On the Geopragmatics of Anthropological Identification 9781789202045

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ON THE GEOPRAGMATICS OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL IDENTIFICATION

Loose Can(n)ons

Series Editor: Bruce Kapferer, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, University of Bergen, and Honorary Professor, University College London Loose Can(n)ons is a series dedicated to the challenging of established (fashionable or fast conventionalizing) perspectives in the social sciences and their cultural milieux. It is a space of contestation, even outrageous contestation, aimed at exposing academic and intellectual cant that is not unique to anthropology but can be found in any discipline. The radical fire of the series can potentially go in any direction and position, even against some of those cherished by its contributors. Volume 4 On the Geopragmatics of Anthropological Identification Allen Chun Volume 3 Heading for the Scene of the Crash The Cultural Analysis of America Lee Drummond Volume 2 PC Worlds Political Correctness and Rising Elites at the End of Hegemony Jonathan Friedman Volume 1 Starry Nights Critical Structural Realism in Anthropology Stephen P. Reyna

ON THE GEOPRAGMATICS OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL IDENTIFICATION

n

Allen Chun

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2019 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2019 Allen Chun All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. cataloging record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Control Number: 2019003726 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-78920-203-8 hardback ISBN 978-1-78920-204-5 ebook

In memory of Barney Cohn and Arif Dirlik

n Contents Preface viii Introduction. The Illusion of Anthropological Identity

1

Part I. Anthropological Reifications from Ethnicity to Identity Chapter 1. Toward Identification: The Unconscious Geopolitics of Ethnicity and Culture in Theory

11

Chapter 2. The Diasporic Mind Field in the (Inter)Disciplinary Politics of Identity

33

Part II. Beyond the Imagined Community of Writing Culture Chapter 3. The Predicament of James Clifford in the Anthropological Imaginary 57 Chapter 4. Writing Theory: Rethinking the Emancipation of the Author from His Function

80

Part III. Can the Postcolonial Speak in Sociological Theory? Chapter 5. Subaltern Studies as Historical Exception / Postcolonialism as Critical Theory

107

Chapter 6. Nation as Norm, State as Exception: Unseen Ramifications of a Hyphenated Modernity

129

References 151 Index 163

n Preface

T

he can(n)onical nature of this book series has prompted me to offer an unorthodox perspective on a field of study that I have had ambivalent attitudes about from the inside and have gradually moved away from in disciplinary practice. The two anonymous reviews were instructive: one seemed to be by a cultural studies reader who was positive and focused mostly on various themes that connected the chapters. The second reviewer seemed to be an anthropologist. Although he was critical of specific arguments in the book, he found little to say about the broader themes that meant to crosscut disciplinary debates yet still recommended publication. As reflected in reader reviews, audience reception matters. Despite my anthropological background, I have gravitated long ago toward cultural studies, less to identify anew than to proclaim disciplinary neutrality. At the same time, I do not assume that anthropology is a unified field, given its inherent diversity of voices, although we continue to teach it that way. I did my PhD at the University of Chicago. In contrast to other departments that I knew, Chicago at that time identified closely with its school of thought. This was not to imply that everyone there equally subscribed to this label, but there was a consensus that it was the standard bearer for a kind of cultural or symbolic anthropology. This school of thought was a major object of scrutiny in Sherry Ortner’s (1984) “Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties.” Moreover, Chicago was fiercely theoretical, which made it intolerant of many other “schools.” As such, it took seriously the broader conceptual foundation on which its approach to anthropology was based. The core course was a classics approach that emphasized eclectic interdisciplinary influences on it. Not surprisingly, Marx, Durkheim, and Weber (plus Lévi-Strauss) mirrored the same ancestors that sociology traced its intellectual roots to. This core course was referred to as “systems,” a rationalist branding par excellence. In this kind of mind-set, it was heretical to argue that its theory was shaped more by its anthropological relevance or values than by the content of its thought per se. However, this is precisely what I argue. If we trace the traveling

Preface  ix

of theory over different disciplines, I argue that the relevance of concepts has been routinely disciplined by its discipline in ways that its practitioners do not readily admit. Why is it that some theories—for example, classical paradigms, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and so on—travel more than others? Even when we argue that they have produced revisionist schools of thought, we tend to think that they are revisions by definition or in conception instead of in the way in which different practitioners have appropriated them. Before Foucault systematically developed his notion of discourse, his critique of the emergence of the human sciences flattened theories into broad epistemes that crosscut fields of knowledge. This is contrary to the way in which disciplinary institutions shaped the advent of modern social science. In this latter narrative, our knowledge should be conditioned by institutional practices, with schools of thought being a lesser dependent. Nonetheless, successive eras of grand theory have mobilized intellectual movements in following decades. On the contrary, I would argue that, despite our intellectual openness, disciplinary boundaries have hardened over time, reinforced even more by regimes of assessment, not to mention neoliberal rationalizing. If anything, discursive thought should have mutated accordingly, despite our denial of identification to any disciplinary correctness. This is a long-winded preamble to explaining the title of the book, On the Geopragmatics of Anthropological Identification. If one is unwilling to believe that anthropologists subscribe to a mind-set that is largely demarcated by the evolution of disciplinary boundaries and practices, despite minor internal differences, then one will react with hostility to anything that follows. This identification is influenced by all manner of things, at the low end from what we call petty politics subsequently to how we carve theoretical spaces, which is ultimately at the high end my object of scrutiny. My definition of identification follows my recent book on Chineseness, subtitled On the Geopolitics of Cultural Identification (Chun 2017), which was an application of an argument about ethnicity, culture, and identity in an essay in Anthropological Theory (Chun 2009). This has been revised extensively as chapter 1 in this book. My critique of identity in social sciences and cultural studies is predicated on my assertion that we as anthropologists fail to seriously theorize discourses of culture as the natives themselves articulate it. I come from a school of theorizing culture, from Geertz to Sahlins, where “the native’s point of view” refers less to what the natives actually think or say than to our interpretations of those cultural representations, however defined. At the analytical end, the main reason why anthropologists have never taken popular discourse seriously (conceptually) is that, at its lowest level, we all know that it can be thoroughly politicized. At the high end, I attribute this failure more to our impoverished notion of geopolitics. It is thus possible to view anthropological identification—in fact, any disciplinary identification—in analogous terms. The transition from geopolitics

x  On the Geopragmatics of Anthropological Identification

to geopragmatics is less about politics than subjective process. Pragmatics here is a linguistic term for subjective construction of meaning. Geopragmatics is literally about the discursive spaces of our speaking position and their underlying practices. To a large extent, my object of gazing involves axiomatics, in the sense that all conception assumes an unquestioned belief in the underlying axioms that drive the discipline, but one should underscore more importantly that inculcation of such axiomatic beliefs has also been the product of our institutionalization as academic discipline, defined by normative standards and regulated in professional practice.

n Introduction The Illusion of Anthropological Identity

These representations and politics of the invisible belong to the order of the imaginaire. As Deleuze said, “the imaginaire is not the unreal, but the inability to distinguish the real from the unreal.” All the same, the imaginaire is not constituted once and for all; it is “constitutive.” —Jean-François Bayart, The Illusion of Cultural Identity

T

his book is admittedly based on a series of articles published in diverse journals that seem on the surface to deal with concretely distinct issues. Over the years, it has become increasingly clear that these issues are part of core problematics inherent to anthropology as a discipline. All these articles have been expanded and, more importantly, restructured to synthesize central themes that drive this book. Having gradually dissociated myself from anthropology to teach in “interdisciplinary” cultural studies and published more in nonanthropological journals, it is somewhat ironic that I have chosen to address this overdetermined field of anthropological theory. Without doubt, the major impetus was prompted by a desire to develop further several of the more provocative articles that had been limited by standard journal word counts. Since I argue throughout here that interdisciplinarity is a myth, especially in the realm of theory, it is possible to juxtapose this argument against the institutional trends of academic neoliberalism that have galvanized existing disciplines into readily discreet niche discursive communities. Sherry Ortner’s (1984) “Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties” represents perhaps an uncontestably clear characterization of the state of anthropological theory or its history of thought, at least until the 1980s, which

2  On the Geopragmatics of Anthropological Identification

probably mirrors the way in which other social scientific disciplines literally characterize their own theoretical development. Anthropology in the 1980s might have been “coming apart,” but its development from the 1960s on was still defined by the formation of distinct “schools of thought.” In her article, Ortner cites well-known examples, such as symbolic anthropology, cultural ecology, structuralism, Marxism, political economy, and practice, mainly as a preamble to her interest in developing a more integrated approach to culture, power, and social agency. Anthropological identification to a recognizable school of thought (or grand theory) was at this time quite common, and the history of anthropological thought was typically taught in this way. Needless to say, the content of any theory was taken seriously. Alien schools of thought might have been considered “fictive,” but identification to one’s own school was substantively real. Foucauldian interpretations of theory as “discourse,” in its early version as episteme or later versions as knowledge/power agents within a modern disciplinary system, were probably not welcome in this depiction of theory. On the other hand, I argue that such theory is a discourse in many senses, driven by a disciplinary imaginaire. To be sure, much anthropological work has had a significant impact in other disciplines. This can be combined with the work of professional anthropologists whose training and influence have been inherently interdisciplinary yet moved the discipline greatly. Nonetheless, despite the general nature of culture and society as phenomena and concepts, it is possible to ask why certain notions, even those that seem to proliferate in many disciplines, have appeal mainly within narrow specialized niches, despite the literal, open-ended nature of theory. Marx, Durkheim, and Weber seem to share the same exalted status of classical theory in anthropology and sociology, but different readings of the same text have produced bases for different schools of thought. One can also argue that its appropriation within anthropology has subtly differed from sociology in ways that have more to do with disciplinary relevance than content per se. One can then contrast the curious fate of Clifford Geertz in anthropology, despite his continued influence in other disciplines, with the impact of Writing Culture’s critique of his authorial subjectivity. If writing is general to any social science, theory above all, one will be hard-pressed to explain why the influence of this critique has been limited to anthropology. Anthropological theory has never been viewed seriously as a discourse, not simply as the product of authorial subjectivity but more importantly in how the content of its ideas is seen as shaped by disciplinary relevance. In Foucault’s early work, theories were defined less by their relationship to an object of gazing than their shaping by epistemes that were broadly transdisciplinary in nature and encompassed explicit schools of thought. This early notion of discourse may have been transformed into “spaces of dispersion” created by the evolution of institutional practices that gave birth to social

Introduction  3

scientific disciplines, but they are imaginations par excellence—in other words, authorial creations within well-defined yet abstract mind-sets. One is generally aware that such mind-sets exist, however defined, but one tends to be less cognizant of how they influence the shaping of ideas and systemic paradigms. It would not be inaccurate to regard such mind-sets ultimately as a kind of identification. Identity is a thoroughly misunderstood term, even in the social sciences. Identifying as an anthropologist means to some extent assimilating to the ethos or mind-set that guides one in professional or analytical practice, and hence authorial subjectivity. However, that subjectivity not only refers to “roots” but should also include the totality of institutional practices that constrain and regulate the paradigms being advanced. In other words, behind the text is a context, which is itself a field of (authorial) practice; the spaces of dispersion that characterize this identification are termed here “geopragmatics”: the mapping out in conceptual space of our speaking position. In the geopragmatics of anthropological identification, there is a space of conceptual relevance, an authorial subjectivity, and a politics for critical theorization and disciplinary worldview. This book is thus divided into three parts. The first discusses the concept of identity and its relevance to anthropological discourse. The second is a somewhat different take on the theme of anthropology’s authorial subjectivity, which reveals on the one hand the provincial nature of the Writing Culture controversy and then argues in turn how it can be made general to all social scientific writing. The third engages the literature on postcolonial theory in order to show how, despite its prevalence at a literal level in literary criticism, it can be used to offer a critical articulation of cultural difference, not only to “provincialize” theory, in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (2000) terms, but ultimately to provide the grounds for other possible genres of critical intervention. Part I, “Anthropological Reifications from Ethnicity to Identity,” comprises two chapters. The first is an expansion of an article in Anthropological Theory (Chun 2009), which takes issue with the understanding of ethnicity, culture, and identity in both the anthropological and sociological literature, especially in light of recent debates. It is necessary to problematize their usage in order to clarify their presumed objective and subjective nature and then to show in what regard the inherent subjectivity of identity makes it prone to politics and the strategies of choice in ways that contrast with the concepts of ethnicity and culture. This is a necessary preamble for showing how the concept of identity in particular is discursive and thus not prone to rules that have typically governed anthropological discussions of ethnicity and culture. Being subjective by nature, identity is then a function of pragmatic laws, not semantic ones, and thus do not engender the kind of systemic meaning that has typically dominated ethnicity and culture. To counter criticisms that greeted the original journal article, I maintain that the anthropology of ethnic relations has

4  On the Geopragmatics of Anthropological Identification

not evolved much beyond Frederik Barth (1969). More saliently, this is an attempt to bridge recent criticism by Rogers Brubaker (2004) about the implicit groupism of the concept of ethnicity and reservations about the usefulness of identity put forth by Richard Handler (1994) and other social constructionists. At another level, what Barth viewed in ethnographic terms as ethnicity is less an objective attribute of difference than one’s subjective perception. The second chapter traces the history of the concept of diaspora, as it has diffused from one niche to another and its meaning or concrete referent has mutated accordingly. As a case study, my focus is less on assessing the usefulness of this concept in literal terms or its exact relationship to existing phenomena so characterized. It is perhaps necessary to distinguish the nature of diaspora as cultural phenomenon as separate from its role as conceptual problematic. The different disciplinary usages of this term reveal to some extent how it is invoked in some contexts as an explanatory concept while in others serves an emancipatory function in a critical theory of culture. The controversy over diaspora ultimately shows why diasporic identity has become a problematic entity that has never been satisfactorily defined. This is a problem that actually transcends disciplinary usages and has important ramifications for how one views its objective and subjective attributes and then subsequently its critical value, if any. The supposed relevance of diaspora, as a phenomenon, to anthropology is less important than the ways in which diaspora, as a concept, can be used to invoke a politics of identity, especially anthropological ones, which contrast with the politics of identity prevalent in other genres of cultural studies in general. Needless to say, the politics of identity is related to actor agency. Before its current revision as a chapter, the original article was rejected by several diaspora-related or ethnicity-oriented journals. Their inability to consider subjective identification as a relevant factor in defining and explaining diasporic attachment is in part attributable to their reliance on the objective criteria used to evaluate the solidary nature of ethnicity. On the other hand, the politics of identity in cultural studies of various genres used to invoke diaspora as a critical class value tend to overemphasize its subjective desirability over objective attributes. Part II, “Beyond the Imagined Community of Writing Culture,” is an alternative take on authorial subjectivity, comprising two chapters. The first is an expansion of a review essay of James Clifford’s work that I wrote in boundary 2 (Chun 2015). Asked to review his most recent book, Returns, I eventually decided to review his entire trilogy in order to assess the evolution of his work and comment more comprehensively on the scope of his thinking in relation to a changing anthropology and other competing approaches. Clifford’s transition is in one respect a gradual formation, especially in methodological terms, of a distinctive approach to cultural analysis in anthropology. At the same

Introduction  5

time, it was a deliberate transition to move away from his early position as outsider to one that increasingly embraced an empathetic anthropological identity. Nonetheless, anthropology still remembers him most for his critique of ethnographic authority, which gave birth to “new ethnography.” The original review essay was significantly expanded to include “the fate of Geertz,” who was the implicit object of literary criticism in Writing Culture. Despite Geertz’s diminished authority in anthropology, his work continued to inspire “cultural turns” in many other disciplines, for which there is already a voluminous literature. Nonetheless, it is necessary to explain why a critique of authorial subjectivity never undermined the salience of an interpretive approach to cultural meaning, despite appearances to the contrary. Moreover, in the context of this book, I reassess authorial subjectivity to make a rather different point in the long run. On the one hand, Clifford’s critique actually exposes the provincial nature of an anthropological “knowledge.” If all disciplines have authors, one must ask why only anthropologists felt prone to such attacks, unlike other social “sciences.” In the next chapter, I explore seriously the other half of this alternative take on the “author.” If all social science analysts are authors, this should have unsettling ramifications for the presumed “objective” nature of such knowledge, most of all what one terms “theory.” This chapter is an extensive restructuring of an article that first appeared in Anthropological Theory (Chun 2005). It is not surprising that anthropologists and sociologists who write and produce “theory” are least likely to regard it as a discourse, or a process of writing, in Foucault’s terms. A comparison of Durkheim’s The Division of Labor in Society and Foucault’s Discipline and Punish as narratives (in a literary sense) of the evolution of modern society provides the basis not only for showing how different readings of the same text can produce different theories but also for exposing how authorial subjectivity is embedded in the imaginative construction of any such knowledge. Modern theory is already to some extent a reification of what started in a “classical” era as critical reflections on local, social phenomena (capitalism, modernity), not unlike contemporary political criticism of ongoing social problems, which have over time been “disciplined” in institutional terms, giving rise to niche “professional” mind-sets/practices. If what we take to be theory is rooted in the grounded critique of historically constituted social experience, how can we be sure that the concepts that we use to make sense of the facts are not culturally tainted by given local nuances? Sociology, like most other social sciences, which has its origins in the West expanding outward, would seem to be especially prone to it. Part III—“Can the Postcolonial Speak in Sociological Theory?”—directly addresses the politics of authorial subjectivity. If there is nothing inherently “objectifying” about cultural interpretation, it is still difficult to prove/show that it is immune from politicizing, explicit or implicit. I deliberately contrast

