments, but I also find manuscripts that are perfectly preserved and meticulously copied. Yet, like all texts, they share a common limitation: they exist in a frozen form, like a snapshot. I cannot tease the kind of information out of these texts that I can gain from observing behavior in the field and talking with farmers. Geertz also compares culture to “an ensemble of texts, themselves ensembles, which the anthropologist strains to read over the shoulders of those to whom they properly belong.”55 This shoulder-​view of interpretive ethnography fails as a useful metaphor, no matter how many texts are placed within the native point of view. While any outside observer may peer over the shoulders of someone, participant observation requires a dialogue between the ethnographer and the informant. It is the face-​to-​face encounter that informs the process of ethnography, not a passive reading over or into the behavior observed. Ethnography is an eye-​to-​eye endeavor informed through dialogue, not over-​the-​shoulder guess work. Those who think all ethnography is fiction fail to note that there are different kinds of texts, just as there are different forms of fiction. A novel, for example, may be based on reality but it results from an individual creative effort and not an attempt to document reality.56 Jane Austin and William Faulkner mesmerize the reader because of the way they express quotidian life. The

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opened to suspicion the very question as to whether the understanding of humankind was advanced by fieldwork.” Although Geertz is recognized outside anthropology as the major anthropological icon of the last half of the 20th century, Laura Nader (in Scheper-​ Hughes 1995:427) complains that he was responsible for an “erasure of anthropology as a discipline” and that his followers “did not read much anthropology either.” Geertz was not trained in the sciences, and as S. P. Reyna (1994:558) notes, “Geertz gave up science because he did not ‘buy’ it.” Rabinow (2011:29) suggests that Geertz used the label “science” as a rhetorical device. Geertz (1973:10). Geertz (1973:452). As Sherry Ortner (2016:49) observes, those critical of Geertz argued that “treating culture as literary texts, they ignored the harsh realities of power that drove so much of human history.” As William Roseberry (1994:24) observes, “A text is written; it is not writing. To see culture as an ensemble of texts or an art form is to remove culture from the process of creation.” Steven Caton (2005:66) writes: “Like the historian, the anthropologist enters into an implicit ‘contract’ with the reader in averring that his ethnographic representation of the world is as factually true as he can make it. Unlike the historian or anthropologist (or for that matter, journalist), a writer of fiction is bound by no such contract.”

42 ­chapter  ethnographer likewise uses his or her creative energy to communicate, but the best ethnographies are those that seek a realistic fit with what was observed above and beyond achieving literary excellence. No ethnography can be totally objective, nor is this form of writing the only kind of truth useful for understanding cultural others.57 But if our only understanding of each other is from words written down rather than experiences shared, we have little to contribute as anthropologists. I fear the perilous outcome if the immediacy of experiencing culture through fieldwork is hermeneutically sealed as a mere textual illusion. Consider the charge of Henry Munson, an ethnographer with fieldwork experience in Morocco: “If we are all free to spin the hermeneutic wheel as we will without any attempt to assess our interpretations empirically, why should anyone take us seriously? If all we write is fiction, then why not leave the task to those who do it really well.”58 Clifford Geertz, like James Clifford, was selective in the ethnographies he chose to criticize. In an essay that in effect reduces ethnographic fieldwork to persuasion through writing, Geertz suggested that ethnographies “tend to look at least as much like romances as they do like lab reports;” this sets up a disingenuous either/​or.59 It is possible to find examples of both, from Mead’s novelesque Coming of Age in Samoa to Malinowki’s detail-​driven Argonauts, but the critical difference in both cases is that neither is intended as fiction. There is nothing “romantic” about Mead’s appendices, where she describes her research methods; nor does Malinowski’s penchant for shocking his reader limit him to only describing Trobriand canoe-​building skills. The vast majority of ethnographies by the time Geertz was writing his essay were neither presented as journalistic romances nor as mere lab reports, but rather represented attempts by trained scholars, some of whom were not skilled writers, to document and communicate what they observed. I  am curious how Geertz would have classified his own previous ethnographic writing, such as Peddlers and Princes: Social Development and Economic Change in Two Indonesian Towns (1963). In this study, based on his fieldwork in Java and Bali, Geertz concludes that anthropological studies are relevant “to the whole range of development issues from import policy and taxation to industrial location and the allocation of scarce resources, for they describe the dimensions of the sociocultural world within which these issues take on a determinate and hence resolvable 57 58 59

Some anthropologists have experimented in writing fiction as well as ethnography, a major example being Michael Jackson’s 1977 ethnography on the Kuranko, followed by his 1986 Barawa, and the Ways Birds Fly in the Sky. Munson (1993:185). Geertz (1988:8).

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form.”60 To the extent Geertz was able to write readable prose, it does not automatically place his ethnography in the genre of romance. The fact that a field loosely called “Cultural Studies” evolved out of literary studies and its practitioners now far outnumber the guilded discipline of anthropology is reason enough to revisit the ways we conceptualize culture. I have no wish to dismantle this large and legitimate intellectual field, nor do I blame scholars in literary studies, for they have not invaded the field of anthropology and forced their methods down our collective throats. As John Borneman and Abdellah Hammoudi observe, “No doubt the study of literary output, with a recognition of the authority of textual constructions, adds a good deal of information about prevalent concepts and their institutional settings, but it does not tell us much about the pertinence of all this to human action.”61 I do, however, blame those anthropological colleagues who have in theory slit their own throats, ignoring the theoretical and methodological insights of the discipline’s founders and sustainers as though these have no redeeming value. The destructive deconstruction of the study of culture has also opened up an intellectual vacuum for the return of biological determinism, despite all the effort by anthropologists in the last century to debunk it.62 The reflexivist critique of ethnography should yield more productive and responsible gathering of field data, not a rejection of the process itself for the all too inevitable flaws in its products. ““Ethnography, in other words,” suggests Michael Agar, “is a construction that shows how social action in the context of one world can be understood as coherent from the point of view of another.”63 All ethnographic writing needs to stand the air, even if it is gale force, of scrutiny. The problem I have with much of the reflexivist critique of ethnographic writing in the past several decades is not the writing about “writing culture” but writing as if culture were only something that is understood through the way it is written.64 Substance, which is the value of what is being documented, is ignored in favor of style. There has been considerable resistance to the notion that the most significant thing about an ethnography is the 60 61 62 63 64

Geertz (1963:157). Borneman and Hammoudi (2009:15). This point is made by Goldschmidt (2000:799), who argues that the four-​field approach of American anthropology keeps a “balanced position in the confrontation between the biological and the cultural.” Agar (2004:21). For a review of the reflexivist dismissal of fieldwork, see Lewis (2014), Poewe (1996) and Trencher (2000). As Nancy Scheper-​Hughes (1995:419) suggests, “The answer to the critique of anthropology is not a retreat from ethnography but rather an ethnography that is personally engaged and politically committed.”

44 ­chapter  person who wrote it. Robert Murphy, for example, complains that self-​critical ethnography is “not one that finds the ethnographer more interesting than the natives.”65 Paul Roth observes that “Stylized self-​reflection no more guarantees authenticity than does a pose of detachment.”66 Rejecting the navel-​gazing of reflexivist writing does not mean failing to put the observer into the picture; even the avowed cultural materialist Marvin Harris finds this a valid point.67 There is an underlying assumption in much of the critique that reality is mainly interesting for the ways it is represented or said to be misrepresented. To reduce an ethnographic text to representation qua representation suggests that there is no observable reality worth writing about. Argue as you like about Foucault’s playful reading of the author function, but every ethnography has a real author whose ethnographic fieldwork in a real place is the starting point for the text. When James Clifford suggests that “Ethnography’s tradition is that of Herodotus and of Montesquieu’s Persian,” he conflates the product with the process.68 The process of ethnography as participant observation, its methodological underpinning, is not textual but experiential. The Greek Herodotus may have been a traveling historian, but he held a blatantly biased view of the non-​Hellenic world, not surprising for someone who lived two and a half millennia ago; he is not the Greek forebearer of modern ethnography. Montesquieu’s pun-​in-​cheek Persian letters were written with no experience among real Persians; should his satire be read as a serious communication of what Persian life was really like?69 Trashing the intentions of major anthropologists like Evans-​Pritchard or Malinowski easily becomes a play with words on words. The mantra that “writing about” must be “writing against” because of who does the writing removes all pretense of scientific method from anthropology as the praxis of a social science. Ironically, some of those who are most critical of writing about culture fail to write clearly in their own scholarly rhetoric, as they establish their anti-​ ethnographic authority. What exactly is one to make of Stephen Tyler’s comment about polyphonic and dialogic texts not being about representation because they “defy the ontic irresponsibility of the rhetoric of that mimetic mode and reckon differently”?70 Where are we to locate “a readership caught up in 65 66 67 68 69 70

Murphy (1994:57). Roth (1989:560). Harris (1999:78). Clifford and Marcus (1986:2). The trope that Herodotus was either the father of ethnography (e.g., Clair 2003:3) or history assumes that ethnography is simply writing about the other. For a critique of this contention, see Varisco (2007:187). Tyler’s reply in Roth (1989:566).

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the post-​Darwinian bourgeois experience of time” with “cultural islands out of time (or ‘without history’)” described by many ethnographers as having “a persistent prelapsarian appeal.”71 Does this mean that the Trobriand Islands are now firmly postlapsarian? As Robert Murphy notes, postmodern anthropologists eschew clarity when they create “thick writing” sentences that “range from one word to involuted puzzle boxes of embedded clauses.”72 A  writer need not be overtly obtuse in sorting out the abstruse. Nor should the long-​standing critical engagement with the nature of science lead us into the blinds of assuming that all forms of rigorously analyzing human interaction, whether quantitative or qualitative, are on a par with poetry or prose fiction. The absurd claim by Chris Barker and other chroniclers of Cultural Studies that “there is no fundamental epistemological distinction between an ethnography and a multi-​layered novel” suggests both a fuzzy view of what “epistemology” means and a distinct lack of reading actual ethnographies. Most ethnographers gain knowledge through methods designed to elicit what is being observed and try to communicate the results as faithfully as possible. A novelist relies on his or her creative imagination in order to embellish rather than to document real behavior. Whether or not an ethnographer’s interpretation is correct, the method that informs the writing is not overtly aimed at reducing reality to fiction. Just as there is no single format for the novel, there has never been one way of writing an ethnography. However, to conclude that therefore an ethnography can take any form, as Stephen Tyler implies, is a “counsel of despair.”73 Two of the earliest ethnographic texts which obtained classic status were Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) and Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa (1928). Although they both describe island people in the Pacific, they are very different kinds of texts. Malinowski’s account is descriptive, documenting in detail crafts like canoe building, while reflecting his theoretical approach to culture as functioning to meet basic human needs. He provides extensive information in the Trobriand language, which he had to learn in order to conduct his research. Mead, on the other hand, wrote in a more popular narrative style at times resembling a novel. Although she provides descriptive details on the young Samoan girls she interviewed, it appears that most of her field data was collected in English. Unlike Malinowski, the main goal of her 71 72 73

Clifford (1986:111). Murphy (1994:56). He also calls this “egghead rap-​talk.” Layton (1977:212), responding to Tyler (1986:123). In his review of Writing Culture, Birth (1990:554) suggests that Tyler’s article “verges on the incomprehensible.” For an extended critique of Tyler’s anti-​science stance, see Reyna (1994:561–​563).

46 ­chapter  book and indeed her entire life was to show the relevance of studying other cultures to better understand our own. Of course an ethnography can never be a totally objective substitute for the reality observed. “No science dealing with human beings can ever attain the degree of objectivity possible to the physical and biological sciences,” noted Ralph Linton in 1936.74 What matters is the fit between what is said or written with the documented observable situation and interchange between the anthropologist and those she or he is writing about. Evaluating any given ethnography is made more difficult by the fact that in many cases there is no way to independently verify what is being described. Even when an anthropologist visits a cultural group studied earlier by another anthropologist, the context will never be the same. Cultures are not static because human behavior is dynamic, which is why every ethnography relates to a specific “ethnographic present.” It is usually the reader, rather than the ethnographer as author, who essentializes what is written as a kind of timeless whole. Fieldwork, no matter how long and how intimate, does not make the anthropologist one with the local culture. As Cora Du Bois, reflecting on her fieldwork in India, once noted, “None of us are experienced ‘India wallas.’ We are, in varying degrees, amateurs (in both senses of the word) of the culture.”75 But amateurs can do more than write poetry. First fieldwork, usually conducted for an academic degree, is by definition provisional and often admittedly sketchy. Even when the ethnographer is able to spend one or two years in a given site, the data gathered seem miniscule in terms of what it is not possible to observe or document. As I returned to America after living over a full year in the valley of al-​Ahjur, I wondered if I had enough information to write a dissertation. There was so much more I wanted to know, so many unanswered questions, some of which I realized could probably never be answered. I never assumed that my dissertation would be the last word on the subject, but hoped it would contribute to a debate over the adequacy of models used to interpret behavior. Most ethnographies I have read do not claim to be comprehensive and do recognize the difficulties of doing fieldwork. “In his early experience in the field the anthropologist is constantly grappling with the intangible,” notes Raymond Firth about his first work in 1928. “The reality of the native life is going on all around him, but he himself is not yet in focus to see it.”76 In his detailed We the Tikopia (1936) Firth confides that many of the problems he recognized in his ethnography could be better treated with a return visit, which he was able to do in 1952 and 1966. Return 74 75 76

Linton (1936:3–​4). Du Bois(1986:227). Firth (1967:2).

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visits to our field site and continuing contact with several of the people who live there have enabled both Najwa and myself to revise earlier thinking. In focusing on a specific ethnography, as the articles in Writing Culture do, critics invariably freeze the “ethnographic present” as though “being there” results in little more than a faded Kodak snapshot. No consideration is given to a number of ethnographic projects that have resulted in return visits to the same site or long-​term field research of students and faculty. There are several relevant examples of such projects, which can justifiably be claimed to have “changed the face of anthropology.”77 One of these is long-​term field study among the Navaho. Clyde Kluckhohn, who carried out ethnographic fieldwork among the Navaho in New Mexico during the 1920s, began the Ramah project in 1936 on the socialization of Navaho children, which was later focused on a comparative study of values from 1949–​1955, followed by more recent research on healing methods and most recently resulting in collaborative work with the Navaho.78 Tracing the history of a project like this illustrates not only the change in methods and goals of ethnographic fieldwork but the lessons learned. What started out as salvage work, study of a marginalized community whose way of life was severely threatened, shifted as the paradigms in anthropological theory evolved. Beyond the archival value of the past documentation for the Navaho, the current emphasis on collaboration shows just how far anthropology has come of age in engaging the people studied as partners in the process. 3

Culture beyond Texts Possibly it is inevitable and even desirable that representatives of different disciplines should emphasize different criteria and utilize varying shades of meaning [of culture]. But one thing is clear to us from our survey: it is time for a stock-​taking, for a comparing of notes, for conscious awareness of the range of variation. Otherwise the notion that is conveyed to the wider company of educated men will be so loose, so diffuse as to promote confusion rather than clarity.79 Kroeber and Kluckhohn, 1952

77 78 79

Kemper and Royce (2002:xvi). See their text for twelve accounts of long-​term and large-​ scale ethnographic projects. Collaborative research also includes ethno-​archaeology, research that critics of ethnography completely ignore. Lamphere (2002). Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1963:7). This sentiment was expanded by Kroeber in a joint statement with Talcott Parsons about the confusion between anthropological and sociological usage of the terms “culture” and “society.” “We therefore propose a truce to quarreling over

48 ­chapter  As I read Writing Culture –​my own words especially –​I feel most profoundly their historicity, their distance. They belong to another world.80 James Clifford

In their volume on culture concepts Kroeber and Kluckhohn, far from thinking that they had all the answers or that anthropology was somehow the only way to understand humanity, focused on the history of the culture concept to illustrate the range, not the fixed truth, of variation in approaching the human sense of being human. Their critical anthology, ridiculed by some as old-​fashioned and out of date, should be revisited as an invitation to continue debating and refining anthropological approaches to the complex reality representable by the term “culture.” The range of variation in applying a culture concept evolved through lessons learned in ethnographic fieldwork, not by endlessly recycling the important, but hardly definitive, social theorists of the European Enlightenment. In his founding of the modern discipline of anthropology, Tylor was well aware that much of the information collected by travelers and missionaries suffered from bias and misunderstanding. His vision was to appropriate the emerging scientific methods to better understand the wide variation of cultural behavior. Like Darwin, Tylor was not a seer and should not be judged Whiggishly by what we know today. But his role in advocating a scientific approach to collecting ethnographic data must be acknowledged. James Clifford took anthropology to task three decades ago and challenged the notion of “ethnographic authority” in representing cultural others. His critique of the very idea of ethnographic fieldwork and analysis centers on what he sees as weaknesses in the ethnographer. Rather than engaging critically with the information provided in the early ethnographic writings of Franz Boas, Bronislaw Malinowski, Margaret Mead, Marcel Griaule and Radcliffe-​ Brown, he lumps these pioneers together as communicating “a vision of ethnography as both scientifically demanding and heroic.”81 Early fieldwork was indeed demanding, given the ever-​present health issues, difficulties of communicating in the native language and frequent lack of modern amenities. But

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whether culture is best understood from the perspective of society or society from that of culture. As in the famous case of heredity “versus” environment, it is no longer a question of how important each is, but of how each works and how they are interwoven with each other,” they suggest (Kroeber and Parsons 1948:583). Clifford (2012:419). In a later rambling reflection, Clifford (2015:27) reminisces that Writing Culture was embedded in a historical moment, but appears to admit that his own writing had too much “certainty of its uncertainty.” His focus is on style, not on the failure to provide a historical defense of the writing against ethnography. Clifford (1988:30).

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the claim that these anthropologists promoted themselves as scientific heroes says more about individual personalities and students’ accolades than ethnographic methods, which have been used in various ways by literally hundreds of trained individuals. Franz Boas was adamant that scientists were not immune from cultural bias, noting in 1928 that the “emancipation from current thought is for most of us as difficult in science as it is in everyday life.”82 It was his emphasis on fieldwork that has enriched the discipline. As Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs emphasize, “Fieldwork produced observations of facts, not speculations about historical or psychological origins. Their publication, which constituted a major component of the Boasian program, transformed the texts into stable, publicly accessible observations that could be subjected to scrutiny, analysis, and comparison, like the collective observations on what took place in the glass container.”83 Bronislaw Malinowski was keen on stressing his work as “scientific,” but this must be seen in light of the contemporary social science opposition to the value of studying “primitive” others. In a classic article on Trobriand views of birth, Malinowski laid out the reasons for maintaining a scientific approach in the field: “The often fragmentary, incoherent, non-​organic nature of much of the present ethnological material is due to the cult of ‘pure fact.’ As if it were possible to wrap up in a blanket a certain number of ‘facts as you find them’ and bring them all back for the home student to generalize upon and to build up his theoretical constructions upon. But the fact is that such a proceeding is quite impossible.”84 Similarly, Margaret Mead’s much contested Coming of Age in Samoa was an important rejoinder to the racially-​tinged biological determinism of psychologist G. Stanley Hall’s theory of adolescence.85 Ethnographies should be read in the context of their time rather than deconstructed post hoc as politically charged allegoric fantasy.

82 83 84 85

Boas (1928:206). His student, Edward Sapir (1994:42) argued in the 1930s: “If we are honest with ourselves we must recognize that no matter how careful and scientific one tries to be, the student of culture faces some serious methodological difficulties.” Bauman and Briggs (2003:273). Malinowski (1916:418–​419). Mead’s work should be read alongside Hall’s (1921) massive study of adolescence, where savages are depicted as children in need of civilized salvation and the teen age years were everywhere seen as destined for stress. The caustic critique of Derek Freeman on Mead’s discussion of Samoan sexuality is discussed in detail by Shankman (2009). The fact that Freeman disagreed with Mead’s findings should not be seen as a failure of ethnographic method. “Different ethnographers will produce ethnographies that will differ from each other,” notes Michael Agar (2004:20), “That is to be celebrated because they can be compared to obtain a larger perspective than just one alone can provide.”

50 ­chapter  Clifford’s six-​fold dissembling of ethnographic authority shows a distinct lack of understanding of changes in the development of fieldwork methods. Nor has Clifford examined anthropologists’ analysis of the relevance of ethnography for understanding the culture concept.86 I find it hard to see a problem with the idea that a trained anthropologist, admittedly not with the same sophistication in the 1920s as later, held an advantage over amateurs and missionaries. Had Clifford read critically some of the missionary and amateur travel accounts, he might have seen how blatantly biased these usually were. Consider the case of the Nuer about whose religious system Evans-​Pritchard wrote a ground-​breaking study.87 In the mid-​19th century Sir Samuel Baker, a British officer, described the Nuer as not having any religion, “nor is the darkness of their minds enlightened by even a ray of superstition.”88 A local missionary described Nuer religion as based on fear and terror, but Evans-​Pritchard was able to demonstrate through his limited contact with the Nuer that there is comfort and hope along with the inevitable fears that religion evokes. Nor does Clifford appear to have read beyond a few “classic” ethnographies of the past, at least in English; there is only one reference in his 20-​page bibliography to an article in the American Ethnologist, which has been publishing current ethnographic research since 1974. In emphasizing the “power of observation” Clifford misses the reason it is called “participant observation” by anthropologists. To participate means to engage with the people the ethnographer is living with, not to simply walk around with a notebook and jot down observations. The limitations of mere visualization are well described by Michael Jackson in his ethnographic engagement with the Kuranko of Sierra Leone as “lived experience.”89 Drawing on the radical empiricism of William James, Jackson argues that it is the interaction between observer and observed that is critical in the ethnographic encounter. “As for our comparative method,” writes Jackson, “it becomes less a matter of finding ‘objective’ similarities and differences between other cultures than of exploring similarities and differences between our own experience and the experience of others.”90 This can only happen when the anthropologist is

86 87 88 89 90

See LeVine (1984). As Herb Lewis (2014:xiii) observes, “As a rule these works are rich with references to current critical and theoretical literature but largely devoid of references to the books and papers of the anthropologists whose work is condemned.” Evans-​Pritchard (1956). He mentions the missionary reaction on p. 312. Quoted by Evans-​Pritchard (1965:607). Baker was speaking to the Ethnological Society of London in 1866. Jackson (1989:2). Jackson (1989:4).

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literally there, not sitting on a colonial-​era verandah, in a contemporary academic study or delivering a paper at a university workshop. Clifford’s deconstruction of ethnographic authority, based solely on his reading of a select sample of dated ethnographic texts, hinges on what he sees as ambiguity with the idea of experience: “Precisely because it is hard to pin down, ‘experience’ has served as an effective guarantee of ethnographic authority.”91 This echoes Geertz’s mischievous “Vas you dere, Sharlie?” trope from Baron Munchausen.92 The hubris that a person’s account must be accepted because he or she was there is hardly something invented by anthropologists. It has been a common trope of travel accounts for centuries. But there are multiple ways of “being there.” If ethnographic documentation was based solely on the mantra “I saw it with my own eyes,” this would hardly be proof of truth or accuracy. Good ethnographies provide sufficient information to evaluate the claims being made. Many times earlier ethnographers recorded information that is of historical value for the people studied.93 The point that Clifford evades is that nothing at all remotely resembling the actual situation can be said if one is not actually in a real “there.” The literary critic is free to feel at home in an arm chair, parsing a narrative, but the ethnographer must be physically present to observe behavior as it happens and try to make sense of it. As an anthropologist, I argue that it is important to go beyond the skewed textual attitude of Western cultural traditions in order to consider the ways in which “culture” is lived worldwide, whether in literate or predominantly oral societies. Anthropologists have been documenting cultural groups for more than a century, no longer as open windows to our evolutionary past, but as evidence for the diversity of human experience in distinct contexts. Edward Tylor’s seminal definition of culture: “Culture or civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired of man as a member of society” signaled a major paradigm shift in studying humanity.94 Tylor’s approach to culture as a “complex whole” rather than a “civilized” 91 92 93 94

Clifford (1988:37). Geertz (1988:5). Lewis (2014:60) notes that his 1950s fieldwork among the Oromo in Ethiopia provided details on political processes at the time that Ethiopian scholars and members of the local community find valuable for better understanding their own past. Tylor (1871:1). For his re-​orientation of 19th century anthropology, Tylor is credited as the father of modern anthropology e.g., Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1963:14, Leach 1967:24, Lévi-​Strauss 1967:19. In the last three decades many introductory anthropology texts have begun with Tylor’s seminal definition; e.g., Hicks and Gwynne (1994:47); see also the discussion by Brumann (1999:S4).

52 ­chapter  few offers a broad but meaningful path to better understand what it means to be human. His elaboration of culture was significant in placing all human societies within an evolutionary framework and proposing the psychic unity of mankind. This holistic approach to culture differed dramatically from the prevailing view that man was created a little less than the angels or that Western man had attained the pinnacle of rationality. As Edward Sapir, in his class lecture notes written in the 1930s, noted, “it is illusory to think culture is clearly defined” in Tylor’s quote.95 Sapir considered Tylor’s definition as an orientation but realized that it was inadequate to explain the generative values that result in patterns of behavior and at the same time explain individual variation. He warned against conflating the connotations of “cultural” and “social” into a homogenous whole with no explanatory power.96 Sapir, a brilliant linguist with field experience among native Americans, also recognized the fact that our concepts about culture and society were “pre-​judged in advance by the culture of the observer.”97 It is important to remember that Sapir was writing half a century before James Clifford. The debates among anthropologists about how best to approach culture have not been sterile, simply parroting Tylor’s broad definition. The critical comments of earlier anthropologists like Sapir deserve a re-​reading, for most anthropologists today a first reading, in order to mitigate the hubris of contemporary scholars who think the wheels they inventively spin inevitably carry more weight than those of their intellectual ancestors. Isaac Newton, the godfather of gravity-​driven physics, is noted for remarking that he felt like a dwarf standing on the shoulders of giants. The origin of the metaphor appears to stem from the 12th century Bernard of Chartres, quoted by his contemporary John of Salisbury, in the phrase nanos gigantum humeris insidentes (dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants).98 Anthropology is no exception; we see farther today because of the work of men like Tylor and Sapir and women like Margaret Mead and Nora Zeale Hurston. The point is that we progress not simply by our own individual ability but by building on the work of those who came before us. Anthropology built on Tylor and Boas just as biology built on Darwin and physics on Newton. We can see further because of what we now regard, in hindsight, as successes and failures of these

95 96 97 98

Sapir (1994:35). This caution is echoed by Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1963:79), who state: “Moreover, all ‘definitions’ are constructed from a point of view –​which is all too often left unstated.” Sapir (1994:47). Sapir (1994:48). John of Salisbury (1955:167).

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past scholars. These giants were products of their times, but their intellectual insights are worth engaging critically rather than disparaging out of hand. The problem with those who fail to learn from past perspectives is that they remain dwarves, stunted by their own self-​imposed ignorance. My argument here is hardly novel, although it is as necessary today as ever before. The distinguished American anthropologist Eric Wolf notes that “knowledge and insights gained in the past can generate new questions, and that new departures can incorporate the accomplishments of the past.”99 Sidney Mintz, acknowledging that some ethnographers have been ethnocentric, observes:  “If we wish to call these ethnographers into question, we should nonetheless use caution in trashing the results of their fieldwork.”100 Even Clifford Geertz, who was not immune to iconoclastic critique, urged his readers that “there are better things to do with even a defective inheritance than trash it.”101 It is bad enough to pay no attention to our intellectual predecessors, but quite beyond the pale to either urinate or ejaculate all over them, as do some of those who write against culture, with iconclastic hubris. Much of the current discussion by those who would reduce ethnography to poetry and politics suffers from a textual bias, in which culture is a pretext to opine on what texts mean rather than what human beings actually do and say they do as they do it. If “culture” is mainly something to be teased out of texts, whatever the genre, then our analysis is reduced either to the Nietzschean nightmare of a truth-​to-​power play or tail-​wag-​the-​dog Derridaian word play, both ultimately self-​serving chimeras. If the tools of literary criticism, valuable as they may be for the purpose of eliciting meaning from texts, are to trump participant field observation and reflectively sound ethnographic description, then we should fear, as Professor Turner warns, the end of anthropology. 4

So What is Culture? We cannot take culture for a rigidly defined thing. [But perhaps there are nevertheless some common themes we might identify and thence arrive at out own idea of] the meaning of the concept of culture.102 Edward Sapir, 1930s

99 100 101 102

Wolf (1994:220). Mintz (2000:176). Geertz (2000:18). Sapir (1994:23), from a reconstruction of his lecture notes.

54 ­chapter  One of the reasons “culture” has been so hard to delimit is that its abstractness makes any single concrete referent out of the question…”103 Kroeber and Kluckhohn

The reality that anthropologists investigate is the shared diversity of a humanity which has evolved from earlier non-​human species and shares in its bodily and basic mental forms an affinity with the other great apes in its extended family. Darwin suggested that humans differed by degree from other animals, but this idea was resisted in both theological and philosophical circles of his time, in addition to the man on the street who did not want a monkey for an uncle. However this totality of human experience is conceptualized, a major lesson of over a century of anthropological research is that some elements assumed in the past to be solely human, like tool-​making or the moral quality of empathy, are shared with other species. We can choose to restrict the idea of “culture” to our own species, Homo sapiens, but it is obvious that we cannot use such a bounded view of who we are to explain what it means to be human. The common usage of “culture” in the broad sense is in reference to what humans can be observed to share over time. This sense is not about to disappear, nor need it be an obstacle to interpreting the kinds of things that appear to be unique to our species. What matters is not any specific definition or concept of culture, but the ways in which we study ourselves. Anthropologists have never been willing to agree on a definitive culture concept, apart from the most general sense as a way to refer to human behavior in social contexts. No single culture concept could capture the complexity of human life, past and present. There is always a focus, whether on the material dimension, the economic aspects, the political and ideological, or the cognitive and psychological. All of these approaches are intertwined and not independent variables. Culture is not a thing, whether thought to be organic or superorganic, but an invented concept to deal with a reality that is not easily defined. Debates over the “reality” of culture confuse the issue by conflating the concept with what it is meant to represent. This is hardly unique to anthropology. Scientists refer to atomic particles and genes without suggesting that the concepts do more than give us a way to describe the structure of the universe and our genetic makeup. As Adam Kuper concludes in his survey of anthropological approaches to culture, “it is a poor strategy to separate out a cultural sphere and to treat it in its own terms.”104 Yet, whatever the shortcomings of specific culture concepts, there is something about human behavior worth conceptualizing. 1 03 Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1963:80). 104 Kuper (2000:247).