6  On the Geopragmatics of Anthropological Identification

sociological critique in its classical heyday with how those same ideas have been appropriated by professional disciplines then systematically promoted as school of thought or theory, partly to suggest that there is a space for critical intervention (politics) that should complement the interpretive process. However, the source of my critical reflexivity comes from two unlikely sources: debates on postcolonialism and the nation-state. This part comprises two chapters. The first contrasts two approaches to postcolonial “culturalist” critique. It is prompted by problems in the recent literature on postcolonial theory, one fraught by disciplinary inconsistencies of definition, which has been complicated also by the specific niches that gave rise to disciplinary mind-sets. On the other hand, one can assess certain theoretical ramifications of subaltern studies, albeit rooted in a different historicity and thematic debates. These two postcolonial approaches have been misleadingly depicted in the literature as metropolitan versus nativist, poststructuralist versus historicist, and so on, which fails to capture the constructive differences between them as critical theories. Moreover, they both converge from different angles to present the bases of a critique of Eurocentric social theory. Despite its explicit application mostly in literature, postcolonial critique in the genre of Edward Said’s (1978) Orientalism has essentially provided a sophisticated take on the politics of cultural difference that is not limited to the study of colonialism per se. Subaltern studies, as initially conceived by Ranajit Guha (1983), was less a counter-narrative to Indian nationalist history than a response to British Marxist theories of social evolution. His notion of “dominance without hegemony” resonated far beyond India. Both postcolonial critiques intersect interestingly in Chakrabarty’s (2000) Provincializing Europe. Read literally as a cultural critique of Eurocentric universal history, one can also find here the basis for a critique of Eurocentric social theory. It is paradoxical and illuminating that postcolonialism as a mode of thought has influenced some disciplines more than others. Why its influence has been negligible in sociology goes far beyond its relevance in literal terms (or lack of it) and should have ramifications for sociological theory in general. In defining postcolonial critique in this way, I have underscored its potential as a critical mode of authorial self-reflexivity in ways that are actually consistent with Clifford’s Writing Culture gaze while at the same time exposing the fact that much of self-proclaimed postcolonial theory, especially in the genre of Homi Bhabha and similar literary critics, was never really about colonialism in a literal sense (as historical phenomenon). From the opposite perspective, it is undeniably easy for us to recognize that much significant work on historical colonialism has been done and theorized by anthropologists, yet why has our own influence on so-called Western literary postcolonial theory been relatively negligible by comparison?1

Introduction  7

Finally, while the literature on nation-states has focused mainly on the origins and nature of the institution and cultural mind-set, similar analyses of its “unseen presence” and regimes of cultural “mystification” overlap in many ways with the politics of cultural difference that has dominated debates on postcolonial critique. I argue ultimately that politics of/in culture can explain not merely the nature of the nation-state as a phenomenon but also reveal how its unseen presence has infiltrated routine “theories” of culture and society, not unlike how Foucault has shown the complicity of social science in the regulation of modern discipline. The last chapter starts with an analysis of a previously unpublished article by Geoffrey Benjamin ([1985] 2015), “The Unseen Presence: A Theory of the Nation-State and Its Mystifications,” and then attempts to show how it overlaps with the work of Ernest Gellner and Benedict Anderson to present a cultural imaginary that is in a crucial sense a progressive, constructed reality, which entails what Philip Abrams ([1977] 1988), a political sociologist, regards as the basis of modern society’s moral regulation. Not only is this unseen presence “an unacceptable domination,” in Abrams’s terms, but the critical theory that Benjamin suggests is not much different from the critical self-reflection that has driven the ethos of postcolonial critique. In effect, the culturalist theoretical critique that I ultimately foresee for society today is rooted not only in modernity but also in theory’s entanglement with it (Chun 2016).

Note   1. Writings by Talal Asad, Johannes Fabian, Ann Stoler, Bernard Cohn, and the Comaroffs readily come to mind.

PART I

n Reifications

A nthropological

from Ethnicity to Identity

Chapter 1

n

Toward Identification The Unconscious Geopolitics of Ethnicity and Culture in Theory

I

dentity has served in recent decades as a powerful trope in literary criticism, cultural studies, history, and race and gender studies, invoking in turn identity politics of all kinds. Despite its apparent interdisciplinary appeal and broad theoretical ramifications, the concept of identity has been fraught with semantically flawed usages and provincial disciplinary assumptions, which have not only reified myopic fields and positions but also influenced how we have understood its inherent relevance to social relations and concrete institutional practices. I argue first that ethnicity, culture, and identity are analytically distinct notions whose meaning has been muddled in disciplinary practice. Identity’s relationship to ethnicity in particular is tied less to the putative existence of groups (or an assumed sameness) than to a notion of subjectivity that must be seen in a context of evolving social and political forces. Such forces are more complexly nuanced than how they have been viewed in the literature as products of social construction or Bourdieuan practice. In sum, the pragmatics of identity is less a political contestation per se over ethnicity and culture than an abstract struggle within such geopolitical processes.

Disenfranchising Concepts from their Disciplinary Mind-Sets There has been in the past decade or so a torrent of critical reflection questioning prevailing “theories” of ethnicity and identity, mostly in sociology. Instead of engaging in a complicated review of this literature, I wish to focus on a few paradigmatic examples, mostly as a point of departure for reframing the definitional basis for ethnicity, identity, and process in culture. One of the more comprehensive attempts to rethink the literature in this regard is Rogers Brubaker’s (2004) Ethnicity without Groups, a volume of essays that

12  On the Geopragmatics of Anthropological Identification

consciously proposes to transcend prevailing notions of ethnicity and identity by focusing instead on relational and dynamic processes (in Bourdieu’s terms), which presumably gives new meaning to how one understands the role of cognition, while having ramifications for how one should perceive ethnic conflict, (post)national identities, and ongoing reconstructions of the past in the present. Despite Brubaker’s eventual emphasis on the revitalized role of cognition in relational and dynamic processes, it is important to note that the force of his rethinking relies heavily in the first instance on his critique of “groupism” as the foundation of how social scientists have conceptualized ethnicity and identity. Ethnicity and ethnic relations, according to Brubaker, are not the concrete interaction of social groups, which is the imposition of what he calls vernacular categories or folk sociologies in Lawrence Hirschfield’s (1996) terms, but rather the “ethnicization, racialization and nationalization as political, social, cultural and psychological processes,” which makes us rethink ethnicity, race, and nation “in terms of practical categories, situated actions, cultural idioms, cognitive schemas, discursive frames, organizational routines, institutional forms, political projects and contingent events” (Brubaker 2004: 11). In actuality, these vernacular categories and mundane understandings in short reflect a more basic reliance on notions of social structure and organization that have permeated structural-functionalist theories in social science generally. This strong tendency toward groupism has subsequently led analysts to misuse ethnicity as a label for categorizing phenomena that are in actuality the consequence of actions by specifically motivated actors, localized organizations, politically vested classes, routinized interests, and other specialized role players. This mislabeling has thus produced confusion in how observers tend to perceive events and transformations in places such as Eastern Europe, where Brubaker did his empirical research, which has usually been classified as the archetypical case of ethnonationalism, leading to extreme genocide.1 Brubaker follows up his critique of ethnicity with an attack on the concept of identity. In this context, he takes a broad swipe at the various uses and abuses of identity in the social sciences, arguing that identity “tends to mean too much (in a strong sense), too little (when understood in a weak sense), or nothing at all (because of its sheer ambiguity)” (2004: 28). In adopting a rationalist, analytical stance, he acknowledges that identity is a key term in the “vernacular” idiom of contemporary politics but attempts to transcend the ambiguities of this term in favor of a more rigorous framework of social analysis. In the latter, he concludes that he is not convinced that identity is an indispensable or even privileged category of analysis. His critique of ethnicity relies heavily on a Eurocentric definition of identity prevalent in social science. Philip Gleason (1983: 911) notes that identity comes from the Latin root idem (the same) and that this core meaning

Toward Identification  13

is intrinsic to notions of personal identity in psychology and mind-body dualism in philosophy, citing its definition from the Oxford English Dictionary: “the sameness of a person or thing at all times or in all circumstances; the condition or fact that a person or thing is itself and not something else; individuality, personality.” In empirical philosophy and psychology, this tradition of usage invested identity with great intellectual significance and moral seriousness. Even in the social sciences, the notion of identity takes the form of an overdetermined ego, characterized by an underlying sameness, which has been ramified many times over in “folk” sociology, politics, literature, and cultural studies. Erik Erikson’s (1950) Childhood and Society represented the most sophisticated treatment of identity, which had wide reverberations for its usage in other disciplines, making “identity crisis” a keyword for characterizing processes at the level of the individual, society, and politics. This crisis was not just the emergence of an articulated response to the question of “who am I?” but also implied identification to a referenced group, that is, sameness. Or, as Erikson (1950: 38) phrased it, the emphasis on the personality of the ego makes it possible “to experience one’s self as something that has continuity and sameness, and to act accordingly.” The way in which identity became transposed in other fields of study to ethnic groups, culture, nations, and other institutional entities was a displacement not just of an ego concept but more importantly of the assumption of sameness within a group.2 In the context of social science, which has always privileged the primacy of groups as a focal point of departure for looking at everything else, the concept of identity was a tool for incorporating the individual into society and a framework for studying groups as a function of implicit identification or assimilation. Brubaker’s object of criticism is no single definition of identity but rather the tendency of identity to cover a plethora of meanings ranging from strong conceptions that highlight the fundamental sameness within a group to weak ones that accent, especially in a postmodern, poststructuralist sense: the multiple, competing, fluctuating, and fragmented nature of identity. Moreover, expanding on his earlier critique of ethnicity, he argues that, despite the “identity talk” and evoking of “identity politics,” one can analyze “nation talk” and “race talk” without positing the existence of “nations” or “races”; one can understand claims made in the name of putative nations or races without using the latter as categories of analysis, so one should be able to analyze identity talk and identity politics without positing the existence of “identities.” Inherent to such strong definitions of identity are notions of self-understanding, as opposed to self-interest, assumptions of sameness, assertions of its being foundational, and its presumed role as the primary agent of social action and process. These attributes underscore further assumptions that identity is somehow necessary, natural, inherent, and bounded in nature. As for weak definitions, he does not understand why they count as useful concepts at all since, as he puts it, “what

14  On the Geopragmatics of Anthropological Identification

is the point of using the term ‘identity’, if this core meaning [of sameness] is expressly repudiated” (2004: 38)?3 That is, while acknowledging the definition of identity as something based on sameness, he simply argues that it is possible (and preferable) to analyze identity (even in its strong sense) without reference to the group that is indexically marked. Since identity is a “condition,” it emphasizes categorical modes of existence, self-understanding, and commonality instead of relational modes of identification, social location, and connectedness, which are key to his focus on identification as “process.” It is debatable whether this theoretical focus is really new (structuralism’s emphasis on contrast in meaning was also invoked as a critique of the inherent semantic meaning of words), but its focus on relational process and social practice in Bourdieu’s sense is evident. As Brubaker (2004: 41) put it, “identification—of oneself and of others—is intrinsic to social life; ‘identity’ in the strong sense is not,” not to mention the weak sense. The rest is a matter of social dynamics. I happen to share Brubaker’s emphasis on process, even though we differ on how best to define this term, but it is more important to point out, at this juncture, that we disagree on the relevance of the concept of identity. He argues that it is overworked in a strong sense and ambiguous in a weak sense, which are reasons enough to dispense with this term altogether. I argue to the contrary that it is still an important and useful term, as long as we can divest it of its assumptions of sameness that are rooted in its vernacular usage and embodied even in folk sociologies disguised as analytical theory. Identity, in both his strong and weak senses, is the product of social processes, but this in itself does not devalue its significance for seeing how ethnicity, culture, race, and other categories are discursively constructed in different societies and for understanding how different levels of identification compete or function in diverse contexts of practice. In the final analysis, identity is not about sameness, just as ethnicity is not about groupism. It is about positionality and subjectivity, which fundamentally predicates the existence of an ego and whose ramifications regarding sameness or sharedness follow as a function of its ego-centered construction of meaning. It is the same difference that opposes a semantic construction of meaning with a pragmatic one. Whether one defines it in Peirceian or other terms, pragmatic meaning by definition must be contextual in origin, insofar as it is a product of an ego-based indexical referencing of the world.4 If Brubaker concludes that “identity” is not analytical enough, he really means that it is not analytical in a theoretical sense that assumes an understanding of ethnicity, culture, and race as semantic constructions. What is needed rather is an elucidation of this pragmatic framework of meaning and process. An unlikely advocate of the concept of identity is Frederik Barth. His classic critique of prevailing notions of ethnicity in Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference (1969) undermined the idea

Toward Identification  15

that ethnic formation and continuity were products of internal constitution and boundary maintenance, as though stable and impervious to influences from the outside and interethnic relations. If anything, he argued, these ethnic boundaries were the consequence of maintaining cultural difference with external others, and this process of interaction played a primary role in defining ethnic culture and consciousness vis-à-vis others. As he put it, it is “the ethnic boundary that defines the group, not the cultural stuff it encloses” (1968: 15). The ethnic boundary thus “canalizes” social life by entailing a complex organization of behavior and social relations. This process of identification in terms of conscious cultural or social formation then maintains the persistence of cultural difference. The “ecological” framework that Barth invokes in this regard refers to this underlying context of social interaction. His use of (ethnic) identity in this regard explicitly follows Erving Goffman’s (1959) presentation of the self, and the phenomenology of social interaction provides the framework for ego formation and construction of cultural meaning. The existence of this ego identity is an indispensable element in this process. As a social agent, Barth empowers it with an autonomy that seems to transcend Brubaker’s overworked notion of identifier, in the strong sense, and it is clear from his ethnographic examples that this agent can refer either to the ethnic group as a whole or individuals who through strategic choice transform themselves from one ethnicity to another. In other words, the assumption of sameness is a secondary, if not subdued, aspect of this act of group referencing. The primary framework is the ecology of social interaction that engenders strategic choice and creates mutual difference, not sameness. In Barth’s review of the ethnography, ethnic change and persistence are both common phenomena, and thus identification (of all kinds) should lead to cases of totalizing boundedness as much as to divisive fractures and ambivalent or overlapping ones. But instead of rationally privileging strong senses of identity, which legitimate the primacy of sameness at the expense of weak ones, I would argue that the entire range of identifying is a significant phenomenon in itself worthy of scrutiny, insofar as it should invoke a complex range of social, historical, and political processes, not unlike Barth’s ecology, which engenders the act of identification. Since Barth’s ecology is limited to a narrow context of locally interacting cultures, instead of a wider framework that might include the overarching specter of empires and nation-states, not to mention the abstract interventions of capitalism, religious conversion, and globalization, his understanding of process, unlike Brubaker’s, is relatively myopic. This ecology is a broad framework that manifests potentially diverse effects of culture, discourse, and politics.5 Despite identity’s assumption of ego, I have avoided talking about identity as though it is the extension of a notion of person, which is perhaps closer to a layperson’s understanding of the term. The concept of person or

16  On the Geopragmatics of Anthropological Identification

personhood, one can argue, is a Eurocentric one as well.6 If so, different cultural conceptions of the person should in turn invoke different constructions of subjectivity, which is not a bad thing in itself, but they divert us from an understanding of why identity, in its prevailing uses by scholars today or in modern society, invokes a peculiar boundedness to and interrelatedness to ethnicity and culture, which has contributed also to its ambiguity. Long before the concept of identity began to resonate in cultural studies and social sciences, it had been an object of analytical inquiry in psychology and philosophy, where it was situated within more established ruminations about the individual ego and subjectivity. One can find speculations about identity in almost all other disciplines, but the appropriation of this notion tends to follow its relevance to disciplinary issues or usages.7 Not surprisingly, political scientific discussions of identity refer somewhat exclusively to national identity and political attachment. Literary uses of identity refer to authorial imagination, and sociological ones refer to the agency of the social actor. Anthropological usage of identity, where it is not explicitly marked, tends to refer to ethnic identity. In short, if identity in different disciplines tends to refer to different phenomena, then the likelihood of finding a neutral interdisciplinary framework to ground discussion of such a concept seems even more remote. Deconstructing identity in different disciplines would not be an especially useful endeavor, except to reiterate what we already know about the standard division of academic knowledge. But disciplinary deconstruction is necessary to show first how prevailing “provincial” theories have obscured our understanding of the interaction of identity vis-à-vis ethnicity and culture, the relationship between discourse and practice, and the geopolitics of process in the formation of identity.