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A major confusion in studying human behavior is the fact that the term “culture” has been used both in the broad sense for what all humanity shares and also for a particular group of people. Conceptualizing human culture necessarily involves consideration of our evolutionary and archaeological past beyond the diversity of current behavior. Calling a group of people or what they share a “culture” is something very different and overlaps with ideas of what makes a society, an ethnic group, a language group or even a nation. In this sense the notion of “cross-​cultural” often ends up comparing proverbial apples and oranges. The Kwakiutl of the American Northwest and the Yanomami of the Amazon are both cultures, but so is France or the Kurds of the Middle East. Even if all the ascribed cultures of the world could be documented, this would not define culture in the broad sense. The whole of humanity is not defined by the sum of its arbitrary social parts. A distinction must be made between the use of “culture” as a marker for various kinds of groups and the broad sense of “human nature.” When James Clifford titles his book The Predicament of Culture, he is referring to the ways in which various groups of people have been categorized, often through a process of defining the other as inferior. The field of Cultural Studies is directly concerned with the political dimensions of human interaction, especially issues of race and gender. Invariably the sense of cultures emphasizes differences, a practice that has been going on as long as we have recorded history. Anthropologists did not invent the notion of bounded, individual cultures. As Marshall Sahlins observes, “ethnography has always known that cultures were never as bounded, self-​contained and self-​sustaining as postmodernism pretends that modernism pretends. No culture is sui generis, no people the sole or even the principal author of their own existence.”105 Some of the earlier anthropological writing flirted with such divisions, in part because there seemed to be so many differences on the surface. Ruth Benedict’s famous Patterns of Culture (1934) reified several Native American groups in order to fit a theoretical scheme derived from Friedrich Nietzsche in which a culture could be assigned a distinct personality. But this particularly American approach was a passing fad that has been long superseded in later anthropological theory. To be blunt, cultural concepts are inventions, heuristic tools that can be honed when useful and cast aside or thrown out when no longer useful. There is no unequivocal answer to the question “What is culture?.” The more important question that has stimulated anthropological research from the start is “What is the reality behind the concept labeled culture?” As Ulf Hannerz 105

Sahlins (1999b:411).

56 ­chapter  observes, “people as actors and networks of actors have to invent culture, practice it, experiment with it, reflect on it, remember it (or store it in some other way), and pass it on. And along the way, they may just debate it, and change their minds.”106 Thus, there can never be a single concept of culture, whether emic or etic, but rather a range of approaches depending on the focus of the researcher. My ethnographic fieldwork in Yemen dealt primarily with a mode of production, the local irrigation system and distribution of water rights. My fieldwork site was a community of highland tribal farmers who practiced Islam and lived in a modern nation state which provided very few services to the local community. My study of water rights required not only participant observation of what was done in the fields and in resolving disputes, but analysis of local customary and relevant Islamic legal principles, the dynamics of local perceptions of what it meant to be tribal, and the process of adjusting to new forms of technology and contact with the outside world. I was immersed in the local “culture” and this is the primary value of fieldwork. When I speak of Yemeni “culture” I cannot sum up the diversity within the geographic area in which people define themselves as “Yemeni,” but I do reflect on the connections I could see based on the limited contact I had at a particular point in time in the field. As a historian I know that the context I lived in has undergone considerable change over the centuries, even though it is so easily viewed at first glance as an unchanging “traditional” society. I speak of Yemeni culture as a shorthand, for talking about the things I observed and not to create a bounded group and certainly not to argue that there is anything inferior to the society I come from. My interpretation of Yemeni culture is an invention that represents what I saw going on and what people told me to the best of my abilities as an ethnographer. A large part of my research was documentation, but ultimately the goal is interpreting what I saw. Any interpretation or representation requires concepts, whether articulated or not. I could hardly write about the Yemenis I know as though they didn’t live in a cultural context that is not the same as my own. Yemenis can experience their own “culture” without a specific concept, but as an outsider I cannot. Instead of asking what a culture is, why not think about what a culture is not?107 A century of ethnographic research, through thick and thin reporting, suggests several things that poorly define a culture. No culture is homogenous, no matter how many things are shared by the people who share the same group name. Otherwise we would not have needed to coin the term “sub-​culture.” No culture is truly isolated, living without contact since time immemorial in a 106 Hannerz (2016:144). 107 I am indebted to Gerald Sider for this idea.

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distinct location. There is no inherent equivalence between the groups of people that get labeled as cultures, whether in scholarly usage or popular understanding. There is no justification for judging cultures as inferior or superior to another; this is the common theme of cultural relativism that is a defining principle of anthropology as a discipline. We need to conceptualize culture for what we think it is, learning from the lessons of what research suggests it is not. The reality out there of human behavior does not need our concepts, but we do if we want to make sense of it, whether we admit it or not.

­c hapter 2

On Not Reading against Culture I cannot say whether it is now possible for anthropology as anthropology to be different, that is, to forget itself and to become something else as a way of responding to the gauntlet thrown down by imperialism and its antagonists. Perhaps anthropology as we have known it can only continue on one side of the imperial divide, there to remain as a partner in domination and hegemony.1 Edward Said

…

The problem of power and culture, and their turbulent relations during the great metamorphosis of our social world, is too important to be left to lit crit.2 Ernest Gellner

∵ Few literary critics have traveled further around American anthropological discourse than Edward Said, whose Orientalism (1978) is frequently cited, and whose Culture and Imperialism (1993) both overlays and underplays a disciplined, reflexivist self-​critique of ethnographic authority. There is much to admire in Said’s criticism of the blatant ethnocentrism, racism and sexism of a number of earlier European scholars who wrote about the so-​called “Orient.” Yet his lack of knowledge of the history of this scholarship and blurring of scholarly writing with fictional genres resulted in a polemical essentialization of Western Orientalism, as

1 Said (1989:225). I recognize that Said raises this point with rhetorical intent and then proceeds to suggest that a different story appears to be emerging. My purpose, as the narrative will show, is also rhetorical –​questioning how Said approaches anthropology rather than what he, as an outsider, eventually concludes about a discipline not his own. 2 Ernest Gellner (1993:4). Similarly Grimshaw and Hart (1995:61) note, “But anthropology as a project will not be saved by formal innovation alone, by literary devices dreamt up by isolated intellectuals in the seclusion of their studies.”

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004381339_004

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I detail in my Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid.3 I focus here on Said’s reception in American anthropology largely because the response elsewhere among social scientists has been minimal; in this respect I adopt Timothy Brennan’s argument that Orientalism is “a profoundly American book” even as Said looks back over the canon in Culture and Imperialism.4 While Orientalism has surprisingly little to say about anthropological texts, Culture and Imperialism has much to indicate about Said’s rendering of “culture” out of canonical Western texts. In the extensive literature about Said’s theory of Orientalist discourse little attention has been given to how he reads anthropological concepts of culture. I offer here the read of an anthropologist, a writing back –​in large part a writing against –​the “culture” that informs Culture and Imperialism. Which anthropological texts on the culture concept does Said consult and, at times, insult? I refer to those that are cited or conspicuously absent in his writings. What exactly informs Said’s “literary” criticism of the texts that he places on the wrong side of the imperial divide? Have anthropologists learned anything new or useful from Said’s “novel” approach to culture? Is there theory in his worldly-​finessed corner of cultural critique that anthropologists should find worth traveling for, let alone with? It is best to first situate my own [con]textual attitude as an anthropologist who has read through Orientalism and Said’s other major texts with great interest. In Saidian terms I begin with two strikes against me. First is my ethnographic fieldwork among real “Orientals”: in 1978–​79 I lived among highland farmers in North Yemen and conducted a cultural ecological study of their water resource use and agricultural system. The second issue is my formal training in Arabic and Oriental Studies at a major Ivy League haven. Over the years I have received four post-​doctoral grants for the study of Arabic texts, especially for the history of Yemeni agriculture and astronomy. A third strike could perhaps be called for my professional consulting work on agricultural development and environmental analysis in projects funded by usaid and the World Bank in Yemen and Egypt. Yet I never considered myself an “Orientalist,” nor do I know many historians or other scholars who continue to use this outdated and misleading term. Edward Said presented himself before my conventional guild, the American Anthropological Association, in 1987 as an interlocutor, someone “clamoring 3 Varisco (2007), reprinted in 2017. For a similar critique which is less sympathetic to the contributions of Said, see Irwin (2006). As Marcus and Fischer (1986:2) note, Said’s work “is effective only as polemic.” Fox and Gingrich (2002:5) argue that Said “conflated vast regions of the world as subject to Orientalism and as ‘colonial’ in an undifferentiated way.” Regarding Said’s view of othering, William Sax (1998:299) argues “that the Self is always valorized and the Other always vilified –​is simply not true, or at least not so simple.” 4 For example, Said has received little attention in Sociology (Go 2013:26).

60 ­chapter  on the doorstep” and making “so unseemly a disturbance as to be let in, guns or stones checked in with the porter, for further discussion.”5 What I find disturbing in Said’s diatribe against the discipline that he seems to think is only about defining “tribes” is that his remarks are unfinished rather than unseemly. Said has no trouble listing and branding anthropologists –​more on the hindsight end –​but seminal anthropological texts remain unopened by him. I consider my response here a gentler knock, a pacifist olive branch for a rhetorical quarrel that has gone on far too long. The quarrel is ostensibly over “culture,” a concept anthropologists naively thought they almost owned by default until the emergence of Cultural Studies in the latter half of the last century. Paraphrasing Gellner, the issue of culture is too important to be left to critically lit point-​counterpoint across barbed defenses. Said’s written corpus and extensive range of interview counter-​criticism indicate little knowledge of the trajectory of modern anthropology as an intellectual discipline. His usage of “anthropology” is at times widened philosophically to include Enlightenment icons such as Vico, Herder and Rousseau as part of an “efflorescence of secular anthropology.”6 The “rise of ethnography” is traced to Gobineau, Maine, Renan and von Humboldt –​none of whom actually did ethnographic fieldwork or provided methodological models embraced by modern anthropology as a formal discipline.7 Said is, of course, talking about long-​standing ethnocentric –​even when Enlightenment-​ed –​views on “primitive” others before the disciplined investigation of real others. Whether represented as a Hobbesian savage “savage” or a Rousseauan “noble savage,” the exotic other in Western discourse was ill-​will-​established long before anthropology was first taught in the university. Lacking a focus on ethnographic fieldwork as the major methodological constant in modern anthropology’s rise, Said cavalierly dismisses the entire field as yet another handmaiden of the dominant Western discourse machine that is “Eurocentric in the extreme” and that “often went hand in glove with a consciously undertaken imperial enterprise.”8 Said further contends that anthropology has an “unresolvable” problem of representing the other “epistemologically defined as radically inferior” so that the “whole science or discourse of anthropology depends upon

5 Said (1989:210). 6 Said was unaware that the anthropologist Edmund Leach (1976) had written an article about anthropology and the historical writing of the early 18th century scholar Giambattista Vico. 7 Said (1993:44, 108). Said is not alone in metaphorizing anthropology; see Marrouchi’s designation of Said as a “wild anthropologist” because he quotes from fieldwork –​where? –​and tells stories about his “being there” as a Palestinian (Marrouchi 2000:188). 8 Said (1993:44,48).

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the silence of this Other.”9 These are hefty allegations, hastily made and unsupported by credible evidence. Notably absent from Said’s writings are numerous histories of anthropology, including the plethora of historiographic renderings of the discipline by George Stocking. When he does comment on an anthropological text, Said makes careless errors. An example is misreading an interview conducted by Georges Charbonnier with Claude Lévi-​Strauss. “For Lévi-​Strauss, on the other hand,” writes Said, “the beginning is the initial violence of language itself, which makes its hypothetical first appearance during the neolithic age in catalogs of property, including lists of slaves. Yet Lévi-​Strauss has never systematically introduced this hypothesis (mentioned in an interview with Georges Charbonnier) into his investigations: those do not depend upon an incorporated beginning, such as Foucault’s, for their coherence.”10 Lévi-​Strauss does not link written “language” anachronistically to the Neolithic era. In the passage in question Lévi-​Strauss specifically refers to what happened” after” the Neolithic; he is hardly offering a “hypothesis” in this spontaneous remark on an archaeological subject about which he has no claimed expertise. It is not surprising that Micaela di Leonardo finds a dissonance between what she views as the “genuinely scholarly tenor of Said’s work as a whole” and his “anthropological solecisms.”11 Said is not alone in “othering” the history of anthropology. Bernard McGrane others anthropology completely by asserting “anthropology is thus essentially grounded on a structural incapacity to account for itself.”12 In the same passage he claims: “A sociology of sociology, one might say, makes sense, whereas an anthropology of anthropology doesn’t.” As a sociologist he is welcome to assess his own discipline sociologically, but his failure to do an anthropology of anthropology is hardly the fault of the discipline that he wishes to go beyond. His rhetorical reification of both disciplines assumes fixed boundaries, indeed guilds in the Saidian sense, that prevent creative engagement within and between disciplines. Anthropology has never had closed borders or a dominant paradigm at the expense of alternative views of culture. Anyone willing to read what anthropologists have been saying since Tylor will find plenty of accounting. This same blatant blanketing of anthropology in the mode of Said is continued unabashedly by Hamid Dabashi:  “Anthropology, in other words, was as instrumental in the European colonial conquest of multiple worlds as the 9 10 11 12

Quoted in Viswanathan (2001:42). Said (1975:320). di Leonardo (1998:44). McGrane (1989:119). For a rebuttal to McGrane, see Lewis (2014:70, note 14).

62 ­chapter  soldier who carried the gun. The anthropologist’s pen was, and remains, mightier than the colonial officer’s sword.”13 This sweeping claim, which radically underestimates the on-​the-​ground reality of colonial rule, is made without any specific examples. Ironically, Talal Asad, whose Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (1973) predated Said’s Orientalism, confides: “And I felt that one had to somehow try and find a way of speaking about this without descending either into personal blame or describing the discipline as the ‘handmaiden’ of colonialism.”14 Clifford Geertz makes a poignant suggestion:  “The need is to put social science not in the dock, which is where our culture belongs, but on the witness stand.”15 It would help if the vociferous critics of anthropology actually read what anthropologists have said about colonialism. “Colonies were pale proxies,” argue the Comaroffs, “subsidary holding companies as it were, for sovereign Western powers, at once dumping grounds for their superfluous people-​and-​products and sources of raw value, rare exotica, and racialized labor.”16 Voilà! Radical alterity, the idea that there are bounded cultural groups so different that one can be deemed superior to another, has been hung out to dry like a dead albatross around the ethnographer’s neck. Roger Keesing went so far as to say that if radical alterity did not exist, “it would be anthropology’s project to invent it.”17 But, in fact such an in-​group vs. out-​group mentality has been in evidence since the first written texts. In a sweeping study of the rituals of war in ancient Mesopotamia, Zainab Bahrani shows how torture and warfare were justified by the state through the ideological force of texts and palace images.18 Anthropology did not invent otherness; the primary concern since Tylor has been to dissect the contentious notion of in-​group superiority that fueled ethnocentrism and racism. Anyone who has read the pioneering work of Franz Boas would find that he “was guided by an attempt to overcome Otherness rather than cement it.”19 The irony is that what was once considered a major contribution of anthropology, starting with Tylor’s psychic unity of mankind, is now discarded as a hegemonic plot. Herbert Lewis sums up the problem well: “To spend years of one’s life trying to learn a language of another group; to live with them; to listen to them; to learn about their feelings, values, 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

Dabashi (2013:52). Quoted in Scott (2006:258). Geertz (2000:38). Comaroff and Comaroff (2011:6). Keesing (1994:301). For a detailed rebuttal of Keesing, see Lewis (2014:5–​21). Bahrani (2008). Although the focus of her study is on the warfare between Assyria and Elam, the issue of domination of the “other” is present from the first historical records. Bunzl (2004:437–​438).

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problems, the bases of their social relations, their economic struggles and political travails; to seek to understand their rituals and beliefs: all this is really a way of distancing yourself from them?”20 Anthropology, for Said, is thus a closed circuit –​a politically charged one –​ in which pouvoir indelibly defines savoir. Just as Orientalism almost invented the Orient, anthropology is reduced to dominating the “primitive” other. The novel twist in Said’s argument is his choice for the archetypical anthropologist. Foregoing the founding fathers of social science, the ultimate [mis]anthropologist becomes Colonel Creighton, the burdened white man of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim. “In the extraordinarily rich text of Kim,” writes Said, “Kipling extrapolates the political meaning of that relationship and embodies it in the figure of Colonel Creighton, an ethnographer in charge of the Survey of India, also the head of British intelligence services in India, the ‘Great Game’ to which the young Kim belongs.”21 The anthropologist is thus realized as both a colonial era mapmaker of folklore and an overt operator of errant colonial policy. In this parading of the fictional Colonel Creighton, who is clearly aligned on the wrong side of the imperial divide, the field of anthropology is lumped together with linguistics, history, Darwinism and high cultural humanism as reinforcing the division of the world into culture-​laden categories of “languages, races, types, colors, mentalities.”22 Colonel Creighton, for those who have read Said’s Orientalism, is thus of the same rank as swash-​buckler Captain Richard Burton; both are at the [dis]service of empire.23 Few of the founding fathers or eminent guiding lights in the rise of modern anthropology would fit the role of Kipling’s protagonist. Edward Tylor, the Englishman who jump-​started the modern discipline in the 1870s, was a Quaker pacifist, not a be[k]‌nighted colonial administrator. One would be hard pressed to find a staunch military man among the rank and file of what soon came to be known as “Mr. Tylor’s science.” On the American side Lewis Henry Morgan, architect of a model of cultural evolution, was an early advocate of Native American rights. In his The League of the Ho-​de-​no-​sau-​nee or Iroquois (1851) he not only documented Iroquois life, but lamented that the public estimation of the Indian, “tinctured, as it has ever been, with the coloring or prejudice, is universally unjust.”24 Far from assuming an arrogant outsider stance, Morgan

20 21 22 23 24

Lewis (1998:721). Said (1993:56). A similar passage can be found in Said (1989:217). Said (1979:227). Burton is at least a historical figure in the service of empire, although he was not a trained anthropologist; see Varisco (2007:162–​164). Morgan (1851:1).

64 ­chapter  dedicated his ethnography to his Iroquois informant, Eli Parker, referring to the fruit of their joint researches. Being an anthropologist did not ipso facto liberate a scholar from being racist or ethnocentric, but the fictional Colonel Creightons and their real-​life prototypes are not in the direct line of modern anthropology’s formal descent. James Clifford delivers the same historiographic faux pas by identifying the “ethnographer” from an image in the early 18th century travel custom book by Father Lafitau.25 Lafitau is no more an example of a modern ethnographer than Herodotus is of a modern historian. In dismissing anthropology’s imperialist-​by-​default heritage, Said fails to acknowledge the role of those anthropologists who have used their ethnographic and biological research to resist harmful racist and ethnic categorization and to critique European colonial policies. I find it ironic that Said, a professor at Columbia University, failed to note the pioneering deconstruction of the category of “race” by Franz Boas, who founded anthropology at Columbia and trained the first generation of American anthropologists. Not only did Boas exemplify an academic scholar unambiguously critical of essentialized scientific models, but, as Marvin Harris observes, he provided a “distinguished record of public protest against racist bigotry.”26 As a committed public intellectual, Boas argued against the academic grain of his time by insisting that the category of “race” was a social construct. As early as 1907, Boas stated that “the racial purity on which European nations like to pride themselves does not exist,” unequivocally concluding: “It does not matter from which point of view we consider culture, its forms are not dependent upon race.”27 It is also important to note that Boas, though in failing health, fought vigorously in public forums and the press against Hitler’s Nazism.28 From this grounding, Boas’s student Ashley Montagu added: “ ‘Race’ is the witchcraft of our time. The means by which we exorcise demons. It is the contemporary myth. Man’s most dangerous myth.”29 A similar debunking of 25 26

27

28 29

Clifford (1988:21). Harris (1968: 292). Similarly Alfred Kroeber (1952:38) in a classic 1917 article on the “superorganic” labeled the eugenics of his time as “a fallacy; a mirage like the philosopher’s stone, the elixir of life, the ring of Solomon, or the material efficacy of prayer.” Walter Goldschmidt (2000:791) notes that contemporary students of anthropology “do not seem to realize how strong a hold biological determinism and racial explanations had on the scholarly community in the interbellum era.” Boas (1908:14; 1962:60). The role of Boas as a champion of human rights and opponent of racism is discussed by Herbert Lewis (2001:447–​467; 2014:123–​184) and Briggs (2002); see also the extended discussion in Bauman and Briggs (2003:255–​298). As Rabinow (2011:32) notes, Boas saw the role of the anthropologist as a scientist “to speak truth to power.” See Lowie (1960:431). Montagu (1963:23). The first edition of this seminal text appeared in 1942; the sixth edition in 1997 with Altamira Press.

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the notion that the “white race” was superior was provided in 1922 by Alexander Goldenweiser, another student of Boas.30 On which side of the imperial divide did Boas, Montagu and Goldenweiser stand in relation to racism? Nor does Said acknowledge the anthropological critique of simplistic and misleading accounts posed by missionaries, journalistic travellers and colonial administrators like the fictitious Creighton. Ethnographers were rarely the first Westerners to encounter “primitive” others under European control; their direct impact on forming colonial policy has arguably been minimal. To imply that most anthropologists in the past were mostly willing agents or, at best, well-​intentioned dupes of imperialism is little more than uninformed polemical posturing. As Nicholas Dirks notes, one of the reasons anthropologists who are interested in issues of colonialism and imperialism have resisted Said’s approach is this “kind of totalizing epistemological discourse.”31 Said’s mantra impeaches the locus criminus of guild practice: the “field” anthropologists can claim because most come from the colonial or neocolonial power in virtual control of that field. Bronislaw Malinowski, a Polish émigré exiled during World War I on Melanesian Islands far from the trappings of England, is credited with initiating the central rite of anthropological passage known as participant observation fieldwork. Living among the “natives,” observing their daily life, communicating in their language and attempting to elicit “their” points of view, Malinowski advocated a new “science” of anthropology a century ago.32 Breaking with the myth-​remaking of James Frazer’s encyclopedic The Golden Bough, Malinowski proposed a common-​sense functional approach to studying the so-​called exotic other where the other lived. As his own field diaries published posthumously and indiscreetly by his second wife indicate, the ideal of reaching an objective representation of the other was clouded by the baggage Malinowski brought

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Alexander Goldenweiser (1922:6). Dirks 2004:39. Sangren (1992:278) suggests that Said’s dismissal of anthropology and related fields underestimates “the important counterhegemonic possibilities in these disciplines” and assumes that only his approach is legitimate. Almost a century later, Malinowski’s theoretical contributions need to be understood in the overall climate of the time, when native peoples were generally thought to be inferior in the Arnoldian sense and “race” was a fixed identity in the biological sciences. As Eric Wolf (2000:51) remarks: “This was surely no grand theory, but it had a powerful effect. It put an end to the study of culture as made of bits of customs, presumably carried by people but not enacted by them, and to ethnographers listing cultural items as ‘present’ or ‘absent’ on endless checklists.”

66 ­chapter  with him from his own Western culture.33 Nevertheless, he was under no illusion that the colonization policies of his adopted country were benign or benevolent. At the close of World War ii, Malinowski wrote with a rhetorical flair reminiscent of Said’s own worldly oppositional criticism: There is no doubt that the destiny of indigenous races has been tragic in the process of contact with European invasion. We speak glibly about the ‘spread of Western civilization,’ about ‘giving the Natives the benefit of our own culture,’ about the ‘Dual Mandate,’ and the ‘White Man’s Burden.’ In reality, the historian of the future will have to register that Europeans in the past sometimes exterminated whole island peoples; that they expropriated most of the patrimony of savage races; that they introduced slavery in a specially cruel and pernicious form; and that even if they abolished it later, they treated the expatriated Negroes as outcasts and pariahs.34 Consider also the following statement: We are beginning now to see how dangerous it is to speak about the white man’s burden, and to make others’ shoulder it and carry it for us. We give all the promises implied in our concept of human brotherhood and of equality through education, but when it comes to wealth, power, and self-​determination, we refuse this to other people.35 As an anthropological historian of that future, I suggest that Malinowski –​fellow Pole to the novelist Joseph Conrad that Said analyzed in detail –​should be

33

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See Malinowski (1967). These diaried sentiments express depression and loneliness, as well as more than a modicum of lust for naked island girls. Their publication created a major scandal in the discipline. Among the anthropologists who discuss the relevance of the diary revelations is Clifford Geertz (1988:73–​101). Many anthropologists have kept diaries to document what they observed. In his research in Tikopia, starting in 1928, Raymond Firth (1957:12;1967:16) kept a daily diary of events. As Steven Caton (2005:44) notes, it is hard to separate the idea of a personal diary from formal field notes: “Personal anecdotes constantly spill over into the supposedly objective field notes, and a diary contains much information of ethnographic import.” Malinowski (1961:3–​4). For a review of how Said and others have misrepresented Malinowski and others, see Herbert Lewis (1998). This is not to say that Malinowski was untouched by the racialized frame of his day, as noted by Rigby (1996:78–​79). Malinowski 1944:219.

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read as the “essential” anthropologist rather than Kipling’s out-​of-​date fictional colonel. Said’s charge against anthropology is based less on specific examples than the careless condemnation of anthropology as either a child or handmaid of imperialism. Because the discipline was born –​never mind the rationale for its rise in the academy –​during the age of an imperial based colonialism, the field is dismissed as guilty by birthright. Yet, as Peter Rigby, who was certainly not on the wrong side of Said’s rigid colonial divide, noted, “the very capitalist mode of production itself was such a child; and imperialism, too, had parents.”36 Literary Studies, as it evolved in creating the Western canon, was no less a child of imperialism, as Said himself acknowledges in Culture and Imperialism. The legacy of Western imperial exploitation and colonization of so-​called “new worlds” is a shared legacy that permeated every field of knowledge in Europe. To insist that anthropology was a key player in legitimizing this legacy requires more than a polemical charge. Contemporary anthropologists do not whitewash the “white man’s burden” of their discipline’s past matrix any more than they ignore the deleterious impact of neoliberal policies and globalized capitalist greed of the world today. When Said lectured anthropologists at their annual meetings in 1987, he omitted the first anthropologist he wrote about and perhaps one of the first he read. This is Claude Lévi-​Strauss, whose The Savage Mind (1966) was earlier praised by Said as “one of the greatest books of the century” and the author as “the most challenging intellectual figure today.”37 Said provided Lévi-​Strauss the distinct honor of post-​canonization with Giambattista Vico, one of his own intellectual heroes; both are dubbed “grammarian of culture.” Said expands on Lévi-​Straussian structuralism in his Beginnings:  Intention and Method (1975), where he cites the following books of Lévi-​Strauss: The Raw and the Cooked, The Savage Mind, Totemism, and Tristes Tropiques, as well as several articles and a book review. It is telling that in Beginnings Said indexes Lévi-​Strauss and bricolage, but not culture, anthropology, ethnology or sociology. The young Said admired the creator of structural anthropology for debunking the racist ideology of Gobineau, taking on the meta-​existentialism of Sartre and demonstrating an uncanny ability to assimilate the views of opponents for his own rhetorical aims. It is not hard to see why such praise was given. A key

36 37

Rigby (1996:48). Said (1967:257, 268).

68 ­chapter  argument in The Savage Mind was that many anthropologists have been guilty of reducing the “savage” to a being governed by organic or economic needs; seemingly objective scientists are thus trapped by structural categories not of their making.38 In Tristes Tropiques, an eloquent accounting of the ethnographer’s unequal encounter with the “primitive” other, Lévi-​Strauss poses a contradiction, an inconsistency that goes to the core of anthropology’s virtually unique emphasis on “being there” in “exotic” worlds so seemingly different from Western standards: “How could we announce that these societies were ‘important’, if our judgment were not based on the values of the society which inspired us to begin our researches?” “We ourselves,” he continues, “were the products of certain inescapable norms; and if we claimed to be able to estimate one form of society in its relation to another we were merely claiming, in a shamefaced and roundabout way, that our society was superior to all the others.”39 This is no casual variant of cultural relativism, no suspension of the need to speak truth to power, but rather a recognition that our endemic ethnocentrism cannot be suspended at will by unreflective claims for objectivity.40 Clearly even those anthropologists Said read have not all been trapped on the wrong side of the imperial divide. Lévi-​Strauss’s work attracted Said in 1967, although few other contemporary anthropologists appear in Said’s overall corpus until his 1987 lecture to anthropologists. There he finally acknowledges a critical anthropology beyond the French structuralist Claude Lévi-​Strauss and the colonial Colonel. The roll call includes intellectual oppositionists who are said to be Marxist or anti-​imperialist (June Nash, William Roseberry, Michael Taussig, the early Eric Wolf), feminist (Lila Abu-​Lughod, Emily Martin), interested in political struggle (Jean Comaroff, Richard Fox), concerned with contemporary American issues such as religious fundamentalism (Susan Harding) and aware of the social problems in development (Shelton Davis).41 Although he praised these 38 39 40

41

Lévi-​Strauss (1966:19). The English title misinterprets the original French La Pensée sauvage. The sense of the French is closer to what is called “primitive” in English. Following Tylor, Lévi-​Strauss (1966:268) believes the “savage” mind was as logical as any other group. Lévi-​Strauss (1961:383). Lévi-​Strauss (1961:395). For a more disciplined explanation of his view of culture, see Lévi-​Strauss (1967). A more nuanced study of Lévi-​Strauss is given by Tzvetan Todorov (1993:60–​89). For a detailed anthropological evaluation of the structuralism of Lévi-​ Strauss, see Scholte (1973). Geertz (1988:27) notes that Lévi-​Strauss is “very difficult to read.” Said (1993:64). These are not the only anthropologists cited in Said (1989), but they are the ones singled out for ready praise.

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anthropologists in a list, they rarely appear in Said’s lecture or later texts, including Culture and Imperialism (1993). A notable exception is Said’s strange dismissal of Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History (1982) as a text that he states unreflectively and in a “somewhat self-​congratulatory” manner misrepresents the other by under-​analyzing the self. Wolf’s book describes how societies often treated by anthropologists as isolated and closed systems were politically invented in the course of Western capitalist expansion. Said does not appear to have read far beyond the book’s title, since Wolf’s critique of Western exploitation of non-​Western peoples –​including the false model of a quintessential West and an equally quintessential East –​is a major feature. It is hard to see what Said would find silencing with a thesis that concludes: “This book has asked what difference it would make to our understanding if we looked at the world as a whole, a totality, a system, instead of as a sum of self-​contained societies and cultures; if we understood better how this totality developed over time; if we took seriously the admonition to think of human aggregates as ‘inextricably involved with other aggregates, near and far, in weblike, netlike connections….”42 Ironically, Said quotes in depth an excerpt on the attempt of the Department of Defense to usurp ethnographic research when Wolf was consistently one of the most vocal critics of such political intrusion.43 Wolf also shared Said’s critical view of academic specialization. Scholars who know Wolf’s lifelong work are generally at a loss to understand why this concerned intellectual, one of the most outspoken anthropological critics of imperialist-​minded American foreign policy, would be singled out by Said for such an inappropriate verbal dressing down.44 Wolf was one of the most committed anthropologists, drawing on a sympathetic understanding of Marxist theory, addressing the power dynamics of dominating native peoples. He 42 43

44

Wolf (2010:385), originally published in 1982. Said also ignores the role of Boas in denouncing the use of anthropologists as spies during the administration of President Wilson. In a 1919 letter to The Nation, Boas argued: “A person, however, who uses science as a cover for political spying, who demeans himself to pose before a foreign government as an investigator and asks for assistance in his alleged researches in order to carry on, under this cloak, his political machinations, prostitutes science in an unpardonable way and forfeits the right to be classed as a scientist” (quoted in Stocking 1974:336). This letter by Boas prompted the conservative American Anthropological Association at the time to censure him, a travesty that was not repudiated by the association until 2005. In contrast, Fernando Coronil (1996) favorably comments on Wolf’s attempt to bring “non-​Western peoples into the Self’s history.” For an extended critique of Said’s failure to consider Wolf’s activist voice denouncing anthropology’s role in imperialism, see di Leonardo (1998:47–​49). A decade before Said published Orientalism, the “skeletons in the anthropological closet” had been articulated and laid bare in a pioneering volume edited by Dell Hymes (1969).

70 ­chapter  recognized that in the early development of anthropology in the 20th century little attention had been paid to issues of power, especially the misuse of state power. But, unlike Said, he did not consider all modes of anthropological thought to be “handmaidens” of colonialism.45 Responding to the charge that anthropologists had served as “positivistic imperialists,” Wolf countered: “If anything, good anthropology was always characterized by a postmodern scepticism about the certainty and fixity of things. Things are rarely what they seem, and they are only rarely how they are presented to you by the locals.”46 His counterpoint to claims, like that of Said, is if “anthropologists have favored a view of culture without power, other social analysts have advanced a concept of ‘ideology’ without culture,” at least as anthropologists have grappled with the issue for over a century.47 Despite the significance of Said’s Orientalism in stimulating debate among scholars of the Middle East and Islam across disciplines, Nicholas Dirks is wrong to assume that this was thus “one of the most critical books for the reconceptualization of anthropology in the second half of the twentieth century.”48 Said’s approach to culture ignored the entire sweep of modern anthropological theory. His lecture to the anthropologists in 1987 illustrated how little he understood what anthropologists do. While a number of anthropologists have appropriated Foucault’s notion of discourse, this has not been through Said’s work. Even historian James Clifford, who challenged the authority of ethnographic writing, was critical of Said’s alteration of Foucauldian discourse, referring to it as a sidetracking “by humanist fables of authenticity.”49 Anthropologists who are sympathetic to Said’s overall argument about bias in the study of the “other” still note the inconsistencies and flaws in his comments on anthropology. As Micaela di Leonardo observes, Said “ ‘shuts and blocks out’ the work of American anthropologists who, although largely ignored by middlebrow media, repeatedly speak and write against empire and domination; who, at home and all over the globe, work with ‘native’ radical scholars and activists; who are his true allies.”50 45 46

47 48 49 50

Wolf (2000:64). Portis-​Winter (2006:340) argues that other anthropologists “have not dealt with the issue of power in the broad and comparative sense as has Wolf.” Wolf (2000:53). Consider also, the following statement:  “Contrary to the view of some now in the grip of postmodern uncertainty, moreover, anthropology has built up a creditable tradition of research that tries to guard against the virus of ‘self-​interested error.’ ” (Wolf 2000:50). Wolf 1999: ix. Dirks (2004:42). In his tribute on the influence of Said in anthropology, Dirks fails to analyze Said’s view of culture. Dirks (2004:54, note 52), a historian by training, acknowledges his admiration for Said, a colleague at Columbia. Clifford (1988:270). di Leonardo (1998:49).

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Culture vs Discourse In the first place, culture is used to designate not merely something to which one belongs but something that one possesses and, along with that proprietary process, culture also designates a boundary by which the concepts of what is extrinsic or intrinsic to the culture come into forceful play. These things are not controversial … But, in the second place, there is a more interesting dimension to this idea of culture as possessing a possession. And that is the power of culture by virtue of its elevated or superior position to authorize, to dominate, to legitimate, demote, interdict, and validate: in short, the power of culture to be an agent of, and perhaps the main agency for, powerful differentiation within its domain and beyond it too.51 Edward Said, The World, the Text and the Critic

As I use the word, ‘culture’ means two things in particular. First of all it means those practices, like the arts of description, communication, and representation, that have relative autonomy from the economic, social, and political realms and that often exist in aesthetic forms, one of whose principal aims is pleasure … Second, and almost imperceptibly, culture is a concept that includes a refining and elevating element, each society’s reservoir of the best that has been known and thought, as Matthew Arnold put it in the 1860s.52 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism

It is not hard to gauge how little Edward Said read in the theoretical discussions about culture in anthropology and sociology. Apart from bric-​à-​ brac[keting] Lévi-​Strauss and denigrating Eric Wolf, Said rarely incorporates or responds in any of his writing to specifically anthropological discourse on the topic. In The World, the Text, and the Critic he references Kroeber and Kluckhohn’s “thesaurus” on the variety of meanings given for culture, but as a hurdle to be jumped over rather than a resource that frames earlier debates over the culture concept. This latter text was compiled in the 1950s, but the discussion of culture has continued unabated in professional journals and books up through Said’s anti-​ethnographic present and beyond. “The professional student of culture,” however, is glossed by Said as “the humanist, the critic, the scholar” as though the discipline that has the most direct 51 52

Said (1983:8–​9). Said (1993:xii).

72 ­chapter  experience with cultures worldwide –​in the meaningful plural that makes all culture worldly –​is not worth reading about.53 Given Said’s training in literature and his Western orientation to virtually everything critical, the culture concept most prominent in all of Said’s work is that of the Victorian literatus Matthew Arnold. Yet, if there is any part of the Saidian corpus that anthropologists should find problematic from the outset, it is this intellectualist rendering of the most central concept in the history of anthropological discourse. Said compounds his indifference to discussions among anthropologists regarding culture with a naive reliance on the sickeningly sweet –​my oxymoron is intentional –​Arnoldian view of culture as “the best which has been thought and said in the world.”54 “Culture,” suggests Said, “is an instrument for identifying, selecting, and affirming certain ‘good’ things, forms, practices, or ideas over others and in so doing culture transmits, diffuses, partitions, teaches, presents, propagates, persuades, and above all it creates and recreates itself as specialized apparatus for doing all those things.”55 If a musical metaphor is apt here, Said wants to play out culture as a symphony, but only on a grand concert piano. He certainly would not recognize the irony in the anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn’s observation that a “humble cooking pot is as much a cultural product as is a Beethoven sonata.”56 As Said correctly notes, all disciplines have customary ways of doing things. The trajectory of anthropology as a modern academic field extends back to the late nineteenth century, when Edward Tylor –​a compatriot of Matthew Arnold –​provided what became the central defining concept of culture as a complex whole that included what people did as well as what they thought and made. The primary merit of Tylor’s broad and thus serviceable definition is that it liberated the culture concept from its overtly ethnocentric rendering as “civilized” or an elitist “best of the best” in the Arnoldian sense. Since Said subscribes to the textual privileging of culture exemplified by Matthew Arnold,

53 54

55 56

Said (1993:56). Arnold (1965:233); see also Arnold (1873:xiii, xvi, xxxiii, 8) where the best that culture has to offer is linked to an attack on the Dissenters who wanted to abolish the state religion of Britain. It is quite clear that Arnold views this “best” as coming from literature; see Arnold (1899:136). For Arnold (1873:xxx:iii) “culture is reading.” It was also clear to his followers in literary studies, who turned the term “culture” into a “curricular shibboleth, so that literary critics continue to bridle when they hear others using the word for purposes of their own” (Levin 1967:4). Said (1983:176). David Bidney (1944:41) would have labeled this view of culture as the “metaphysical fallacy for which Aristotle originally criticized Plato, namely, the fallacy of attributing efficiency to mental forms which are not actual, concrete substances.” Kluckhohn (1961:20).

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it is important to indicate how these two Victorian gentlemen stimulated a major and unfortunate gap in the evolving use of the term “culture” between anthropologists and students of literature. The key difference in the “modern” sense is representation of culture as a condition or state of all human societies rather than the cultivation of mind central to Arnold’s concept and implicit in previous philosophical usage. The significance of Tylor’s synthetic inventing of a new science of anthropology is that it took seriously the rapidly evolving paradigm that humans were different from animals only by degree rather than in immutably casted categories. Before Tylor fixed on the rallying cry of the “psychic unity of mankind,” endemic Western racism had kept anthropology chained to the theologian’s delight in a divinely ordained Natural History. Since “race” was no longer God-​given in a Darwinian framework, an attempt could finally be made to analyze what humans have in common rather than reiterating the categorical fault lines that necessarily privileged the Christendom[inated] Western self over “other” sons of Adam. It is not surprising that Tylor advocated an approach to human societies as evolving systems rather than the prized possession of a “cultured” elite. Just as Darwin liberated human origins from the biblical line of begats back to Adam, so Tylor sought to free the study of humanity from its concentration on the achievements of Christianity and Western civilization.57 This is the only sense in which his radical book title Primitive Culture could escape being an oxymoron in Victorian thought. But, is it possible that anthropologists have recognized the wrong father of their culture concept? In a mid-​1960s critical analysis of the impact of Tylor, historian George Stocking challenged the conventional reading, labeling it an “anthropological creation story,” a Whiggish reading back of a modern sense that Tylor did not share.58 Adding insult to injury, Stocking maintained that Tylor was simply making Arnold’s culture concept fit an evolutionary time scale, and that the literary critic’s view of culture was actually closer to what Stocking then called “the modern anthropological idea of culture.”59 Stocking is reacting to the observation by Kroeber and Kluckhohn that it took almost fifty years before Tylor’s definition entered formal dictionaries. Arnold’s definition was included in the oed right away, but Tylor’s did not make it until the 1933 supplement. While Kroeber and Kluckhohn saw this as evidence of 57 58 59

It is worth noting that Tylor followed the same distancing approach from his own cultural assumptions in defining religion as a general belief in spirits rather than the notion of “God” (Pals 1996:24). Stocking (1968:72–​73). Stocking (1968:89).

74 ­chapter  how long it can take a scientific concept to gain acceptance in the “avowedly literary segment” of society, Stocking countered that Tylor’s view was simply not as modern as that of Arnold’s. Stocking ignores the caveat in Kroeber and Kluckhohn that the early shapers of anthropology, like Pitt-​Rivers and Franz Boas, did run with Tylor’s definition.60 In 1963, when Stocking was publishing his argument, the “modern” idea he had in mind is the now discarded “culture and personality” approach that had characterized a major trend of American Anthropology and which lent credence to the genre of essentialist renderings of cultural patterns exemplified by Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead.61 The danger here is that in glossing over the blatantly elitist ethnocentrism and racism moralistically mooring Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, Stocking  –​like Edward Said  –​redirects the Arnoldian definition of culture to a generically acceptable “way of life” while ignoring the fact that it privileges literature read, words out of intelligent mouths, thoughts in “cultivated minds”  –​the “best” only in an intellectualized sense. The key point is that Tylor’s culture concept can be salvaged from the assumption of inevitable progress to a Western level, while Arnold’s “way of life” was one that only the already civilized, as he defined it, could attain. Stocking admits that Primitive Culture would have been a contradiction to the man who wrote Culture and Anarchy; that alone mires an Arnoldian approach to culture as moving in the opposite direction from an anthropological discourse about to be informed by ethnographic encounters.62 Stocking fails here to take note of the critique by Boas in 1896 of the social evolution that ordered societies on a scale of civilization.63 With the benefit of hindsight, Tylor’s view is all the more to be respected for not matching the now past-​modern culture concept discussed by Stocking. Stocking’s dated comments on Tylor aside, anthropologists rarely discuss Matthew Arnold’s concept of culture, except to acknowledge its undisguised

60 61

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Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1963:285,287, note 2). For Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1963:295) Tylor’s definition was overshadowed by Arnold’s “ultra-​humanist sharpening” of the term “culture” in an educational context that focused on the classics. A number of anthropologists advocated the “personality and culture” approach. In 1950 Kroeber (1952:149) noted: “Some of the culture-​and-​personality enthusiasts hardly know any culture history –​in fact, have perhaps never viewed a cultural situation in really cultural terms and might be at a loss to do so.” Eric Wolf (2000: 18) criticized these advocates for ignoring the impact of state policies:  “They spoke of patterns, themes, worldview, ethos and values. but not of power.” Stocking (1968:87). Boas (1896). Boas was not rejecting evolution as a principle, but rather the speculative interpretation that early cultural evolutionists like Tylor and Morgan fostered.

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ethnocentrism. In an article written in 1924 Edward Sapir labeled this snobbish “cultural ideal” that graced the halls of Oxford and Cambridge little more than “a vesture and an air”, and spurious to the core.64 Said is aware of the problematic “hierarchies and ethnic preferences” of Matthew Arnold’s unbending justification of Britain’s strong-​arm tactics which flows from his conservative assertion that “the very framework and exterior order of the State” is sacred, so that any attack on the authority of the state, such as a strike or demonstration, leads to anarchy.65 The perverse implications of Arnold’s position are not spelled out by Said beyond noting that they are “profoundly important.” Arnold clearly viewed his own British culture, despite its anarchic tendencies, as the best of the best:  “No people in the world have done more and struggled more to attain this relative moral perfection than our English race has,” he proudly asserted.66 Said’s critical opposition of British imperialism or, by extension, American policy toward Israel would brand him an anarchist by Arnoldian logic rather than a defender of culture. I am not aware of any passage in which Said labels Arnold an “Orientalist,” although surely he is as complicit in Said’s own definition as Karl Marx, who is chided in Orientalism for supposedly defending British imperialism in India.67 Said inexplicably chooses to rescue Arnold’s culture by simply brushing aside the inseparable link Arnold himself made to its manifestly destined power over anarchy. Arnold’s metaphorical choice of “sweetness and light” is borrowed from Jonathan Swift’s satirical parable enobling ancients over moderns.68 Responding to Arnold’s privileging of culture as literary acumen, Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s “bulldog,” noted: “After having learnt all that Greek, 64 65 66

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Sapir (1956:82). He adds: “The genuine culture is not of necessity either high or low; it is merely inherently harmonious, balanced, self-​satisfactory” (Sapir 1956:70). Said (1983:11). Arnold (1965:100). For a discussion of Arnold’s views on race as determinant of culture, see Faverty (1951) and Pecora (1998). Arnold (1873:1) was also anti-​Semitic, sarcastically dismissing the British author and politician Benjamin Disraeli as having “the scornful negligence natural to a Hebrew.” Said (1979:154). For a discussion of Said’s critique of Marx, see Varisco (2007:175–​177). Swift (1890:43). This is in a parable about a humble bee and a boastful spider; Aesop sides the with bee, saying “For the rest, whatever we have got has been by infinite labour and search, and ranging through every corner of nature; the difference is, that, instead of dirt and poison, we have rather chosen to fill our hives with honey and wax; thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light.” A satirical response to Arnold is evident in an article published in the Fortnightly Review by Frederic Harrison (1867:604). The author claims to meet a skeptical young Prussian gentleman named Arminius von Thunder-​ten-​dronck, who is told that “ ‘culture is the moral and social passion for doing good; it is the study and pursuit of perfection, and this perfection is the growth and predominance of our humanity proper, as distinguished from our

76 ­chapter  Roman, and Eastern antiquity have thought and said, and all that modern literatures have to tell us, it is not self-​evident that we have laid a sufficiently broad and deep foundation for that criticism of life which constitutes culture.”69 Anthropologists, following Tylor, did not follow Arnold’s blatantly ethnocentric view of culture. In 1917 Robert Lowie cautioned against “a persistent tendency to associate with culture the more impressive phenomena of art, science, and technology,” which he did not think was necessary for the culture concept.70 Arnold’s approach was hardly accepted as a universal truth at the time. The Yale sociologist William Graham Sumner, apparently writing in the 1880s, offered this sardonic note:  “Mr. Arnold, the great apostle, if not the discoverer, of culture, tried to analyze it and found it to consist of sweetness and light. To my mind, this is like saying that coffee is milk and sugar. The stuff of culture is all left out of it.”71 It is worth noting that Sumner is credited with creating the term “ethnocentrism,” which fits Arnold’s worldview like a glove. Said might also be surprised to learn that Sumner had little use for culturally loaded terms such as “Western civilization” or “American ideas,” which he dismissed as “grandiloquent phrases.”72 “It is a wise rule of life,” continues Sumner, “for a man of education and sense not to allow his judgement to be taken captive by stereotyped catch-​words, mottoes, and doctrines.” Among his targets was the travesty of American imperialism in the Spanish-​American war. There is a crucial paradox, an indelibly marked inconsistency, in Said’s stance of oppositional criticism aimed at culturally approved “power” at the same time that his very notion of “culture” assumes the legitimacy of privileging power. As Terry Eagleton notes, Arnoldian culture for England was about “incorporating the ruled,” notably the industrial working class that “came increasingly to be seen as a dark continent at the heart of Europe.”73 While Arnold pegs anarchy as the greatest evil, Said seems to most fear conformity

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animality. It teaches us to conceive of perfection as that in which the characters of beauty and intelligence are both present; which unites the two noblest of things, Sweetness and Light.’“ Arminius is curious to learn how such sweetness and light are attained; he is informed that it is “an afflatus which steals into the attuned soul, and into no other.” (p. 605). Huxley (1888:9). Lowie (1917:6). Quoted in Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1963:55). Sumner (1911:277). For a discussion of Sumner’s view of culture, see Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1963:108–​109). Eagleton (2016:119).

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to a dogmatic guild. In Said’s critical vision, academic guilds in complicity with state power invariably create and perpetuate the dreaded dogmas. This explains in part Said’s consistent antagonism to Marxism and the “New Criticism” of the American Left, which he lumps together with state power. Such Marxism, argues Said, proffers “oppositional debate without real opposition,” and it accommodates “the wild exigencies of rhetoric while surrendering its true radical prerogatives.”74 Where Marxists are alleged to fear to tread, Said issues a clarion oppositional call: “To what degree has culture collaborated in the worst excesses of the State, from its imperial wars and colonial settlements to its self-​justifying institutions of antihuman repression, racial hatred, economic and behavioral manipulation?”75 This is the kind of question Marx himself would and did pose, yet Matthew Arnold would oppose with all the best in his critical arsenal. The paradox did not begin with Edward Said. The literary genealogy that traces intellectual descent from Arnold as a critic of wrongly directed bureaucratic culture remakes him into a patron saint of intellectual criticism while seldom coming to terms with the patronizing ethnocentric politics of the man in his time76 The Arnoldian “culture” of some literary critics is not the culture recognized by anthropologists as a habitual process shared by all human societies at any stage of societal evolution from the time when all humanity had its beginning. The polarization of culture and anarchy, no less than the binary cloning of culture and imperialism, provides little room for thinking beyond the dueling dogmas of discarded culture theories. As Nicholas Dirks suggests, to the extent the Arnoldian assertion of culture as a privileged domain could be useful for interpreting what anthropologists study, anthropology must democratize and universalize it.77 Said refuses to allow this, escaping from the task by claiming that the ways all cultures operate –​hegemonically –​is “a topic for comparative 74 75 76

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Said (1983:160). Di Leonardo (1998:49) blames Said’s “willful blindness” to the work of anthropologists as his “unthinking, reflexive anti-​Marxism.” Said (1983:177). This paradox has already been noted by several scholars, e.g., Ahmad (1992:168–​169, 218), Gossman (1990:48) and Young (1990:227–​228;1995:63). T. S. Eliot tried to reconcile Arnold with Tylor but not in a way that made sense to Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1963:61–​62). Spuhler (1956:403) notes that Arnold “had no direct recourse to the explanatory power of the concept (culture) which his contemporary Tylor did so much to foster.” Aijaz Ahmad (1992:71) is particularly critical of any attempt by literary critics to imply that Arnold shared a theoretical position with Gramsci. As Tumino (2011:26) notes, Arnold’s idealization of culture also stemmed from the inequality of capitalism in Britain at the time. The recent attempt to rehabilitate Arnold by Caulfield (2012), who surveys the history of critique of Arnold, ignores the views of anthropologists. Dirks (1992:22).

78 ­chapter  anthropologists.”78 With his privileged amateur status, Said thus makes a virtue out of not “advancing a completely worked out theory” of the connection between culture and literature or imperialism, as though one can construct by simply opposing a part of what is already there.79 Said’s chosen starting point for “culture” suggests what it consists of as well as what it constitutes and authorizes. In The World, the Text, and the Critic, as quoted above, he goes beyond the obvious sense of product –​“something that one possesses” –​to process: “culture also designates a boundary by which the concepts of what is extrinsic or intrinsic to the culture come into forceful play.” Here it is the syntactic dimension of culture in generating cultural discourse that Said toys with. As formulated, this is dangerously close to saying that culture is that which defines it’s own borders, a solipsist involution. In Culture and Imperialism Said returns to the more commonly cited sense of culture as “practices, like the arts of description, communication, and representation, that have relative autonomy from the economic, social, and political realms and that often exist in aesthetic forms …” In both cases, not surprisingly, Said views culture metaphorically as a politically charged grammar. The economic, social and political products in culture are of no more interest than letters, syllables or even words in a language. Thus, the “stuff” of culture, in Sumner’s sense, is snuffed out resulting in langue without parole. The relevance of culture for Said is how it allows, and at the same time orders, processes of describing, communicating and representing. It is not about what culture is, but rather what culture programmatically does as a kind of pro-​grammar-​matic discourse. Thus, culture in an abstract sense is to blame for society’s problems. Rhetorically, Said plays on the manifold connotations of culture across a plethora of disciplines. He glides between the sweetness of “culture” as such and various sweetened or soured “cultures” in the world. Said is oblivious to the ambiguity in his continual cross-​rendering of culture in the collective and the singular. “Partly because of empire, all cultures are involved in one another, none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated, and unmonolithic,” he argues in Culture  –​note the singular  –​and

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Said (1983:14). Said (1983:14). It is a slippery slope between amateur reasoning and a disdain for expertise as such. Regarding contemporary America in the Trump era, Thomas Nichols (2017:3) warns that “we are witnessing the death of the ideal of expertise itself, a Google-​fueled, Wikipedia-​based, blog-​sodden collapse of any division between professionals and laypeople, students and teachers, knowers and wonderers –​in other words between those of any achievements in an area and those with none at all.”

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Imperialism.80 In like manner, a given culture can resemble a given text, just as Heart of Darkness is so “hydrid, impure, and complex a text.”81 The specific examples provided, given his focus on Eurocentric colonialism, are national cultures that also tend to be heterogeneous. Said routinely refers to a geographically indistinct conglomerate as essentialized Western culture, although studiously avoiding all references to an authentic “Oriental” culture. No attention is paid to the nesting of cultures, British and French being in effect sub-​cultures of Western culture, not to mention the further division of British culture into Anglo, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, immigrant and the like. The problem here is that the “cultures” rendered in Culture and Imperialism, at least on an epistemological level, are not commensurate. At times they might as well be synonymous with “societies” or “ethnicities;” at other times they are simply the assumed human cultural mode writ small. The “culture” opposed by title to “imperialism” is more abstract and far more problematic than its pluralized usage. “Besides,” writes Said, “culture is not monolithic either, and is not the exclusive property of East or West, nor of small groups of men or women.”82 This is a truism that no serious anthropologist would dispute. The rhetorical trap is that what makes specific cultures cultural is that they all have something also called culture. This is where Said’s twofold definition is refined in sugar-​coated Arnoldian terms, both “the power of culture by virtue of its elevated or superior position to authorize, to dominate, to legitimate, demote, interdict, and validate” and its privileged “refining and elevating element.” Said is compelled, like most anthropologists, to go beyond the collective sense of what the notion of culture “consists of” –​specifically, cultures –​to what it “does to.” This explains Said’s attraction to Gramsci’s suggestion of “elaboration” as “the central cultural activity,” and thus “the material making a society a society.”83 But if, as Arnold and Said suggest, culture literally serves the state, how is such a defining role played out in specific cultures that have no state in the modern sense, such as the Yanomamo in the Amazon or the Palestinians? Indeed, how could culture in the “best” sense exist outside the ideological frame of a centralized and hierarchical “state”? By not probing the ambiguity in his own rhetoric, Said can proceed to make retroactive claims on the nature of culture writ large. After discussing the specific case of European imperialism, he assumes “There is no reason to doubt 80 81 82 83

Said (1993:xxv). As Paul Bohannan (1973:358) observes, “A culture is no mere subset of culture, but a different order of abstraction entirely.” Said (1993:68). Said (1993:xxiv). Said (1983:171).

80 ­chapter  that all cultures operate in this way or to doubt that on the whole they tend to be successful in enforcing their hegemony.”84 From an anthropological perspective, there is very good reason to doubt this. Ethnographic analysis of societies from simple hunter-​gatherers like the!Kung Bushmen to Afghan nomads to Mayan villagers shows that the European model is not universal. By extrapolating only from a contemporary reading of cultural dynamics as manifest in Eurocentric thinking, the understanding of culture as a pan-​human affair is prematurely prejudiced from the start. Said is not only suggesting that savoir is pouvoir, but that the intellectual trajectory of savoir within Europe is the only kind worth knowing. Switching at will between singular and plural, Said has little to offer anthropologists who have become only too aware of the blinders imposed in such a reading [back]. The problem noted by James Clifford in critiquing Said’s Orientalism sums up my frustration well: “the absence in his book of any developed theory of culture as a differentiating and expressive ensemble rather than as simply hegemonic and disciplinary.”85 Likewise, Ernest Gellner dismisses Culture and Imperialism for offering “no general discussion of cultural transformation.”86 As Roy D’Andrade complains about much postmodern reading of culture, “it is a theory in which there is only one real system, the power system.”87 As a result, argues Sherry Ortner, this leads anthropology to the dark side, a “theory that asks us to see the world almost entirely in terms of power, exploitation, and chronic pervasive inequality.” Reading culture as a discursive power play would seem to be the best Said has to offer those who venture to observe cultures. The result is little more than Machiavelli with a textual attitude. If cultures should be read as texts, the way Said reads Kipling’s Kim, interpretation must advance beyond semantic potential. A given text is a product frozen in time, the work of a real author even when authorship is denied teleological priority. In this sense no single culture, and certainly not the overarching 84 85

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Said (1983:14). Clifford (1988:263). Apart from Clifford, reviews of Orientalism seldom addressed Said’s assumptions about culture (Mani and Frankenberg 1985:188). Although Said mentions Clifford briefly in his AAA lecture, he does not respond to Clifford’s widely cited critique of Orientalism. Gellner (1994:162). D’Andrade (1995a:251). Sahlins (1999b:405–​406) descries the “afterology in succumbing to powerism” that critics of the culture concept adopt. As Orin Starn (2015:15) suggests, “By the end of the twentieth century it sometimes seemed as if every ethnography had politics or at least power in its title.” Wolf (1994:217–​218) describes four different modes of power instead of lumping such a complex set of issues in one totalizing word.

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progression of human interaction, can ever be reduced to text. The culture framed textually is always the culture as perceived from a particular angle in time. As a set of frames, it should not be confused with the reality it represents. Said, like Arnold, views culture as an aesthetic theoretically alienable from economic, political and social realms, but this is culture with the stuffing knocked out of it. The appeal of such a culture concept is that it serves as the “refining and elevating element,” as Said puts it, that makes ultimate sense of all human behavior as uniquely human. The problem with such a reading of culture is that it can only be a reading back from the privileged view of the present. Had Said consulted anthropological reviews of culture beyond Kroeber and Kluckhohn’s compilation of who said what before 1950, he might have found common cause with several culture concepts that are consciously modeled on a linguistic metaphor. One notable example of this is Ward Goodenough’s recipe-​ reading of culture: “expectations one has of one’s fellows may be regarded as a set of standards for perceiving, believing, evaluating, communicating, and acting. These standards constitute the culture that one attributes to one’s fellows…”88 Goodenough considers the manifest features of what people habitually do as a society’s structure, not its culture. From this perspective of cognitive anthropology, formulating a set of standards that allows one to function in a culture becomes a variation of discovering the grammar of a given language so one can speak it.89 Thus, Goodenough argues that the ultimate goal of ethnography becomes knowing “how an ethnographer can come to share a set of understandings with the people he studies and how he can in turn share these same understandings with the audience for whom he writes an ethnographic report.”90 Knowing a culture means being fluent enough to act appropriately in that culture. I am not suggesting that Goodenough was articulating the dominant anthropological view of culture at the time, or one that is commonly followed today, but simply that there was more to culture theory than Matthew Arnold, the earlier definitions archived in Kroeber and Kluckhohn and the structuralism of Lévi-​Strauss. In this regard, there is a notable absence in Said’s corpus of Clifford Geertz’s major “interpretive” social hermeneutic of culture from the early 1970s. Dangling a metaphor from Max Weber, Geertz suggested that culture should be approached semiotically: “man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun,” these webs metaphorizing

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Goodenough (1970:99). A survey of the development of the “cognitive anthropology” advocated by Goodenough and others is provided by Roy D’Andrade (1995a). Goodenough (1970:12).

82 ­chapter  culture.91 Geertz distanced his approach from the cognitive anthropology of Goodenough as well as from old-​style behaviorist approaches that reduced culture to its products and observably classifiable behavior. Indeed, it is Clifford Geertz –​more than any other anthropologist –​who can be credited with raising the consciousness of anthropologists about the textuality of their ethnographies. Although they both developed different theoretical agendas, both Goodenough and Geertz were trying to lay bare the seemingly inherent power that melded “collective” representations and seemed to direct behavior in bounded ways. Neither addressed nor had any patience for the Arnoldian “bestiality,” to coin a phrase, of culture as a civilizing tool. Neither thought that textuality itself was the core of culture. 2

Writing against Culture The notion of culture (especially as it functions to distinguish “cultures”), despite a long usefulness, may now have become something anthropologists would want to work against in their theories, their ethnographic practice, and their ethnographic writing.92 Lila Abu-​Lughod

The followers of Foucault, Edward Said, and Johannes Fabian have managed to do to anthropology what Said says Westerners have done to the Orient or to the Other: invent something that never existed in order to dominate it.93 Herbert Lewis

My reading of the literature in my own discipline suggests that most anthropologists remain unconvinced that Edward Said has stimulated a better understanding of the culture concept. Many praise Said’s powerful dismantling of the Orientalist discourse that invented an “Orient” through stereotype and ethnocentric rendering. Others, like Nicholas Thomas, seem willing to overlook the polemical faults of Orientalism because of the “novelty of its project.”94 A few, like Michael Richardson, accuse Said of “as much mis-​representation of 91 92 93 94

Geertz (1973:5). Keyes (2002) discusses the influence of Weber on Geertz and other anthropologists. For a survey of the influence of Geertz, see Alexander, Smith and Norton (2011). Abu-​Lughod (1991:138). Lewis (1998:726; 2014:23). Thomas (1991:6).