Reframing Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity In an article on Chineseness, which was subtitled more explicitly, “On the Ambiguities of Ethnicity as Culture as Identity,” I once argued that—despite interchangeability and looseness in usage—ethnicity, culture, and identity are in fact analytically distinct concepts that refer to separate entities and thus should invoke separate definitions (Chun 1996a). Ethnicity is a concept that anthropologists seem to talk much about or claim to have particular expertise in, yet ethnicity and ethnic relations emerged in anthropology relatively late, certainly much later than notions of culture. Not all anthropologists claim to be interested in studying ethnicity; it has generally occupied a less seminal place in theoretical discussions that tend to revolve more around discussions about the nature of culture and society. Although anthropologists unambiguously recognize that peoples exist, that they form visible communities and

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practice materially documentable beliefs, customs, and lifestyles, which is normally what ethnicity refers to, ethnographers have a much more difficult time ascertaining why ethnic groups form or distinguish themselves from others and whether their boundedness as a group is a function of ongoing material practices or a consequence of social interaction per se. Anthropologists who focus on ethnicity and ethnic relations occupy a specialized niche within the discipline as a whole, which is marked by its own peculiar set of definitional problems and debates, but this is another way of saying that, while ethnicity can be seen in some sense as overlapping with questions of culture, it is at the same time viewed as a distinct phenomenon to some degree. Anthropologists in this subfield of study presumably have different opinions as to how ethnicity and ethnic relations may be constituted as social processes, but they recognize that ethnicity refers to a set of materially existing practices. In other words, it tends not to be a function of subjective imagination or a matter of abstract definition. What you see is what you get, especially if it is so practiced. Being shared, it is immune to divisive class processes. Culture is a somewhat different entity. It is worth noting that, despite more than a century of anthropological discourse about culture, anthropologists still have little idea what it is, or at least it continues to be a matter of definition and object of endless discussion. Geertz, whose concept of culture is most heavily cited by anthropologists and nonanthropologists alike, was not the first to define culture but the first to advocate its theoretical primacy, which was also a function of his unique definition. Despite his invoking of “the native’s point of view” (Geertz 1974), his definition of culture, like other anthropological ones, should not be confused with natives’ definitions of their own culture(s). Anthropologists aside, however, culture as a phenomenon can always transcend material notions of ethnicity. It may partake of those shared practices or choose to reference an overarching entity by incorporating larger or more abstract entities not specifically rooted in ethnic practices. One need not necessarily share the same ethnic identity in order to share a cultural identity; ethnicity and culture can occupy different levels of social or cosmological space. Whether ethnicity needs culture or vice versa is a matter of debate, but I think it is more possible to talk about culture without concrete reference to the existence of a people or community than it is to articulate ethnicity without reference to an existing group. Some who understand culture (and civilization) in terms of its relation to the existence of a higher-level polity might wish to explain the difference between ethnicity and culture, in terms of content, as one of part to whole or real to ideal. Thus, China might be viewed as the integration of local, even mutually incompatible, ethnic traditions within a higher order unity. However, there is no necessary continuity between political entities invoked by ethnicity and culture. Empires have been defined by the alliance of

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separate ethnic groups identifying with a distinct cultural center. Similarly, it is possible to be Westernized (culturally) without being a citizen of that Western nation. The more important point is that culture, however defined in fact, can both appropriate and transcend ethnic considerations, although in what (substantive) terms, to what degree, and at what level of abstraction will be an unending matter of debate. In premodern times, it would be easy to recognize the mutual and stable autonomy of those regional ethnic traditions enveloped by and coexisting with a higher order Latin civilization, not unlike how ethnically autonomous peoples on the periphery were seen by the Chinese at the same time as being part of a single sinocentric universe who “came to be transformed” (laihua). The uneasy marriage between ethnic tradition and cultural consciousness that is indicative of many nations today, on the other hand, has been prompted by the paradox that culture must draw on its ethnic substance as a source of its legitimacy while at the same time transcending the “primordial sentiments”—in Geertz’s (1963b) terms—associated with those same traditions. This is a crisis engendered by the emergence of the nation-state and other political processes or historical forces, such as colonialism and modernity, and not by the intrinsic contradictions or overlaps in the concepts of ethnicity and culture. Moreover, the perception and attempted resolution of such crises are played out very differently in different venues. Cases such as the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia seem to suggest the inevitability of recognizing to some extent a synonymity between ethnicity and nationhood, while cases like Indonesia and Papua New Guinea tend to suggest otherwise.8 Ethnicity and culture coexist, albeit in uneasy terms. The fact that social processes ultimately influence how ethnicity and culture “should” interact is another way of saying that analytical attempts to theorize them universally are misleading. Identity is a problem of a different order altogether. In contrast to both ethnicity and culture, identity is in essence a subjective or pragmatic relationship: I identify, therefore I am. In the era of empire, identification with culture meant submission to the spectacle of kingship and its cosmology of rites. In the service of the nation-state, identity is in the first instance rarely a question of who one is as an individual but instead a question of who we are as a group, with assumed bonds to an abstract community of citizens. Identity is less about the fact of who we are than about the perception of those facts. Discourses of identity are based on perceptions; one should emphasize too that they are selective and strategic by nature. Discourses produced by the state or cultural mainstream thus make claims about the nature of identity as though based on natural facts, when in actuality they are only representations that must be constantly legitimated through power. By choosing to identify, people are in turn dealing with a priori categories about who they are supposed to be as persons and how they relate to others in the group. This communion

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with imagined others explains in effect the overwhelming focus that cultural discourses inevitably put upon conformity to shared values and common lifestyles. At the level of public discourse, it is not surprising to see that people seem to be incessantly obsessed with discovering who they “really” are and less concerned with questioning existing categories or why and how these categories have framed the discourse. If identification is really engendered by its dependence on the existence of a priori cosmologies and institutions, then deconstruction of these cultural representations and discourses must ultimately be rooted in critical understanding of the practice of the state and its polity as a function of the values that legitimate their existence and of the power relationships that ultimately sustain them.9 Appeals to disenfranchised groups, such as women, minorities, gays/lesbians, and those with multiple identities, have been staple standard bearers for an alternative politics of identity or resistance to cultural hegemony promoted by social movements, for example, feminism, indigenous movements, ethnic studies, queer theory, cultural studies, postmodernity, and postcolonialism. While not denying the positive contributions of identity politics in underscoring the salience of identity in the construction of theory and the relevance of political positionality in general, I argue that they rely largely on the assumption of the ipso facto character of identity and the boundedness that identity naturally creates. If the idea of shared values and common cultural lifestyles is largely the creation of modernity, reified by colonial rule or the advent of the nation-state, which should force one to question the existence and legitimacy of the latter, then the advent of multiple identities, hybridity, and other alternative notions should by the same token force one to question transnationalism, postcolonialism, and other processes.

Discursive Fictions in the Geopolitics of Modernity, Nation-State, Colonialism, and So On In my opinion, one of the least debated rifts in postmodern or postcolonial definitions of discourse revolves around positions advocating the multivocality and polysemy of identity. In adopting Michel Foucault’s notion of discourse, Edward Said (1978) underscored at the same time his own differences concerning the question of identity. More interesting than Said’s overcharge, that Western scholars had exoticized the Orient as an object of gazing, was his assertion that there was a “real” Orient whose identity had been distorted by virtue of its having been denied the authority to speak. In much the same way, identity politics that have rallied around the notion of multiple identities have primarily assumed the existence of real identities, which have been suppressed by the monolithic and arbitrary (and hence constructed or fictive) authority

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of culture. In essence, advocates of polysemy—who include social constructionists who have emphasized ongoing inventions of culture, often invoked in the name of tradition, and changing imagined communities characteristic of nation-state formation everywhere—have implicitly accented the constant fiction of identities, whose perceived reality cannot be separated from a relationship to a process of legitimation that authorizes dominant political institutions and social groups.10 One cannot have it both ways, as both positions have mutually opposed ramifications for how one should understand the nature and function of identity or identification, not to mention its politics.11 In this regard, discourse is more than simply text and talk. It is, as Foucault (1991: 55) aptly phrased it, a “space of dispersion” that maps out who is really speaking and from what position or in what role, how statements are produced and disseminated, how they relate to other discourses, and how they become systematized or institutionalized in practice. The fact that identities, especially ethnic and cultural ones, often claim to speak on behalf of society as a whole (not attributable to any author, when it is in fact the end product of a complex process of discourse production) should make self-effacing, altruistic accounts of any such ethnicity or culture (as is typically portrayed in a standard history or ethnography) anything but neutral or objective. They are not fictive, by virtue of being false, but they are in any case inventions. One thus cannot underestimate the importance that Werner Sollors (1989) attaches to this idea, when he devoted an entire book to what he called The Invention of Ethnicity. One should highlight not just the importance here of language in the social construction of reality but also the will that drives the act of identification. When Ernest Gellner (1964: 169) provocatively argued that “nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness; it invents nations where they do not exist,” he was really underscoring the fictive nature of the nation and the cultural substance that it was based on, in sharp opposition to primordial theorists of the nation, such as Anthony D. Smith (1986). Sollors argues that the discursive notion of ethnicity, as distinct from the phenomenon of ethnic groups, which no doubt has an ongoing history, is relatively recent, whose emergence parallels that of modernity. It causes him to ponder whether ethnicity is “the modern and modernizing feature of a contrasting strategy that may be shared far beyond the boundaries within which it is claimed,” as it “marks an acquired modern sense of belonging that replaces visible, concrete communities whose kinship symbolism ethnicity may yet mobilize in order to appear more natural” (1989: xiv) We already know that our use of “ethnicity” has recent origins in the West, partly in contradistinction to and in transcendence of race, which as a concept must be understood in the context of nineteenth-century theories of human and social evolution, as well as the notion of biological essentialism associated therein.12 That ethnicity was an attempt to shift understandings of difference away from physical

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phenotypes to culturally constituted ones is a marker of ethnicity’s emergence in the context of racial and ethnic studies. However, Sollors’s focus on modernity highlights the inherent boundedness of the concept of ethnicity, within which various essentialist notions of kinship and genealogical transmission operate more as idiom than attribute. What is noteworthy about this discursive fiction, then, is not simply that it appropriates imagined or symbolic characteristics but that, as a process of invention, it is in fact invoked by and tied into a modern sense of belonging and the various institutions or regimes of everyday practice that this might involve. Among those things that are shared “far beyond the boundaries within which it is claimed,” he includes “productive forces in nation-building enterprises” (1989: xv). This is another way of saying that—in terms of process—ethnicity, culture, and identity are things that should be viewed not as de facto autonomous entities in themselves but rather as part of a larger context of social or political interactions. Instead of just asking how they are constituted, one should more importantly ask when and why they are invoked, especially why there are crises of perception that give rise to new identities or new forms of identification. Discourses of identity, by their emergence and mode of dispersion, are important signifiers that can elucidate crises of perception as contests of meaning or value while pointing to those social contexts of power that engender them. Mervyn Bendle (2002: 6) understands the crisis of identity in “high modernity” in sociological theory largely as a response to historical transformations that invoked attention to four areas of reflexive concern: (1) the problematizing of self-knowledge; (2) the revalorization of human potential brought about by the advent of secularization; (3) the breakdown of hierarchies, rise of individualism, and increased social mobility; and (4) a new flexibility of self-definition freed from traditional social constraints, all of which led scholars to theorize new roles for identity. These refashionings of identity were then attempts to transcend the ego psychology of staple conceptions of identity crisis, which moreover rearticulated notions of social agency in order to transcend the groupism or pattern maintenance of prevailing theories of social organization. Yet, despite the focus on social agency, at least from an analytical perspective, there is little or no attention to the role of discourse or cultural imagination as relevant factors in this process. In contrast, one should note that Benedict Anderson’s (1983) “imagined communities” not only posited an empty homogeneous space of cultural sharedness; the latter relied on the advent of text genres such as novels and other forms of colloquial literature that permeated popular media and spread widely through the mechanical reproduction of print capitalism. These are not the only discursive media for the spread of identity—in this case, nationalist. One can cite a plethora of discursive forms that range from mass literature,

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folk narrative, reenactments or codifications of ritual, embodiments of social memory, performative events, constructions of myth, and the writing and rewriting of history to cultural policies and industries along with other ideological investments of the state. The kinds of cultural spaces invoked herein invoke many levels of abstraction from the culturally unconscious to politically conscious and are really a systemic response to ongoing, historically constituted social and political processes. In essence, there is basic similarity among the crises of identity that Bendle maps out as the product of transformations in society, that Anderson sees as the evolution of the empty, homogeneous spaces of the nation, and that Sollors understands to be a discursive formation brought about by a conjunction with modernity. In each case, ongoing social and political forces set in motion abstract disjunctures and possible reformulations of prevailing cultural spaces, which are reflected, codified, and enacted at many levels of discourse by actors representing various institutional powers, social classes, and interest groups, all of which become the stuff on which identities become refashioned and establish themselves. Identities can reaffirm relations of sameness with existing groups, claim to create affinities with new ones, and carve out niches in opposition to other bounded entities, but identification is rarely an autonomous action by individuals, as though operating indifferently from the larger universe of social and political processes that makes these discursive imaginations viably possible in the first place. For Bendle, the crisis of modernity that has caused social theorists such as Anthony Giddens and Manuel Castells, among others, to posit new formulations of identity is in essence a complex one that operates at a civilizational level, but it is one that has been perceived and debated differently in different societies and then put into routine practice as a way of life. Sollors’s modernity is in many ways reflective of deep-seated changes peculiar to the United States that have galvanized the formation of ethnic consciousness in a society shaped by immigration while at the same time reconciling a changing history of racism and embracing particular visions of multiculturalism. Anderson’s focus is largely on the cultural spaces and imaginations that have made possible the advent of nationalism as a concrete, powerful political formation, especially in countries where it was alien, but there is no reason to believe that the advent of such “strong” identities did not also produce the emergence of competing imaginations and identities. In many places, nationalism had to be institutionalized by the formation of the state, which rigidified borders, mandated passports (identity cards), controlled movements, and structured identities in terms of ethnicity, class, and religion, sometimes where such categories did not exist or implied no necessary relationships to set beliefs or practices. Bernard Cohn’s (1984) work on colonial India has shown how the modernity of colonial rule necessitated the demarcation of land and villages through surveys,

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the structured knowledge of its inhabitants through censuses, and the legal codification of administrative practices that rooted people’s relations to place and social group, which imposed and took for granted relationships to caste, religion, and so on, but in ways that reified people’s identities, contrary to native conceptions, then—through the apparatuses of state power—effectively institutionalized the system and put them into “rational,” everyday practice. In a larger cultural context, especially as a social process or political practice, the construction of identities, strong and weak, has been an ongoing historical reality in which emergence of cultural identities is only one subset in an infinitely wider realm of possibilities. Anthropologists seem to think that ethnic groups are by nature concrete social entities, and thus one should perhaps leave it to them to spell out what ethnicity really means, insofar as it embodies in abstract terms the systemic constitution of such customs, beliefs, and practices.13 However, ethnic identities, insofar as they are rooted in speaking and practicing subjects who imagine their world and relations to others in reference to ongoing discursive formations of the public, are by nature fictions. If ethnic groups by Barth’s strict definition form themselves and often change as a result of social interaction, then identities, especially those that are not necessarily tied to the constitution of whole groups by virtue of sameness, can change as well, if not more often, in accordance within changing discourses and changing times. Moreover, one should not blindly assume, as Brubaker already rightly points out, that ethnic identities necessarily act on behalf of the group (by virtue of claims to sameness) when they just invoke ethnicity as an idiom of identity. Identity as a speech act serves only to separate the self from the other; the rest is a matter of perception (symbolic articulation or interpretive imagination). Identities, especially those that invoke ethnic differences, can and are often divorced from ethnic reality. A comparison of postwar Hong Kong and Taiwan easily shows how two places with similar ethnic populations can, through different sociopolitical experiences, have radically different perceptions of identity.14 The composition of the Chinese living in Hong Kong and Taiwan after 1949 is roughly the same, with 25 percent made up of people coming from mainland China after World War II and then the establishment of the PRC. In Taiwan, officially known as the Republic of China (ROC), this 25 percent minority also included the Chinese Kuomintang (KMT) government and its supporters, which reclaimed sovereignty over an island settled by ethnic Taiwanese and Austonesian aborigines under Japanese colonial rule for fifty years. Postwar Taiwan was largely a typical cultural nationalist state, which only recognized Mandarin Chinese as its official language, claimed legitimacy over all of China, promoted all things Chinese as national culture, ruled Taiwan as an extension of the ROC established on the mainland in 1911, and claimed to be the sole voice of Chinese history and the polity. While one

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cannot deny that this definition of Chinese includes ethnic Taiwanese within its fold, which should be a criterion for its ethnic inclusiveness, one cannot deny as well that the postwar history of Taiwan has been marked by ongoing, intense conflict between mainlanders (waishengren) and local Taiwanese (benshengren), so much so that the sociological literature on ethnic relations or ethnicity in Taiwan is routinely cast in these terms. Although few anthropologists would call either of them, by strict definition, ethnic groups (in the sense that the Hokkien, Hakka, and other regionally distinct ethnic groups are), they cannot be defined as ethnic groups for an even simpler reason. Literally, benshengren and waishengren just mean “us” (local provincials) and “them” (alien provincials), which are really Orientalist categories, by virtue of their linguistic “othering.” Barth would be comforted to know that these categories are a consequence of social interaction instead of inherent traits, but, in actual practice, people perceive the differences between benshengren (who generally speak Hokkien and have specific local customs) and waishengren (who generally speak other Chinese dialects and have other customs) as ethnic differences. It would be more accurate to say, on the other hand, that ethnicity clearly serves as an idiom of identity, where the latter is place-based and where identity primarily serves a pragmatic function of separating self from others. Although ethnic and public political discourse of all kinds in Taiwan has increasingly highlighted the emergence of Taiwanese cultural consciousness, especially in the context of debates over reunification and independence, it is clear that such newfound identity and consciousness are really the result of anti-KMT experiences and a history of cultural nationalism, that is, a construction or invention that is distinct from the fact that Taiwan has always been occupied by Taiwanese. Very different forces have, on the contrary, shaped Hong Kong identity. The British had ruled Hong Kong, given its explicit status as a British colony since 1841, largely as a caste system. The official language and institutions of government were British, but the bulk of the population lived in a world that was essentially an extension of China. Before 1949, the borders with China were open, and there was little sense of a separate Hong Kong identity before 1970. People called themselves Chinese, and “our nation” (woguo) usually referred to China. Hong Kong was a battleground torn by the Cold War and split by allegiances to either the PRC or ROC (not Britain) that peaked in the late 1960s. The transformation of Hong Kong into a free market port, which was maintained by a colonial regime determined to neutralize nationalist conflict in the territory, brought about explicit Westernization, the evolution of a class-based market society, and the depoliticization of public culture, which spawned, among other things, the emergence of a mass-mediated Hong Kong cultural identity. In this kind of public sphere, the sort of ethnic dualism that characterized Taiwan was completely absent. If anything, it created a

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generation of people whose lifestyle was perceived as largely alienated from developments on both sides of the China straits and where an identity gap increasingly widened between Hong Kongers speaking Cantonese and rooted in “a borrowed place and a borrowed time” (to use the most popular slogan of this period) on the one hand and an older diasporic generation yearning to return to the motherland on the other, not to mention a large proportion of people who identified with Britain (primarily those who by class, education, or political affiliation benefited most from ties to Britain). The Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984 to repatriate Hong Kong to China eventually brought about a renaissance of Chinese cultural consciousness (as though in search of lost roots), but the direction of ethnic identification clearly ran counter to the trend of indigenizing sentiments seen in Taiwan. One can in both Taiwan and Hong Kong find alternative or dissonant voices, but identity discourse in the realm of public culture was the product of radically different sociopolitical conditions and conceptual influences. People made identity choices, but they were also a product of how one perceived one’s own (class, positioned) interests in light of ongoing but given conditions. To term identity formation in either case “ethnicization” (when ethnicity as an idiom is invoked as the basis of identity) would be a misnomer.15 All identities should be the result of the same kinds of larger, ultimately geopolitical forces, constructed differently in different places. Even in the United States, the process that assimilates Afro-Americans and people of color as “blacks,” Europeans and Jews as “whites,” and Chinese and Japanese as “Asians” is one less of ethnicization (as though based on ethnic sameness) than of Americanization. Geopolitics negotiates between local and global but concretely through the political mediation of culture.