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Orientalists as he accuses them of making in their representations of the Orient.”95 The danger in viewing a theory of Orientalism as a dogma determined by power, as noted by Borneman and Hammoudi, does not do justice to “the ethnographic enterprise.”96 Herbert Lewis, in a vigorous defense of anthropology, argues that Said “brought down the greatest obloquy on the very enterprise of studying ‘other cultures.’ ”97 Beyond Orientalism, few anthropologists have attempted to re-​think culture along Saidian lines. Said has certainly stimulated anthropologists –​pro and con –​through Orientalism and other texts, but discussion of the issues addressed in his work is moving beyond and, in many ways, away from his approach to discourse, imperialism and culture. An example of the kind of self critique which Said overlooks is Harvard anthropologist Steven Caton’s analysis of David Lean’s film Lawrence of Arabia. Caton calls for a new phase of cultural criticism in which Said’s oppositional “contrapuntal” reading is superseded by a “dialectical critique” he sees evolving in feminist film criticism and post-​colonial studies.98 Shared criticism of Said among scholars in anthropology and post-​colonial studies may lead to a constructive form of cultural criticism that uncritical adoration of Orientalism was unable to do. The anthropologist who has traveled furthest in admiring the thesis in Orientalism is Lila Abu-​Lughod, an ethnographer of the Awlad ‘Ali, a Bedouin society in the Western Desert of Egypt. Abu-​Lughod entered the field as a “dutiful daughter” of a prominent Arab American scholar.99 Her ethnography, Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (1986), draws loosely on Foucault’s notion of discourse to frame the “politics of sentiment” among the women she studied in Egypt. Significantly, the discourse expressed through Bedouin women’s poetry liberates against a dominant tribal ideology that privileges maleness. “For Awlad ‘Ali,” Abu-​Lughod argues, “poetry represents what is best in their culture, what they consider distinctively Bedouin.”100 Yet, in terms that would horrify the Victorian Matthew Arnold, these Bedouin elaborate and sanction poetry as a “discourse of rebellion.” Unlike Said’s rendering of Orientalism as a discourse of domination, here is an example of real people in the “Orient” representing themselves to themselves. In her ethnography 95 96 97 98 99

Richardson (1990:17). Borneman and Hammoudi (2009:7). Lewis (2014:47). Caton (1999:8–​9). A reflexive account of her fieldwork is provided in Abu-​Lughod (1988). Her father, Ibrahim Abu-​Lughod, was a well-​respected political scientist of Palestinian origin. 100 Abu-​Lughod (1986:251). It should be noted that Abu-​Lughod worked primarily with one extended family in her fieldwork.

84 ­chapter  Abu-​Lughod relegates Said’s Orientalism to a single footnote as a reference that notes the link between discourse and power. However, after Said’s 1987 lecture at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Abu-​Lughod engaged with Said’s suggestion to write against essentializing discourse in anthropological theory. “Therefore,” she urges, “ anthropologists should now pursue, without exaggerated hopes for the power of their texts to change the world, a variety of strategies for writing against culture.”101 Before noting which ideas about culture Abu-​Lughod is against, it is worthwhile to examine the ground from which she writes. The brunt of her critique is directed appropriately at Clifford and Marcus’s seminal Writing Culture (1986), a reflexivist anthology of almost biblical status in the discipline but one that for all intents and purposes should be re-​titled Men Writing Culture.102 Abu-​Lughod’s starting point is both that of a feminist anthropologist and a “halfie”; the former is an influential voice in modern anthropology and the latter an indicator of her status as an Arab American conducting ethnography in an Arab culture. Halfies –​a generic rather than a fractional term –​stands for “people whose national or cultural identity is mixed by virtue of migration, overseas education, or parentage.” This creates, Abu-​Lughod suggests, a split self “caught at the intersection of systems of difference.” Such an intersection is also a slippery slope, since “for halfies, the Other is in certain ways the self.” Thus, the argument goes, halfies –​like feminists –​are “forced to confront squarely the politics and ethics of their representations” in a representational universe which is never innocent of power. Abu-​Lughod as halfie closely resembles Edward Said as an intellectual in exile; both claim to cross the colonial divide that separates current American academe from their ethnic origin, whether as a halfie or a wholie out of place.103 101 Abu-​Lughod (1986:251). The quoted passages by Abu-​Lughod in the succeeding paragraphs all stem from this article. Similar points are made in the introduction to her Writing Women’s Worlds: Bedouin Stories (1993). For a collage of quotes from anthropologists who either want to abandon or write against the culture concept, see Brumann (1999:S1–​ S2), who is critical of Abu-​Lughod’s approach. Abu-​Lughod appears to be unaware that calls to abandon the concept of culture have a long history, even in sociology (Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1963:8). 102 A feminist response was issued by Ruth Behar and Deborah A. Gordon as Women Writing Culture (1995). Abu-​Lughod contributes a reflective essay on her pregnancy to this anthology. 103 It is unclear what opposes a “halfie,” especially since the definition is broad enough to include those who are ethnically “wholies” among Middle Eastern anthropologists, including Najwa Adra, Soraya Altorki, Richard Antoun, El Sayed El Aswad, Abdul Hamid El Zein, Soheir Morsy, Seteney Shami and many more. The more commonly cited label, hardly free of terminological baggage, is that of a “native anthropologist,” which begs the question of how native is a native anthropologist (Narayan 1993). However, the concept implies a privileged positioning in asserting that one is necessarily able to see both sides

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The specific essentialist notion of culture that Lila Abu-​Lughod is writing against is one that most anthropologists would concur needs to be delegitimized. “Anthropological discourse gives culture difference (and the separation between groups of people it implies) the air of the self-​evident,” she argues. This makes it a conceptual cognate of “race,” although she immediately recognizes that, unlike race, a concept of culture “removes difference from the realm of the natural and the innate.” From here on her argument stumbles over a series of despites: “Despite its anti-​essentialist intent, however, the culture concept retains some of the tendencies to freeze difference possessed by concepts like race.” This ignores the point that culture is conceived by anthropologists as something that is learned and can change, hence a concept that deviates significantly from classical notions of race. As Michel-​Rolph Trouillot observes, the American anthropological concept of culture is “race repellant.”104 It is at this moment of contradictory suspension that Said’s Orientalism is brought in to make Abu-​Lughod’s point “easier to see.” Said is cited as the authority who showed how Orientalism as discourse “fixes” differences in ways “so rigid that they might as well be considered innate.” Returning from the imagined Orient to the culture concept, Abu-​Lughod argues that while culture might have some utility as an analytical tool, this is overpowered by a negative impact inherent in all representation of otherness. Thus, to bring her argument to a close [reading], Abu-​Lughod suggests that anthropologists start to treat “culture” with the same suspicion Said brings to the “Orient.” Throughout her essay Abu-​Lughod wavers between anthropologists who seem to take culture for granted and those who have been actively deconstructing culturalist notions and formal models. Unlike Said, she notes that cultural anthropologists have “long questioned” the idea of scientific objectivity, pursued “self-​conscious opposition to racism,” developed “a fast-​growing, self-​critical literature on anthropology’s links to colonialism” and are writing experimentally about culture.105 I know of no anthropologist who would

more sharply simply by being a kin-​based “halfie” or through intellectual border crossing that does not sacrifice being “native.” As Trouillot (1991:44, note 20) observes, “Anthropology needs something more fundamental than reconstitutive surgery, and halfies, women, people of color, etc., deserve something better than a new slot.” In my own case, borrowing Abu-​Lughod’s indigenous categorization, I am half a halfie from my Sicilian grandfather. This dilutes me to only a quart and condemns my grandson to be a half-​pint. 104 Michel-​Rolph Trouillot (2002:40). 105 The best anthropology has always rejected scientism. A case in point is the preface to Kroeber and Waterman’s (1931:vii) Source Book in Anthropology, where they state that the passages chosen “are included not because they present ultimate scientific truth, but because they embody facts and interpretations which are useful for the exercise of thought on some of the larger problems in anthropology.” This was written when the field was still

86 ­chapter  disagree with Abu-​Lughod’s claim: “If anthropology continues to be practiced as the study by an unproblematic and unmarked Western self of found ‘others’ out there…” The problem is assuming such an “if” has always been and continues to be the norm. As Michael Fischer observes, “culture” can be a dangerous concept when it is “singularized, frozen, or nominalized,” but such usage is not inherent in the very idea of conceptualizing.106 In the history of the discipline this issue has been anything but unproblematic because of the role of the ethnographic encounter, a point well articulated by Lévi-​Strauss in Tristes Tropiques. In fieldwork every ethnographer becomes a kind of halfie, forced to negotiate not only self with other but pre-​fieldwork self with fieldwork self. Abu-​Lughod’s challenge to write against culture is in effect a call to write against othering, using an assumed cultural difference to justify an attitude of superiority or exploitation. While anthropologists, like everyone else, have not been immune to creating artificial groups or parroting those in native points of view, it is this very issue that has been at the center of debate in the development of anthropology as a modern discipline. “The anthropological concern with difference, often misunderstood as a preference for it and an aversion to theory,” observes Geertz, “is hardly more than the recognition, hard-​earned in hundreds upon hundreds of detailed and extended field investigations, that difference is what makes the world go round, especially the political world.”107 The argument for cultural relativism, not the bland notion that anything goes but the realization that a cultural group needs to be evaluated in terms of its own values rather than summarily judged with an ethnocentric bias, has been central to anthropologists for over a century. Herb Lewis argues forcibly that “the doctrine of cultural relativism was a direct consequence of opposition to colonialism, cultural arrogance, and ethnocentrism!”108 Anthropologists have in its infancy, not to produce a canon but a cross-​section of articles, now long dated, with various viewpoints. 106 Fischer (2007:1). Eric Wolf (1997:2) noted that some concepts are essentialist but other concepts “concepts are analytic, suspicious of holisms, interested in how seemingly whole phenomena are put together. Periodically raising the question of whether the unities we define are homogeneous or whether they are better understood when they are disaggregated and disassembled not only allows us to evaluate concepts we have come to take for granted; it also allows us to think better.” 1 07 Geertz (2010:215). 108 Lewis (2014:117). This view of cultural relativism counters the misleading claim (e.g., Eagleton 2016:41–​42; Harrison 2000:xxv, Rabinow 2011:22) that cultural relativism prevents evaluation of values in another cultural system. The issue is not that anything goes, but that evaluation should be as free of one’s own cultural bias as possible. Renteln (1988:68), drawing on a history of the concept, argues, “Since relativism does not imply tolerance, moral criticism remains a viable option for the relativist.”

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been writing against cultural arrogance, including high-​minded literary scholars, since the beginning of the discipline. There should be no absolute variant of cultural relativism. The suggestion by Terry Eagleton that the concept is “a vastly implausible position” illustrates the literary tunnel vision that comes from ignoring what anthropologists have written about cultural diversity over the past century.109 Deriding a genre he characterizes as “culturalism,” Eagleton directs his critique at those who believe there are no “universal foundations to human existence.” Anthropologists, at least the vast majority since the founding of the discipline, are well aware that all human cultures share universal features through our evolutionary development. The ability to communicate in language is universal, even if there is no universal language. Not only do all known societies have an incest taboo, but this extends even to our simian cousins. Denial of the interplay between our dna and our learned behavior is as absurd for a cultural theorist as an arch biblical creationist. Eagleton is right to deride hyper-​culturalism, but he would have found intellectual allies if he read some anthropology. The “culture” that Abu-​Lughod writes against is not that represented through ethnography, but the popular notion that circulates in the media and in small talk at dinner parties. In an article responding to Laura Bush’s promotion of women’s rights in Afghanistan, it is the media’s rendition of Islam as a bounded “culture” that Abu-​Lughod rightly writes against. I know few anthropologists who would challenge her suggestion that “we need to be suspicious when neat cultural icons are plastered over messier historical and political narratives…”110 In her recent book expanding on this suggestion, it is again “what the American media present” that is her target, not the perceptive ethnographic accounts she cites.111 It should not be a surprise that most Americans readily assume that Muslim women have no rights. The news reports focus on honor killings and heavily veiled Muslim women, not the diverse realities of Muslim women worldwide. During my fieldwork in Yemen the local villagers praised the United States as God-​fearing country and vilified the Soviet Union as a haven for atheists. Common knowledge is often off the mark. One unfortunate irony in Abu-​Lughod’s appeal to Said’s thesis is that while Said posits his worldly locus for intellectualizing in the state of exile –​a cultural

109 Eagleton (2016:41). Eagleton (2016:53) suggests that “fulfilling some biological need” is “non-​cultural” as though sex and defecation defy symbolic rendering. It is this absolute distinction between culture or civilization and our evolutionary framing that anthropologists criticize. 110 Abu-​Lughod (2002:785). 111 Abu-​Lughod (2013:4).

88 ­chapter  transplanting  –​he does not recognize the common ground he shares with those who do ethnography –​a formal mode of cultural translating. Consider the well-​traveled reflection of Erich Auerbach, a mimetic archetype for Said’s secular criticism: “The most priceless and indispensable part of a philologist’s heritage is still his own nation’s culture and heritage. Only when he is first separated from this heritage, however, and then transcends it does it become truly effective.”112 Auerbach’s –​and Said’s –​further citation of Hugo St. Victor’s sentiments captures an important element of the ethnographer’s field experience: “From boyhood I have dwelt on foreign soil, and I know with what grief sometimes the mind takes leave of the narrow hearth of a peasant’s hut, and I know, too, how frankly it afterwards disdains marble firesides and paneled halls.” This homelessness, what Said calls the “executive value of exile,” appreciates that which alienates the self from its original home. In like manner the anthropologist who lives for an extended period in another cultural context understands dialogically what it means not to be at home in a culture. As Roy Wagner explains it, the anthropologist “begins to see his way of life in sharp relief against the background of the other ‘cultures’ he knows.”113 Wagner refers to this process of methodologically induced exile as an opportunity to “invent” culture in which inventing the culture of the other necessarily re-​invents one’s self. Like the 12th century Augustinian mystic Hugo, the fieldworker knows the grief of having lived for a spell in “the narrow hearth of a peasant’s hut” and then, upon returning home, to not feel at home even in the marbled –​and garbled –​halls of academe. Many of the anthropologists Said ignores have been there, done that. As Stanley Diamond suggests, “But since when has anthropology been comfortable in the academy.”114 In appealing to Orientalism, Abu-​Lughod unwittingly reproduces the same reality problem that haunts Said’s analysis of Orientalism as a discourse independent of how the “real” Orient should be represented. Epistemological flirtations with representations as representations aside, both Said and Abu-​ Lughod, literary critic and ethnographer, accept the reality of flesh and blood Orientals as victims of a pervasive and pernicious discourse of domination. Said deconstructs the notion of Orient because he resents the ways Palestinians and other Arabs are being treated; Abu-​Lughod writes against a problematic notion of culture because of her ethnographic encounter with particular others whom she cares about and with whom she shares an identity. The flaw in her argument is an unprobed assumption that any concept of culture must 1 12 Quoted in Said (1983:7). 113 Wagner (1981:9). 114 Diamond (1974:426).

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essentialize in a powerfully negative way just as the manifestly false invention of “Orient” does. Ethnographers do not just look at differences; the best probe the similarities that we share no matter what the local cultural context. For Abu-​Lughod, all culture concepts are problematic because they contain inevitable generalizations that she feels only serve to distance people from each other. Her problem seems to be with what should be called over-​ generalizations, specifically an assumed tendency to essentialize or freeze “cultures.” 115 The bottom line in her writing against culture is that anthropological generalization is “inevitably a language of power” and that culture “is the essential tool for making other.” 116 Generalization itself can not be the problem; it is hard to imagine how we could communicate without it. The problem is the way in which generalizations can be misused. A negative usage, however, is not, as Abu-​Lughod suggests, inevitable. All concepts generalize and typify, but this does not mean that any attempt to conceptualize culture as a tool for analysis itself should be abandoned because of potential misuse and distortion. Abu-​Lughod’s suggestion to avoid generalization is to write “narrative ethnographies of the particular,” as though reproducing what people say in any narrative format is not also a generalization. By reducing the reality of human relations to the stories that are told about it, she succumbs to what Kenneth Burke rightly calls a “reductive anecdote.”117 As Fadwa El Guindi notes, this becomes “a nonempirical orientation forcefully rejected by four-​field anthropology, which is built on systematic data, analytic frameworks, and cross-​cultural knowledge.”118 Particulars never say much on their own unless situated in a broader comparative framework. Ethnography is not like compiling a dictionary or set of aphorisms. Using an example from her own fieldwork among the Awlad Ali Bedouin, Abu-​Lughod argues that the ethnographer could refuse to generalize that they are “polygynous” and instead proceed by “building a picture of it through the participant’s discussions, recollections, disagreements, and actions…”119 But 115 Or, at least most other species. Many anthropologists, myself included, would argue that the idea of being human as opposed to being some other kind of animal is equally artificial. As Paul Bohannan (1973:371) cogently suggests, “The differences between human animals and other animals should be a matter of examination, not definition.” My point, moreover, is that making such a distinction need not be negative or destructive but can serve as a basis for uniting multiple others around commonly shared adaptive features and social practices. 116 Abu-​Lughod (1991:150, 143). Hastrup (1995:57) suggests that Abu-​Lughod confuses experience with anthropological knowledge in avoiding generalizations. 117 This has been pointed out by D’Andrade (1995b:405). 118 El Guindi (2015:171). 119 Abu-​Lughod (1991:153).

90 ­chapter  why would any modern ethnographer want to simply define people by a list of formal traits and not delve into the details observed and communicated in the field? This kind of picture has been built throughout the history of ethnographic writing. Raymond Firth constructed his picture of the Tikopia in his 1936 text with an extraordinary amount of particulars, so what exactly was the problem in his noting that the lineages on this Polynesian island were patrilineal. Firth argued at length that classifying societies as matrilineal or patrilineal “would have no meaning if by that were implied an exclusive concentration in all social affairs on one or other line to the total neglect or rigid repression of the other.”120 It is Abu-​Lughod who generalizes about ethnographies past, exaggerating the extent to which anthropologists both othered and over-​generalized the people they studied. Abu-​Lughod valorizes Said’s Orientalism thesis about, and seconds his suspicions of, the way in which anthropologists work within, or at least alongside, the imperialist rendering of the real world. But apart from admiring his stance as a humanist, which Abu-​Lughod tactfully amends in a call for “tactical humanism,” it is hard to see how this results in anything new. The reflexivist concern among anthropologists for unveiling power issues in ethnography, both as a field method and a form of academic writing, predates Said’s interlocution.121 Dragging Said’s textual attitude into the field –​pun intended –​results in Abu-​Lughod’s connotative conflating of characteristics such as “homogeneity, coherence, and timelessness” as necessarily negative and antithetical to cooperation in human groups.122 Andrew Shryock suggests that Abu-​Lughod is essentially writing against “androcentric, agonistic discourse,” adding that this “slights a world of experience and concern; moreover, it renders much of intellectual and political life in the Middle East immediately unintelligible.”123 120 Firth (1957:298). 121 In a critique of Abu-​Lughod’s position, Lindholm (1995:807) notes that the indictment of essentializing others was well established by prominent anthropologists like Clifford Geertz and Pierre Bourdieu before Said came along. In fact it goes even further back; consider Lowie’s (1936:305) comment that “a specific culture is an abstraction, an arbitrarily selected fragment.” 122 Abu-​Lughod (1991:154). 123 Shryock (1997:314). Gregory Starrett (2008:272) agrees that Abu-​Lughod’s abandoning the idea of culture is “misplaced.” Boggs (2004:191) criticizes Abu-​Lughod’s critique of the culture concept: “But now the properties being attributed to culture are not emancipatory or enlightening but hidden, dark, politically ominous.” For a related critique of Abu-​ Lughod’s dismissal of the culture concept, see Brightman (1995:527), who warns: “Recent critics, through selective forays into disciplinary history, have retrospectively synthesized images of the culture concept, devising essentialist representations of what culture has signified or connoted in its anthropological usages.” Brumann (1999) challenges the assumption that the culture concept has outlived its usefulness.

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In her supposedly ungeneralized writing against culture, Abu-​Lughod shows a profound misunderstanding of the scientific use of concepts by stating that she does not think that “concepts have transcendent or true meanings.” Few serious scientists ever do think that. As Ulf Hannerz advises, we do better to approach the culture concept as a pragmatic reformist than as an abolitionist.124 It makes as little sense to write against culture in Abu-​Lughod’s ambivalent terms as it does to suggest, pace Gellner, that probing the link between power and culture is too important to be left to literary critics. I write as an anthropologist, but I view the best voices in my discipline as honing to the cutting edge of divesting knowledge from essentialist renderings. I respect the work of critics who pursue the same goal in the textual world that ensnares us both as academics. My writing against Culture and Imperialism is motivated primarily by what Said has failed to read, not simply because he has been trained to read differently. Contrapuntally, Said’s sugar coating of culture is as much an absence, a cavity resulting from less informed critique, as it is a blow to the power which all politicized essentialisms share. I do not choose to write against culture, although I share Abu-​Lughod’s concern that those who use cultural categories to freeze difference have yet to realize the unifying potential of diversity. Culture as a pragmatic concept is not the problem; reading too much into it is.

124

Hannerz (2010:546).

Chapter 3

On to the Logic of Being There Fieldwork is a dialectic between reflection and immediacy. Both are cultural constructs. Our scientific categories help us recognize, describe, and develop areas of inquiry. But one cannot engage in questioning and redefining twenty-​four hours a day. The scientific perspective on the world is hard to sustain. In the field there is less to fall back on; the world of everyday life changes more rapidly and dramatically than it would at home. There is an accelerated dialectic between the recognition of new experiences and their normalization.1 Paul Rabinow

…

Construing anthropology as either science or art, fact or fiction, true or false, knowledge or opinion implies an absurd antimony between objectivity and subjectivity, and the idea that we must somehow choose between one or the other.2 Michael Jackson

∵ Twenty-​five years after his death, Bronislaw Malinowski –​the reputed Father of Participant Observation –​haunted the academic underpinnings of anthropology through the posthumous publication of his private field diary, originally inscripted in cryptic Polish. This was in 1967, when I was a sixteen-​year old high-​school junior dreaming of a career in archaeology. A decade later Paul Rabinow published his acclaimed Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco; the year was 1977 and I was making final preparations to head off to Yemen to begin my ethnographic fieldwork as a participant observer. Over three decades later, I still have not published the monographic ‘ethnography’ that would mark my post-​ethnographic-​present adult status in the discipline. The task –​dissecting 1 Rabinow (1977: 38). A 30th anniversay edition of this text was published in 2007. 2 Jackson (1989:181–​182).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/​9 789004381339_005

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an increasingly distant dissertation of an unmanageable 725 pages into a more feasible and hopefully more mature book requires at this point a cutting-​edge Caesarian moment. I went, I saw, I conquered my fears; now what? If ever there was an appropriate time to set down my reflections on my fieldwork in my village, this is it. Is this what being there was really all about? Re-​reading Rabinow at the same time as I relive my own diary entries from the field provides a fertile frame for these reflections. After all, Rabinow was one of the first to offer a reflexivist critique of his mentors, hinging on their unwillingness to let down their academically coiffured hair and tell it like it was regarding the ‘clan secrets’ about being in the field.3 Having been there, he wanted to know why he had not been prepared for the less than theoretical other[there]ness of this anthropological coming-​of-​age ritual. Rabinow, with an impetuous honesty, asked “leading anthropologists who espouse this ‘before and after’ view of fieldwork why they have not written on the subject themselves, since it seems to be such an important one for the field.”4 The “culturally standardized” response he received from the gentlemen in his academic gens was “ ‘Yes, I suppose. I thought about it when I was young. I kept diaries, perhaps someday, but you know there are really other things which are more important.’“5 There were, at the time, “memoirs or anecdotal accounts of sufferings,” including Malinowski’s infamous yet wonderfully humanizing diary of loneliness, disgust and lust. But the point for Rabinow was that “they all cling to the key assumption that the field experience itself is basically separable from the mainstream of theory in anthropology –​that the enterprise of inquiry is essentially discontinuous from its results.”6 My increasingly distanced sense of that alleged discontinuity, as reflected in my field diary, is what this essay is all about. 3 Marcus and Fischer (1986:34) identify Rabinow’s fieldwork confessional as influential in opening up serious discussion on the epistemology of fieldwork as a method. In a later work Rabinow (2011) expands on his relationship with his mentors and earlier anthropological theory. For a trenchant critique of the reflexivist genre exemplified by Paul Rabinow (1977) and Vincent Crapanzano (1980), see Beal (1995), Darnell (2001:296–​307) and Trencher (2000). Geertz (1988:91–​99) comments on Rabinow’s and Crapanzano’s texts, which he classifies as a style of Malinowskian “diary disease” but he says little about what they share apart from the assumption that “being there” is both difficult and corrupting. Salzman (2002) provides a reconsideration of the role of reflexivity in anthropology. 4 Rabinow (1977:4). As Crapanzano (2011:126) suggests, “That anthropologists have not always proclaimed their reflexivity does not mean that they have ignored it. It is rather their mode of critique that demands scrutiny.” Since the reflexivist turn in anthropology over the past four decades many accounts of the fieldwork experience have been published, both by individuals (e.g., Caton 2005) and in anthologies (e.g., DeVita 1992, 2000; Kemper and Royce 2002). 5 Rabinow (1977:4). 6 Rabinow (1977:5).

94 Chapter 3 It is not clear what anecdotal accounts of suffering, beyond the cryptic musings of Malinowski’s diaries, Rabinow was familiar with. It may be true that few discussions of the fieldwork experience were made in the classroom. Walter Goldschmidt reminisces that when he asked Alfred Kroeber in the 1930s for advice on conducting ethnography among the Nomlaki, he was just told to take along plenty of paper and pencils, since “it could not be taught.”7 Gerald D. Berreman notes that when he and his fellow students asked a professor what it was like to be in the field, the “counsel fell rather short of our expectations.”8 Recognizing the problem that anthropologists were reluctant to speak about their fieldwork experience, Morris Freilich in 1970 brought together articles by ten established ethnographers to discuss the issue. Rabinow appears not to have noticed Freilich’s comment: “What it is like includes feelings of frustration, fears, hopes, isolation, exciting ‘on-​stage’ performances, euphoric heights, and deep depressions, and these feelings must be understood both for the anthropologist’s psychological comfort and for effective research.”9 Nor did Rabinow consider the hair-​letting-​down experiences from the personal accounts by a number of women ethnographers in Peggy Golde’s 1970 edition of Women in the Field, which is cited in his bibliography. When Laura Nader commented on “the intellectual problems of anthropology as they affect the field anthropologist,” was she to be dismissed as part of the “rustling-​of-​the-​wind-​in-​the-​ palm-​tree” or Return to Laughter genre.10 Helen Codere, who conducted fieldwork in Rwanda in 1959–​1960 noted the embarrassment of being a White American liberal in a colonial context needing personal servants and described how she had to undergo her “own private revolution of cherished anthropological doctrine in order to function effectively.”11 What did Rabinow not understand when Ruth Landes said “Field work serves an idiosyncracy of perception that cannot separate the sensuousness of life from its abstractions, nor the researcher’s personality from his experiences.” She adds: “Underneath culture’s variations we are not all the same, but we are recognizable. When the field worker recognizes personalities this way in the alien culture, he discovers his own. This gives the human depth to information he gathers and will interpret for scholars and others.”12 7 8 9 10

11 12

Goldschmidt (2000:792). Berreman (1962:3). Freilich’s (1970:32). Nader (1986:97). Lutkehaus (2008) analyzes the failure of males like Evans-​Pritchard and James Clifford to respect the popular writing style of Margaret Mead. Return to Laughter was the title of a fictionalized reflective narrative by Laura Bohannon, the wife of fellow anthropologist Paul Bohannon (Bowen 1954). Codere, Helen (1986:153). Landes (1986:121).

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Rabinow might have benefited from reading the poignant reflexivist account of Andreas Köbben, who in 1967 described his fieldwork experience among the Djuka of Surinam. “The personality and interests of the research-​ worker are thus a significant factor in determining the contents of his report,” concludes Köbben. “Pure description does not exist.”13 Like Rabinow, Köbben found life in the field to be a challenge, reflecting: “Personally, I lived under great psychological stress and felt little of the proverbial peacefulness of ‘country life.’ Few books touch on this subject, but I know that the same is true of quite a number of other fieldworkers. Perhaps it is even a sine qua non for field work.”14 It is hardly a sin if the sine qua non of “being there” does not provide the comforts of home for the participant observer. As Doug Raybeck reflects on fieldwork conducted in Malaysia in the late 1960s, “The problem with fieldwork is not that things are different; one expects things to be different.”15 At least one should expect that things will be different. Rabinow quite consciously set out to violate the specific taboos that haunted him by arguing that “all cultural activity is experiential, that fieldwork is a distinctive type of cultural activity, and that it is this activity which defines the discipline.”16 Rabinow claimed that he was not challenging the need for fieldwork; he wanted to bring it out in the open for an airing. His radical suggestion at the time was that a “positivistic view of science” was a poor way to study humanity. He saw the reluctance of his mentors to speak about process as a byproduct of what many anthropologists were trying so hard at the time to show –​that they were objective social scientists and ethnographic data were more than quantitatively deficient anecdotes. Fieldwork method, inaugurated in Malinowski’s pioneering Argonauts (1922) had now become a hermeneutical problem, exemplified in the private musings of the same author’s A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term (1967). The predicament of having been there as an ethnographer is summed up neatly by Rabinow –​as participant reflector –​in Hegel’s oft-​quoted insight that “the owl of Minerva flies at Dusk.”17 Minerva, the Italian goddess who began materially as a patron of handicraft and war à la the Greek Athena, served as a symbol of philosophical wisdom for Hegel. The idea of a twilight flight perhaps reflects Hegel’s own sense that his civilization had arrived at a stage in 13 14 15 16 17

Köbben (1967:41). Köbben (1967:46). Raybeck (1992:5). Rabinow (1977:5). Rabinow (1977:7). This quote is taken from the introduction to Hegel’s (1954:227) Philosophy of Right and Law, a classic defense of the positivist rationale that truth can be found. In a 1989 interview with Susan Trencher (2000: 11), Rabinow noted that he wrote Reflections as an intentional mirroring of Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit.

96 Chapter 3 which such a bird’s eye view would be meaningful. The owl is a skillful hunter at twilight because it can see better than its prey, a fitting metaphor for the kind of rationality Hegel triumphed. In this philosophical sense, having the advantage of hindsight, the ethnographer should have a firm commitment to providing, as Hegel advised, “only a scientific and objective treatment.”18 A humanist mode of anthropology was, for Rabinow, just beginning to spread its wings, although I imagine Hegel would be surprised to learn that such a wise owl could fly at all in a world without definitive intellectual boundaries. Paul Rabinow started reflecting on his field experience in Morocco as the perils of scientistic positivism were being debated among anthropologists.19 The debate spread far beyond anthropology to critical deconstruction of the paradigm inaugurated by Auguste Comte in the early 19th century as positivism, a philosophical dictum that preceded the development of modern scientific theory but still greatly influenced it. Rabinow ignores the previous criticism of Comte’s positivism, which cultural materialist Marvin Harris has labeled a “fatally muddled outlook.”20 “Anthropological activity is never only scientific,” noted Bob Scholte in his contribution to Dell Hymes’ Reinventing Anthropology.21 Tylor’s utopian hope for a science that produced laws analogous to the physical sciences could not withstand the complexity of human behavior that later ethnography documented. Some anthropologists, like Evans-​ Pritchard, have argued that anthropology shares more in common with history than the positivist thrust of the sciences.22 Even Johannes Fabian, whose critique of anthropology has been sharp, argues: “For those of us who continued to work as ethnographers because, not in spite, of our intellectual and political commitments, the struggle for liberation from positivism and scientism never meant that empirical accountability and claims to the scientific status of our findings were to be abandoned.”23 18 19 20 21 22

23

Hegel (1954:227). As Paul Roscoe (1995:493) notes, the resultant reflective criticism of Rabinow and others became a kind of intellectual free fall in which “everybody is a positivist save critics of positivism –​and they turn out to be ‘cryptopositivists.’ Harris (1968:66). Scholte (1974:431). Regarding a late 19th century comment of the British historian F.  W. Maitland, Evans-​ Pritchard (1962:190–​191) writes:  “Maitland has said that anthropology must choose between being history and being nothing. In the sense I have outlined, and in which also I believe he wrote, I accept the dictum, though only if it can be reversed –​history must choose between being social anthropology or being nothing –​and I think Maitland might have accepted the stipulation.” Fabian (2012:442). He adds that the argument over whether or not anthropology is a science or a humanity has a great deal to do with academic resources and institutional support.

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More than any other social science, anthropology’s holistic approach meant that it straddled the arbitrary academic boundary separating the sciences, physical and social, from the humanities. The assumption that anthropology was positivist to the core reifies an artificial boundary in the study of humanity. Rabinow ignores the poignant argument by Gerald Berreman about the nature of the discipline: The question I  see is not whether to be scientific of humanistic, but how to be both. That is, the ethnographer must strive to make his observations and analyses more rigorous than those of a casual observer and he must do so without losing the fundamental insights that are obtained by perceptive non-​scientists (for instance, novelists). The humanistic view tends to overlook the advantages of rigor –​especially of verifiability of findings; the scientist view tends to overlook the advantages of insight.24 Surely an anthropologist can be a pragmatic empiricist without having to be a card-​carrying positivist.25 The problem, shared with many disciplines outside anthropology, is not a theoretical strait-​jacket but finding appropriate ways as humans to study ourselves and, more specifically in ethnography, how we as particularly socialized humans represent others. Any anthropologist who thought she or he were really being totally objective was, in a fact-​ finding sense, never capable of such an impossible goal. Those who were looking for Truth could only find certain kinds of truths, at times the very kinds they were seeking. In many cases it is the misreading of what anthropologists write that is taken as truth rather than what the ethnographer believed or intended. 1

Why Being There Matters To me the experience is far more like a sharp blow to the head or a large spoonful of horseradish; it is a process that marks those who have been through it.26 Daniel Bradburd

24 25 26

Berreman (1968:368). I owe this thought to Douglas Raybeck, personal communication. It is even possible to be a Humean “kinky empiricist” (Rutherford 2012). Bradburd (1998:161).

98 Chapter 3 Critical theoretical critiques aside, the heroic (heroinic) contribution of fieldwork is the great achievement of a century of anthropology.27 James Peacock

It borders on the redundant to suggest that anthropologists who have undertaken ethnographic fieldwork have no choice but to reflect. Some vent in diaries or letters, most in person to friends and lovers –​off the publish-​or-​perish record –​and certainly all of us are occasionally tormented, or at least mildly troubled, to some degree about what it all meant. At the risk of violating what may be a reflective clan taboo of much, if not most, distinctively postmodern reflexivist anthropology over the past two decades, I begin with an immodest counter claim:  most anthropologists have been reluctant to discuss the implications of their fieldwork experience because there are really other things which are more important. When ‘I’ becomes the main issue, ethnography can easily descend into ordinary journalism where reflections tend to be self-​serving, even when they are self deprecating. Placing the spotlight on the carefully crafted rhetorical ‘I’ in the ethnographic encounter does not in itself give the ‘other’ a more authentic voice. We should reflect in order to ease entry into the ubiquitous –​yet hardly iniquitous –​field context, continually hone our analytical tools, and filter our theories. Reflect, that is, in order to act responsibly rather than to keep on endlessly reflecting in mirror imagining. The goal, in my mind, is that we understand who we are anthropologically in order to better understand the other encountered in the field; otherwise dissing ethnography becomes a disturbance, a disincentive to our students and a disservice to the discipline. I am certainly not the first to make such a claim, nor do I wish here to simply pile on what other critics have said about the importance of fieldwork. I find solace in the sentiment offered in Margery Wolf’s A Thrice-​Told Tale: This is a book for anthropologists and other social scientists who, like me, have read and listened with interest to the protagonists’ often heated exchanges –​over polyvocality, reflexivity, colonialist discourse, audience, the nature of the relationship between anthropologists and informants, and the like –​and still are just a little more interested in the content of the ethnographies we read and write down than in the ethnographers’ epistemologies.28

27 28

Peacock (2002:54). Margery Wolf (1992:1).

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“Fieldwork is a dialectic between reflection and immediacy. Both are cultural constructs,” suggests Rabinow.29 Fieldwork is first and foremost about immediacy; ‘being there’ only comes into being when we are there. Methods courses and theory seminars aside, our collective rite of passage is a get-​along-​by-​the-​seat-​of-​ your-​pants experience that defies cogent description in academic language. The fieldwork context includes feeling lonely and out of place, getting sick as a dog, making foolish mistakes in etiquette, interrupting and often complicating the lives of others, and learning a lot you might not want to know about yourself. To assume otherwise is to be naïve, not necessarily duped by one’s university mentors. Fieldwork can also be exhilarating, a peak experience, a store of memories that will do more than haunt your lectures for decades. Yes, we reflect in the field; as humans we tend to reflect wherever we are. But a ‘dialectic’? Not in a formally logical way, not one that arrives at a critical understanding, certainly not as Kant, Hegel or Marx would recognize dialectic as a process leading to ultimate clarification. Indeed, beyond the catachrestic fixation on ‘dialectic’ in much postmodern criticism, I fail to see how this term could be cited simultaneously with a rhetorical denial of the metaphysical base for a positivistic view of science.30 For Rabinow fieldwork is dialectic “because neither the subject nor the object remain static.”31 But what set of human relationships is ever static? What else could being there be if not culturally constructed? This was one of the compelling reasons I did not choose to collect rocks or split atoms but to live with people. A fieldwork context presents the opportunity for dialogue, but mandates neither the impossibility nor the necessity of arriving at a suitable synthesis. The key problem with Rabinow’s reflective gloss is how reflecting after the fact could logically resurrect the immediacy of fieldwork. It is only meaningfully immediate once. All else is representation, the truth of which is more often than not ascribed solely through the rhetoric of a unilaterally reconstructed post-​dialectic. “Our scientific categories help us recognize, describe, and develop areas of inquiry. But one cannot engage in questioning and redefining twenty-​four hours a day” continues Rabinow.32 One cannot engage in anything twenty-​four hours a 29 30

31 32

Rabinow (1977:38). In reviewing the term ‘dialectic,’ Raymond Williams (1976:93) noted it has been used in a variety of different ways: “It is not often easy to see which of these various senses is being used, and with what implications, in the course of contemporary argument.” A case in point is Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s (1999:58, 331)  “crudely dialectical reading of a moment in the Gita,” which eventually leads to the Derrida-​on-​arrival notion that ‘dialectic’ could be ‘aporetic doublethink.’ The fact that Spivak (1989:290) refers to herself and Edward Said metaphorically as “wild anthropologists” is pure catachresis. For a nuanced anthropological discussion of “dialectical,” see Jackson (1989:2–​3, 171–​187). Rabinow (1977:39). Rabinow (1977:38).

100 Chapter 3 day. But should we abandon training in formalized methodology and disciplined theory when this seems to clash and at times crash before our eyes in the immediacy of experiencing other cultures? Is it not possible to choose sounder categories from unsounder ones in representing others when reflecting on previous experience in the intellectual history of both the sciences and the humanities? Is there a better way than applying rational logic and avoiding logical fallacies –​the force behind the philosophical concept of dialectic –​for recognizing, describing and developing areas of inquiry as an anthropologist? If our anthropologizing cannot be sustained twenty-​four hours a day, is it worthless? If we need to read a novel, drink ourselves silly or escape a pesky informant, do these personal moments constitute an indictment of who, what and why we are as anthropologists in the field? I do not think that reflection is unimportant, else this essay would not be written, but simply that it is worth considering what else may be more important. “In the field there is less to fall back on; the world of everyday life changes more rapidly and dramatically than it would at home. There is an accelerated dialectic between the recognition of new experiences and their normalization” Rabinow notes.33 Precisely! This is true for anyone who crosses cultural boundaries, not only anthropologists; it is more challenging to function away from the comforts of home. The routine is not there, emotional supports may not be available; there’s no automatic pilot for behavior because every day in the field is not everyday any more. Hence the designation of ethnographic fieldwork as our quintessential –​ and emotionally stressful –​rite of passage. Students of human behavior who do not go into the field can be brilliant and make lasting contributions to the field –​ Durkheim or Weber, for e­ xample –​but consider how their ideas might have benefited from the disorienting and reorienting of being in a field and observing real others in context. It is because we are not at home and cannot be so –​even when we try –​that we have an opportunity to understand something significant about what is going on, with our own psyche as well as the culture we have come to study. As Daniel Bradburd reflects on his field experience in Iran, “While it is far from a perfect technique, spending a good long time with people, watching what they do, listening to what they say, understanding what is important to them, and constantly examining what one experiences living with them –​in short, doing long-​term fieldwork –​remains the best way, and in my view probably the only way, to achieve some significant understanding of another culture.”34 To experience the immediacy of the field, we do have to be there. However, our collective having been there has been dismissed by some “hermeneutically sophisticated anthropologists,” in the connoting trope of James Clifford, 33 34

Rabinow (1977:38). Bradburd (1998: 11).

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as a power-​stained tool to manufacture a textualized aura of ethnographic ­authority.35 Rabinow mentions his mentors’ disdain for those who worked in libraries as “not ‘really’ anthropologists, regardless of what they knew about anthropological topics.”36 The primary example he chose was Mircea Eliade, a distinguished historian of religion at the University of Chicago. But this example supports the very point Rabinow thought problematic. Despite Eliade’s recognized erudition, which his scholarly output establishes beyond any academically reasonable doubt, his lack of fieldwork and unchallenged ethnocentric assumptions clearly detract from the application of his work to specific cases. Eliade’s intuition, like that of his encyclopedic predecessor James Frazer, was extraordinary, but because “it had not been altered by the alchemy of fieldwork”37 I suggest that it remains untested against the immediacy of observing what people actually do and say they do with ideas. Is it not counter productive to suggest, even indirectly, that Eliade’s ideas about anthropological topics would have been less significant if he had actually done fieldwork somewhere? If Rabinow reflects on his own fieldwork experience as in some important sense disillusioning, does that mean there must be a bad alchemical reaction for all ethnographers? Styling fieldwork as alchemy only makes sense from the platform of the scientific method; otherwise everything might as well be mere intellectual fool’s gold. In later work Rabinow continues to disparage ethnography, arguing that anthropology is too focused on culture as an “object.” This ignores the fact that an ethnographer lives among subjects, not objects; this experience can not be reduced to a specific written product, which can take many forms and always has. Instead of building on the work of previous anthropologists, Rabinow turns to a range of philosophers and social critics. In so doing he turns the field into an intellectual minefield. It is hard to see how the following jargon-​loaded phrasing offers anything new: “Rather, I  take the object of anthropological science (Wissenschaft) to be the dynamic and mutually constitutive, if partial and dynamic, connections between figures of anthropos and the diverse, and at times inconsistent, branches of knowledge available during a period of time; that claim authority about the truth of the matter; and whose legitimacy to make such claims is accepted as plausible by other such claimants; as well as the power relations within which and through 35 36 37

Clifford (1988:38). Rabinow (1977:3). Rabinow (1977:3).

102 Chapter 3 which those claims are produced, established, contested, defeated, affirmed, and disseminated.”38 What he defines as a narrowing of scope is rather an idiosyncratic philosophical meditation, where speculation outside the field is considered the only thing worthwhile. 2

Reflecting after Yemen Reflections on fieldwork –​it really does demand a lot just to be here –​ I haven’t begun to feel anthropological yet. Now I begin to understand the mentality of those who go to Ireland or someplace ‘like home.’ I will never understand the lure of New Guinea or the Amazon. Here at least we can live + eat European food (be it from cans). Field Notes 4/​6 /​7 8

This living in a foreign country is a bit too much –​and I really do not enjoy it (yet –​). Perhaps in a village on our own –​with a vehicle. Field Notes 4/​2 9/​7 8

Will I have happy memories of Yemen? I keep stumbling over my own mental state –​still sulking in fear of this very real unknown –​ so easily known yet so seemingly far away. Field Notes 8/​2 2/​7 8

I arrived in Yemen on March 22, 1978. The next day I began a ‘Yemen Diary’ to record events and feelings.39 At the beginning I  was quite diligent in my comments, in part because it took several months to obtain government permission to settle into a rural field site. Once in the ‘real’ field these diary entries became less frequent as I focused on research issues and wrote down specific 38 39

Rabinow (2007:4). I have not counted the pages of diary notes, but imagine loose sheets of ruled paper about half an inch thick. For those readers who did not conduct fieldwork before the personal computer age, a comment on our notation system may be useful. While in the field all our notes were written, mostly with carbon copies, on 5 1/​2 by 8 1/​2 sheets of paper and filed in small notebooks arranged largely by topic. The combined output now covers about two dozen notebooks in our study. Steven Caton (2005), who carried out ethnographic research in Yemen about the same time, has written an “ethno-​memoir” with extensive use of his personal diary notes as well as his field notes.

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field notes. Re-​reading the diary years later I only vaguely recall the immediacy of the experience that prompted my reflections. I am more than a little chagrined at how much was left out of what I actually did in the field; there are details on where I went, what I ate, and how I was feeling, but these are sporadic and not a daily record. There is quite a lot of reflecting going on in these pages; some of it is refreshingly honest, while other parts seem contrived like poems written at the last minute for an English composition class. Would I publish it as is? I doubt it; no one would want to read its tedious droning of the mundane. Is it embarrassing? Not in a Malinowskian sense; less now than it would have been soon after I wrote it. Does it shed light on my ethnographic data? Not much for anyone but myself, I suspect. About two weeks after arriving in Yemen there is an entry on my initial reflections to being there. I was undergoing initial culture shock, realizing how demanding it was not to be in my previous and far more comfortable ‘there’ at home. The consolation was that at least Yemen had some of the comforts of home. There seemed to be an abundance of my kind of super market food in cans, but oh how I would grow to despise those tins of rubbery Australian Kraft cheese, bland Asian mackerel, and out-​of-​date A&P peanut butter! I had reason to be a bit glum, since I still was not sure if I would be receiving a Fulbright grant, without which I had little idea how long I could stay in the field.40 That my wife, Najwa Adra, was also an anthropologist and we would be doing our fieldwork side by side is relevant for reflecting on what it meant for me to be in the field.41 We spent the first week with a friend of Najwa’s family, then found a temporary place to stay in the capital with a Yemeni family while we snailed through the bureaucracy to get permissions. None of my mentors promised this part would be fun; I just hoped it would be and sometimes it was not. In retrospect, however, I would not simply try to post hoc[us pocus] whine it away. After only a few days in Morocco, Rabinow notes “already I was set up in a hotel, an obvious remnant of colonialism, was having my coffee in a garden, and had little to do but start ‘my’ fieldwork.”42 Although his reflections on fieldwork have been widely read, his fieldwork monograph from 1975 is almost never cited. One reason may be that it is very thin description, only 100 pages, mostly derivative historical construction and uncritically anecdotal. For

40 41

42

I received a Fulbright Hayes Doctoral Dissertation Research Grant for 1978–​1979. Najwa focused her ethnographic research on the semiotics of dance and Yemeni tribal identity. For a concise description of her ethnographic research, see Adra (2011, 2009, 1998, 1985, 1983). My dissertation (Varisco 1982) has long since disappeared into the maze of University Microfilms. Rabinow (1977:11).

104 Chapter 3 a work that proposes an actor-​oriented approach, “to understand the actor’s view of his social world,” there is virtually no ethnographic actor in sight.43 The few times a local Arabic or Berber term is discussed, Rabinow relies on the range of meanings in a French dictionary. How ironic that a person known for his reflections on fieldwork did not seem to actually find much worth writing about in his published fieldwork ethnography. After two weeks in the capital of Yemen I had not begun to feel anthropological yet. Rabinow says he was unsure what it meant to start his fieldwork, except to wander around the place a bit. “After all,” he concludes, “now that I  was in the field, everything was fieldwork.”44 I  was in the field alright, but there was much to be done before I could begin field research. I do not suggest that the preparation for getting to my field site was not part of the fieldwork process, but it felt more like spring training than the big league dissertation variety. First, our visas had to be renewed and a research permit negotiated, both requiring substantial assistance from the American Embassy. Unlike Morocco, Yemen did not have a system in place to deal with anthropologists. Nor had the colonial powers left their quaint remnants of third-​class tourist hotels with waiters who spoke fluent French and served wine. The reality that faced us was quite simple: without the necessary permission, we would have to leave.45 Our ethnographic authority –​a concept no Yemeni official would have recognized even in the abstract –​could not be waived through the bureaucracy; postcolonial privilege is hard to brandish in a country that was never directly colonized.46 We also needed to find a suitable field site for our respective research plans before we could get to the there we came for. Unlike Rabinow, I find it trite to think that everything happening to me in the field was fieldwork. The entire experience shaped my understanding of being an ethnographer, as did the type and extent of training and, by logical extension, almost any previous experience in my rather banal personal biography up to that point. Being there only made fieldwork possible. Chatting with an occasional waiter was certainly a useful experience for me as well, because it was exposure to Yemenis and a chance to begin dialectizing my staid textbook Arabic. But in my mind then, as well as now, this was preparatory to what 43 44 45 46

Rabinow (1975:3). Rabinow (1977:11). I do not make this point facetiously. More than one anthropologist has in fact been denied permission to conduct ethnographic research in Yemen; a few have even been asked to leave. Our research was conducted in North Yemen, the former Zaydi imamate, which no Western power had ever controlled. The British controlled the southern port of Aden from 1839 to 1967, and the two Yemens did not unite until 1990.

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I planned to do as formal research. I did not attend graduate school with the goal of ordering dinner in Arabic from a waiter-​as-​other. Other things seemed, and I think came to be, more important. Nor is ethnography all fieldwork and no meaningful play. There are times when it is necessary to desist from taking notes and absorb the experience as a fellow human being intent on better understanding the other as well as oneself. There were times when I  sought solace on my favorite rock, shared only with a blue agame lizard nearby. We both could watch the mist flow up through the fertile terraces below, billowing like waves but without sound. I might hear the voices of farmers calling to each other as the day’s work was done or the local imam calling the villagers to prayer. Here was where reflection came naturally –​in the field. Why was I here? Here in Yemen, in this lush mountain valley, on this rock? Why was I here at all, born in a land my Yemeni friends could not imagine I left? Who was I? It depended on who you asked. To the government officials who had to approve our papers, I was probably an unwanted pain in the posterior. Some no doubt wondered if we were really spies, as though living in a rural mountain village would aid American foreign policy in the waning days of the Cold War. In the field site we rented a room from a respected sayyid, the term used in Yemen for a literal descendant of the Prophet Muhammad. During the civil war following the collapse of the millennium-​old religious imamate in 1963, he and his family had been forced to live outside Yemen. He had the benefit of a formal education, and, unlike the local villagers, he understood why we would want to do research. He was also willing to help us. When we first met him, he offered us a room attached to his house. This was a room with a fantastic view of the terraces below, a separate entrance and a bathroom with water piped in from a nearby spring. Our first thought was that we should live in one of the nearby villages. After all, we would not want to look on the natives from a verandah, even if it was not a colonial venue. Our soon-​to-​be landlord took us on a brief tour of the nearest village. It was obvious that there were no available rooms. In fact new houses were being built at a remarkable pace, due to the remittances that Yemeni men working abroad were sending back home. If we lived in a village, water would have to be carried in from a nearby spring, the pail-​on-​head variety that Najwa soon discovered from personal experience was not easily learned on the steep terrace paths. We settled on the room in his spacious country house and welcomed his family’s support. We were free to visit villagers and they were free to visit us. On Rabinow’s fourth day in Morocco he was, in his own words, “in a rather ideal ‘anthropological’ position … fluent in the language, familiar with the culture,

106 Chapter 3 concerned with related issues, yet unquestionably an outsider.”47 Fluent in “the language”? The language in question was of course French, which Rabinow says gave him an immediate ‘entrée’ into his “everything was fieldwork” assumption. Yet Rabinow had theoretically come to Morocco “intent on studying rural religion and politics,” not to discuss French philosophes.48 To what extent did his fluency in French allow him to be a participant observer of rural society? And, if French –​surely not Moroccan French at first –​was all he needed, why did he make the effort to start learning Arabic with a local, and untrained, teacher, or throw in “a few broken Arabic greetings” for a cafe owner?49 What are we to make of the experience of going to a wedding and realizing his “minimal Arabic did not permit much expansive conversation?”50 To make matters worse, at least linguistically, many of the people Rabinow met spoke Berber as a mother tongue. I admire Rabinow’s honesty about the difficulty of communicating when he did not know two of the three relevant field languages, but I am confused how this amateurish encountering could be considered fieldwork or how postcolonial French over red wine could unveil the mysteries of rural religion and politics. Rather than focus on the clannish taboo about the personal aspects of fieldwork, perhaps some criticism should have been redirected at mentors who did not stress the importance of attempting to learn some Arabic or Berber before going there. Rabinow implies that he literally hit the ground running because of his fluency in French. I faced quite a different situation, since few Yemenis –​especially the ones I wanted to talk with –​knew anything other than Arabic and it was a specific dialect of Yemeni Arabic at that. Despite three years of formal university training in Arabic, I could barely understand a thing when I first arrived in Yemen. Because my wife and co-​ethnographer was a native Arabic speaker, I was at first spared the embarrassment of making myself understood in my haltingly formal textbook Arabic.51 When we found a room soon after our arrival with a Yemeni family, I noted optimistically: “Hopefully this will accelerate my Arabic.” Two weeks later I bought my first English-​Arabic dictionary, 47 48 49 50 51

Rabinow (1977:19). As Deborah Kapchan (2013:170) notes, in her “visceral and almost violent reaction” to Rabinow’s book, it “was written by a man whio did not speak Arabic except cursorily.” Rabinow (1977:11). Rabinow (1977:24,33). Rabinow (1977:41). Textbook Arabic is an obvious beginning, but it does not prepare an ethnographer for the nuances of dialect. In his lively account of travel in Yemen, Tim Mackintosh-​Smith (1997:1) captures this disconnect well: “Cowan’s Modern Literary Arabic lay open at ‘The Dual’ (not content with mere sungulars and plurals, Arabic also has a form for pairs): ‘The two beautiful queens’, it said. ‘are ignorant.’ The odds against ever uttering such a sentence were high: grammars, like theatre, call for a suspension of disbelief.”

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writing ‘al-​hamdullah’ (thank God) in Arabic in my diary. This book turned out to be utterly useless for communicating in the local Yemeni dialect, which I had to pick up through conversation in the field. I felt anything but fluent in the daily flow of language, so I filled my days by brushing up on Yemeni Arabic for the immersion I knew was coming once we arrived in what for me was going to be the ‘real’ field. I never hired a tutor; having a fluent wife as co-​worker helped mitigate my nascent navigation through local dialect to a great extent. Several of my informants had the patience to teach me the local dialect by trial and error in conversation. Once in the field I improved through daily practice to the point where I could get along reasonably well –​at least on my research topic –​even if I invariably felt lost when listening to the poetry Yemenis were so fond of reciting. But it was only when I was able to use Arabic adequately that I can say my field research was enabled to expand beyond confused abstract observation to learning through participation. Before coming to Yemen I had made a copy of Ettore Rossi’s 1939 L’Arabo Parlato a San‘â,’ which made it far easier to understand both the local dialect grammar and increase my vocabulary. Rossi, an Arabist who traveled to Yemen during the time of Mussolini’s fascist regime in Italy could easily be dismissed, as Edward Said would argue, as an Orientalist handmaid of colonialism. Whatever Rossi’s private views were, or his connections to the Italian government, his linguistic research on Yemeni Arabic stands on its own as a valuable contribution. It was indispensable for my research in the field and for my growing interest in Yemeni manuscripts. While in the field I was able to examine and photograph an abridged version of a 14th century Yemeni agricultural treatise with details and vocabulary remarkably similar to what I found in daily life.52 The agricultural system I was observing had a long history; it was not simply a tradition with a blurred and unchanging past. Learning more about this history greatly aided my understanding of what I saw; previous “Orientalist” research was vital for filling out my ethnographic study. 3

Flies in the Ointment I find myself enjoying killing flies, which, of course, is an exercise in futility. Field Notes 3/​2 7/​7 8

52

I received help in understanding this important text from Professor R. B. Serjeant, with whom I planned to publish a facsimile of the manuscript. This was eventually published by the Gibb Memorial Trust (Varisco and Smith 1998).

108 Chapter 3 Met M. W. for the first time –​tall fellow sauntering about the room methodically swatting flies Field Notes 3/​2 9/​7 8

Spending first night in new room. Cleaned from 10:30–​ 5:30. Swarmed with billions of flies –​some rather pesky. Must get some screen to fly-​proof this place. Field Notes 3/​3 1/​7 8

Went on a rampage against flies today, but they just kept on coming. Field Notes 4/​1 /​7 8

Beautiful now –​no flies, cool breeze, the mueddhins calling to each other in the distance, a glass of water (unboiled unfortunately) + quiet. Field Notes 4/​2 /​7 8

So pleasant not to be hassled by flies. Field Notes 4/​3 /​7 8

Just killed a fly with my Bic pen! Field Notes 8/​1 7/​7 8

Culture shock, the deep structure of the ethnographer’s superficial anxiety, takes many forms.53 For Rabinow this trope surfaces over the rudeness of Ali, who would not leave a late night wedding despite Rabinow feeling ill from a stomach virus.54 Feeling “confused, nauseous, and totally frustrated,” Rabinow told his friend he was acting like a baby and inhospitably let him off on the road five miles from town. Acknowledging later that this might have been a “grave professional mistake,” blame is reflected back on his professors “back in Chicago,” where they had advocated “one simply endured whatever inconveniences and annoyances came along.”55 For Rabinow this kind of anthropology “simply wasn’t for me.” “I found the demands of greater self-​control and abnegation 53

54 55

For examples of culture shock by anthropologists in the field, see Golde (1986:10–​12). Kirsten Hastrup (1995:15) notes that beyond the monotonous diet, cold weather, loneliness, sexual assualts and loss of identity in Iceland, “one of my greatest shocks in the field was to be reminded of my own world.” Further examples of shock and awe in the field can be found in two volumes edited by Philip R. DeVita (1992, 2000). Rabinow (1977:40–​45). For an extended analysis of this event, see Trencher (2000:76–​ 8, 83–​4). Rabinow (1977:46).

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hard to accept,” he adds. “I was used to engaging people energetically and found the idea of a year constantly on my guard, with very little to fall back on except the joys of asceticism, productive sublimation, and the pleasures of self-​ control, a grim prospect.”56 But, we are told later, paradoxically, that Rabinow’s rude all-​too-​American response to Ali was exactly what he needed to do: “Indeed, from that point on, we got along famously.”57 The professors were wrong again; in-​your-​face not only felt good, it aided fieldwork. So is being rudely selfish, the ultimate ‘Ugly American’ trope, also part of fieldwork? A major part of culture shock is, of course, realizing how uncomfortable it is not to be in your own culture, not to know the rules, not to be able to avoid frustrations. One advantage not often recognized is that being seen as a fool, or someone with the social IQ of a small child, teaches the ethnographer what it is like to be on the receiving end. For Rabinow a robotic self-​control was out of the question. Subordinating his own code of ethics, conduct and worldview was not what Rabinow wanted to endure. But what he describes is less a dialectic between reflection and immediacy than a zero-​sum diatribe to let off steam. Is it simply me versus them, my dominating culture over and against their dominated culture, my reluctant give and their expected take? Is fieldwork necessarily a virtual war of will, one fought on a not-​quite-​level playing field where the anthropologist and the informant can never speak the same language? How interesting that Rabinow and Ali, his guide through Moroccan culture, sought to communicate through a second, culturally laden, language foreign to both. Ethnography is never only about the “other” as Rabinow’s reflections or Malinowski’s diary clearly demonstrate. The problem with Rabinow’s memories of culture shock is that he valorizes the otherness he felt with Muslim Moroccans.58 His contact with Moroccans was said to “highlight our fundamental Otherness” which is blamed as “the sum of different historical differences.”59 Yet the personal feelings of the ethnographer reify the Moroccan as an other by accentuating the differences rather than looking for common ground in the quotidian give-​and-​take of all communication in the field. In a perceptive discussion of the nature of friendship in the field, Emilio Spadola, who also 56 57

58 59

Rabinow (1977:47). Deborah Kapchan (2013:170) suggests that “Rabinow decidedly did not feel at home in Morocco.” Rabinow (1977:49). Rabinow’s “general characterization of Moroccan intimacy as tests of domination and submission, weakness, and humiliation” does not square with the experience of Emilio Spadola (2011:755, note 2) or Deborah Kapchan (2013:173–​178), who also conducted fieldwork in Morocco. The personal experience of any ethnographer is always an interplay of his or her social performance and local cultural norms. This point is made by Beal (1995:295). Rabinow (1977:162).