Pragmatic Crises of Context in the Ecology of Social Process While it is important to shift the discussion of ethnicity and culture away from notions that necessarily invoke the inherent constitution of groups and assumptions of identity, which tie actions and behaviors to the mobilization of these groups toward a focus on processes such as ethnicization, racialization, and nationalization, one must also transcend Brubaker’s overly sociological analysis of practical categories, situated actions, cultural idioms, cognitive schemas, discursive frames, organizational routines, institutional forms, political projects, and contingent events, as though centered seemingly on the rational calculation of social actors. What literally appears as ethnicization (or racialization and nationalization) may in fact be a function of tensions and contradictions operating at an even deeper level of the polity in the abstract spaces of an ongoing geopolitics. If the categories and discourses are fictions,

26  On the Geopragmatics of Anthropological Identification

then they and their underlying processes deserve to be problematized by locating the operation of forces that create these spaces of dispersion. Sollors, for instance, locates the invention of ethnicity in its conjuncture with modernity, but even modernity is too loose a term for the kinds of abstract geopolitical transformations that ultimately engender ethnicization in an American context. The assimilation of peoples into white, black, Asian, and so on in an American context (like that of benshengren and waishengren in Taiwan) is in sum a reification of grand proportions that is rooted in complex historical experiences, shaped by actors and institutions representing different vested interests and social values. “Ethnicity” so constructed only has meaning in these local contexts of experience and power, even as they work out in practice tensions, conflicts, and contradictions that are rooted inextricably at a global level. “Identity” so invoked is in effect a marker of diverse perceptions of those power struggles and values. Steve Fenton’s (2004) efforts to think “beyond ethnicity” lead him to focus more on the global conditions underlying ethnic difference and conflict. He roots the source of ethnonationalist conflict in places such as Serbia and Malaysia less in the inherent differences and boundaries that divide ethnic groups than in the global politics of imperial or nation-state systems whose destabilization has created space for politicized ethnicities. In this environment of realpolitik, one way of characterizing this destabilization would be to call this a failure of civic society. Perhaps in contrast to what Geertz (1963b) initially recognized as the challenge of new nations to transcend primordial sentiments rooted in local ethnic traditions, Fenton seems to suggest that the contingent revival of ethnic primitivism16 in such places is largely a fundamentalist resort taken by failing governments and groups to mobilize solidarity under conditions of uncertainty and insecurity rather than an inherent appeal to ethnic essentialism. Bruce Kapferer’s (2001) analysis of ethnic nationalism and violence in Sri Lanka addresses in a more sophisticated way the complex political and economic dynamics that were initially forged during the British colonial era and then transformed by nationalism, state formation, and, most recently, globalization. Quite clearly, it is not enough to say that Sri Lanka is a postcolonial state in crisis or that it is a failure of civic society. In this case, the failure of modern nationalism was itself a stage in a long history that witnessed the transformation of ethnic groups coexisting peacefully under the umbrella of a galactic Buddhist polity through colonial intervention, where ethnic categories were made fixed criteria of personal identity, creating notions of ethnic consciousness that did not really exist in the past. Such boundaries became repositioned along hardening class lines and then transformed religion into the complicit agent of state domination and modern violence. These interventions and dynamics had to be seen within a global context and in a context of

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local meaning, insofar as they involved modern reifications and restructurings of the state. The discourse of culture that was played out in a Sri Lankan context was the ongoing dialectic of party politics and class tensions. All these events were first predicated by a changing traditional polity, which gave ethnicity new power to reconstitute a modern order and then co-opted forces of state bureaucracy and Buddhist religion to fashion a radical Sinhalese cultural consciousness, which manipulated and fueled ongoing class struggles as well. The process of social action gave identity its force. Rather than being the essence of a nationalist ideology, identity was the product of ongoing political negotiation. Identity was integral to the formation of the state, as it was part and parcel of the practices that formed its content and values. In this sense, too, the national imaginary was not simply a free-floating signifier but rather a cultural reality grounded ultimately in everyday practice. When Joseph Ruane and Jennifer Todd (2005) noted that “the roots of intense ethnic conflict may not in fact be ethnic,” in a Northern Ireland context, they were invoking the same kinds of mutual dependence between ethnicity and other practical categories, most notably religion, but more importantly pointing to the existence of an underlying power structure that creates solidarities or alliances across explicitly defined lines. However, discourses (ethnic and civic) still play a seminal mediating role, as Bernhard Peters’s (2002) work on German national identity shows. While public debates over national identity constantly feature discussions about the respective salience of ethnocultural and civic values, they cannot be read at face value. While ethnic or racialist discourse has been discredited, it has nonetheless been sublimated by appeals to a certain interpretation of machtpolitik on the political right, which has made it a focal point of political ideological difference and of apparent differences between policy and practice. Regardless of its contingent or fictive nature, identity discourse is a crucial signifier, not only for what it says in content but also in how it forms bounded categories and notions of consciousness that did not exist in the past. It should force one to question the conditions of its production, the positionality of its speakers, the vested interests of various classes within a hierarchy of power, and the space of relations with other overlapping or conflicting discourses. In fact, it should be used to problematize the underlying processes of modernity, nationalism, colonialism, state formation, class struggle, and globalization that seem—from diverse cases, as manifested throughout the world—to be the root causes of its construction and articulation. Moreover, the phenomenon of ethnicization seems distinct from the uses and abuses of how ethnicity is invoked as an idiom of social processes. Recently, it is not uncommon to discover that people and scholars in the Third World have suddenly woken up to something called globalization, which has become the new locus of discussion in the scholarly literature. Whether this

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“phenomenon” is new is debatable. That is, if we define it in Arjun Appadurai’s (1990) terms, as transnational disjunctures, prompted by what Scott Lash and John Urry (1987) called the end of organized capitalism, then this globalization is different from the modern world system, first coined by Immanuel Wallerstein (1979), for two reasons. First, the center of gravity has shifted (or one is led to believe so); second, the cultural imperialism of the prior era has now been replaced by free-flowing waves of multicultural hybridity (i.e., scapes, in Appadurai’s terms). Yet, what seems paradoxical about the discourse of globalization, as viewed from the periphery (Global South), especially if one considers the increase in anti-WTO movements that have surfaced, is that globalization is almost always seen as a new wave of cultural imperialism, Westernism. This is paradoxical, since globalization as a phenomenon in the historical longue durée is not new; nor is capitalism—in fact, capitalism has always been global. Globalization should have little to do with Westernism, as a cultural force. Yet, in the current debate on globalization, we seem to waver between definitions that attribute the global to the nature of the phenomenon, as distinct from its mode of institutional operation. McDonald’s is the ideal-typical example of a global phenomenon, but McDonaldization really refers to a mode of operation that results in a kind of standardization and commoditization that is quintessential to globalizing process. In this sense, the expansion of IBM or Sony and their products can be rightly labeled as globalizing. Moreover, there is nothing explicitly cultural about this globalization. Cultural promotion does not seem to be a prerequisite for this kind of capitalism; if anything, its mode of operation seems to be pancultural and glocal. Yet, as we all know, hamburgers were not the first food product to spread globally. Chinese food has spread to more places throughout the globe and much earlier in history than the Big Mac. The spread of New World spices to the Old World and the diffusion of European food that followed traders in a classic era of Western imperialism have brought about more change in the nature of traditional cuisines everywhere than McDonald’s, but why do we continue to assume that McDonald’s is the first or typical example of global food? Hamburgers have become the quintessential American food, yet their diffusion from Germany to the United States is typically characterized as ethnicization, their creolization into a generic fast food product is called Americanization, while their mass marketing throughout the rest of the world is called globalization. There seems to be little in their transformation of substance that distinguishes these processes, yet we seem to think that ethnicization and globalization are inherently different thus cannot be used interchangeably. Even more disturbingly, we seem to know a priori what is global and what is local, even before the phenomenon is invoked. Many global products have in fact already become universal, although they are rarely characterized as such. We do not call cars or phones global, much less Western; they are simply

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modern. We seem to think that Japanese tempura and tonkatsu are quintessentially ethnic (despite their European origin in fact), but will sushi become global? Some people think so, and it is not just a matter of substance or ethnic origin. In short, there are implicit value judgments associated with global and local, despite our best attempts to define them in neutral, analytical terms. Their relative positional status is one that inscribes or reflects a caste-like hierarchy. One might add to this the question of why these rankings become ethnically marked or culturally coded, when in fact they are clearly not. While the recent literature has raised salient questions about the relevance of ethnicity, despite its appearances, and emphasized a clear need to problematize its underlying processes, I would submit that our continued misuse of ethnicity points to perhaps an even wider gap in our understanding of these processes and their underlying frameworks of power (geopolitics).

The Illusion of Identity and the Groundedness of L’Imaginaire Gerald Izenberg’s (2016) Identity: The Necessity of a Modern Idea and JeanFrançois Bayart’s (2005) The Illusion of Cultural Identity represent diametrically opposed approaches to the problem of identity. Izenberg attempts to substantiate laypeople’s assumptions about the taken-for-granted existence of identity by documenting a comprehensive intellectual history of identity as an ontologically real concept. The world wars may have played a seminal role in galvanizing such a concept, but its concretization can be viewed as the product of diverse disciplinary ruminations, ranging from philosophy to psychology, identity politics of all kinds, ethnic studies, and the influences of (post) nationalism or (post)modernity. As expected, the result is nothing less than encyclopedic and extensive. If anything, the overwhelming weight of the “discourse” seems to reiterate its necessity in epistemological terms. Despite its recent emergence in humanistic and social scientific thought, its necessity is grounded in its referent to the real world and ultimately by those conditions of authenticity. How can this be a fiction? Bayart’s book initially appeared in 1996 in French as L’Illusion Identitaire. In invoking Deleuze’s notion of the imaginaire, he was stressing above all that identity is not constituted, as though rooted indelibly to an authentic past, but rather constitutive and ongoing. Bayart is a well-known political scientist of Africa. Despite the book’s eclectic coverage of the world, it has received surprisingly little attention outside Francophone circles. One might compare his proclamation “il n’y a pas d’identité française” (there is no French identity) in alluding to Fernand Braudel’s (1990) epic work on French identity, as structural totalization of la longue durée, with Foucault’s (1972: 17) often-quoted remark “do not ask who I am.”17 Bayart’s book comprises two parts: one a

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systematic critique of culturalism in its various impositions around the world, and the other an effort to articulate this process that engenders the imaginaire, popularly termed “construction” elsewhere in the literature. Part I is a polemic critique of the fiction of culturalism that has infected academic theory and political policy, which includes the myth of the neo-Confucian rise of East Asia, Islamophobia, and the myth of the chief in modern Africa. These myths in turn underscore the role that exaggeration of cultural difference, the hysteria of terrorist fundamentalism, and the historical injuries of colonialism play in prompting such mind-sets. He advocates more strongly than Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (1983) that the invention of tradition was in essence an invention of modernity: a fundamental constituent of the structuration process of the modern state. In perpetuating the myth of tradition’s stability over time (timelessness in some instances), the illusion of culture’s closed community and their complicity in projecting artificially bounded political identities, he goes beyond Brubaker, in tying the illusion of groupism to politicized practices and politicizing projects. Part II then tries to reconstruct the polemic destruction by showing how the imaginaire can be viewed as part of an ongoing process that is materializing at the level of everyday regimes in ways that potentially engage with alternative and heterogeneous realities. In principle, the imaginaire is ambivalent and incomplete, which accents unsettling aspects in both parts of the book. One is never provided stabilizing solutions or unambiguous methodologies for the constant situation of flux and perpetual crisis depicted throughout. More of a cultural critic than political scientist, he promotes a framework for making sense of messy political realities. If fictive culturalisms are deeply embedded in political practices, then they can also structure rigid disciplinary mind-sets. In adapting what Cornelius Castoriadis ([1975] 1987) first termed “the social imaginaire,” he not only stresses that a society is held together by a world of meanings but also attributes the illusions of culturalism to “the paradoxical invention of modernity.” At the same time, he does not adequately elucidate the basis for regaining what he calls a “reconquest” of the imaginaire. At this point, one should in turn ask how such illusions are inscribed by particular agents and, as disciplinary discourses or public mind-sets, how they are specifically bounded and enforced. The institutional policing of politics and academia also plays a role in galvanizing “identities.”

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Notes This chapter is an expanded version of Allen Chun, “On the Geopolitics of Identity,” Anthropological Theory 9, no. 3 (2009): 331–49.   1. Brubaker was not the first to deflate the relevance of ethnicity in ethnic conflict. Banton (2000: 484) noted, “Many of the conflicts (called ethnic) had arisen, when imperial powers could no longer guarantee the political frameworks they had established, as in Sri Lanka, Cyprus, Chad, the western Sahara, the Kurdish region, and the republics of the former Soviet Union.” That we see ethnic conflict as a result of ethnic groupism is another issue.   2. Friedman (2000) has emphasized that the decline of Erikson’s theory of identity was in large measure because of ego psychology’s naive political assumption that adaptation to society was a seamless and positive end. In other words, the identity crisis would not have been the brunt of radical and feminist critique had it not been seen as an extension of ego psychology (his definition of identity) into the realm of the social.   3. Ironically, Baumeister (1986: 265) made this precise same point when he said, “identity is a theory of the self associated with an inadequate contextual framework and with a concept that injudiciously blends reality and unreality.” Moreover, he argues that the concept of identity appeared in 1800 as a result of the disintegration of value consensus in society prompted by Enlightenment’s decline, feudalism, revolutions, erosion of religion, and so on.   4. Pragmatics is not limited to C. S. Peirce’s notion of indexicality. It includes J. L. Austin’s speech acts (emphasis on doing), performativity, and others. The common thread linking pragmatic approaches is the a priori existence of a subject ego and the assertion that meaning is context based; they differ in relation to their definition of context.   5. In other words, Barth’s ecology refers to a local context of interethnic interaction or concrete external factors, typically in an “ethnographic” field situation. But “abstract” processes like capitalism, colonialism, or nationalism are justifiably contextual (ecological), external (to ego), and salient to a wider range of sociopolitical processes.   6. Following the well-known essay by Mauss (1985), other exemplary works here include Geertz’s (1973b) essay on Balinese notions of personhood and Marriott and Inden’s (1977) essay on Indian notions of “dividuals.”   7. In the following context, it is not necessary to cite the voluminous literature in diverse disciplines, much of which has already been extensively reviewed, to show how usages of identity differ and invoke different crises.   8. I do not necessarily subscribe to the position that, even in typical cases of ethnonationalism in Eastern Europe, ethnic separatism is a product of ethnically bound conflict per se, as though to imply the enduring persistence of essentialist bonds of ethnicity. In cross-cultural contrast, different places have clearly dealt differently with the relevance of ethnicity in the making of a national culture. This follows the importance of ethnic versus civic values.   9. The state is not the sole source of identity but invests heavily in it, as part of a legitimation process. 10. Handler’s (1994: 27) critique of the usefulness of identity, for example, follows directly from his observation that “cultures get constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed as people pursue their identities.”

32  On the Geopragmatics of Anthropological Identification 11. Foucault (1977) did not address the specific notion of identity, but his history of discipline in modern society shows that identities are a function of changing regimes of practice and are not autonomous vis-à-vis the norm. 12. The seminal and most relevant works in this regard include Burrow (1966) and Stocking (1968). 13. De Heusch’s (2000) attempt to revitalize the notion of l’ethnie, despite its definitional flaws and politicization, highlights the necessity of a broader notion of cultural. Yet, ethnicity is secondary to its appropriation by identity. 14. For a detailed comparison of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore in this regard, see Chun (1996b). 15. In Taiwan, differences between a local self and alien others were coded in ethnic terms, while these differences in Hong Kong were not marked in socially significant ways. This is a product of nonethnic forces, which are culturally arbitrary signs and engender distinctive sociopolitical processes. The way in which racialization in the United States marked off ethnic others from a hegemonic whiteness similarly reflects its unique Americanization as well. 16. James (2001) has termed this entity “modern tribalism,” which has resulted from emerging contradictions of postnationalism in a globalizing world, as well as tensions between conflicting dimensions of modernism itself. 17. As Bayart phrased this point, “Il n’y a pas d’identité française mais des processus d’identification contradictoires qui définissent la géométrie variable de l’appartenance nationale et citoyenne” (There is no French identity, just contradictory processes of identification defining the variable geometry of national membership and citizenship). This aptly mirrors geopolitics, in my terms. For reference to the text, see Bayart and Minassian (2009).