110 Chapter 3 conducted fieldwork in Morocco, challenges Rabinow’s dismissal of his informant for seeing the anthropologist as a resource: “Is not the two men’s relationship mutually –​blatantly –​instrumental?” asks Spadola.60 Reading over my diary entries for the first ten days after arriving in Yemen, I am struck by a recurring theme –​how I hated flies. Unlike Rabinow, however, none of my professors had cautioned me to simply ignore the flies and tough it out. I freely admit that these mentors avoided all mention of the insect pests they might have encountered in the field. If any had ingested grubs or suffered swollen limbs from mosquito bites, such lecture tropes did not get imprinted in my memory. Indeed, my notes in graduate anthropology classes show no evidence that these professors were even aware of the problem flies could pose for a graduate student fresh in the field. Without forewarning, I took action on my own from the very start, destroying a staggering number of these insolent pests. The bloody ichor literally dripped from the swatter as disheveled carcasses of this insolent enemy clustered and crusted wherever I went. Now that I was in the field, if everything was fieldwork then surely that would include killing flies. Why was I so obsessed with flies? My diary gives few overt clues. I remember that they were easy to kill. Most were sluggish, perfect targets for my frustrations. They seemed to taunt me, oblivious to the fact I carried an American passport and in America cleanliness and killing flies are next to godliness. Since my own country had conquered flies, did they now loom as a symbol of the exotic –​certainly not erotic –​other I was indoctrinated to observe? No informants I know of were driven off by my ethnocentric American penchant for swatting. For every fly I swatted millions more were ready to take its place. In their face, their behind, anywhere I was lucky enough to land a blow, I zapped them. It felt good, but did it aid my fieldwork? Were there flies in the ointment as the owl of Minerva readied in the wings for a dusk-​light flight? I seriously doubt if any anthropologist in the field has escaped culture shock, although certainly some suffer more from its impact than others. I cannot say that my graduate coursework formally prepared me for the experience of such shock in the field, but none of my professors gave me the impression it would be a bed of roses minus any thorns. Coping in the field is a personal thing, not something easily learned from a book or lecture. My diary entries record that I spent a lot of time killing flies and that at times this might have seemed to me one of the more important things to do. But none of these flies made it into my field notes or my dissertation. Even if one or two did, after more than thirty-​five years their preserved but dead presence is largely beside the fact.

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Spadola (2011:742).

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Sick and Tired Excellent dinner again  –​first time for a sponge-​like bread, tastes something like pancakes –​excellent with honey. Field Notes 4/​3 /​7 8

I said ‘excellent dinner,’ but the results were not so excellent. During the morning I proceeded to lose my dinner, heaving it up in 5 monumental eruptions. The whole day long I had a high fever –​almost to 103 + every muscle in my body ached. I tried to sleep, but every position was painful. Drank lots of liquids, but only yoghurt tasted like the real thing. So sick I could not write, and these notes are penned the next afternoon. Field Notes 4/​4 /​7 8

This whole sickness business is a real pain –​drumming up all those probing questions, like ‘why did I come here,’ ‘why give up the American standard of living?’ etc. When you are sick + far from home, it is possibly the worst of sensations; how saving that Najwa is here. Alone, this would have really zapped me. The family has been very nice + concerned, stopping in late last eve to see how I was doing. S + S brought me roses this morning –​very thoughtful. I think the culprit of my malady was the ghee (let me clarify this better) in which the eggs were fried two mornings ago or else the cabbage. Whatever –​I did receive the ‘Imam’s revenge.’ We used our pressure cooker for the first time yesterday –​made a whole chicken in 20–​30 minutes. The broth really hit the spot, thank God for chicken broth! From now on we boil our water + will get a filter soon. (4/​5 /​7 8)

I had a case of heat exhaustion + spent the day in bed, suffering from chills … My off days all seem to get eaten up by being sick. (4/​1 3/​7 8)

Feeling rotten today. No voice  –​headache + terribly sore throat. I read our medical books, which didn’t help at all. There are a million things I could have. Am taking the ampicillin we have with us –​ maybe that will kill the blasted viruses. Today, has to be one of the low points thus far. When will I get back to normal? … I am so sick and tired of being sick and tired. (4/​1 7/​7 8)

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112 Chapter 3 In addition to culture shock most ethnographers tend to get sick at some point during their fieldwork. Rabinow felt “truly ill” at a late night wedding, although he does not expand on how illness might have affected his research.61 Soon after my arrival in Yemen, the local flora cruised into my American cuisine-​conscious intestines and I felt like crap even though my ability to do so was literally watered down. Our thermometer indicated that my fever had reached 104.5, which I rationalized away as “Evidently, fevers get higher here because of the altitude” (4/​24/​78). My wife, sick of my stoic John-​Wayne-​solid resolve to just let the fever run its course, finally pushed me into a cab and dragged me to what at the time was one of the better hospitals in the capital city of Sanaa. It was formerly known as the Military Hospital and looked very much like it had been through a war or two. Najwa tells me that those at the front of the long line of Yemeni patients waiting to get into the emergency room took one look at me and told her to take me straight in because I looked to be at death’s door. Once inside I have no clear memory of how the staff handled an obviously sick foreigner. My diary notes indicate that we were met by a Yemeni surgeon trained in Russia, someone I saw as a “very nice gentleman + one who inspires confidence.” But it wasn’t a surgeon I needed. Relatively soon a large Russian doctor examined me with a professional manner that belied what I thought was a relatively recent thawing in the Cold War. Not knowing English –​and apparently not deigning to use Arabic –​her bulging Soviet-​sized hands prefigured the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, if you think of that wall as a metaphor for my spinal column. It was somehow important for me to record all the medicines prescribed: Resoferon, Mexase, Intestopan, Unicap M, Epargriseovit and “another capsule (God knows what).” The next day Najwa and I returned to the hospital so I could get a glucose shot. My frustrated diary entry is anything but politically correct: “The room this was to take place in had not been used in some time –​very musty –​a cat had crawled through the window screen, cobwebs on the ceiling –​and the ceiling was partially falling in. To top it off, the bed was filthy.” My diary indicates that I survived and soon started complaining obnoxiously about being so sick and tired. Being in bed, especially when you think you are recovering, is fertile ground for reflection. In this case my field research had not yet begun and already I was wondering why I had come. I was clearly venting, certainly not in a politically correct sense, in my diary. Nor did I find any of the locals insensitive to my condition. The family we were living with was very sweet. The two little boys I was at times tutoring in English brought me roses. Najwa kept me well stocked with chicken soup and yoghurt. A Yemeni health worker rode his motorcycle to our 61

Rabinow (1977:43).

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apartment every day for a week to give me a shot in the arm. But it was hard for me to accept this largesse without nagging doubts:  “I still wonder about the hygienic aspects of all this –​or is it just my western ‘hospital-​clean’ bias?.” I am surprised on rereading this entry that I had written a letter to the chair of my department suggesting that Penn offer a course entitled ‘The Hygiene and Basic Health of Fieldwork Situations.’ I believe they never did. My diary entries are quite understandably self-​serving, like crying in your beer. We all need to do this at times. At that time these entries suggest there were other things that really were more important and I had yet to get to them. Just a few days after my trip to the hospital I wrote: “I really ‘miss’ regular things in America –​the music, the food, etc. much more than I expected –​no doubt accentuated by being sick here. I am quite anxious to go to a village. This place now is rather confining + I feel in limbo.” Limbo is an apt term to describe that unsatisfying stage between arriving in a country as an anthropologist and actually getting to a suitable field site. In the classic Van Gennep sense my sentiments fit easily into that liminal stage separating the profane (as ordinary and mundane rather than problematic) culture I  chose to leave from the sacred (in pragmatic terms) fieldwork I was longing to start. “To see a sacred object for the first time is universally an act of very great import; the magic circle is broken for the first time, and, for that individual, it can never be completely closed,” argued Van Gennep without seeing his own reflection at the time.62 As I looked forward to my fieldwork as an alchemical rite of passage, my diary suggests I was very much a novitiate about to enter into immediate contact with an unknown that felt at the time to be both sacred and scary. I doubt I was consciously aware of the irreplaceable immediacy in this rite of the first time entering into fieldwork. Like all things sacred, the awe shapes the memory; but there is really no going back except via rhetoric inherent in memories. 5

A Matter of Fact Culture is interpretation. The ‘facts’ of anthropology, the material which the anthropologist has gone to the field to find, are already themselves interpretations. The baseline data is [sic] already culturally mediated by the people whose culture we, as anthropologists, have come to explore. Facts are made –​the word comes from the Latin factum, ‘made’ –​and the facts we interpret are made and remade.

62

Van Gennep (1972:177).

114 Chapter 3 Therefore they cannot be collected as if they were rocks, picked up and put into cartons and shipped home to be analyzed in the laboratory.63 Paul Rabinow

The fieldwork means less than nothing to me. I  am no martyr to academics. I am not quite sure where my loyalties lie –​perhaps in a fantasy –​indeed I should think. At least, I have an easy subject –​no deep probing needed to write about the most common of things –​ agriculture. And the people are most friendly here. Yet, I  am still too much in awe of what I see to analyze it. Too uncertain as to the value of such analysis anyway. Another set of useless facts to waste away on library shelves. Field Notes 8/​2 2/​7 8

If we think of facts in a rock-​hard materialistic way, it would be hard not to admit that they do exist. Stub your toe on a real rock and the immediacy of the encounter will convince you that both rocks and toes exist. It does not really matter how we classify rocks, or whether or not we choose to collect them and take them home. Some facts interrupt our consciousness with such stubborn regularity that it would be impractical to deny them. This, I think, is the spirit –​if not the letter –​of a soundly followed positivist approach to knowledge, at least as envisioned by Enlightenment scholars emerging from a commonly non-​sensi-​calculated world of spontaneous generation and leech therapy. But beyond the immediacy of the encounter with a fact, we have the ability, if not an obligation, to reflect on what facts mean to us. The facts we reflect are most assuredly figments of our rationalizing, re-​presenting that which is now past but that we want to be present again. All ethnographic data are necessarily packaged in rhetoric; they can be debated, finessed, trussed up, and even disputed. After our toes have stopped reminding us that rocks can cause pain, we may decide that we only imagined that rock or that what we thought was a rock was really a marshmallow, but in fieldwork there really are more important things to think about. As anthropologists we employ a variety of metaphors to interpret culture, but even if we declare rhetorically that culture is an illusion –​or a hegemonic power play via discourse –​we still have to reckon with the obvious fact that people exist and do things as if something called culture really does exist.64 Our theory and methodology, including our reflections, should account for more 63 64

Rabinow (1977:150). As Marshall Sahlins (1999a: xx) laments, facetiously of course, “Now everyone has a culture; only the anthropologists could doubt it.”

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than a self-​illuminating search for not-​quite-​universal chimeras. The four-​field anthropology I was trained in approaches the world with several seminal starting points. Because we have evolved and were not placed here by fiat or aliens from another planet, we cannot understand what it means to be human unless we probe our evolutionary past and biological affinities with other living species. Ethnographic research shows that everywhere on earth humans form social groups with rules for behavior. Some of these groups appear homogenous, which is why earlier anthropologists mistakenly treated so-​called “primitives” as closed cultural groups. Regarding the term “primitive,” by the mid 1950s Edward Dozier noted “the shaky and unsure ground” for use by anthropologists studying societies.65 Melville Herskovitz had already suggested abandoning the loaded term “primitive: in favor of “non-​literate,” because the latter term is “colorless, conveys its meaning unambiguously, and is readily applicable to the data it seeks to delimit.”66 The sociologist Emile Durkheim confused the issue by referring to “social facts,” in an attempt to distinguish what he considered purely social from the organic or psychological, but anthropologists have rarely followed this distinction.67 To say that all facts are interpretations ignores the crucial point that some interpretations are more credible than others. Perhaps we should take an epistemological cue from theology rather than rockhound data collecting. As anthropological ‘theologians’ we may and often do debate whether or not culture –​our supreme being for being there –​exists. Postmodern agnostics within the discipline may even write against culture, as if it were merely a heretical text that could be placed on the Index. But all this can only be done in a rhetorical way and only because we have been to a specific cultural there that we can reflect on. Theologians who do not believe in the formal definitions of God still go on doing theology simply because so many people say they do believe in God. Until most people in the world live as if culture were only an elusive interpretation, we should do ethnography, regardless of the theoretical creed we are trained to confess or deny. “The fieldwork means less than nothing to me.” My plaintive diary entry has shock value only if distorted out of the mental tug-​of-​war of my immediate culture shock at the time. It came less than a month after we were actually set up in 65 66 67

Dozier (1955:187). He further notes (p. 195) that “when the term ‘primitive’ is used to designate a particular non-​literate society, the popular assumption is that such people are racially, mentally and culturally retarded.” Thus, the term should not be used. Herskovitz (1948:75). Durkheim (1982:52). Durkheim’s approach in forming a distinct academic field of “sociology” should be read in light of the philosophical and psychological views of his day in France. Even so, his definition is more about the influence of cultural constraints than equating social facts with those in the physical sciences.

116 Chapter 3 our field site. This day was obviously a low. Perhaps that is what brought the earlier and memorable sentiment of Malinowski to mind. Other entries suggest that some days were highs. Ups and downs, feeling alone and enjoying the throng, sick in bed, happily perched on top of a mountain –​these conditions motivate the swings in moods that my diary notes record in a random, self-​serving fashion. I also record the warmth and hospitality of the Yemenis I met and the friends I made. Such is the stuff of diaries. The immediacy of fieldwork demanded reflections and there they were –​a Faustian dialogue jerking me through the exhausting yet exhilarating invention –​or perhaps I should say the simultaneous de-​invention and reinvention –​of my culture and their culture. Rabinow vents at his mentors’ lack of candor, accusing them of fostering the myth that “we are neutral scientists collecting unambiguous data.”68 Because some anthropologists may have given the false impression to Rabinow that the streets of fieldwork would be paved with unambiguous data, are we supposed to treat the search for ethnographic truths as counterfeit? My mentors also were reluctant to let down their golden –​bordering on gray –​hair and share their diaried dirty linen, at least in the classroom. Despite this apparent sin of omission, I did not arrive in the field expecting to pick the data literally off the trees. Nor did I assume that handing over my passport to the customs official was part of my fieldwork. There were data everywhere, an overwhelming mass of ambiguity that I hoped to make less ambiguous through the celebrated magic –​dare I say alchemy –​of participant observation. The success or lack of success of this, I thought then and still do, should be determined on several fronts: the obvious paper trail of what I produce as a scholar and teacher, the practical career trajectory provided by the fieldwork experience and what I am enabled to give back to the Yemenis with whom I continue to interact. Telling field initiation tropes or confessing my moment-​by-​moment mental vacillations can be entertaining in the short term, but if such rhetorical devices take precedence over the cultural reality I struggled to understand back then, then why should I want to be an anthropologist at all? 6

Picturing Fieldwork This book centers on the mutual (yet always partial) construction of fragile commonplaces of activity and communication by the anthropologist and the people he works with in the field.69 Paul Rabinow

68 69

Rabinow (1977:152). Rabinow (1977:back cover).

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Today I wanted to give a picture to a man. I was sure it was him. But he said it wasn’t. He didn’t recognize himself. What could I say? Field Notes 2/​2 5/​7 9

Reflections owe their origin mainly to our sense of the visual, the aesthetic underlying the intellectual exercise of bringing past events to textual life. My own makeshift diary is made up entirely of words, not rigorously framed by sound grammar and lacking in any photographs or drawings. Rabinow’s text includes several photographs visually representing the objects of his reflection.70 Inside the text, the first photograph (p. 12) shows a smiling key informant; the readers are allowed in black and white terms to quite literally look over, in a Geertzian sense, what appears to be Rabinow’s own shoulder. There is no mistaking the Persian manqué here, but the visual ethnographer plays no role other than an observing narrator who might as well be in a Parisian bistro. The next photograph (p. 37) is of Ali, who plays an important informant role in the reflections. Dressed in unmistakable Western-​style clothing, Ali looks directly into the lens of the photographer/​ethnographer, who once again peers over the back of a seated man who is wearing Moroccan dress and mentioned in the caption simply as an unnamed friend. The third photograph (p. 43) shows two Moroccan men, one standing and one seated, as an illustration for the fieldwork-​escape trope of “Much time is spent hanging around cafes drinking tea.” Here both men gaze touristically at the camera, important primarily as drinkers of the empty tea glasses on the table. Ironically, these images convey the experience of a tourist snapping shots of the locals and are devoid of ‘ethnographic’ color. The next image (p. 61) is of a young housewife –​included just after a narrative discussing Berber prostitutes –​standing on her doorstep in traditional Moroccan dress and staring at the photographer/​ethnographer, looking ever so posed to be a simple housewife. Flipping the page, we find the stark contrast of an old Berber woman, again staring –​almost defiantly –​at the photographer. These are the only women to appear as visual objects inside Rabinow’s text. Indeed, the reflections given are decidedly male and unreflectively sexist. “Prostitution was a flourishing subculture in Sefrou,” notes Rabinow matter of factly.71 “Almost every Moroccan man I knew had his initiation into heterosexual activity through a visit to the prostitutes.” Even his friend Ali had a secret prostitute lover who apparently accepted the ethnographer with limited Arabic as “part of the roguish circle” in 70 71

The photographs in Reflections were taken by Paul Hyman, who also provided the photographs used at the start of Rabinow (1975). Rabinow (1977:58).

118 Chapter 3 which the male anthropologist can comfortably observe that such prostitutes “were not systematically despised or ostracized in the medina.”72 I suspect that the inference about prostitution as rampant in Morocco is dubious. Beyond this, however, women are elided in the photographs as though they were on a par with men drinking tea. Rabinow’s unabashed male narrative reflects back at the reader in his account of what he describes as “the best single day” he spent in Morocco.73 This was a day of adventurous male fantasy, the bored anthropologist following his risqué informant and two Berber girls to an eventual swim at a remote mountainside pool. “Ali and the two Berber sisters decided to go swimming,” Rabinow writes.74 “Swimming, nude, in Morocco!” he adds for emphasis. “I did not go swimming myself. I was too timid,” he confides. “So I sat on the edge of the pool while Ali and the Berber sisters splashed each other,” in a scene where the observer declined being the participant. “There was no strong sexual tone to this,” he recalls. “I am not sure why, but it was not there.” Back in the village, sexual overtone is disguised only in the ambiguity of his account. “Ali took me into the next room and asked me if I wanted to sleep with one of the girls,” notes the participant side of the observer. “Yes, I would go with the third woman who had joined us for dinner. She had her own room next door, so we could have our privacy.” The room had only one bed, and although the paid Berber woman is dismissed as “not that affectionate or open either,” she is reported to have kindly labeled Monsieur Paul as “Numero wahed, first class” the morning after. Few anthropologists are prudes; no doubt more than a few of the male variety have followed Malinowski in groping native women, or men, and even buying a night of sex. As evolved cousins of bonobos this is not a surprise, nor is it the ethical issue of a sexual encounter as such that concerns me here. The problem is telling the story as if the anthropologist is sitting on a barstool with other men and no ladies are present. This tryst trope exemplifies a major fault in the selectively male reflexivist writing of culture seen in the almost biblical Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (1986), edited less than a decade later by James Clifford and George Marcus. If male anthropologists are so concerned about the legitimacy of attempting to represent the other objectively, why is it alright to write women out of the process and also relevant to recollect how well or poorly they performed in bed? Is it any wonder that Ruth Behar, in her introduction to Women Writing Culture, wrote back: “The Writing 72 73 74

Rabinow (1977:61). Rabinow (1977:66). Rabinow (1977:67–​69).

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Culture agenda, conceived in homoerotic terms by male academics for other male academics, provided the official credentials, and the cachet, that women had lacked for crossing the border?”75 In his laudatory preface to Rabinow’s Reflections, Robert Bellah warns us that “the presence of value judgments” is not dangerous, but rather “only those judgments that remain beyond the reach of critical reflection and are not subject to revision in the light of experience.”76 Precisely. An ethnographer has the right to casually reflect on a sexual tryst as a peak experience, but perhaps in fieldwork there are more important things to be done. Brian Edwards labels Rabinow a “Hippie Orientalist,” whose focus on his own particular experience in Morocco discounts the portrayals that Moroccans make of their own worlds.77 As Deborah Kapchan suggests, Rabinow’s approach amounted to “painting with a large, Western, and decidedly cynical brush.”78 That brush is decidedly male as well. The largest photograph in Reflections is a two-​page spread (pp.  108–​109) in which the smiling anthropologist “toasts members of the holy lineage” with tea as he becomes the focal point in the center of nine Moroccan men. This is the only time in the book that we see the ethnographer face to face. The occasion is, at least visually, a picnic rather than an excuse for interviewing informants. It connotes a celebration of the ethnographer’s being there, being accepted and being comfortable enough to act –​even if in jest –​as host in a ritual that is thoroughly Moroccan. In contrast to the one-​on-​one private comfort of the bar in the first photograph in the book, this image validates Rabinow’s presence among others. Significantly, the scene is staged and camp, a consciously pictorial memento rather than in situ documentation of Moroccan culture. Through these images Rabinow treats the ethnographic encounter as a series of isolated events rather than as a methodological process with specific research goals.79 By contrast with the previous studioesque photographs, there are two which look ‘ethnographic’ in a more formal sense.80 In one we look over the shoulders of Berber observers viewing Berber horsemen said to be honoring a saint. In this the foregrounded men blend imperceptibly into the distant horsemen. All of the figures either have their backs turned or are too small to distinguish individually except in outline. The next photograph (p. 138) is the quintessential exotic 75 76 77 78 79 80

Ruth Behar (1995:4). Bellah in Rabinow (1977:xi) Edwards (2005:270). In discussing a dialogue between Rabinow and an informant, Edwards (2005:272) observes “The work of the cultural anthropologist cannot be sustained by an informant who is able to make his own cultural comparisons.” Kapchan (2013:172). This has been pointed out by Trencher (2000:66). Rabinow (1977:134, 138).

120 Chapter 3 dimension of an ethnographic image. Here we see a man slashing the underside of a cow’s neck for a ritual offering. “The botching of a ritual offering caused much anxiety,” reads the caption. Even without the ethnographer’s warning, it is clear that something is awry from the expressions of concern in the Moroccans’ body language. In this photograph we are at last able to look right at –​not over anyone’s shoulder –​men engaged in a direct and apparently unstaged ritual. Yet the exotic venue and the shock it could engender in a Western viewer are mitigated by Rabinow’s subjective gloss that this was a “botched event.”81 To only record visually the inability of the native to get it right is, in a purely visual sense, to deny the value of what the native is doing, or at least the native’s competence. All of the photographs just described require the reader to engage, or at least flip through, the narrative of the text. There is no list of photographs, nor are they numbered. They are interwoven with the narrative like items in an old museum showcase, not as archived images in documentation, nor as illustrations of the ethnographic context. The one photo that overrides all others is that chosen for the cover. This, at least in the original paperback version, is a sepia tone shot of a shop owner gesturing forcefully –​his left hand is actually out of focus –​at the photographer, who might as well be the ethnographer and who draws us into a problematic voyeuristic role as viewer and potential reader. The expression on the man’s face, in my visual reading, appears to be one of anger. He seems to be saying, “Go away. I don’t want my picture taken. I don’t want you to take a picture of this young girl in front of my shop.” He could, of course, be joking, turning a common native repulsion of outsiders into shared terms of endearment. The young girl, in a plain native robe, may be a customer or neighbor, but that hardly matters here. Unlike the man, she glares back with what I interpret to be a bemused look, hand on her hip. Is she upset? Is she flattered? Is she a potential prostitute? These are the questions we are teased with visually, although none are addressed verbally in the narrative. For anyone about to open the book, this image cannot help but shape perceptions of what fieldwork involves for Rabinow in Morocco. Were I not to read Reflections, but merely to reflect on what the chosen cover could mean to me, my immediate gut reaction would be that the ethnographer is an unwelcome intruder. The photographer thinks he has a right to snap a picture when he pleases, regardless of what the people being photographed think. For a book said to center on “the mutual (yet always partial) construction of 81

A similar cute or flippant attitude about captions is evident in Rabinow’s (1975) formal ethnography, where the scene of a man using a scratch plow is simply titled “With limited possibilities…” Did the Moroccan using such a plow tell the ethnographer how limited this technology was? Was it limited because it was traditional, not a new tractor donated as development aid? Is it only the ethnographer who can best define the limits of agriculture?

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fragile commonplaces of activity and communication by the anthropologist and the people he works with in the field,”82 it is visually only the anthropologist who constructs textually and visually the people studied. Nowhere is irony more present than in the cover image. Here the photographer/​ethnographer is being waved off, told to mind his own business, and to ultimately go reflect on his own –​which is what Rabinow in fact ends up doing. I dwell on the visual images because of our genealogical drive –​back across so many meta-​narratives –​to privilege the word, to assume that writing about culture is the ultimate purpose of being in a culture. Although there are no pictures in my diary, I took hundreds of photographs during my fieldwork, including many of men, women and children in the local villages. Like all fieldworkers, I  remember a few moments when I  knew snapping a photograph would be intrusive, the burden of outsiderness. Ironically, although I was loaded down with several cameras virtually whenever I walked in the agricultural fields I came to study, I do not remember ever being scolded to stop taking a picture. In part my excessive caution kept me from playing the snap-​happy tourist, but I also made it a habit to ask permission before pulling out the camera. Photographs were a relatively recent and ambiguously viewed option in the rural valley that Najwa and I lived in. While individuals often wanted pictures of themselves or family members, they were reluctant to go to the capital and have them taken or developed by a stranger in a studio. After Najwa and I became trusted in the community, some individuals would ask for a picture to be taken of themselves or family members, especially after word spread that I would develop the pictures myself. An ethical decision we both made at the time was not to publish these photographs without permission or at least wait until so many years have passed that the issue becomes moot. Photographic documentation has a long trajectory in anthropology as a visual aid to what can be seen and recorded in words. Archives of images that Franz Boas took a century ago of Kwakiutl rituals in the American Northwest preserve a heritage that current generations no longer can recall. Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead’s Balinese Character:  A Photographic Analysis (1942) remains a valuable resource for its multiple frames on the behavior of Balinese in the 1930s, even though their assumptions about the relation of personality and culture have long been superseded. Film has been a major aid to ethnographic documentation and is now indispensable in teaching courses in cultural anthropology. In addition to photographing agriculture and irrigation activities in Yemen, I shot footage that provides a broader context than I could ever describe in words. Najwa filmed the local dances at a time when relatively 82

This is taken from the back cover of the original paperback edition.

122 Chapter 3 little visual imagery of Yemeni dancing was available; this now serves as a base for comparative analysis with the large number of recent Youtube videos uploaded by Yemenis in the last decade. Images, like texts, cannot substitute for the experience of ethnographic fieldwork as a mutual engagement. Both freeze what was observed, felt and shared in the field. Like all representations, they only have value if they serve a purpose. and there is never only one purpose. It was important that I had the opportunity not only to photograph a Yemeni man as he plowed or irrigated, but also to talk with him, asking questions about what I did not understand and listening to him as he tried to teach me, the outsider who wanted to learn. Looking at my photographs years later does not replace the immediacy of being in the field, the vividness of relationships formed, but it does allow my memory to reflect, imperfect as all recollection inevitably is. One day I ran into a man I had photographed earlier and proudly gave the print to him, but he did not seem to recognize himself. He was sure it was someone else; I was sure it was him. In retrospect I suppose we were both right: the man in front of me could not be reduced to the image in the photograph. 7

Final Refractions The book is a reconstruction of a set of encounters that occurred while doing fieldwork. At that time, of course, things were anything but neat and coherent. At this time, I have made them seem that way so as to salvage some meaning from that period for myself and for others.83 Paul Rabinow

There are some scenes so rich in the textures of life, it would be tragic, if not criminal, to despoil them with photographs. A painting might capture the fancy in the artist’s eyes and thus do limited justice to the scene. But the old faithful recording of the photograph merely copies, without imagination’s permission, the sense of the scene. A sense that must be lived to be understood. Color gives life to everything –​a vibrancy that brings tears to the eyes –​but shadows make that life penetrate deeper and allow a partial union with nature. Field Notes 2/​2 5/​7 9

83

Rabinow (1977: 6).

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The problem I  have found with much of the reflections-​on-​fieldwork genre is that the focus seldom shifts beyond ‘writing culture’ from memory. Fieldwork as the ethnographer’s quintessential rite of passage gets glossed over as a mere w(rite) of passage.84 Field notes either do not count or are deemed to be disposable for the purpose of spinning a personal narrative. My purpose in interposing my field diary reflections with Rabinow’s text is to highlight the difference between reflections in the face of the field’s immediacy and the almost infinite possibilities for reflecting retroactively. Rabinow’s “uncommonly perceptive and provocative reflections of an ethical-​philosophical kind,” as noted on the back cover, are precisely that –​reflectively removed from the immediacy of fieldwork. No longer being there, he and I are both free to make of that there what we will. Most of the time no one else bothers to go to the same there, the hindsight blinding of Margaret Mead and Napoleon Chagnon notwithstanding. And if another anthropologist does, it is easy to say that what is there today is not the same there as before. Reflections, like memoirs, give insights that people find worth reading because the rhetoric of reminiscence is seductive. But should we dissolve ethnography into its textual presence? This is what sets an ethnographic text off so formally from the fleeting, but I think far more satisfying, immediacy of writing a personal diary in the first place. I admit that there are times when I enjoy the reading of my diary more than my piles of hand-​written research notes. The attraction of Rabinow’s Reflections, which anthropologists are more likely to have read than his earlier fieldwork ethnography, is that it liberated the reader from the strict form of the genre. Rabinow tries to free himself from the rules of a discourse that had by the time of his writing come unmoored across the humanities and social sciences. The issue beyond fieldwork is the perceived failure of a pre-​postmodern positivism to provide objective and universal truth. Ironically, the founding icon of positivism, Auguste Comte, did not believe that a scientist or philosopher could ever achieve an absolute and unchanging knowledge of reality.85 Since Rabinow’s mentors apparently dished out an unreflective truth, sparingly as far as doing ethnography was concerned, the process of fieldwork itself gets challenged. In his later contribution to the canonical Writing Culture in 1986, Rabinow removes ethnography even further from the field experience. Rorty, Descartes, Kant, Husserl, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Dewey, Foucault, Weber, Clifford, Jameson:  these are the 84 85

I borrow the pun from Trencher (2000:92), although I suspect it has multiple, independent origins. This point is stressed by Evans-​Pritchard (1970:17) in his analysis of Comte’s views on sociology.

124 Chapter 3 links in Rabinow’s intellectual genealogy that are reflected upon before we encounter an ethnographer, Clifford Geertz, who actually did fieldwork that was written down. This particular form of reflexivist critique flirts with being a surrogate post mortem for all ethnography. But if ethnography is the method few other disciplines dare or desire to lay original claim to, should field research be so easily written off within anthropology? Reflecting on the writing of ethnography and the authority of ethnographic texts becomes in a text like Reflections a literary endeavor with metaphysical pretensions. As long as writing remains an important way –​certainly not the only visual medium –​we use as anthropologists to communicate the results of ethnographic fieldwork, criticism of texts will be necessary. The historiography of ethnographic writing is no longer taboo, if it ever was. But writing in anthropology should be a means rather than an end in itself. Do the rhetorical limitations in a written ethnographic text mean that the ethnographer failed to understand the culture or that ethnographic data do not exist apart from their rhetorical and artifactual construction after the fact? If any particular ethnographic text, usually critiqued independently of an ethnographer’s entire written corpus, comes up short on insights and long on relative inserts, is this because the ethnographer is incapable of finding out some meaningful truth about the other? Are the only truths to be spoken to be power those that can be teased out of texts? A particularly bizarre and avowedly “kinky” defense of the Writing Culture trope that the fieldwork enterprise must always be suspect is given by Danilyn Rutherford. Appealing to the philosopher David Hume, but more accurately reflecting the doubts of Michel de Montaigne, Rutherford concludes: Simply ‘being there’ in the field cannot qualify an ethnographer to produce a transparent account of what he or she has witnessed. Every observation is haunted by a multiplicity of places and times. This holds for ethnographers and the ethnographers of the ethnographers, not to mention the people they study. There is no act of reasoning that is not a leap of faith, both embodied and collective.86 It is not readily apparent from this what an account must do to be “transparent.” No account of what is observed in the field is ever a reproduction of reality; few anthropologists ever suggested it was. Textual representation, by its very nature, is a form of explanation, communicating a sense of what was observed and what the ethnographer makes of it. Thus, the “reasoning” involved must be received as a “leap of faith” on the part of the reader. But this does not mean it 86

Rutherford (2012:471).

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needs to be a blind leap over an unknown chasm into the fog of fuzzy rhetoric. There is an enormous gap between the leap in believing in a literal Adam and Eve and that of accepting the decodification of human dna. The scientific method, which I believe Hume would embrace warmly were he alive today, allows for leaps that are more faithful than the incessant hand-​wringing of reflexivist doubt about the process itself. As philosopher Peter Winch remarked over half a century ago, the problem is with the “extra-​scientific pretensions of science,” but even philosophy “has no business to be anti-​scientific: if it tries to be so it will succeed only in making itself look ridiculous.”87 Rabinow was not the only Middle East anthropologist in the past three decades to reflect over and above the obligatory ethnographic monograph. Vincent Crapanzano, who also worked in Morocco, presented his innovative portrait of the Moroccan healer Tuhami as “an experiment designed to shock the anthropologist” from the complacency in which the anthropologist is eliminated from the ethnographic encounter.88 An ethnographer, Crapanzano later explains, “is a little like Hermes,” literally a decoder and an interpreter but more rhetorically a trickster who thinks he can convince you that he –​a quite conscious ‘he’ for Crapanzano –​is able to tell the whole truth.89 If Crapanzano’s Grecian metaphor is to earn the respect afforded by Rabinow to Hegel’s Minerva –​and I certainly do not share in such an impishly divine origin for our craft –​then it follows that even Crapanzano as ethnographer must be suspect. Reading beneath the surface of the classic essay “Deep Play,” for example, Crapanzano suggests that the author Clifford Geertz did little more than peer over the shoulder of the Balinese; he snapped the picture for us but forgot to put himself in it. His point is well taken. However, in his own work Crapanzano proceeds to skew the native view as well. By providing the words –​framed and translated by the ethnographer of course –​the informant Tuhami is hermetically assumed to speak for himself. As Susan Trencher concludes after analyzing the writings of both Crapanzano and Rabinow, “The understandings which fieldwork ethnographers reached were negotiated through the mind of the analyst, not the interaction of participants.”90 Recording and editing fragments of 87 88 89 90

Winch (1958:2). I am not defending Winch’s view of social science; for a critique of this, see MacIntyre and Bell (1967), who cite several anthropological case studies. Crapanzano (1980: xii). Crapanzano (1986:  51). Lett (1997:18) suggests that Crapanzano’s Hermetic rejection of “reason” as a Western cultural prejudice is “the most misguided and pernicious argument in our discipline today.” Trencher (2000:85). To be fair, in a recent essay Crapanzano (2011:120) reflects back on his earlier reflections, noting “but the sense of dialogue that is promoted seems to be our construct and rather saccharine.”

126 Chapter 3 the ethnographer’s dialogue with a native do not reproduce the immediacy of the original interaction; the dialectic established in Crapanzano’s interchange becomes a rhetorical trope when it is after the fact but not really after facts. In contrast, Kevin Dwyer, who also worked in Morocco, successfully blends informant’s words and ethnographer’s interpretation. Part of what makes Dwyer’s work successful is that he records the entire interviews and was able to translate the material himself.91 My frustration with Rabinow’s and Crapanzano’s reflections about fieldwork is that they do not so much reflect as they refract. When I think of my own face reflected in a mirror, I  am reminded of the limitations of a two-​ dimensional image of a reality I cannot literally see. I look in mirrors when I need to, but I consider it vanity to simply stare at my mirror image as though it held as much meaning as my actual face. A mirror image gives a view of the surface and only –​I might add for the sake of a realistic analogy –​when the light is on. My objections would greatly diminish if I viewed this rhetoric as fieldwork refractions in the sense physicists think of light refracting through a prism. Imagine a seemingly uniform wave of light deflected and changing direction with the practical result that we can see things more colorfully. In one spontaneously ethnopoetic entry in my diary, written while perched atop a rock as I surveyed the wider contextual beauty of my fieldwork valley, I was absorbed by the color that I could see so vividly and experience so intensely at the moment. At the time I saw color that I knew my black-​and-​white film could never do justice to; nor could even the most National Geographic-​like color photograph capture the vibrancy of the view overwhelming my senses. The scene had to be seen and felt to be understood. If this is alchemy, so be it. Ethnography is far more than alchemy, however. Being in Yemen was not to satisfy a desire to live in an exotic location, collect data and return home to write up a dissertation. Being in the field exposed me to everything that I could observe, not willing to rule anything out as a priori irrelevant. My research was premised on a specific theoretical issue:  to what extent are rights of access to water dependent on the ecological context of water allocation. Occasional sitting on a rock and soaking in the local atmosphere did not prevent me from talking with farmers in the field, documenting their activities as they were performed, following up with discussions about what I observed and thinking through my experience against the backdrop of my graduate training. Rabinow’s classic text, like most memoirs, functions primarily as a polemic trying not to be mere apologetic. Like literary critic Edward Said assessing the manifest biases of Oriental Studies through Orientalism, the returned 91

Dwyer (1982: 278–​279, note 6) provides a critique of both Rabinow and Crapanzano.

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ethnographer needed to say what many others were thinking. Although Rabinow was not the first to discuss the personal side of fieldwork, his work stimulated others to let down their hair as well. Polemics, Orientalism being a case in point, shoot across discipline borders like shooting stars, in a brilliant but temporary display of power. There was a moment, the late 1970s, when the discipline of anthropology needed to be lit up. Reflections are not wrong in themselves, for they were certainly right for Rabinow himself and the discipline, just as Said’s literary deconstruction of Orientalist discourse was significant for him and Middle East Studies in its time. Just as, I might add, my diary notes were right for me at the time and continue to remind me of the personal struggle fieldwork involved. Polemical texts have trajectories; eventually even the best written go out of print except for the very few that get co-​opted into either an establishment or anti-​establishment canon. And, of course, polemics are valuable since they beget countering polemics. I first read Rabinow’s Reflections, as Geertz might say, after the fact. Fresh from my own fieldwork, I  was at the time more concerned with generating the narrative that a dissertation requires than reflecting on the process. This was a book that I thought provocative and amusing, but also one I found confusing and at times disturbingly self-​indulgent. Rabinow’s preoccupation with his post-​field reflected male self seemed a detour along which the others he wanted to represent just went along for the ride.92 It was certainly à propos for a publication series designed to be “short enough to be read in an evening and significant enough to be a book.” Given that this book is still being read and has been consecrated in an anniversary edition, while his ethnographic study of Morocco has left the print world, the seminal status of his text and the productive career of the author remain intact. But I do wonder, at least as I consider my own ethnographic fieldwork, if there are not more important things to do.

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A joke, quoted in Rutherford (2012:467) expresses this well: “ ‘I’ve talked enough about me,’ the ‘postmodern’ anthropologist in the famous joke says to an informant. ‘What do you think about me?’“ As Darnell (2001:320) notes, in his reflections, “one learns more about Rabinow than about Morocco or Morrocans.”

­c hapter 4

Beyond the End of Anthropology Is the discipline that brought us knowledge of the kula ring and the mother’s brother slated for extinction? Has the labor of Morgan and Malinowski been for nought?1 Stanley Barrett

…

Whenever the end of anthropology has been proclaimed from within there has been a renewal of both external interest and internal theoretical energy.2 Michael Herzfeld

∵ Anthropology has been an apocalyptic academic field ever since Tylor’s revelation that culture is a complex whole cemented by the psychic unity of humanity. Like its older sibling, sociology, it evolved to make sense of what it means to be human without a literal Adam and Eve as parents.3 But the subject matter of all human diversity, up from the apes in a global sense, had a time-​sensitive half-​life from the very start. Those early social evolutionists who saw in “primitive cultures” a comparative resource for uncovering the past were well aware that progress would eventually deprive them of their workshop. Tylor and Boas urged their students to study exotic others before they melded into the rapidly expanding modernity of the West. Malinowski’s ground-​defining fieldwork among the Trobrianders was also the start of a salvage operation. Even when new tribes were found, the missionaries usually got there first, as Margaret 1 Barrett (1984:211). 2 Herzfeld (2000:5). 3 Although sociology and anthropology evolved as distinct disciplines in the university, they share methods and theoretical approaches. There is room in the world of scholarship for both disciplines to continue. As Bernard (2002:3) explains, “In fact, the differences within anthropology and sociology with regard to methods are more important than the difference between those disciplines.”

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/​9 789004381339_006

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Mead discovered for her own coming of age in Samoa. Over a century ago, when Alfred Kroeber greeted the last native Yahi, a man whose name he would never know, in the new Museum of Anthropology at Berkeley, museums had already become the mausoleums of primitive humanity.4 Critics of anthropology at times characterize the discipline as suffering from an “anthropological imperialism that would encase cultures in a permafrost.”5 In this sense the ethnographer becomes both the antithesis of the missionary, in not wanting to convert the native, and at the same time an academically inclined Luddite unwilling to civilize the native with the benefits of modernity. There is a misperception here about the nature of cultural change. No anthropologist has ever studied a totally isolated “primitive,” if such were to be found in the last century or so. Malinowski recognized this early on, noting “Just now, when the methods and aims of scientific field ethnology have taken shape, when men fully trained for the work have begun to travel into savage countries and study their inhabitants –​these die away under our very eyes.”6 All ethnography in the modern sense has been salvage work. Ethnographers have often been concerned about protecting the people they study from the dangers imposed from without, but the emphasis has almost always been on promoting self-​determination rather than creating an isolated human zoo. Although anthropology has invariably been associated with the study of “primitive” peoples, the broader focus has always been on working out the details of all human diversity, past and present. Robert Lowie’s sentiment, presenting “culture” to the public in 1917, noted that ethnology was concerned with “cruder cultures of peoples” for practical reasons. But he then argued that such an exclusive focus was “illogical and artificial,” since the anthropologist “might examine and describe the usages of modern America as well as those of the Hopi Indians.”7 And ethnographers did begin to study Western societies in earnest, including pioneers such as Nora Zeale Hurston, who studied with Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict at Columbia in the 1920s. Her work on African Americans in the South and in the Caribbean has at times been styled as “folklore,” but it was based on participant observation and the same training that her fellow student Margaret Mead had received. Before the end of the second World War American anthropologists received Ph.D.s for ethnographic study at home of rural farmers, New Deal projects, Jewish intermarriage and community studies in America.8 4 The story of Kroeber’s ethnographic remake of Ishi is told in a widely read text by Theodora Kroeber (2002), originally published in 1961. 5 Harrison (2000:xxvii). 6 Malinowski (1922:xv). 7 Lowie (1917:6). 8 See Lewis (2014:11–​12) for more details on these studies.

130 ­chapter  The earliest generation of anthropologists, plagued by a dominant Western worldview which was ethnocentric and still imperially inclined, were products of their time. Some thought of the others they studied as inferior; others saw the people they met in the field as equals. Some documented customs in their ethnographies that otherwise would have been lost forever; others floundered in trying to understand the other. Through it all, the major figures in the evolution of the contemporary field of anthropology contributed to debunking the insidious notion of racism, promoting the need to understand the “native point of view,” and championing the human rights and dignity of the people studied, female as well as male. Far from merely fixing cultures as discrete units, anthropologists engaged in cultural critique of the ethnocentrism that Western societies perpetuated; this ongoing engagement with the center as well as the periphery has come full force in the last three decades.9 Sociologist Anthony Giddens suggests that anthropology “does have a past which has to some degree to be lived down, but that past contains ideas that either remain as important as they ever were, or have actually become more significant today.”10 A recent presentation of anthropological analysis of the race issue is the “Race: Are We So Different?” multi-​media project of the American Anthropological Association with a website, traveling exhibit and book.11 This project provides a clearly written rebuttal to the racism that continues to influence thought and behavior in American society. For over a century anthropologists, stimulated in large part by the work of Franz Boas, have debunked the claim that “race” has a meaningful biological basis and demonstrated through ethnographic and biological research that it is a invented concept. As Yoland T. Moses explains, “Anthropology’s traditional focus on race, its multidisciplinary expertise, and its evolutionary and cross-​cultural perspectives all position it as the appropriate discipline for replacing myth and folk beliefs about race with data and facts.”12 For example, the linguist Jane Hill explores the “everyday language of White racism” against Blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans in both its overt supremicist slurs and covert racist discourse. Using specific comments in films, by politicians, pundits and ordinary people, Hill shows how 9

10 11 12

Speaking more of European than American scholars, Borneman and Hammoudi (2009:3) write that “research on themes and topics such as power, politics, violence, resource use, production, and consumption, to cite only a few examples, has a long, uninterrupted history, exhibiting continuity as the same objects were reelaborated in light of changes brought about by processes of decolonization.” Giddens (1995:275). The website url is http://​www.understandingrace.org; for the book, see Goodman et al (2012). Moses (2015:43).

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“linguistic ideologies –​ideas about language itself that are shaped by political and economic interests –​” promote the creation and circulation of negtive stereotypes in everyday speech.13 The word “primitive” which figured in the titles of major anthropological texts from Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871) up until Robert Redfield’s The Primitive World and its Transformation (1953) no longer defines the subject of anthropological interest. While the public still views anthropologists as explorers of the exotic other, ethnography is being done everywhere. As Marcus and Fischer noted in 1986, “Fears that the subject of anthropology, the exotic other, is disappearing have proved groundless: distinctive cultural variation is where you find it, and is often more important to document at home than abroad.”14 In studying their own cultures, anthropologists rub shoulders with sociologists; both share ethnographic methods. Talal Asad suggests that anthropology is more than a method.15 Nevertheless, method is essential and the debate over the ways in which anthropologists collect and interpret data is vital to the growth of the field. While original ethnographic fieldwork can never be duplicated exactly, a case in point being the controversy over Samoan views of casual sex after Derek Freeman’s critique of Margaret Mead, this hardly puts ethnography on the same level as the search for Plato’s Atlantis, ufo sightings or an American astronaut mooning over Noah’s ark in Turkey. Being more than a method does not mean that method is not needed or that there is only one kind of method. In my field research on Yemeni water rights, I combined a variety of methods. My training in archaeology and environmental science provided a basis for examining the ecology of local water use in a springfed irrigation system; my conversations with Yemeni farmers and scholars yielded access to local values in customary law and mediation of disputes over water use; my observation of irrigation activities over an entire year created the opportunity to discuss what I saw with farmers as they worked; my course work in Arabic historiography played out in analysis of Yemeni legal and agricultural texts regarding water rights. As a result I was able to provide a detailed analysis of this important mode of production and at the same time develop a conceptual framework for the study of water allocation in ecological anthropology.16 My field research enabled me to challenge a 13 14 15 16

Hill (2008:31). Among the examples provided is a detailed analysis of a controversial statement by then Senate majority leader Trent Lott of Mississippi about Strom Thurmond’s presidential bid in 1948 as a staunch segregationist (Hill 2008:99–​118). Marcus and Fischer (1986:113). Asad (2003:17). I disagree with Asad’s characterization of fieldwork as a “pseudoscientific notion.” For criticism of the textual turn of Asad, see Hammoudi (2009). For a summary of my research see Varisco (1983).

132 ­chapter  simplistic diffusionist model by a geographer who argued that a distinct form of water allocation had been brought directly by Yemenis to Spain during the Arab conquest.17 Methods matter. Ethnography can also be brought to bear on ethnocentric assumptions that have guided American foreign policy. A case in point would be the formulation by Samuel Huntington of a “clash of civilizations” in the post Cold War period. Resurrecting the notion of “civilization” in a way that even Arnold Toynbee would find problematic, Huntington divided the world into seven current civilizations: Western, Latin American, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu and Slavic-​Orthodox.18 In a sense Huntington simply echoes the separation of the West from the Rest, since secular Western civilization is clearly the dominant system in his mind. He also draws on the blatantly Eurocentric prejudice that peoples in Africa and various parts of South Asia are not properly “civilized” and do not warrant entry into his system. Among the critics, several anthropologists weighed in.19 “Remarkably,” writes Hugh Gusterson, “Samuel Huntington has written a three-​hundred-​page heavily footnoted book about all the cultural civilizations of the world without citing any foreign language sources and with scarcely any reference to the anthropologists who study them for a living.”20 Gusterson takes Huntington to task for committing seven deadly sins, one of which is running with an antiquated view of cultures as distinct entities that anthropologists have long since rejected. Another anthropologist, Keith Brown, invites Samuel Huntington to meet the Nuer, noting that his facile understanding of the dynamics of conflict and conflict mediation has less to offer than the classic ethnographic study by Evans-​Pritchard on the Nuer.21 Here is an example where Huntington’s misuse of a retired use of the culture concept among anthropologists is corrected, not just by the logical inconsistencies that almost any scholar might see, but by refutation based on the findings of ethnographic fieldwork. As Brown observes from his own fieldwork in Macedonia, both anthropologists and some 17 18 19

20 21

The diffusion model had been presented by Thomas Glick (1970); my critique is provided in Varisco (1982:24–​32). Huntington (1993:26). The phrase “clash of civilizations” was borrowed from a 1990 article by Bernard Lewis in the Atlantic Monthly. These include Brown (2005:43), Gusterson (2005), Hannerz (1997), Herzfeld (1997). This criticism of a reified civilization or culture had been given by anthropologists decades before Huntington proposed his clash thesis. Referring to a book on African cultures, the British social anthropologist Godfrey Lienhardt (1962:154) noted: “Misleading therefore are such expressions as the ‘clash of cultures’ or ‘cultural barriers’ when they disguise what are really strong divergences of political, economic, moral, and aesthetic views between different communities or sections of a community.” Gusterson (2005:25). Brown (2005:50).

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of the individuals he has studied present culture as “a work in progress yielding ground to human agency and will,” rather than as fixed categories for political gamesmanship.22 It is precisely an understanding of the complexity of cultural categories informed by fieldwork that allows anthropologists to contribute a critique that arm-​chair scholars can not. Colonialism, Neocolonialism and Neoliberalism are pressing issues that anthropologists have taken to task, including the negative influence on research, for several decades. Sherry Ortner refers to this as a turn to “dark anthropology,” in which “theories emphasizing exploitation, inequality, and the workings of power, have come to dominate the field theoretically.”23 The ethnographic trope of “being there” can no longer be seen as locating in a tabula rasa; no “field” is an island. It is not just the missionary who drags his or her cultural baggage into the field, but the global spread of economic and political systems that trap, denigrate and at times punish people being studied. The light that anthropologists can bring to bear on the dark shadows of Neoliberalism is resistance through critique, a cultural critique that begins at home.24 My own career after fieldwork began as a social scientist engaged as a development consultant. I returned to Yemen more than a dozen times on a variety of projects, as well as applied work in Egypt, the Dominican Republic and Guatemala. This type of non-​academic work has generally been called “Applied Anthropology,” and often considered of lesser value than supposedly “pure” research. In my case it was initially a fall-​back for not starting out as a college professor, but for a decade I had an opportunity not only to contribute to projects with anthropological insights, but also could engage in further research. I am under no illusion that my effort made each project a success, but I do believe I was able to mitigate misperceptions and create awareness of local concerns with the economists, engineers and environmental scientists I worked with. The knowledge I  gained from my fieldwork and the ability to work in Yemeni dialect facilitated my interaction with colleagues who often had no experience in the country. The project I am most proud of was one I designed for the Yemen Arab Republic’s Plant Protection Unit on Integrated Pest Management.25 Agriculture has long 22 23 24

25

Brown (2005:59). Ortner (2016:65). In only a few months into the presidency of Donald Trump, the American Ethnologist published a forum on both the 2016 Brexit referendum and Trump election. As the editors note, “detailed ethnographic examples in this Forum help us question, contradict, and expand” on the tensions and debates over both issues (Edwards, Haugerud, Parikh 2017:197). Details on this project are provided in Varisco (1995). This was funded by the German development group gtz.

134 ­chapter  been the major mode of production in Yemen, with its fertile highland terraces and coastal flood zones. When development aid for agriculture poured in during the 1970s and 1980s, a number of new crops were introduced along with chemical pesticides that were dangerous to health. Few Yemenis knew these dangers and they were unaware of how to properly apply pesticides. Having lived with farmers who dealt with pest and diseases through traditional means, I knew that some of these methods were more viable than relying on expensive, imported items. I assembled a team of a botanist, ecologist, entomologist and historian, all of whom were Yemeni. We traveled to three specific ecological zones, interviewing farmers and collecting relevant scientific data. In one case we talked to a coastal farmer who was applying a chemical pesticide to combat the date palm moths in his date palms. He was not wearing any protective gear. He noted that in the past he would take a trip into the mountains and gather some black ants, bring them back and set them up in the palm trees. This was a practice documented in a Yemeni agriculture treatise from the 14th century and a prime example of successful integrated pest control using a harmless and indigenous species. Anthropologists have been practicing outside academe for at least half a century in international development organizations, the World Bank, the State Department of the United States, state governments and private businesses.26 To argue, as Edward Said once did, that such work is on the wrong side of the colonial divide, is disingenuous even if due to ignorance. Anthropologists also practice as activists and advocates, working with indigenous people to help them protect their rights, engaging in legal cases, raising awareness of victims and acting out of concern for people they interact with in their research. An example of this kind of “engaged anthropology” is the work of Stuart Kirsch who first conducted ethnographic research in Papua New Guinea in the 1980s. Although his focus was on ritual, magic and sorcery, he found that one of the major local concerns was over pollution from a large copper and gold mine in the region. He later participated in legal cases to protect the local environment, as well as working with refugees. Such work is not only a contribution to the local community, but, as Kirsch argues, such engagement is “where the rubber meets the road, providing opportunities to develop, test, and refine anthropological understandings of the real world.”27 I find it absurd that any serious assessment of the history of debate over culture concepts, the documentation of diverse ways of life, the speaking out 26

27

For an earlier history of applied anthropology, see Gwynn (2004). Ferraro and Andreatta (2017) offer an introduction to cultural anthropology with a focus on applied work. The reader by Podolefsky, Brown and Lacy (2012) provides articles on all aspects of applied or practicing anthropology. Kirsch (2018:7).

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against troubling ethnocentric, racist and sexual stereotypes and the goal of understanding humanity in a holistic sense would lead to a death wish for anthropology. Anthropology, as it has evolved for the last century, did not invent colonialism, nor have outdated views about human origins, so-​called “racial” characteristics and blatant ethnocentrism by earlier scholars been perpetuated in the field. As practiced in the United States, the field has expanded into a seemingly endless number of subsections with the inevitable result that no single anthropologist can claim expertise across the range. The result may seem like a “tattered umbrella,” in Johannes Fabian’s left-​handed metaphor, but that umbrella serves an important function in the current global political and economic context.28 Despite the naysayers, the vitality of the research results of several thousand trained anthropologists over the past century shows that rumors of an academic death rattle are greatly exaggerated. 1

Modern or Postmodern? In a sense, anthropology has lost its glamor and gone into the wings from where it tries to retrieve power vicariously through conjuring with the texts and names which are at center stage.29 Michael Jackson

Literary anthropologists’ demands for the repudiation of science, and for its replacement with a thick description innocent of validation, means that they hold a doctrine that allows them to know next to nothing.30 S. P. Reyna

The anthropology I  am concerned with is the “modern” variety inaugurated by Tylor and Boas, not the prehistoric musings of “Enlightenment” social philosophers that clearly influenced the birth of the formal discipline at the end of the 19th century. There is no birth certificate for the birth of modernity as a distinct period in human history. Its conceptual genealogy can be traced to the advance of reason in the Enlightenment, the commercial windfall of industrial capitalism, the rise of modern science, the 19th century belief in progress and 28 29 30

Fabian (2012:440). Jackson (1989:183). Reyna (1994:576). Reyna compares the criticism in the Writing Culture authors to the bombast of Dr. Pangloss in Voltaire’s Candide.

136 ­chapter  the emergence of academic disciplines to define such a period. We know we are modern because we drive cars, eat fast food and connect to the Internet. But when were we not yet modern? Were we modern in the 19th century, when Thomas Edison invented both the phonograph and the electric light? In 1903 Picasso was defining modern art just as the Wright Brothers took off in an airplane at Kitty Hawk and Henry Ford formed the Ford Motor Company; Stravinsky did not produce his Rite of Spring until a decade later. Who decides when “modern” is transformed into “modernism” and “modernity”? Or is it the case, as Bruno Latour asks, that we have never been “modern.”31 One problem with “modernity” is reifying the idea as a period of time rather than, as Marshall Berman argues, “a struggle to make ourselves at home in a constantly changing world.”32 Modernity is politicized through and through, but for Berman it is modern capitalism, not modern art or culture, that marks life as a “maelstrom.”33 The corruptive power of politics becomes the bane of academic critique of the modern world. As Talal Asad argues, “The important question, therefore, is not to determine why the idea of ‘modernity’ (or ‘the West’) is a misdescription, but why it has become hegemonic as a political goal, what practical consequences follow from that hegemony, and what social conditions maintain it.”34 This is where the best anthropological analysis has gone in recent years. The cultural repercussions of neoliberal policies have become the focus of many recent ethnographies.35 It is important to distinguish modernity as a set of possibilities ushered in by the Western intellectual menagerie of rationalist thought, science and technology from what James C. Scott (1998:4) labels “high modernism,” an ideology “that borrowed, as it were, the legitimacy of science and technology” but that was “uncritical, unskeptical, and thus unscientifically optimistic about the possibilities for the comprehensive planning of human settlement and production.”36 It is understandable that reputable scholars, like philosopher Herbert Spencer, at the turn of the 20th century could envision a better world 31 32

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Latour (1993). Berman (1988:6). For Berman, this “implies an open and expansive way of understanding culture; very different from the curatorial approach that breaks up human activity into fragments and locks the fragments into separate cases, labeled by time, place, language, genre and academic discipline.” Berman (1988:123, 345). Asad (2003:13). See, for example, the ethnographic studies of Comaroff and Comaroff (2011), Ferguson (2006), Hodgson (2011), Kelly (2008). James C. Scott (1998:4). He notes (pp. 89–​90): “At its center was a supreme self-​confidence about continued linear progress, the development of scientific and technical knowledge, the expansion of production, the rational design of social order, the growing satisfaction

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with the aid of science and education. But two major world wars and many minor ones, brutal authoritarian regimes, religious intolerance, economic disparity and endemic poverty have dashed any kind of utopian vision. Humans, being diverse and malleable creatures, are not robots to be be progressively programmed. It is precisely this diversity and flexibility in defining cultural norms that have been the aims of anthropological study over the course of the so-​called modern era. If there is one point that I think anyone could agree with, it is that modernity is an ephemeral concept. It is a way of separating something we want to refer to as the past from the seemingly immobile present, which in fact is always evolving, continually changing. One can talk about modern science, modern art, modern technology or just about anything that has a recent history that we in the present feel an affinity with. It does not help to over-​philosophize the issue, recasting the obvious in a new set of jargon. A case in point is the following attempt by Paul Rabinow to replace “modern” with “contemporary”: “The contemporary is a moving ratio of modernity, moving through the recent past and near future in a (nonlinear) space that gauges modernity as an ethos already becoming historical.”37 Ratios do not move; ethos is an imaginary with a long history in the discipline. The bottom line is that the notion of “modern” or “contemporary” is inevitably a very Western way of looking at the world. From an anthropological perspective this is a problematic viewpoint, since it implies that a large number of people and cultures either do not belong to this modernity or that they must be helpless victims of it. The idea of modernity is always going to be problematic when approached in the singular. “There are, in short, many modernities,” argue Jean and John Comaroff. “Nor should this surprise us.”38 The multiple claims across academic disciplines and in the public media as to what constitutes modernity cannot be reduced to a singular set of agreed upon traits. The term evolved in a Eurocentric mode under a capitalist umbrella and fueled by a rationalized Christian missionizing mantra of civilized superiority. Whatever a particular perspective of modernity entails, it has a past that makes it possible and a future that will necessarily unsettle it. Even if one limits modernity to a certain Eurocentric project, what was seen as modern in the center of empire was never the same in the periphery. Nor was the center immune from those who were assumed not be modern, or at least not modern enough.

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of human needs, and, not least, an increasing control over nature (including human nature) commensurate with scientific understanding of natural laws.” Rabinow (2007:2). Comaroff and Comaroff (1993:xi).