Chapter 2

Mind Field n TinhetheDiasporic (Inter)Disciplinary Politics of Identity

T

he prevalence of the diaspora concept, or the emergence of diaspora studies in recent decades, has played a significant role in mainstream debates in cultural studies and the social sciences. Problematic definitions of diaspora as a phenomenon have led to problematic usages as a concept. To a large extent, its metamorphosis from a marker of religious status to occupational caste and ethnic group, among other things, has accented its common attribute as a marginal, socially disenfranchised category, despite the focus placed in the literature on its concrete attributes as minority sojourners, homeland ethos, and so on. More importantly, its diverse usages in different disciplines highlight the mutually incompatible nature of diaspora discourse everywhere in ways that raise acute problems in our deeper understanding of the diaspora as formative entity and critical mind-set. In a larger context, how does one assess its emancipatory function vis-à-vis other concepts?

Diaspora as Cultural Phenomenon and Conceptual Problematic The popularity of diaspora studies arguably rivals that of postmodern and postcolonial theory, in addition to being mutually supportive of them. The birth of the journal Diaspora in 1991 is reflective of subtle definitional changes in the phenomenon and of its apparent wider appeal within academia. One can also question whether this renaissance was prompted by this field of study per se, the effect of recent societal changes that have made diaspora potentially relevant to a broader set of issues or the result of a mutually evolving interaction. In prefacing the inaugural issue of Diaspora, Khachig Tololyan (1991: 4–5) proclaimed: “We use ‘diaspora’ provisionally to indicate our belief

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that the term that once described Jewish, Greek, and Armenian dispersion now shares meanings with a larger semantic domain that includes words like immigrant, expatriate, refugee, guest-worker, exile community, overseas community, or ethnic community. This is the vocabulary of transnationalism, and any of its terms can be usefully considered under more than one of its rubrics.” Moreover, Diaspora is subtitled A Journal of Transnational Studies, where equal emphasis is given to both sides of the colon. One can interpret Tololyan’s manifesto to mean that the advent of transnationalism has, among other things, brought about social changes and diverse phenomena that can be usefully understood within a broader conceptualization of diaspora. At the same time, the term itself has been invoked in increasingly diverse disciplinary domains as a pertinent concept, not all of which invoke its applicability to the influence of a changed world. For Tololyan, the relevance of diaspora in this regard really parallels the advent of transnationalism above all; the appeal of diaspora as a concept parallels the need to interrogate the homogeneity, sovereignty, legitimacy, and the institutionalization of borders that are inherent to the nation-state. Not all contributors to the journal have promoted his alternative cartography of social space, but in the process of giving new meaning to diaspora, it has opened up discursive spaces for examining its nature and use. Part of trying to incorporate immigrant, expatriate, refugee, guest worker, exile group, overseas sojourner, or ethnic minority into the framework of diaspora has been the attempt to define the general characteristics of diaspora as a social phenomenon. William Safran (1991: 83) has perhaps endeavored most seriously to conceptualize diaspora in light of its distinctive concrete manifestations, essentially adopting the following shared definitional criteria: 1) they or their ancestors have been dispersed from an original “center” to two or more “peripheral” or foreign regions; 2) they retain a collective memory, vision or myth about their original homeland—its physical location, history and achievements; 3) they believe that they are not—and perhaps cannot be—fully accepted by their host society therefore feel partly alienated and insulated from it; 4) they regard their ancestral homeland as their true, ideal home and as the place to which they or their descendants would (or should) eventually return—when conditions are appropriate; 5) they believe that they should, collectively, be committed to the maintenance or restoration of their original homeland and to its safety and prosperity; and 6) they continue to relate, personally or vicariously, to that homeland in one way or another (their ethnocommunal consciousness and solidarity are importantly defined by the existence of such a relationship).

Such definitional criteria thus enable one to speak of diverse groups of people globally, past and present, as diaspora, although none of them necessarily conforms to the “ideal type” of the Jewish diaspora. For Safran, they provide a comparative framework for describing and assessing diaspora as concrete

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social phenomena primarily as a function of phenotypical characteristics. The qualitative nature of diaspora is in turn a function of the intensity of its constituent features. In other words, one is, minimally speaking, dealing with a physically dislocated people who are alienated to an extent within their host society, retain some sense of collective memory toward their homeland, whose roots and intention to return are always present in a way that accents their sojourner status and a solidary communal consciousness. As an extension of the phenotypical approach to diaspora, Robin Cohen (1997) has categorized diaspora into the following subtypes: (1) victim diasporas (such as Armenians and Africans), (2) trade diasporas (Chinese and Arabs), (3) cultural diasporas (Caribbean), and (4) labor and imperial diasporas (Indians and British). In other words, groups of people in history have become dispersed throughout the world for reasons that can be distinctly typologized. Such a typology can then be used to facilitate a comparative approach to understanding diasporas. Without doubt, a comparative study of global diasporas underscores above all in this regard nuanced differences between diasporic groups and diasporic experiences, perhaps in the spirit of butterfly collecting, but it promotes the same superficial characterization of historical and social factors that have differentiated such experiences. Moreover, like other observers who write in this tradition, despite the functional differentiation of such experiences, diasporic communities and identities are still perceived to be ethnic in nature or represented ethnically. Victims of genocide and slavery, comprador traders in history, contract labor that fueled global migration in an expanding capitalism, and expatriate elites who followed colonial rule were without doubt distinctive historical phenomena that comprised disparate communities in their own right, but the tendency to classify such diaspora ethnically, as though as products of ethnic traits or culturally exclusive experiences, subtly colored the general nature of diasporic phenomena in ways that validated historical mutations and influenced diverging definitions of diaspora. The effect of such ethnic coloration is perhaps most easily manifested in attempts to explain the tendency of diasporas to form separate identities and maintain attachments to a homeland. That is to say, ethnic uniqueness and cultural consciousness now become mutually overlapping and reinforcing forces, even though they constitute analytically distinct entities, strictly speaking. For example, the separateness of Chinese and African diaspora tends to be viewed as a function of its distinctive nature as a group vis-à-vis one’s host society, and one’s cultural substance tends to be seen in turn presumably as the root of its homeland attachment. The prevalence of established scholarship on the Jewish, Chinese, and African diaspora, among others, has implicitly galvanized focus on the role of culturally exclusive experience as a formative factor in cultivating diasporic consciousness and homeland attachments. One is led to view the uniqueness

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of such experiences as representative of such people as a group and in references to local conditions specific to their sociopolitical disposition. One rarely compares such dispositions as though their underlying experiences are commensurable. The Jewish diaspora is typically cited as exemplary, insofar as its culturally distinctive features make it exceptional. Far from providing the general framework for defining other instances of diaspora, the unique attributes of the Jewish case have more often than not been used to particularize diaspora, as though as a cultural variant of an ideal type. Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin (1993: 699) argue, for instance, that “living Jews may have a particular contribution to make to that general effort, especially in the experience of Diaspora that has constrained Jews to create forms of community that do not rely on one of the most potent and dangerous myths—the myth of autochthony.” The notion of African diaspora can similarly be seen as having an equally long history, rooted primordially in the spirit of W. E. B. DuBois, filtered through the notion of presence africaine, and articulated in the work of George Shepperson, St. Clair Drake, Joseph Harris, and others. For Brent Hayes Edwards (2001), this “genealogy of the African diaspora concept” is largely a discourse that excludes other cultures or does not need to engage with other possible diasporas. The literature on the Chinese diaspora, once called “the Jews of the East,” has typically been discussed in equally solipsistic terms as well. The fact that we label diaspora as ethnic group unwittingly highlights its cultural constitution.

Diaspora as Explanatory or Emancipatory Concept in Disciplinary Perspective Writings that have focused on diaspora as historically or sociologically constituted group have focused primarily on making sense of the relationship between the various phenotypical features of its concrete existence. Jewish, African, and Chinese diasporas thus have discrete differences that seem representative of inherent cultural attributes or specific experiences as ethnic groups. Discussions of diaspora in this regard differ on the other hand from the uses of diaspora as a generalized concept in literature, social sciences, or cultural studies. In the field of cultural studies, Stuart Hall (1990) has long advocated the critical role of diaspora in identity politics, one that accentuates the process of becoming rather than the status of being, that is, the transformative nature of diaspora in creating identities that is not simply rooted in the assumption of attachments to a homeland. In the politics of identity, diaspora serves a similar function as social class while giving added meaning to race or ethnicity in a stratified society. In literature, Rey Chow’s (1993) “writing

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diaspora” aptly reflects its usage in literature to highlight the role of diaspora as critical voice that accents subjective imagination of authorial identity vis-à-vis the status quo, resonant especially in ethnic (minority) studies. As an extension of the long discourse on African diaspora, Paul Gilroy’s (1993) notion of “the Black Atlantic” has served mainly as a counter-narrative to Western modernity not just by challenging the dominance of cultural nationalism or ethnic absolutism as key metaphors or paradigms of that experience but also by recasting in the process the centrality of (African) Black experience in the modern history of the West.1 In celebrating hybridity, characterized by him as “the stereophonic, bilingual or bifocal cultural forms originated by, but no longer the exclusive property of, blacks dispersed within the structures of feeling, producing, communicating, and remembering” (1993: 3), he argues that the Black experience is predicated less on the authenticity of voice than on the ongoing structures of feeling that later become the basis of a Black politics of authenticity, which in turn influences the rise of modernity in the West. James Clifford (1994) was not the first in anthropology to ruminate on a well-known phenomenon in the literature but injects a rather emancipatory spin into a term that celebrates tacking gestures, border crossings, strategies of negotiation, and counterhegemonic challenges invoked by disenfranchised natives. Diaspora is invoked here less as marker of a socially alienated group than as a mind-set or language for articulating difference, suturing fractures, and engendering new connections and communities. In this regard, he especially champions Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic as the paradigm for diasporic consciousness, one in which the primordial situation of deracination that bound Blacks in a transnational Atlantic was inflicted more by the common social reality of enslavement, strictly speaking, than its search for roots. The overuse of diaspora as an umbrella term to loosely cover immigrants, guest workers, ethnic minorities, refugees, expatriates, and travelers along with its under-theorization in face of globalizing transformations that have above all altered the nature of diasporic associations in the world have contributed to the general explosion of popularity in diaspora and diaspora studies. Rogers Brubaker’s (2005) criticism of “the ‘diaspora’ diaspora” in the sociological literature represents a different reaction to its prevalence in contemporary academia. Similar to his critique of the concept of “identity” (Brubaker 2004), that is, its embeddedness in the existence of a group, he questions diaspora’s dependence on the criteria of physical dispersion, orientation to a homeland, and boundary maintenance. Rather than treat diaspora as a bounded group, which has been in his opinion subject to unclear ruminations about the various conditions that contribute to its constitution in the above senses, he argues that one should view diaspora less in substantivist terms than as an idiom, stance, or claim constitutive of a condition, process, or field of inquiry. From a

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sociological point of view, this focus on abstract process may offer a better way to divert one’s attention from literal phenotypical attributes of the phenomenon, as it represents a rationalist approach situated between naïve empiricism and identity politics. Steven Vertovec’s (1997) “three meanings” of diaspora represent an alternative interpretation of the conceptual dimensions of diaspora. In distinguishing between diaspora as social form, a type of consciousness, and mode of cultural production, he is in essence arguing that there are objective and subjective dimensions of diaspora that scholars have hitherto not been able to reconcile. To the contrary, one could more reasonably argue that the literature is divided by those who view diaspora largely as concrete social phenomena, definable in terms of discrete phenotypical attributes, and those view diaspora as a reflective subject who actively engenders his world. At face value, both positions seem mutually opposed. But I argue that both aspects of diaspora are mutually intertwined. On the one hand, diaspora is a product of an external sociopolitical context that conditions and situates any diaspora as a marked group vis-à-vis a host society. On the other hand, a complex process of subjective negotiation plays a crucial role in engendering one’s lifeworld between any host society and one’s homeland, and thus between assimilation and resistance as possible life orientations. The changing world has served as the contextual background by which new kinds of diaspora are perceived to emerge, enabling in turn the shifting from religious to trading and other species of diaspora. Transnational globalization has similarly altered the ground on which migrants, refugees, and sojourners of all kinds have renegotiated their lifeworld. The adaptability of the diaspora concept to cover new conditions parallels in turn the need for diasporic subjects to redefine the relationship between host and homeland societies. When Safran (1999: 261) argued that ethnic immigrant or minority status was ipso facto not sufficient for labeling a group diasporic, he was hinting at the importance of homeland (and hostland) in forming diasporic identity in ways that transcend physical dislocation per se. Kim Butler (2001: 189) has also maintained that “we have actually become less clear about what defines diasporas and makes them a distinct category,” but in transcending ethnicity to view diaspora as “a specific process of community formation,” she still relies on connecting the dots between the various phenotypical attributes of diaspora generally recognized by most scholars. She questions the political context that has created boundaries between diasporic communities and its host society, most prominently the nation-state, but the ultimate focus is mainly to explain the formation of diasporic community and its relationship to the homeland as mutually integrated processes. Identity is the product of such communal consciousness.

The Diasporic Mind Field  39

Commenting on the transition “from international migration to transnational diaspora,” John Lie (1995) notes that, despite the long history of migration and multicultural experience in the United States, the complex changes that profoundly affected the structure of adaptive strategies or life choices and prompted renewed attention to diaspora were significant developments. But more than revising one’s understanding of migrants’ mutual relations to their host society and homeland, he advocated a deeper sociological understanding of that transnational ground per se. This perhaps reiterates Tololyan’s designation of transnational studies as a subproject in the renaissance of diaspora. More importantly, it highlights the a priori significance of that sociopolitical ground in shaping migrant strategies and mind-sets that ultimately lead to life choices in cultural assimilation, hybrid adaptation, and the politics of resistance. Dominique Schnapper directly addressed the transformation from nation-state to the transnational world and its relevance to the usefulness of diaspora as a concept by arguing that the waning of the nation-state has given positive impetus to sentiments and attachments linked to the existence of diasporas. As he phrased it, “it was less the reality of diasporas that changed during the era of the nation-state’s triumph, then, than the value that had been granted them” (1999: 229). The advent of transnationalism changed diaspora correspondingly. Instead of assuming that homeland attachment is a sui generis attribute of diaspora, which is how scholars of diaspora have tended to view it, it is easier to show how such mind-sets and strategies are in fact the end product of one’s negotiation with a host society, in which case it should be more prudent to ask in the first instance what the disposition of that host society is. Without doubt, encounters with regimes of cultural assimilation and multicultural democracy should shape diasporic possibilities diversely, in combination with the disposition of specific ethnic groups as marginalized entities; this also makes such negotiation subjective by nature.

The Japanese “Diaspora” in Postwar Taiwan In order to illustrate the problematic nature of diaspora in light of differences between prevailing conceptions, I have chosen to focus on the case of Japanese diaspora in postwar Taiwan. I shall argue that an understanding of what makes any minority ethnicity diasporic has less to do with the strength of ethnic consciousness per se, as though sui generis, than the political conditions under which marginalization is defined, the social situatedness of those involved, and the strategic calculations that they make vis-à-vis their host society (and in turn their homeland) regarding assimilation and difference, which make identification subjective by definition. Such strategic calculations are always

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complex; one might assimilate or differ in reference to some aspects of life situation and not others. In the end, one might question in what sense ethnicity accounts for diasporic identity and to what extent cultural behaviors and mind-sets are attributable to specific ethnic “groups,” as though representative of a whole. After the end of Japanese colonial rule in Taiwan and its return to Chinese sovereignty in 1945, ethnic Japanese were officially repatriated. Nonetheless, many women in particular were married to ethnic Taiwanese husbands and chose to settle in postwar Taiwan. It was common for Japanese-educated ethnic Taiwanese to continue to marry Japanese women in the early postwar era and return to Taiwan. My inquiry into such groups of people started initially with a familiar case. My mother-in-law is an ethnic Japanese married to a Japanese-educated Taiwanese, who had been preparing to enter university in Japan when World War II ended. He returned to Taiwan, followed later by his Japanese wife. Ethnic Japanese and their children have been the object of discrimination, explicit and implicit, during the postwar era. The memory of wartime atrocities added an extra level of animosity to official policies that prohibited the speaking of Japanese and banned the use or dissemination of Japanese texts. On further scrutiny, one will discover different kinds of Japanese diaspora in Taiwan. The ethnic Japanese included herein would without doubt include those who lived beyond the Japanese colonial era or migrated in the postwar era and then settled, perhaps their children too. Their diversity ultimately raises deeper questions about the significance of ethnic constitution as a definitional criterion of diaspora, which at the same time points to the salience of other influences. The restoration of Chinese sovereignty over Taiwan at the end of World War II in 1945, which was ceded to Japan fifty years earlier, introduces various historical peculiarities into the phenomenon investigated here. However, I argue that this historical context and the conditions of rule that consolidated the formation of a cultural nationalist state in the postwar era politicized ethnicity in ways that effectively suppressed possible expressions of diaspora. The discontinuity of political regime can be juxtaposed against the continuity of its populace. To explain why Japanese are living in postwar Taiwan at all, one can simply point to the fifty years of colonial rule and its aftermath. In theory, all ethnic Japanese were repatriated to Japan after the restoration of Chinese sovereignty in 1945, with exception of selected civil servants and technical professionals who assisted in facilitating the change of political regime.2 However, after the transition work was completed, most of these Japanese, aside from a handful who decided to remain and settle in Taiwan, returned to Japan. This meant that the only Japanese who remained in Taiwan after this time were those married to Taiwanese men. Despite the regime change, one can say with certainty that,

The Diasporic Mind Field  41

at least within such intermarried circles, Japanese continued to be spoken, sustaining the survival of other aspects of everyday culture. The attachment of Japanese to Taiwanese educated in an earlier colonial era made it easy for Chinese generally (especially after the influx of mainlanders who came with the KMT to Taiwan) to associate such Japanese with the local Taiwanese as a whole. They were not the only Japanese whom one could account for. Despite official records, which attest to their total repatriation after the war, one can never be sure of the exact number of Japanese who managed to slip through the cracks and remained surreptitiously, eventually adopting local identity. In time, other Japanese arrived, mostly from Manchuria, who were married to Chinese mainlanders in association with the KMT. Many of them tended to be identified with their spouses and thus viewed as mainlanders. As diplomatic relations between Japan and ROC became normalized, Japanese expats, mostly working for and sent by their companies to Taiwan, gradually altered the composition of resident Japanese. Of those who married local spouses, the children born from those marriages added still another dimension. Demographics aside, the way in which ethnic characteristics accounted for the nature of the Japanese community and the extent to which such people identified as Japanese or as a diaspora must be assessed mainly as a function of how the emerging sociopolitical situation influenced or suppressed such identities. In general, the specter of World War II created a highly politicized climate that militated against Japaneseness in any form. The existence of ethnic Japanese in postwar Taiwan is well known but tends to be an object of benign neglect. They share significant similarities and differences with ethnic Japanese in postcolonial Korea. For the same reasons, Japanese cultural influence among Taiwanese, especially those of the older generation educated during the colonial era, has rarely been an openly discussed fact, even after the end of martial law rule. Despite the renaissance of Taiwanese consciousness in an era of anti-KMT indigenization, not all kinds of multiculturalism are celebrated, and not all kinds of repression are deemed worth liberating. This benign neglect parallels the plight of other foreigners, especially Thai contract laborers and Southeast Asian domestic workers. A secondary issue that can be discussed here is whether the Japanese that I am studying can in fact be called diaspora.3 Given how I have framed my underlying problematic, it is probably fair to say that I am not equally interested in the various kinds of ethnic Japanese in Taiwan. Aside from the Japanese who married Taiwanese during the end of the colonial era and then settled in Taiwan, becoming naturalized citizens, few other ethnic Japanese remained in Taiwan during the next two decades of the Cold War. Economic relations between ROC and Japan did not warm up until the 1970s and then expanded in the 1980s with the influx of expat Japanese of various kinds. Some of them continued to reside and work long term in Taiwan, and some married local

42  On the Geopragmatics of Anthropological Identification

spouses and raised families. Since nonethnic Chinese foreigners do not have a permanent right of abode and thus cannot gain citizenship in Taiwan, they should be by definition considered diaspora. But it is clear that the class background and life experiences that marked this latter group of people were very different. The sociopolitical milieu had also drastically changed by the end of martial law rule and the opening of a global economy. My father-in-law was a professor of archaeology at National Taiwan University (NTU), now retired. He was the oldest of six siblings. Although his parents were ethnic Hakka from a traditional village in northern Taiwan, he and his siblings were for mostly brought up in Taipei. His father was an architect by training but did well enough in business to enable most of his children to go to elite schools usually reserved for ethnic Japanese students. The mixture of family background, class influence, and cultural conditions of late Japanese-era Taiwan made them multilingual and multicultural by nature. The siblings speak to their parents in Hakka, to each other in Japanese, and to people on the street in Taiwanese. A year before World War II ended, he was sent to Tokyo to prepare for university. After the war, he returned to Taiwan. In fact, he was admitted to the first entering class of the history department at NTU, which replaced the former Taiwan Imperial University, despite not knowing any Mandarin Chinese, and thus was forced to learn a new language and acclimatize to a starkly different institutional situation. He eventually earned his degree and then continued to teach and do research in archaeology after the anthropology department was established. With exception of two sabbatical years in the United States and Japan, he has continued to live in Taiwan. If I had to characterize him, I would say that intellectually he is still very much Meiji-era Japanese. Japanese is still unabashedly his first language, and the fact that he married a Japanese, who joined him in Taiwan a year after the war, makes him even more Japanese at the level of everyday cultural routine than the average Taiwanese of his time. But compared to Taiwanese of the same cohort, having similar class background and urban influences, he was not all that unusual. Lee Teng-hui, the first Taiwanese president of ROC after succeeding Chiang Ching-kuo, graduated from Kyoto University and, even more spectacularly, despite his background, moved up through KMT ranks mostly as a staunch defender of hard-line KMT policy. Political attitudes for this postwar generation of Taiwanese brought up during the colonial era are complicated. Japan became invented as an object of nostalgia as a result of the same anti-KMT sentiment that gave birth to Taiwaneseness as a genre of cultural consciousness; these two processes were intertwined. When my mother-in-law eventually came to Taiwan, where she would settle down, raise a family, and end up spending most of her life, she was also entering a specific cultural niche. In an extended family context, she was hardly alien. Everyone spoke Japanese, and within a professional circle of similarly

The Diasporic Mind Field  43

situated or minded people, the environment was at least navigable. A culture of Japanese speakers among the Taiwanese thus continued into the postwar era, and the extent to which one can see a continuity of various cultural ethos and practices is, of course, a value judgment. Moreover, this continuity tended to be better maintained among more educated people living also in cosmopolitan cities. How such continuity engaged with the unfolding of KMT rule and its strict imposition of monocultural nationalism is, on the other hand, a complex process that evolved over subsequent decades to this day. Despite having lived in Taiwan for more than seventy years now, my mother-in-law speaks broken Chinese, at best haltingly. As a homemaker, she rarely ventures alone outside, except to buy groceries and go to church. She and her three daughters have grown up speaking Japanese at home, as multilingualism has continued to be the norm. At the same time, my wife and her two sisters have grown up speaking to their father, as well as to uncles and aunts on their father’s side, in Mandarin Chinese and to their grandparents in Hakka. In regard to overall family lifestyle, it is a hybrid mix of Chinese and Japanese practices. Taste in food tends to be Japanese, mostly out of personal preference rather than any deliberate inclination toward “tradition.” Intellectually and in a family context, they tend to be unabashedly Japanese in demeanor, contrary to how political culture has been officially defined in the public domain. In short, I deliberately start with this personal example to offer not a typical example of the Japanese diaspora in Taiwan but instead an extreme case of a very Japanized family. On closer examination, however, one will discover that this extreme case is not just the product of my mother-in-law’s disposition but rather a combination of mutually reinforcing factors that include the culturally accommodating niche, my father-in-law’s personal preferences, and my mother-in-law’s introverted personality, all of which facilitated an isolated lifestyle at the same time buffered to some extent from the daily vicissitudes of society and politics at large. This isolation in the private domain and its cultural difference coexisted peacefully in large part with the politics of the public domain; this tension became a source of contradiction later. Given this extreme, it is certainly possible to maintain one’s distance and separateness from an ongoing politics that is officially and inherently hostile to its existence. How this affects diverse people within the family is in practice a complex matter that can be negotiated in many different ways or in response to diverse situations. In the course of research, I have, of course, encountered Japanese women married to colonially educated Taiwanese who have had smoother experiences assimilating to society at large, facilitated without doubt by a more fluent proficiency in Chinese or local dialect, among other things. Moreover, there is a wide variation in Japanese fluency among children of such mixed marriages. One can expect any diversity in diasporic consciousness to be a function of diverse assimilation experiences, all other things

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remaining equal. But the point that I wish to make here is that people in postwar Taiwan can view such Japanese as an extension of a prior generation that includes Taiwanese as well without necessarily viewing them as typical of all Japanese, that is, as a generic category. For ethnic Taiwanese who remained in or returned to Taiwan during the postwar transition to KMT rule, there has never been any conflict between their national identity as ROC citizens and their cultural identity or lifestyle choice, even among the most Japanized ones. Multiple identities or multiple levels of identities have always coexisted, yet at the same time they have been affected deeply by changing perceptions of KMT rule or historical experiences that shaped such rule and molded newly emerging relations between mainlanders and Taiwanese. In the course of my project, I later encountered several ethnic Japanese women who were brought up in Manchuria and eventually married ethnic Chinese. In recent years, the phenomenon of ethnic Japanese abandoned in Manchuria after World War II, most of whom were adopted by ethnic Chinese and referred to in Japanese media and current literature as the abandoned orphans, has been a topic of intense debate and scrutiny (see Itoh 2010).4 There are three books in English on this topic, and many more in Japanese.5 This phenomenon undoubtedly warrants special attention in its own terms. Recognition in both Japan and the PRC that they constituted a large non-Han Chinese population and that their disposition was a product of the war has made their situation a special case. All the Japanese women in Taiwan whom we know who originated from Manchuria were married to Chinese mainlanders, so it is fair to say that most people in Taiwan relate to their Japaneseness differently or more in connection to their mainlander husbands. If they spoke Chinese (the ones we know spoke it fluently), they tended to speak with a northern accent, which accentuated even more their distance with Taiwanese Mandarin speakers. During the Manchukuo war era, many ethnic Chinese from northern provinces migrated to Manchuria, thus were educated in Japanese, and continued to speak it fluently with their spouses. But Taiwanese in general still primarily identified with such Chinese as mainlanders; the latter’s ability to speak Japanese might have made them more sympathetic but only in contrast to the average mainlander. Nonetheless, for Japanese married to Taiwanese and mainlander Chinese, their status as object of ethnic discrimination in a postwar KMT-dominated Cold War environment, where political reunification was built on a reconnection to two thousand years of Chinese civilization, as well as anti-Japanese war memory, was always ambivalent. KMT-sanctioned racism affected Japanese in general and extended implicitly to children of such mixed marriages, but the married-in status of such women also acted as a kind of buffer. All married-in women, regardless of ethnic origin, are considered assimilated Chinese by choice; this extension of kinship logic can override politics.

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Several books in Japanese of a journalistic nature were written on the lives of Japanese women in Taiwan (e.g., Hayashi et al. 2002; Ikegawa 2011). One oral historian compiled life narratives from textual sources into several volumes, beginning from the early colonial period in the Meiji era up until its end.6 Another journalistic account wrote on ethnic Japanese women who belonged to an informal organization named the Orchid Association, established in the 1980s to promote interest in Japanese culture after the official ban on Japanese language was lifted and waned, and this association also included ethnic Taiwanese Japanese speakers. The point of the matter here is that language and culture, despite their obvious role in this transmission and maintenance, did not function to accent differences with the Japanese as an ethnic group, which is what I think diaspora seems to refer to minimally. Japanese language and culture accented ethnic Japanese and whatever identity they claimed in this regard, but it just as equally characterized those Taiwanese and Manchurian Chinese who were raised with similar experiences. On the other hand, Japanese language and culture became a framework for identity as a contrastive marker (in Barth’s terms), only after the KMT implemented its hard-line culturalist policies. Japanese language and culture continued to flourish in a private domain, only because it was forced underground by official KMT policies. If it alienated Japaneseness, it also alienated Taiwaneseness as part of the larger boat, and this was the origin of Taiwanese consciousness, strictly speaking, that fostered the rise of opposition parties and a later current of Taiwanese political independence, as an extreme offshoot of this culturalist mentality, ongoing today. In short, there is a basis for distinguishing at least several categories of people—namely, Japanese emerging out of Taiwan’s colonial era vis-à-vis those emanating from a Manchurian context—as well as between those who live in cosmopolitan centers and those in rural villages. However, local perception of their ethnicity was influenced less by phenotypical definitions per se than by other political or social situational factors that defined a regime of marginality and in turn stratified ethnic dispositions more based on place of origin and social class. Unlike the thousands of Japanese orphans abandoned at the end of wartime Manchuria, there seem to be no more than a few isolated cases in Taiwan. One example we encountered was an abandoned orphan, Takeyabu, born in Osaka in 1928. At the age of four, his father was dispatched to Taiwan and served as a police officer. When he was nine, he and the rest of his family joined his father in Taiwan. Unlike his older siblings, he did not receive much of an education. At the end of World War II, he was eighteen. His family was to be repatriated during the second stage of evacuation for Japanese nationals. For reasons that remain fuzzy, he did not have a passport and thus was not able to verify his ID. The military officer on site refused to let him board the

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evacuation boat. Despite many attempts to assuage authorities, his father was forced to leave him behind and eventually persuaded a friend to look after him in Taiwan. His two elder brothers returned to Japan with his parents. His sister had earlier married a Taiwanese, but he eventually lost track of her and thus did not know her whereabouts. Left abandoned, Takeyabu had to fend for himself and largely led a miserable life. He was often picked on by bullies and cohorts living in the same village; this could have been because he was Japanese, he was abandoned, he had the misfortune of being the son of a colonial-era police officer, or a combination of all the above. His patron eventually took him to another village to live, where he took up odd jobs. Because he did not have an official identity card, he was forced to live on the margin of society, literally. One villager was sympathetic to his plight. When his own son died in a drowning accident, he gave his son’s ID card to Takeyabu and then decided not to file a death certificate for his real son. After Takeyabu got his ID card, he returned to Japan to visit his natal family. His parents had already died by then, but his relations with brothers and uncles did not seem close at all. Takeyabu eventually got married and raised two children. His wife passed away recently. In subsequent decades, many Japanese came to Taiwan for work or study; some married local Taiwanese. They were no different from other foreign nationals, increasingly in times of modern progressive economic policies, cosmopolitan cultural tendencies, and open political attitudes, especially from the 1990s onward. However, I will put them aside to focus on an example of diaspora that some people might find questionable, perhaps even fictive. I use “fictive” somewhat hesitantly, in light of the obvious associations with real and fictive kinship that have been used to contrast blood-based relations as against metaphorical ones. I would think that the aforementioned cases all minimally qualify as Japanese diaspora, to the extent that they satisfy objective qualifications of Japaneseness, however defined. But given such objective criteria, one might ask to what degree the diminishing of ethnic qualities over generational time, through changes in cultural practices or as the cumulative result of assimilation, eventually diminishes the relevance of being diasporic. At the other extreme, is it possible for those who do not seem to have the proper ethnic qualifications of Japaneseness (in the sense of speaking Japanese, practicing Japanese customs, being genetically related to Japanese, and so on) to claim Japanese diasporic identity? And how does one classify such cases? One of my graduate students happened to be one such case. I once noticed on an unofficial list of students registered for my course someone named Takamori Nobuo. The kanji shows a Japanese name, definitely not Chinese. In class discussions, I discovered that his Chinese was too fluent to be foreign, in fact heavily accented in Taiwanese. Finally, I asked him who he was. He said that his ID name was Lin Xinnan (= Nobuo), Lin being his mother’s surname. Takamori was the surname of his (Japanese) biological father. As Nobuo

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described it, his father was a corporate manager who had been dispatched from his Japanese company to work for its Taiwan subsidiary. During his sojourn as professional expat, his father met his mother, and they lived together, albeit unmarried. Nobuo was born out of this union and then continued to be raised by his single mom. Meanwhile, Takamori had a wife and children in Japan and eventually returned to Japan to live there. Despite the double life, he continued to maintain close relations with Nobuo and his mother, when possible. Nobuo said that he had an opportunity to claim Japanese nationality but decided not to. He does not speak Japanese but feels a cultural affinity to his father and displays his Japaneseness openly. Without using terms such as identity or diaspora, I described my project, hired him as an assistant, and told him to interview people whom he thought were similar to him. He eventually interviewed three people, all of whom were in their twenties and born of mixed unions, official and not. They covered a wide diversity in upbringing: one was born and raised in Taiwan. Because of her father, who lives in Taiwan, she maintains dual nationality, speaks minimal Japanese, and is an avid lover of things Japanese. At the other extreme, another was born of a Japanese father and Taiwanese mother, was raised in Japan, but rediscovered her Chinese roots while working on her own in Taiwan. At present, she has serious intentions of staying and living long term in Taiwan. The third example, a male student, had qualities of both extremes cited above. In assigning my student this research task, I was mainly interested in understanding how he defined his own Japaneseness and to what extent it overlapped or conflicted with accepted social scientific or standard definitions of it. I argue that his situation, however unusual or unconventional it may seem on the surface, reveals at the same time a deeper flaw about how prevailing scholars define both diaspora and identity. Second, such deeper issues impinge directly on the role and salience of narrative.7 If the whole point of narrative is to underline the subjective and symbolic meanings of one’s cultural desires and attachments, how relevant are they in relation to scholarly concepts that seem to be clear cut and objectively definable (regardless of how people themselves subjectively interpret or imaginatively create them)? To be more to the point, I argue that diaspora and identity are essentially definitions of subjective choice whose meaning or rationale can be understood in relation to its imaginative quality rather than in terms of various objective criteria that scholars typically use to assess the nature of such phenomena. One could even challenge objective definitions by arguing that there is nothing ethnic about diaspora, despite what we think or seem to see on the surface: The fictive quality of diaspora is best exemplified by the anachronistic nature of the Jewish diaspora today, especially in mainstream America. One may question its applicability to those persons who have disavowed attachment to an ethnic or religious homeland or chosen to culturally assimilate to its host society. For

48  On the Geopragmatics of Anthropological Identification similar reasons, it would be unusual to speak of an aristocratic French or AngloSaxon Protestant diaspora. If an ethnic group ceases to be diasporic, because it has transcended its socially marginal status, then there is nothing ethnic about diaspora. One does not call capital that fuels elite corporate America diasporic, even if it happens to have Japanese or Jewish origins. Given too the extent to which foreign elements have in fact shaped Hollywood culture today, one would not call it diasporic either. (Chun 2001: 101)

I can now rephrase the gist of my argument as a series of linked propositions as follows: (1) Diaspora is by definition not ethnic per se but rather a social (hierarchical) relation based on perception. (2) If the underlying issue is less ethnic facticity than social perception, then it is rooted in politics. (3) Question: What makes Japanese identity in postwar Taiwan silent? Answer: It is a consequence of politics. (4) Question: Does this make Japanese in repressive Taiwan a diaspora? Answer: It is a question of perception. In other words, this perception is something that invokes a personal and strategic choice. At the same time, I would say that the subjective construction and strategic choice underlying an individual’s identification as diaspora overrides how we as third-party observers define the situation in terms of presumed objective criteria and categories. Going back to my student’s case, if he identifies as Japanese, then I should be inclined to regard it as a legitimate identity, even if it might conflict with my standard of what validly constitutes Japaneseness. One might also be tempted to call this an example of fictive diaspora, a sort of imagined kinship. If he did not have biological ties to a Japanese father, then it would be much easier to classify it as fictive. Yet, on careful examination, his case is not dissimilar to that of US President Barack Obama. If Obama claims to be a Black who identifies as a Chicagoan, then who are we to deny such a claim based on the fact that he was raised in Hawaii by a Caucasian mother in a cultural setting totally devoid of Black influences? In fact, if he is African at all, it is in name only. Chiang Chingkuo, son of Chiang Kai-shek, whom he succeeded as president of the ROC, publicly pronounced himself to be Taiwanese and, unlike his father, did not wish to be reburied in his ancestral village after eventual recovery of the mainland. He had a Russian wife to accompany his thick Zhejiang accent, but should these and other ethnic attributes interfere with how he chooses to identify? First, I think it is important to recognize the subjective quality of identity and the nature of imagination as a valid framework for assessing strategic choice as something analytically distinct from whatever criteria one might use to characterize ethnicity. Identity is a product of crises rooted

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largely in politics and not a product of ethnic composition per se. Diaspora is a special instance of identification insofar as it is predicated on a perception of difference in a context of social marginality. Perceptions can change as a result of many things and are engendered above all by strategic choices, not just objective attributes of ethnic lifestyle. One overlooked work that has challenged engrained disciplinary flaws in the literature is Virinder Kalra, Raminder Kaur, and John Hutnyk’s (2005) Diaspora and Hybridity, two concepts that have advocated different critical perspectives on cultural identity. Kalra and colleagues interrogate the social, cultural, and gendered configurations of diaspora in order to explore the unspoken, racialized assumptions behind diaspora and hybridity as a basis for evaluating its critical role in articulating political and cultural hegemony. In a later chapter, they ultimately highlight the invisibility of regimes of supremacy based on whiteness and the failure of traditional diaspora studies to deal with disenfranchised subethnicities within dominant white culture and the marginality of hybrid ethnicities and mixed races. While they rightly emphasize the critical relevance of diaspora in addressing the political crises of contemporary society, their alternative approach to existing dilemmas is ironically still intertwined with diaspora’s presumed association with ethnicity.