138 ­chapter  Not having a precise date of birth makes it difficult to predict the longevity of our present perceived modernity. Those who claim we became postmodern by the 1970s refer to a critical juncture when the metanarratives justifying capitalism and socialism, the bitter post-​war standoff of the nuclear age Cold War, were no longer seen as viable. Civil Rights for African Americans, women’s equal rights and Native American rights had been simmering throughout the century but had finally made their mark during the 1960s. The postmodern condition was a rejection of the problems that modernity had not solved but without a new metanarrative to carry life on.39 Terry Eagleton, for example, laments that the postmodernized field of cultural studies has shown a far greater interest in sex than in socialism.40 Radical rhetoric does not necessarily result in revolutionary change. If modernity is a “project,” as Asad suggests, then the Borg-​like reach of neoliberal capitalism, the incessant flare up of civil strife and warfare, the sectarian violence, the environmental devastation and the continuing political dominance of “Western” nation states can hardly be “postmodern.” One could say the world is experiencing a neo-​modern effect, like neo-​colonialism to formal colonialism, but the “neo” must itself be perpetually “neo-​nized,” giving way in the future to yet another shift in the power dynamics of a global population now measured in the billions. If we are already postmodern, then what comes next? A Luddite conviction that this is the end of history is ludicrous, unless a real apocalypse sends life back to the stage of bacteria. Our terminological impasse is neither about a beginning nor an end, but the middle that has become an ephemeral modern. The three age system that once placed a medieval mentality between the ancients and the Renaissance has been modernized to become a default pre-​modern before the all-​important-​ to-​us modernity that is overcome by a postmodern condition of civilizational doubt. To the extent pre-​modern has replaced prehistoric, the shift has only been from a 19th century Eurocentric worldview to a post 20th century Euro-​ Amerocentric one. Modernity as a project, one that never stands still, can only end with the end of our species, since modernity is simply the name we give

39

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The literature of postmodernism is prolific. The ur-​texts include Jean-​François Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir (1979), translated into English in 1984, and Fredrik Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). A bitter critique of the influence of postmodern criticism on anthropology was given by Gellner (1992), whose ideas are critically addressed by Turner (1994:15–​18). See also Kuznar (2009:69–123) and Patterson (2001:152–​156). Eagleton (2016:34).

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the present, no matter what we make of the past or fear about the future.41 We continue to be modern because we can never escape the present, but we have trapped our thinking into posting new jargon that ends up making us ever more modern. To speak of the postmodern is often little more than a dislike for what has happened in the past, suffering at the end of the last century from a secular apocalyptic “millenarian malaise.”42 One rhetorical sidestep of the periodization dilemma is calling the postmodern a “condition” rather than a period, as though it can be detached intellectually from the time in which it was invented. But if this condition is heralded by the collapse of all previous metanarratives, is not the narrative of such a condition in itself yet another metanarrative? If some critical theorists have not met a metanarrative they can believe in, if Enlightenment rationalism and positivist science are to be jettisoned, then the resulting anarchy becomes a new metanarrative. The problem with such theorizing is that the reality that narratives seek to understand is not dependent on any particular point of view. Nature defies human imagination of the supernatural without a need for vindication by Lyell’s uniformitarianism. Species evolve and adapt or die out, despite the epistemological jousting over what is really real. The perennial question that haunts the discipline is not just if there will be an end to its subject matter, but to the theory and methods that have been defined as anthropological. John Comaroff’s provocative title of “The End of Anthropology, Again” in a 2010 American Anthropologist article was followed in 2011 by an edited volume reframing yet again The End of Anthropology?43 There seems to be no end in sight of ending scenarios. These endings span both modernity, when the four fields of anthropology blossomed in North America, and what some call postmodernity, a critical panopti-​iconoclasm that, as Signe Howell suggests, entered as a “fifth column within our own ranks” that “knocked away the foundations from beneath the discipline” in their critique of ethnographic practice as a colonial handmaiden.44 Robin Fox has dismissed the postmodern “Lit Critters” as lazy minds only interested in the mere voicing of their own opinions, claiming that “Only Kafka or Lewis Carroll could do it 41 42 43 44

Soares and Osella (2009:S5) note, with good reason, that “Anthropologists have sidestepped hubristic debates about whether ‘modernity’ is single or multiple, when it started and possibly ended, and whether it has existed at all.” This term is from Cerroni-​Long (1999:1). Jebens and Kohl (2011). This volume includes a reprint of Comaroff’s article. As Kirsten Hastrup (1995:10) notes, the angst of anthropology’s critics “bears witness to a temporary theoretical shortcoming of anthropology rather than its imminent death.” Howell (2011:141).

140 ­chapter  justice.”45 Fox’s gibes aside, there is nothing inherently lazy about scholars in any discipline; anthropologists can be as lazy in their thinking as anyone else. One might retort in a poetic joust to Fox: “and has thou slain the Jabberwock?” Those who aggrandize a variety of approaches as “postmodern” can be as guilty of creating a polemicized straw text as those who suggest positivism and Orientalism are hermeneutically sealed discourses with obvious boundaries. The variety of views that are pressed into the bloated rubric of postmodernism or postcolonialism are not, in themselves, easily dismissed, nor should they be.46 Science and education have not eradicated bigotry and ignorance, as the optimistic philosopher-​sociologist Herbert Spencer once prophesied. The world as we know it today still suffers from the colonization of new worlds where native populations are killed off, die off or have little choice but to assimilate while remaining inferior. Sexism and gender discrimination are not simply objects of anthropological discourse, but endemic in the cultural baggage even ethnographers (male in particular) bring to the field as well as to professional meetings. Capitalism, through the neoliberal power structure which feeds off it, aids and abets the age-​old injustice of making the rich richer and the poor poorer. Just-​so alibis for the ongoing War on Terror do not alleviate the conditions that lead people to terrorize in the face of being terrorized. 45

46

Fox (1994:375). He goes on to say “When I hear the word postmodern I reach for my gun” (p. 377). My criticism is pacifist, knowing that in the long run the pen is mightier than sword or gun. Consider the pen of Marshall Sahlins (2002:48): “One of the more poignant aspects of the current postmodernist mood is the way it seems to lobotomize some of our best graduate students, to stifle their creativity for fear of making some interesting structural connection, some relationship between cultural practices, or a comparative generalization. The only safe essentialism left to them is that there is no order to culture.” Or that of Herb Lewis (2014:207): “Few of today’s practitioners of anthropology seem to realize what they have lost; on the contrary, many think of the earlier days of their discipline as the dark ages, marked by the sins of the fathers, and sometimes the mothers.” There are also some who are as extreme as those they criticize; a case in point is the indiscriminate bundling of just about every recent approach in American anthropology as the trifecta of “Postmodernism, Anti-​Science and Anti-​ Reason” by Homayun Sidky (2003:243). I acknowledge the point made by Brumann (1999:S23) and still valid that the influence of “postmodern” criticism on anthropology has been far less overseas than in the United States, although it appears to be making inroads in Southeast Asia. It is important to note that critique of postmodern rejection of anthropology as a science does not mean that issues of bias in representation are being ignored. Annette Weiner (1995:15) wisely notes: “To reject postmodernism out of hand as if all its positions are antithetical (or heretical) is to return to an anthropology of the past that only can alienate us from the major Western and non-​Western discourses of this and future decades.”

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Anthropologists have hardly dropped the ball in speaking the truths learned from ethnography and borrowed from sibling disciplines back to the power brokers and the consumptive media which support them. Texts like Exotic No More: Anthropology on the Front Lines, Why America’s Top Pundits are Wrong: Anthropologists Talk Back and The Insecure American: How We Got Here and What We Should Do About It have come a long way from Malinowski’s description of canoe building in the Trobriands.47 Volumes such as Anthropology and Climate Change: From Actions to Transformations indicate that anthropology is not stuck on the exotic.48 This kind of engaged, public anthropology demonstrates that “in spite of obstacles and opponents, anthropology still matters.”49 As noted in the “Future anthropologies manifesto,” there is much space for an ethnographically-​informed anthropology to grow in the future: “Anthropology of the future is accretive. It builds on traditions, reflects on pasts.”50 The topics covered in Catherine Besteman and High Gusterson’s edited volume The Insecure American: How We Got Here and What We Should Do About It speak a number of “truths” to power in contemporary America. The contributors draw on ethnographic experience to analyze social problems ranging from neocon warmaking and Walmart economics to gated communities and homeless drug addicts. Brett Williams, an anthropologist who studies poverty in the nation’s capital, documents the predatory lending of pawnshops, harassment of debt collectors and health impacts of endemic poverty. “Washington, D.C., has the highest rate of infant mortality and low birth-​weight babies in the nation, but it shares with other American cities the horrific distinction of infant morality rates and low-​birth-​weights babies rivaling the poorest countries of the world,” she writes, documenting the chilling statistics with stories of individuals living in public housing.51 This activist anthropology proves that the field is neither locked away in an ivory tower, nor trapped in an unending circular hermeneutic of texts. Anthropologists are even wooed by the military and security agencies, as problematic as that can be.52 47 48 49 50 51 52

MacClancy (2002), Besteman and Gusterson (2005) and Gusterson and Besteman (2010). Issues of anthropology’s flagship journals, especially the American Anthropologist, provide cutting-​edge cultural critique. Crate and Nutall (2016). Benson (2014:386). Despite the danger of over moralizing as activists, Starn (2015:21) argues that many anthropologists “continue searching for their own ways to cultivate human kindness and social justice in their writing, teaching, and researching.” Salazar, Pink, Irving, Sjöberg (2017:2). This ten-​point manifesto was the result of a 2014 conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists. Williams (2010:232–​233). Ferguson (2012) analyzes the kind of cultural information the U.S. Department of Defense is interested in. For a review of the human terrain system involving anthropologists, see

142 ­chapter  One of the strengths of contemporary activist anthropology is bringing the ordinary to light. Consider the ethnographic work of Didier Fassin, a French anthropologist who published a study of police behavior in the troubled suburbs of Paris. His research began after a major riot in October, 2005 over the accidental deaths of two youths. Although events like this were the focus of the news, Fassin “observed the everyday activity of the patrols, the relationships developed by the officers with the population, the differentiation of their attitudes according to the public, the spiral that sometimes ended in violent acts and near riots.”53 Commenting on Fassin’s book, a newspaper journalist remarked how it allowed him to see police activities in the suburbs “in a completely different light.”54 The value of the ethnographic analysis was the depiction of everyday life, the routine that was often tedious, the mundane reality that journalists rarely saw beyond explosive events. As Fassin’s work illustrates for contemporary social issues, ethnography matters. Only through ethnography can one gain an on-​the-​ground understanding of what Michael Herzfeld calls “cultural intimacy.” Drawing on his fieldwork experience in Greece, Italy and Thailand, Herzfeld shows how intimate details of ordinary life, including those which are self-​disparaging and self-​stereotypes, provide a balance to the cultural identity created and promoted by the nation state. The use of ethnographic data, argues Herzfeld, works against a “static, elitist, and conflationary reading” of nationalism that fails to analyze “how nationalism is understood (and sometimes recast) by living social actors.”55 In the case of Greece, for example, the nation has been imagined metaphorically as “a single, unified patriline” that links the cultural concept of what defines character and values with genetic nature.56 Thus the nation is conflated with ethnicity, ignoring the non-​comformist aspects of everyday discourse. By engaging with social actors and listening to what they say, as opposed to what the political structure assumes about them, the anthropologist contributes to the ongoing debate over what it means to live in a modern nation state. The formal discipline of anthropology has an obvious beginning, no matter what figure is cited as a founder, but the interest in thinking about who we are as human beings is what makes us sapiens. Until we evolve into a new species or a cyborg, it is doubtful there will be an end to what is subsumed under the

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Forte (2011). Several anthropologists discuss drones, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, martyrdom and war as a global problem in Stroeken (2012). Fassin (2013:622). Fassin (2013:632). Herzfeld (2005:11). Herzfeld (2005:77).

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conceptual umbrella called culture. As John Comaroff responded belatedly to a certain Mrs. Evans some four decades after his first job interview in South Wales, anthropology “is not about to die. Nor is it in ‘suspension.’ It is very much producing new kinds of knowledge, new theory work, new empirical horizons, new arguments.”57 This view is shared by Talal Asad, who notes that anthropology “is not one that imposes absolute boundaries, beyond which one can never go or which one can never question.”58 Joan Vincent states that “ethnography is critically important as the one vehicle above all others through which anthropologists represent and transform theory.”59 Particular theories rise and fall, at times to rise again. No one is suggesting a return to the social evolutionism of Lewis Henry Morgan, the historical particularism of Franz Boas, the shreds-​and-​patches patterns of Ruth Benedict, the structural functionalism of Radcliffe-​Brown, the energy harness of Leslie White, the raw structuralist data and cooked interpretations of Claude Lévi-​Strauss, or any of the theoretical approaches that dot, like ghosts, the landscape of anthropologies past. It is our methodological relativism, the “indiscipline” of our maligned discipline, that bodes well for the future of anthropology as one among the many academic fields of knowledge. As Michael Fischer reminds us, “It is a form of knowledge, ever evolving, urgently needed in today’s world.”60 2

Back to the Tool Box Culture is certainly a working tool, good only until we invent something better and more precise, but is there any scientific concept that is different in this regard? And should we really throw out culture without having anything better61 Christoph Brumann

57

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59 60 61

Comaroff (2010: 534). In one of his last books, Geertz (2000: x) also believed that “The end is not nigh,” although with characteristic wit, he adds:  “But aimlessness, a baffled wandering in search of direction and rationale, is.” Similarly, in an assessment of the influence of earlier writing against ethnography, Orin Starn (2015:10) concludes that ethnography “in short, is not an endangered genre” despite the proliferation of new forms of communication. Asad (2006:277). A similar view is expressed by Bessire and Bond (2014:442): “Anthropology is exciting today because its prior ways of knowing –​outmoded as they may be –​are ontologically unruly:  They loop back into the fabric of communities, institutions, and subjectivities in ways that wildly exceed our disciplinary debates.” Vincent (1991:47). Fischer (2007:43). Brumann (1999:S21).

144 ­chapter  The concept of culture has become over-​extended, flabby, over-​ weight. It needs not replacement, nor more puffery, but some good, healthy, theoretical and empirical exercise.62 Roy D’Andrade

If “culture” is to be written off the ethnographic charts, and field research replaced by story telling, what will fill its place? Scholarly writing, like nature, abhors a vacuum. As Gregory Starrett warns, “Were we to choose another concept to be central to our field, we would eventually complain that it, too, was impossibly muddled, the result of our using the concept as a focus for working through manifold concerns.”63 In her desire to write against culture, Lila Abu-​Lughod borrows the Foucauldian notion of discourse, reducing what people do to a latent substructure visualized through institutions and writing. As applied by Edward Said to the generalized genre of Orientalism, discourse becomes a binary power play of us vs. them played out through an imaginative geography of texts. Culture becomes all about power, which Marshall Sahlins reminds us “is the intellectual black hole into which all kinds of cultural contents get sucked.”64 In his critique of postmodern studies of the human/​animal dichotomy, Gary Steiner isolates the fundamental problem with an overemphasis on the dimension of power: “Principles thus become reduced to nothing more than weapons in polemical struggles in which those in power seek to preserve their position of dominance and thwart the endeavor of the powerless to attain recognition and empowerment.”65 This is not to deny the reality of power politics but to challenge the reduction of humanity to one problematic dimension of culture. Writing against culture is logically impossible; no matter what label is used or abused, there is a reality of behavior and circulation of ideas that concepts of culture are applied to represent. It is important to recognize that our concepts are instrumentalities and not finalities, discerning difference rather than becoming dogmatically doctrinaire. As expressed eloquently by Michael Jackson in a perceptive, pragmatic account of his field experience among the Kuranko of Sierra Leone, “Together with tools, physical skills, and practical knowledge, they belong to a world whose horizons are open, the quotidian world in which we live, adjusting our needs to the needs of others, testing our ideas against the exigencies of life.”66 We conceptualize and we generalize in 62 63 64 65 66

D’Andrade (1999:102). Starrett (2008:255). Sahlins (2002:20). Steiner (2013:2). Jackson (1989:1).

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order to communicate, not to explain something away as unassailable dogma. With the proper amount of Weberian Verstehen, the use of concepts should never be Verboten. Neither should we engage in perpetual contestation of culture concepts, as Johannes Fabian suggests; this would amount to an end with no end and little insight in sight.67 Those who are determined to denigrate the work of anthropologists past constantly dredge up the specter of “cultural determinism,” as if Tylor, Boas and their students could not see beyond the particulars of individual cultural groups or else were too quick to super-​organicize humanity. It is important to remember the revolution that Darwin started: humans are related to earlier species by degree and not by kind. Thus, there is little about human “culture” that transcends nature apart from the imaginative reasoning of our species. “Culture” as a concept does not explain “Culture” as the assumed reality we as humans share any more than the chemicals of the human organism explain what it means to be human. As Roy D’Andrade warns, “if we define culture in such a way that it consists of the behavior acquired and transmitted by a society, we then cannot properly use the idea of culture to explain this behavior.” 68 Humans, in the reality they share with the rest of observable nature, are a complex interplay of biological givens and potentials as these mature in a given social environment. Yet, to better situate ourselves in the diverse pan-​human sense, conceptual tools like culture concepts come in as handy to social scientists as the first hand axes were to the early hominids. And like those hand axes, it is well to remember Kroeber’s reminder that “the concept of culture is two-​edged,” tying some things together and separating others.69 Since anthropology covers the entire range of human behavior, past and present, it is not surprising that it has borrowed from other disciplines along the way. There is, of course, no consensus on how best to study what it means to be human. Paul Rabinow, who laments this situation, argues that one way to proceed into the future is to “adopt a metaposition that begins with a principled affirmation of the inevitable plurality of positions.”70 This is hardly a new idea, echoing the interdisciplinary nature of anthropology from the start. The problem is when he concludes that the “anthropological problem” “lies in

67 68 69 70

Fabian (2001:99). D’Andrade (1999:86). He adds: “Culture is a good place to look to understand a good deal about what people are doing, but not such a good place to look to understand why people started to do something in the first place, or even why they continue to do it” (p. 95). Kroeber (1952:118). Rabinow (2003:6).

146 ­chapter  the apparently unavoidable fact that anthropos is that being who suffers from too many logoi.” It is not clear who this abstract “anthropos” is apart from the object of philosophical speculation over which Hegel, Freud, Dewey Heidegger, Foucault and other intellectuals have speculated. Philosophy has played a critical role in interpreting the human condition, but it is precisely this kind of thinking from a Eurocentric perch that anthropologists should not emulate. My problem is not with Rabinow’s meditations on anthropos, which are at times quite insightful, but with the claim that his philosophical musings by European critics are anthropological. He ignores or deflates previous anthropological theory and minimizes the role of ethnography. This is certainly his right, but the fact that he has a degree in anthropology does not make his work anthropological in a meaningful way when it jettisons the lessons that can be learned through ethnographic fieldwork. It is precisely because human society is so complex and the biological nature of us all so intertwined with cultural learning that we need to constantly refine our methods as social scientists rather then casually reject a scientific approach. Culture concepts are heuristic tools, not ends in themselves, rhetorical playthings nor sacred writ, and only part of the many ways we try to make sense of who we are. Because we humans have been writing for some five millennia, texts are an important part of who we are. But the human culture that has evolved over several million years transcends any set of words ever written down. The vast majority of people, even today, live outside what is written about them in texts. It is this quotidian dimension, the almost infinite variety of the ways people live, that anthropology and sociology seek to better understand by actually studying the myriad others in our diverse species. Until there is a better method for understanding others than through the contact and dialogue of actually “being there,” anthropology will have an important role to play in defining, redefining and refining useful culture concepts.71 It is hard to imagine why anyone would want to ignore the anthropological emphasis on the “native points of view,” the battle against crude biological determinism and racism or repeal reasoned cultural relativism in an age of increasingly globalized diversity.72 The business of anthropologists from the start has been to make sense of human behavior, recognizing that we differ by degree not kind from earlier primate species and that our intellectual abilities and range of social interaction should be studied as objectively as humanly 71 Commenting on the accumulated experience of ethnography, Michael Carrithers (1997:101) concludes that “the notion of culture is, in everyday practice if not in theory, a resounding and heroic success.” 72 For a defense of the value of “cultural relativism” for cultural critique, see Ulin (2007).

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possible. Fieldwork, the quintessential rite of passage, for the cultural anthropologist, allows for the collection of information and generation of conceptual tools to analyze that information in a vital way that no one sitting in a library or academic armchair could do in the same way. Fieldwork as a method is important for providing data not only to test theories but to correct them. Eric Wolf summed up this point well: “Fieldwork, however, never goes forward without theory: the theories of the time direct what the anthropologist looks for, but what is seen in the field may expose difficulties in those theories and lead to new formulations.”73 Our discipline, as a field, could not exist without the field we live and work in as ethnographers. As a methodology, fieldwork provides a unique opportunity to test the theoretical jetties from which our academic research is launched. As Tobias Rees suggests, it can be “knowledge producing practice (a science) at the core of which is the field’s particular potential to lead astray; to profoundly derail the fieldwork scenarios one has laid out before one entered the field; to lead into yet uncharted, not thought through terrains of marvel and surprise; with the intellectual challenge to embark on an essentially uncertain journey, a journey in part defined by the goal of reporting back from ‘there’ the unforeseeable discoveries one has made, a goal that entails the challenge of finding adequate means of depicting the singularities one has become part of.”74 This does not mean that the theories which swirl through our heads are wrong or necessarily inadequate, but that models and concepts are worth refining and improving when there is sufficient reason. The long standing debate in anthropology over how to define culture demonstrates the importance of being immersed in diverse cultural contexts rather than simply buying into canonized social theories. Being in the field is an open-​ended endeavor, imperfect for coming away with a total understanding of what one observes. Empirical methods, which anthropologists share with sociologists and other social scientists, are never immune from producing error, exaggeration or misleading statistical validity. But interpreting the thick and thin of all this description is an important part of the process. The patterns and norms proposed to better understand behavior do not become dogma, no matter how badly taught in undergraduate anthropology courses. The key point is that the cumulative effect of the vast amount of ethnographic research now available stimulates our thinking about what it all means to be a diverse species with a blurred prehistory and an

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Wolf (2000:61–​62). Rees (2011:360).

148 ­chapter  uncertain future. If I believed that there was only one viable culture concept in the academic toolbox, then I would fear for the future of an anthropology that has simply replaced the dictatorial smugness of theology or humanistic philosophy. We would be blind to the elephant in the room, if such a gentle beast is an apt metaphor for the kit of culture concepts, if we think the part we grab hold of for our own study stands for the whole. A century and a quarter ago, the arch-​prophet of impending modernity Friedrich Nietzsche announced what to him was obvious: God was dead. In this nihilistic view both the vengeful Jehovah and the triune remake of Western Christianity, Catholic and Protestant, had been reduced to church icons and literally trashed. The Anglican-​shaped God that Darwin toyed with when writing On the Origin of Species had expired in this great scientist’s mind by the time his The Descent of Man was finalized. Now that humanity was known to be evolving, there appeared to be no need for the gods of the past. After all, as Marx had already noted and Durkheim seconded, man makes his own gods, not the other way around. “With the death of God,” argues Bryan Turner, “we are necessarily committed to perspectives, which we may regard as a form of value pluralism ruling out absolute ethical standards.”75 But the idea of God, of multiple gods, is far from dead in the reality of human thought and practice. To the extent our world today could be considered postmodern, the premodern and modern have hardly disappeared. Similarly, those who wish to write culture out of anthropological research or claim that the surviving culture concepts are near death’s door are due to be disappointed. The idea of culture may shed its skin with each perennial wave of critique, but the reality it is meant to understand will only die out if we misuse our cultural heritage to destroy the entire species. 75

Turner (1994:123).

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Index Abu-​Lughod 14, 83–​91, 144 Adra, Najwa 18–​22, 47, 103, 103n41, 106, 112, 121 Afghanistan 87 agriculture 31, 59, 107, 134 American Anthropological Association 10, 69n43, 84 Anthropology  Applied 133, 134 history 8n19, 90 public 141 Science vs. Humanites 9n24, 10–​11 theory 8n19, 23, 47, 70, 93, 146 Arabic manuscripts 31, 41, 59, 107, 134 Arnold, Matthew 29, 73–​77, 81, 83 Culture and Anarchy 29, 74 Asad, Talal 32, 37, 61, 136 Auerbach, Erich 88 Awlad ‘Ali 83, 89 “Being There” 2, 22, 30, 34, 51 Benedict, Ruth 13, 55, 143 Berber 104–​106, 117–​119 blogs, anthropological 3 Boas, Franz 8–​9, 49, 62, 64, 69n43, 121, 130, 143 Boethius 26 Bororo 37 capitalism 16, 17n53, 77, 136, 140 Caton, Steven 83 Clifford, James 13n39, 32–​34, 44, 48–​50, 64, 101 cognitive anthropology 81–​82 colonialism 18n55, 62, 65, 79, 133 Coon, Carlton 12 Crapanzano, Vincent 125–​126 Creighton, Colonel 63 cultural relativism 57, 68, 86, 86n108, 87, 146, 146n72 Cultural Studies 5n10, 15–​17, 29, 43, 45, 55 culture  culture concept 13, 22–​24, 40, 48, 54–​57, 73–​75, 81, 84n101, 85–​86, 89, 90n123, 114, 132, 144–​146

definition 26, 28, 51–​52, 54, 145, 147 shock 24, 99, 103, 108, 108n53, 109–​110 text 23, 32–​33, 80–​81 writing against 82, 86–​87, 91, 144 Yemeni 56–​57 Culture Wars 5 Dabashi, Hamid 61–​62 Darwin, Charles 5, 7, 54, 145, 148 dialectic 99, 99n30 diaries 66n33, 93, 102–​103, 108, 110–​114, 116, 123 Durkheim, Émile xiv, 100, 115, 115n67, 148 Eagleton, Terry 29, 76, 87, 138 Eliade, Mircea 101 Eliot, T. S. 29 ethnocentrism 23, 62, 68, 74–​76, 86, 130, 135 ethnographic authority 18, 30, 44, 48, 50–​51 ethnographic texts 32–​34, 39–​40, 46, 53, 82, 123 ethnography 18–​19, 40, 60, 81 eugenics 64n26 Evans-​Pritchard, E. E. 34–​39, 96 Nuer Religion 37–​38 The Nuer 34 facts 10, 19, 40n53, 49, 113–​115 Fardle of Façions 27 Fassin, Didier 142 feminism 33n30, 83–​84, 84n102 fiction 26, 39–​42, 92 fieldwork, ethnographic 17, 30, 46, 49, 92–​94, 104–​105, 113, 115, 131, 147 film, ethnographic 121 Firth, Raymond 46, 90 Foucault 36, 36n40, 82–​83, 144, 146 four-​field approach 2, 8, 43n62, 89, 114 Frazer, James 65, 101 Friedman, Thomas 3 Geertz, Clifford 40, 40n53, 41–​43, 81–​82, 90n121, 123, 125 generalization 89

173

Index Goodenough, Ward 81 Gramsci, Antonio 77n76, 79

Nietzsche, Friedrich 24n66, 56, 148 Nuer religion 37–​40, 50

Hall, G. Stanley 49 Hammoudi, Abdellah 32 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 95–​96, 99, 125, 146 Herder, Johann Gottfried 27, 29, 60 Hermes 125 Herodotus 26, 44 Herzfeld, Michael 142 Hobbes, Thomas 17, 60 Hugo St. Victor 88 human evolution 6n13, 17, 25, 146 Hume, David 124 Huntington, Samuel 3, 28, 132 Hurston, Nora Zeale 129 Huxley, Thomas Henry 76

objectivity 10, 46, 85 owl of Minerva 95–​96

Jackson, Michael 36n40, 42n57, 50, 144

qat 20

Kant, Immanuel 27, 99 Kroeber, Alfred 4n9, 12, 28–​29, 47n79, 48, 64n26, 74, 94, 129, 145

Rabinow, Paul 14, 92–​102, 104, 106, 108–​111, 116–​120, 123, 137, 145 Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco  23–​24, 92, 117, 123–​124, 127 race concept 64–​66, 73, 85, 130–​131 Radcliffe-​Brown, Reginald 8 rationality 5, 16, 37–​38, 52, 96 reflexivist critique 43–​44, 90, 93, 98, 123–​126 Rosaldo, Renato 35, 35n7, 36–​37

language 26, 87, 106 Lévi-​Strauss, Claude 61, 67–​68, 86, 143 Lévy-​Bruhl, Lucien 37–​38 literary criticism 15, 40, 51, 53 Malinowski, Bronislaw 8–​9, 42, 45, 49, 65–​66, 92–​93, 95, 128–​129 Marx, Karl 15, 75, 99, 148 Marxism 25n3, 68, 70, 77 Mead, Margaret 19, 50n85, 94, 121, 123, 128, 131 Coming of Age in Samoa 2, 42, 45, 49 mediation 20 modernity 17, 29, 135–​139 Montaigne, Michel de 5, 26 Morgan, Lewis Henry 63–​64, 143 Morocco xx, 23–​24, 42, 96, 104, 106, 109, 117–​120, 125–​126 Muslim women 87 native anthropologist 84n103 Navajo 47 Neocolonialism 16, 133, 138 Neoliberalism 133

participant observtion 17, 30, 31n18, 50, 65, 92, 116 photographs 40, 117, 119–​122, 126 pilgrimage 32 Piltdown Man 12 positivism 11n29, 14n41, 24, 95–​97, 114, 123 postcolonial 16, 83 postmodern 12, 15, 33–​34, 45, 80, 80n85, 127n92, 138n39, 139–​140, 144 primitives 13, 37–​39, 49, 63, 68n38, 114–​115, 128–​129, 131 prostitutes 117, 120

Said, Edward 58–​61, 63–​65, 67–​73, 75–​84, 99, 134, 144 Culture and Imperialism 23, 58–​59, 78–​80, 91 Orientalism 1, 23, 39, 58–​59, 63, 80, 82–​83, 85, 88, 127 view of anthropology 58, 60–​70, 87–​88 view of culture 59, 71–​72, 75–​81, 90 Sapir, Edward 15, 49n82, 52, 75 scientific method 9–​10, 125 scientism 85n105, 96–​97 sexual encounter 118 sociology 33, 61, 128n3 Spadola, Emilio 109–​110 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 99n30 Sumner, William Graham 76 Swift, Jonathan 75, 75n68

174 Index Trump, Donald 133n24 Tyler, Stephen 14, 44, 45n73 Tylor, Edward 48, 51–​52, 63, 73, 96 culture definition 27, 51–​52, 72 Primitive Culture xix, 5, 27, 73–​74 Van Gennep, Arnold 113 Vico, Giambattista 60n6, 67 War on Terror 140

Weber, Max xvii, 81, 82n91, 100 white man’s burden 66–​67 Williams, Raymond 25n3, 29, 99n30 Wolf, Eric 11, 53, 68–​70, 86n106, 147 Writing Culture 32–​34, 47, 48n80, 84, 118, 123–​124, 135n30 Yemen 19–​20, 31, 56, 59, 87, 92, 102–​107, 112, 121–​122, 126–​127, 131, 133–​134 Yemeni dialect 107