Diasporic Identification as Subjective Positioning Diaspora has its limits, even as an “ethnic” concept, which, strictly speaking, it is not, as I have argued. Anthony Reid (1997: 36) noted, for example, that its popularity as a term to encompass Chinese everywhere (outside China) was heightened considerably at the first International Conference on the Chinese Diaspora, in Berkeley, California, in November 1992. Its reception of use was more favorable among North American Chinese than among Southeast Asian Chinese, where diaspora directly evoked “Jews of the East.” In the colonial era, the role of Chinese as compradors enhanced their separateness as an ethnic community. In this respect, functional specialization of other Indian and Arab traders contributed to their separateness (sangley means merchant) as diasporic communities, not just ethnic differences.8 The salient issue then is not the existence of differences but rather what this literal difference is a function of. The meaning and use of the concept of “overseas Chinese” cannot be divorced from the conditions of capitalism that caused large-scale immigration of Chinese laborers to Southeast Asia, starting at the end of the nineteenth century, and were heightened during an era of nationalism. However, use of this term changed over time, and its popularity waned during the Cold War. In recent years, Chinese everywhere have increasingly used huaren to

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refer to ethnic Chinese who speak huayu to replace nationalistic terms for Chinese (zhonguoren) who speak Mandarin, first guanhua and later putonghua (PRC) and guoyu (Taiwan). Ironically, the fiercest resistance to “overseas Chinese” (huaqiao) and “diaspora” came from Chinese living in Southeast Asia. As Gungwu Wang (1995: 13) stated, “I do not agree to the word [diaspora] being used for the Chinese, because it has implications which may have applied to some aspects of the sojourners in the past but do not apply to ethnic Chinese today.” A changing world has led many Southeast Asian Chinese to increasingly view themselves primarily as settlers situated outside China whose cultural lifestyles they practice as ethnic Chinese remain unaffected, but (diasporic) identity is still by nature a matter of subjective negotiation and individual choice. In this respect, this should in the final analysis involve the relevance of narrative, but my aim in collecting stories is not just historical or biographical. There is a space for memory and passion as “factive” representations that can elucidate issues of social history and crises of political difference, but there should also be room for imagination and creation as a spirit of ongoing change and constructed action.9 Overlap and tension between the two should be a complex process that invokes a multiplicity of factors. Through life experiences and their passions, one can thus understand what makes any diaspora diasporic. “Factive” definitions disqualify Japanese in Taiwan from being diasporic, but subjective identification is relevant in fact. The role of diaspora in articulating the possibilities of critical voice is a salient issue and ultimately one of diverse concrete strategic choices that drives a diasporic identity. In sum, I submit that diaspora is a fulcrum for examining many important problematics central to anthropology, ethnic studies, or cultural studies as long as one can carefully separate the complex functioning of ethnic constitution, subjective identification, and political process in any social context. In the field of ethnic studies, I argue that we are naively pigeonholed into thinking that diaspora is determined by ipso facto ethnic attributes that, more often than not, are essentially rooted and can be objectively measured. In cultural studies, I argue that diaspora invokes more than just speaking position; it involves in the first instance assessing the political context that engenders and frames the relevance of ethnicity and by implication prompts possible strategic choices and spawns meaningful lifeworlds. In this space between political and ethnic givens, I argue that subjective identification is hardest to define, but this is precisely what situates the person between possible courses of resistance and assimilation. In a larger disciplinary context, the question seems to involve less what diaspora is as a concrete phenomenon but instead what problematic theme it addresses or seeks to explain. Paul Gilroy (1993) eloquently argued that

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the “Black Atlantic” played a major role in the construction of a hybrid modernity, and his focus on diaspora underscored the structures of feeling, producing, communicating, and remembering rooted in this primordial situation of deracination, inflicted through the common social reality of enslavement. An alternative approach to a cultural study of Black Atlantic culture and identity comes from Orlando Patterson’s (1994) concept of “cosmopolis” in the context of the West Indies. Although less celebrated than Gilroy’s analysis of the Black Atlantic, Patterson’s sociohistorical analysis of the origins of reggae in the interactions of global culture and in the formation of the American cultural cosmos shows how multiple flows (rather than singular threats of a homogenizing cultural “imperialism”) have contributed to the invention of new cultural forms while at the same time calling into question meanings of place accorded to fixed cultural origins, which casts in rather different light the status of musical culture in both the American and Jamaican cosmos. Like Gilroy, Patterson clearly describes the formation of an alternative modernity, one in which working-class Rastafarian culture has become a local site of hybridity, whose actual sources of influence are global. In tracing its external influences to the West, one discovers instead that this musical culture has established itself as the site of a rather different kind of globalizing process and synthesis. Patterson contrasts the local assimilative strategies of such working-class Jamaicans with the cultural cosmopolitanism of Jamaican intellectual elites. He resists simply characterizing the different sites of Black hybridity as collectively making up a single Black Atlantic and argues instead that many cosmopolises overlap over a single terrain, thus making the idea of a single global system superfluous. Each cosmopolis is then defined by inherently different processes of cultural accommodation and strategies of sociopolitical positionality. Explicitly unlike Gilroy, whose Black Atlantic excludes the contributions of West Indian scholars to mainstream white intellectual discourse, Patterson’s Black “nationalism” is on the other hand less a hybrid “collectivity” than one inherently divided by social class and represented instead by many parallel cultural ethos. By virtue of their overlap over a single terrain, Patterson’s “cosmopolises” inevitably lend themselves to political negotiation and conflict in ways that contrast directly with Gilroy’s harmonious polyphony, especially with its experiential basis in the social memory of slavery and the repressive structures of feeling submerged therein. Patterson’s concept of cosmopolis shows that imagined communities need not be ethnic in nature and are more often than not class based, accenting the dynamics of social relations within a geography of power. More importantly, recognition of different perceptions of place epitomized by one’s sociopolitical positionality suggests a politics of place that is mediated by these structures of meaning. Thus, there is a sense in which the different

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spaces of culture created over a single terrain are a function of the social location of people within society, or as Doreen Massey (1994: 2) aptly put it, “the spatial is social relations ‘stretched out.’” At the same time, it is in reference to these discourses or universes of meaning that people articulate and affirm their relationship to place. These changing discourses are thus an index of the stability and internal divisibility of place. They pit the desirability of one level of place (locality, nation, world) over another, but they also pit the relevance of place to different domains of the lifeworld (familial, moral, economic, political). In any place, politics is not irreducible but surely attempts to present itself as an a priori given. Like Patterson’s notion of cosmopolis, there appears to be no a priori reason why one should believe that this coexistence of forces is by nature conflictual or must lead to the desirability of one over the other. On the surface, it is easy to sympathize with the postmodern or postcolonial appeal to diasporic resistance and cultural hybridity, but this appeal is based on the a priori “naturalness” of ethnic sentiment or multiple identities, when in fact ethnicity (even native ones) can be shown to be inventions and fictions that must be constantly created, legitimized, and institutionalized in practice. On the other hand, the applicability of multiple identities must be assessed within the specific confines of those institutional regimes that endeavor inevitably to define and regulate them. Multiple meanings of place differ from multiple identities in the sense that they accent the primordial importance of context rather than ethnicity or culture in the construction of identities. Rather than viewing the substance of one’s ethnicity or culture as a natural point of departure, it is necessary to see how context invokes the relevance of culture, as function of strategic choice, to the processes of identifying. Positionality within a context then becomes the subjective framework of power, and perception can become a source of cultural diversity. At this point, one can see how diaspora, as a specific genre of identity, ultimately conforms with the general argument put forth in regard to the imaginative quality of identity, as well as the subjective (socially and politically negotiated) process of identification. Such identities are not limited to ethnic ones; I argue that they also engender and drive disciplinary mind-sets, which in turn demarcates the space of thought and the parameters of conceptual relevance. In shifting from the reifications of ethnicity, culture, and identity, as they exist concretely in social space, to the way in which we as authorial subjects analytically conceptualize their relevance and theorize their existence, we can shift analogously from a geopolitical frame or domain to a geopragmatic one. I argue that, just as such social phenomena are situated within ongoing practices and processes, authorial subjectivity can be seen as similarly framed and instituted.

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Notes   1. Chivallon (2002: 363) notes that Gilroy carefully shifts between his theoretical and political project.   2. See Ou (2003), who states that almost all Japanese, with exception of government officials and other professionals assisting in the transition to the new regime, were repatriated to Japan after the war.   3. Curiously, a recent volume of essays on Japanese diasporas (Adachi 2006) does not include any work on Taiwan.   4. Problems associated with the difficult socialization of the Chinese-raised Japanese orphans repatriated after the war culminated in a recent series of NHK documentaries on the subject, bringing it to wider public attention. The most comprehensive social scientific analysis of this phenomenon is a two-volume work by Guan and Zhang (2008), written in Chinese and then translated into Japanese.   5. In contrast to Japanese works, which range from journalistically impassioned to descriptive historical, recent works in English (e.g., Chan 2011; Tamanoi 2009) have tended to focus on narrative memory. On the other hand, Itoh’s (2010) book is the most comprehensive account in English of Manchuria’s war orphans.   6. Three such volumes (Takenaka 2007a, 2007b, 2009) were translated and published in Taiwan.   7. There is an important difference between narrative as subjective interpretation (Ricoeur 1981; Rosaldo 1993), discursive content (Bauman 1986; Ochs 2001), and pragmatic function (Silverstein and Urban 1996).   8. As Wang (1991: 139) aptly argued, “for most of these merchants and entrepreneurs, being Chinese had nothing to do with becoming closer to China. It was a private and domestic matter only manifested when needed to strengthen a business contact or to follow an approved public convention.” The same applies today.   9. In anthropology, Ryang’s (2008) ethnography of Korean women in Japan and the United States has underscored the subjective and empathetic framework driving narrative analysis. She is a Korean, born and raised in Japan.

n

PART II

B eyond

the Imagined Community of Writing Culture

Chapter 3

Predicament n The of James Clifford in the Anthropological Imaginary

O

riginally written as a review essay on James Clifford’s (2013) Returns, this analysis expanded eventually into a critique of his entire trilogy, beginning with The Predicament of Culture (1988) and followed by Routes (1997). Clifford’s great “theoretical” influence on anthropology must be assessed in contrast to his lack of “authority” in other disciplines. This undoubtedly says much about the nature of theory in various disciplines but more importantly should point to distinctive features in disciplinary mind-sets per se that make concepts relevant in the first place. I take seriously Clifford’s subtle shift from culture as text to culture in politics in the trilogy; there are ramifications not only for anthropology but also cultural studies. One must ultimately problematize anthropological subjectivity.

The New and Newer Ethnography: A Short History of Consciousness Michel Foucault famously and consistently replied to his inquisitors, “Do not ask who I am.” In a literary sense, it matters who is speaking, but in the transition from archaeology of knowledge to the genealogy of practice, identity in a literal sense becomes problematic. Foucault may have identified as a historian of systems of thought, in contrast to philosopher, but this is a case where the disciplinary label, not the person, was in question. In the case of James Clifford, the nature of his identity is curiously enigmatic but relevant in fact. It is common for nonanthropologists to note that Clifford is an anthropologist;

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at least most of the casual references in the scholarly literature that I have encountered routinely trend this way. On the other hand, Paul Rabinow (1986: 242) equally famously noted: “Clifford takes as his natives, as well as his informants, those anthropologists past and present whose work, self-consciously or not, has been the production of texts, the writing of ethnography. We are being observed and inscribed.”1 In fact, Clifford was trained as a historian; he would readily admit that, despite the affinities, he writes about anthropologists and anthropology as an “other.” This chapter is not about partial truths or literal ones. I am ultimately interested in the substance of texts; in other words, it is important to assess Clifford’s trilogy for what it says on paper. Clifford first provoked anthropologists to reconcile the authority of their texts literarily, in reference to their explicit identity as author as well as the subjective or allegorical quality of their analysis and writing; it seems valid thus to ask in what capacity he is writing now, in contrast to the outset. Is he writing anthropology as an anthropologist? And should it matter? There was little inkling that Clifford was writing a trilogy until its third installment, and it is necessary to scrutinize how this circuit begins, evolves, and ends. Moreover, as he asserts, each volume is a loose collection rather than a tightly structured analysis that one might expect from a bounded narrative or monograph. His books revolve around the themes of roots, routes, and returns, respectively; whether these three R’s constitute a coherent network of ideas in the broader scheme of things can be viewed as a question of anthropology, as well as a history of consciousness, namely Clifford’s. In practice, they intersect, but they should be seen, in principle, as analytically distinct, reflecting inherently different trajectories. His nuanced thematic border shiftings nonetheless crosscut his subtle subjective transitions. Clifford’s deepest and longest-lasting influence on anthropology is still Writing Culture, a pathbreaking collection he edited with George Marcus (Clifford and Marcus 1986).2 Clifford Geertz, who was the primary object of criticism for most of its contributors, promoted an interpretive approach at a time when anthropology was swayed largely by a different kind of scientific discourse—for example, structural analysis, functionalist description, and statistical method. The introduction to his collection The Interpretation of Cultures, entitled “Thick Description” (Geertz 1973c), did much to raise consciousness about modes of representation used in anthropological writing. His eloquent defense of interpretation and the appeal to symbolic meaning were, however, marred by his densely esoteric and highly allusive prose. His critics repeatedly pointed out the fact that ironically, in the end, his own style of writing was criticized as unrepresentational, in the sense that his symbolic analysis often blotted out the social discourse that his method of thick description was meant to inscribe. Clifford and his collaborators took literary anthropology to

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a new level by questioning the writing of ethnography, both in relation to the subjectivity of the author and imaginative quality of its description. The “new ethnography” movement that emerged as a result typically began in confessional mode by recognizing the cultural and other roots of the subject-author. Others then adopted more dialogical approaches to ethnographic description, often by literally transcribing interviews with informants, in lieu of “objective” observations and “abstract” analyses. Although his coeditor, George Marcus, developed a longer sustained reflection on ethnography as his core project in anthropology, while promoting it (along with Michael Fischer) as the foundation of anthropology’s cultural critique, Clifford has been primarily credited with initiating a direct attack on anthropology’s authority, literarily.3 Its “othering” overlaps coincidentally with Edward Said’s (1978) Orientalism. In this regard, Clifford’s (1983) article “On Ethnographic Authority,” which was one of several independently written papers included in The Predicament of Culture (Clifford 1988), the first volume of his trilogy, became the paradigmatic point of departure for “new ethnography.”4 The article was reminiscent of Foucault’s (1976) “What Is an Author?”5 By problematizing ethnography as a social scientific discourse, Clifford highlighted a systematic methodological regime that sublimated the disappearance of the author and his subjectivity, thus in the process enhancing the fictive objectivity of its analytical authority. The nature of anthropological inquiry as “the study of the other” magnified at the same time its silencing of indigenous voices as a genre of writing. As long as anthropology remained unchanged (vis-à-vis other social sciences) as a discipline devoted especially to non-Western (hence, culturally alien) societies, along with its reliance on fieldwork as its major mode of data collection and analysis, this crisis of writing authority seemed endemic to anthropology, which could explain, in turn, Clifford’s aura of influence.6 The Predicament of Culture is structured along the lines of discourses, displacements, collections, and histories, but the object of Clifford’s gazing is clearly texts, or the crisis of culture as text. The “Discourses” in question in part 1 are ethnographies, the stuff of anthropology. Clifford’s literary critique of ethnographic authority leads to an account of the dialogical interactions behind Marcel Griaule’s ethnography and an interlude between Joseph Conrad’s novels and Bronisław Malinowski’s ethnographic diary as narrative genres. Clifford’s account of “power and dialogue” in Griaule is an effort to articulate the performative aspects of fieldwork encounter that eventually contributed to his text. Griaule’s metaphoric structures are his documentary system and initiatory complex, less as thematic content than allegories of method (see Clifford 1988: 65).7 In the case of Malinowski’s diary, Clifford asks, in terms of Stephen Greenblatt’s “self-fashioning,” to what extent Conrad’s Heart of Darkness dialogues within Malinowski’s authorial psyche. Literary imagination is seen to live in ethnographic realism; Greenblatt unwittingly becomes

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a “participant-analyst,” thus blurring genre boundaries (1988: 94).8 Clifford’s poetics of displacement in the next part extends his account of ethnographic narrative, taking it to a higher imaginary. What else does “On Ethnographic Surrealism,” part 2’s opening essay, refer to, if not an aesthetics, not just dramatics, something approaching art, not just literature? He traverses Victor Segalen, Michel Leiris, and Aimé Césaire through the genre of travel writings and in terms of poetics, where surrealism approaches fantasy. Part 3, “Collections,” deals mostly with museums and represents a different type of cultural objectification. In content, its crosses the boundary of culture and art; in form, it is reified representation and exercise of colonial appropriation. It is perhaps at this juncture where poetics meets politics and where Clifford’s postmodernity begins to take on a critical shape. Yet, this postmodern critique is hardly new. His romantic defense of native tradition against Western Orientalizing, while admirable, has been made by others with greater sophistication. Part 4, “Histories,” is an odd pair of two incommensurable essays. The first is an astute commentary on Said’s Orientalism, while the other is a rambling account of the Mashpee’s legal struggle to gain official recognition of their tribal identity and existence. Their failure to win legal tribal status was in many regards the product of a broken history that resulted in their loss of cultural continuity and totality. Ironically, it is only in this essay that Clifford encounters culture in the concrete—unmediated by text and anthropology. At this point, one might ask, what is this predicament of culture that Clifford confronts? Whatever it is, it is clearly something that interfaces primarily at the level of text and in the mind of the West. Unfortunately, his inclination to underscore the subjectivity of narrative, surreal imaginary, and power of aesthetics ultimately makes culture impressionistic at best. He is not necessarily dialoguing with other anthropologists but instead invoking the literary in us all. Finally, his notion of politics remains crudely defined, or naively reflective. As a history of anthropology, his approach raises comparison with George Stocking, an intellectual historian of anthropology in a more conventional sense. Stocking has always claimed not to be an expert of anthropological theory or any of its specializations. As a historian, he stands outside the discipline and its internal squabbles, but there is a sense in which his intellectual history relates inherently to the content of thought and its thinker in ways that Clifford’s does not. Stocking’s history of anthropology is intimately tied to influences of its biblical roots, evolutionary theory, and all else in between, as well as to the transformations of its folklore practitioners into professional academics. In Clifford’s history of anthropology, there is little indication that the content of thought counts for very much, especially insofar as its genre of writing can be seen to speak for it, authoritatively at least. From a larger perspective, this is a perversion of Foucault’s discursive authority. Foucault also started with authorial gazing but was ultimately interested in explaining

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epistemic transformations in a way that Clifford only considers secondary at best, through sleight of text, and not worth considering at worst. I have gone to great lengths to accent the Eurocentric rootedness of his predicament, which is epitomized by a style that prioritizes mediation of text over the inherent context of culture.9 As an aside, one should point out that nowhere in this book does Clifford say it is the first of a trilogy. The first mention of a trilogy or multivolume work comes only much later, when one begins to find an explicit thematic movement and a subtle shift in his own identity. The rootedness of his predicament in the text and in the Euro-American center overlaps with the explicit deracination he attributes to the concept of culture by replacing its nature as a site of origins and traditions to one of translation and transplanting. He is surely not the first to de-essentialize culture in this regard, which has been part of a broader intellectual mind-set. He has been, on the other hand, one of the strongest voices to promote detotalizations of all kinds by rejecting narrative closures, championing destabilization, and invoking polyphonic negotiations in writing, thought, and practice. Subjectivity is primarily authorial, so the decentering he provokes is a tension that involves the process of gazing rather than those contexts of practice in which the native and his own culture are situated. The sociopolitical contexts of uprooting and transformation that I refer to are at best implied in Clifford’s text, not an object of direct investigation. We view cultural tensions through ethnographic texts, as an amplification of surreal imaginaries, and as a refraction of institutionalized and legalized negotiations. Politics is critically reflective in an authorial sense, but what is it in reality? To his credit, Clifford begins to move away from the authorial solipsism above in his later works. In a special issue of Inscriptions, published by the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, titled “Traveling Theories, Traveling Theorists,” Clifford (1989) begins his “Notes on Travel and Theory” by explicating that the Greek theorein is “a practice of travel and observation, a man sent by the polis to another city to witness a religious ceremony. Theory is a product of displacement, comparison, a certain distance. To theorize, one leaves home. Like any act of travel, theory begins and ends somewhere.” I do not know if theorein has an English equivalent, but Oxford Dictionaries Online defines “theory” as originating in the “late 16th century . . . via late Latin from Greek theōria, ‘contemplation, speculation’” (denoting a mental scheme of something to be done) and “from theōros ‘spectator.’”10 For Clifford, its Greek roots suggest that theory involves displacement, comparison, and travel. The essays in the second volume of Clifford’s (1997) trilogy, Routes, are structured along the lines of travels, contacts, and futures, all of which invoke themes of movement and destabilizations of border and convention. It is easy to see how they represent extensions of earlier reflections on the de-essentialization of culture and detotalization of anthropological writing. He continues

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his ruminations (theorizing as spectating) literarily and aesthetically through his typical combination of meditation, poetry, and guessing (first step in Geertzian interpretation). In “Traveling Cultures,” the opening essay to part 1, “Travels,” Clifford argues that “twentieth-century anthropology—an evolving practice of modern travel—has become increasingly wary of certain localizing strategies in the construction and representation of ‘cultures’” (1997: 19).11 This appears to be consistent with his view that the history of anthropology is a sustained reflection on or distillation into theorein. Yet, more importantly, the focus on traveling cultures represents a subtle shift from the reified accounts of culture in ethnographic texts to the changing world, within which the natives live and interact, dialogically, of course. So, as Clifford asks, how much of what anthropologists theorize in terms of culture can be seen as an accumulation of their travels? Needless to say, cultures also travel and mutate in the process. Movements across borders, in turn, disrupt the hegemony of boundedness; displacements thus invoke constructed and disputed historicities, interference, and ongoing interaction, or, as Jonathan Friedman (2002) puts it, “tropes for trippers.”12 From multisited ethnography, which then expands the fieldwork habitus to interdisciplinary fertilizations in more abstract senses, all manner of cross-dressing and hybridization can be suggested as paradigms for new spatial practices in anthropology. Like Michel de Certeau’s walking in the city, Clifford’s focus is less on structures of the confines than in how the tacking strategies and oppositional tactics enable people (and anthropologists) to create new cultural spaces and discursive possibilities. I find it simpler to understand Clifford’s dislocations of method as a refraction of Arjun Appadurai’s (1990) transnational disjunctures and chaotic flows.13 Part 2, “Contacts,” includes a series of essays on museums, or, as its representative essay terms it, the museum as contact zone. A site of reification in his earlier book, it now becomes a site of negotiated meaning between different agents. Nonetheless, focus is still on display as representation. Just as ethnographic writing can serve as a site of negotiation between author, producer, informants, and readers, the contact zone is a site that pits different interests and thus different meanings. Politics enters as an external influence, not just as the authority of gazing but also as the concrete subject of appropriation or circulation. Like travelers walking in the city, it engenders a multivocality that reiterates the desirability of a dialogical complexity. Part 3, “Futures,” is Clifford’s version of the ongoing present. Just as people navigate or challenge the changing rifts of seemingly bounded places, fixed places also become foci of continental drift and its changing political economy, as he quips in his meditations14 on Fort Ross: “Fort Ross: the West Coast of the United States, not long ago the eastern edge of Russia, is being bought up by investors from Japan and Hong Kong. Is the U.S. American empire in

The Predicament of James Clifford  63

decline? Or perhaps in metamorphosis? It’s unclear” (1997: 330).15 In the essay “Diasporas,” he is not the first to ruminate on a well-discussed phenomenon in the literature but now injects a rather emancipatory spin into a term that celebrates the tacking gestures, border crossings, strategies of negotiation, and counterhegemonic challenges invoked throughout the book. Diaspora is invoked here less as a marker of a socially alienated group than as a mind-set or language for articulating difference, suturing fractures, and engendering new connections and communities. In this respect, he champions Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic as a paradigm for diasporic consciousness. While Gilroy brilliantly highlights the neglected contribution of blacks in the making of modernity and its hybrid nature, the primordial situation of deracination, which bound the experience of blacks in a transnational Atlantic, was on the other hand inflicted more by the common social reality of enslavement, strictly speaking, than its search for roots. Its socially marginal status aside, I would argue that the strategic choice of whether diaspora is invoked as a language for articulating difference is less a function of mind-set per se than its context of speaking.16 The anachronistic nature of the Jewish diaspora now in mainstream America is in part the result of a conscious disavowal of attachments to an ethnic or religious homeland as well as an unconscious decision to assimilate to a host mainstream. The advent of an Asian diaspora in the United States today, cited by Clifford, can be contrasted with its demise in Southeast Asia, whose exemplary paradigm is the Chinese, once referred to in the literature as “Jews of the East.”17 Above all, why should diaspora invoke an alternative identification? In short, the transition from Roots to Routes involves Clifford’s discovery of politics, but the shift in critical positionality leans closer to Certeau, not Foucault. In acknowledging the pathbreaking work of diasporic intellectuals such as Said, Homi Bhabha, and others, he advocates the facetious façade of Arif Dirlik’s (1994) “postcolonial aura” instead of its sociological substratum, the crisis of global capitalism.18 In his discussion of contact zones in museums and diasporas, the description of the multiplicity of interests that characterize the production, circulation, and consumption of representation; the dislocations of place, power, and identity that invoke diasporas of mind; and the cross-border negotiations that unsettle, structure, and reconstitute discourse in practice have been facilitated by the postcolonial, transnational, and supracapitalist disjunctures that have become part of the cultural topology in the 1990s. Why do we not see this (or so much of it) in his discussion of an earlier era characterized by seemingly monolithic hegemonies and sharper dualisms between East and West? He seems to empower marginal voices and their multiplicity of interests as a general corrective but does not really confront politics directly. Clifford asks, “What would it take (and why would it matter?) to treat the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan as a contact zone rather than

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a center? Or the Louvre?” (1997: 213).19 I may add, what would it take to treat the British Museum as a negotiable contact zone? Or the Western Wall (in the Old City of Jerusalem)? It took two hundred years, and only after intense debate, for the Musée de l’Homme to repatriate the remains of Sara Baartman to South Africa. The Annenberg Foundation secretly bid for and successfully bought twenty-some sacred artifacts on behalf of the Hopi Indians at a recent Paris auction, which it then donated by repatriating them.20 The kind of critical subjectivity that Clifford espouses is a valuable first step, but the extent to which it can, as though autonomous and liberating, overcome politics beyond one’s control is limited. Regarding the future of theorein, theory is not just tristes tropes, writ large. Moreover, why is anthropology only about “the impossible, inescapable tasks of translation”? In a collection of interviews curiously titled On the Edges of Anthropology, Clifford (2003: 9–11) tacks skillfully with anthropological interlocutors by confronting the three denials that reflect their intrinsic identity (we’re not missionaries, we’re not colonial officers, we’re not travelers) in order to contest their participation as inert agents, the implicit collusion with colonialism, and refusal to engage with literary expression. In Routes, the focus is still on anthropologists, but the point of departure in Returns (Clifford 2013) is presaged by his concluding commentary on Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: “identifications, not identities, acts of relationship rather than pre-given forms: this tradition is a network of partially connected histories, a persistently displaced and reinvented time/space of crossings” (Clifford 1997: 268).21 Returns is aptly subtitled Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century. So, to mimic Dipesh Chakrabarty, who speaks for indigenous pasts? In the prologue to Returns, Clifford reflects retrospectively on the trilogy in the making. The most apparent difference that caused him to distance himself from some of his earlier works was the radical decentering of power relations and discursive locations that produced, among other things, the advent of postcolonialism, globalization, and network societies. As he puts it, “the ground has moved” (2013: 1).22 In actuality, this ground shift was already present in Routes, albeit as background to his methodological decentering. The extent to which this context, otherwise termed the world, has emerged as an epistemological point of departure in Returns can be seen indirectly in the way the indigenous has come to the forefront as the object of gazing. Returns is divided into three parts: “Travels,” “Contacts,” and “(More) Travels.” It clearly reiterates the themes that he introduced in Routes with renewed persistence. Part 1 claims to be theoretical in scope, an extended exploration of theorein, as an attempt to develop an alter history based on articulation, performance, and translation. They become the basis not only for “indigenous articulations” but also for “varieties of indigenous experience.” The world is an important point of departure for what Clifford calls “indigenitude,”

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in contrast to the “negritude” of an earlier anticolonial literature. At the same time, his alter(native) history is a framework for disarticulating postmodernity. In effect, these alter histories (as concrete plural) constitute a further elaboration for his continued promotion of a renewed ethnographic realism. In short, Clifford finds our tendency to reduce the crisis of the world under the rubric of neoliberalism and postmodernity too facile. More precisely, he finds these assumptions of monocultural hegemony and knee-jerk reactions to their underlying totalizations that have also prompted inventions of traditions and premature demise of indigenous cultures everywhere simplistic. It is thus no surprise that his primary targets of disdain include various theoretical tendencies to silence the indigenous within a seemingly omnipotent world system or universal narrative of history. They divert us from the partial truths—hence, his “return” to the indigenous as a primary axis of concern. In essence, these regrounded alter histories serve ultimately as an exemplary terrain for showing not only that indigenous cultures and societies have a future but also that these living traditions have always engendered a process of sustained resistance, negotiation, and renewal. In this regard, articulation serves as his methodological language for describing the connections and disconnection that operate fundamentally at the local level, not unlike the flaneur walking in the city who, in the process, tacks and reconstitutes his world. Performance is the regime of practices within which people not only “show and tell” but also meaningfully inscribe and realistically reorder life experiences, and thus identification as positive attribute, to counter identity as static entity. Translation is not transmission through diffusion and mindless assimilation. It is “something is brought across, but in altered forms, with local differences. Traditore tradutore” (Clifford 2013: 48).23 I prefer not to use “translation,” which tends to privilege culture as a discursive trait, to denote the act of appropriation in a broader sense, which should also include practices of a political, economic, and other nature. But the notion of tradition invoked here is really a simplistic reference to the uniqueness of “others.” The local might be an object of benign neglect for “grand theory,” but, in fairness to his detractors, Eric Wolf ’s (1992) Europe and the People without History and others who write in a genre of global capitalism have essentially countered a different simple-minded anthropology that has typically assumed the insular, self-regulating nature of local culture, where one can study it as though immune from the rest of the world, as most village ethnographies seem to do. The renewed focus on indigenitude is worthy, but it, too, is prone to possible accusations of Rousseauesque romanticism about “noble” traditions. Subaltern marginality is the issue, but it must be viewed as part of a dependent context of larger forces. It is also worth noting that Clifford’s definition of indigenous is a phenomenon, otherwise referred to as aboriginal culture, that is, a native society challenged by the external domination of globality,

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modernity, and coloniality. It is different from the notion of “indigenization” as process. Indigenization is undoubtedly a force, among many, that drives indigenous cultures everywhere, but nationalism can also be defined as an indigenizing process (vis-à-vis the world) without being indigenous “by nature.” Indigenization might invoke tradition, of course, but it is, in strict terms, only one of many possible strategies that indigenous cultures use to resist/assimilate with the outside. Clifford’s essay “Indigenous Articulations” raises three issues: (1) How is “indigeneity” both rooted in and routed through particular places? (2) How are relations between “edge” and “center” articulated? (3) How expansive can notions of indigenous (native) affiliation become, before they begin to lose specificity, falling into more generalized “postcolonial” discourses of displacement? For him, articulation provides a nonreductive way to think about cultural transformation and the apparent coming and going of “traditional” forms. These metaphors of movement, predicated on roots/routes, center/ margin, and the local/global, have in fact been a key feature in Routes, but the difference in Returns is their explicit concern with the coming and going of tradition. There are subtle differences between “diasporism” and “indigenism” as articulations that straddle the local and global, but at the same time he cautions us against the absolutist extreme of nativism or xenophobic shadow of indigeneity, which “denies the messy, pragmatic politics of articulation” (2013: 65).24 What becomes obvious about Clifford’s politics, on the other hand, through his absolutist denial of narrative closures and totalization of any sort, is his firm privileging of the inherently noble vis-à-vis corrupt nature of tradition, hence worth liberating, which at the same time underscores its authenticity in the face of Hobsbawmian insinuations of “invention.” I have little problem acknowledging the fictive nature of many traditions today.25 Not unlike Clifford’s critique of the external forces that have attempted to silence the indigenous, fictive traditions were inventions of modernity. The nation-state, from Ernest Gellner to Benedict Anderson, is inherently modern in character, so should anyone be surprised that it happens to be one of the prime producers of fictive cultures and identities, through its machination of tradition? As Tom Nairn (1997: 4) put it, “through nationalism the dead are awakened, this is the point—seriously awakened for the first time. All cultures have been obsessed by the dead and placed them in another world. Nationalism rehouses them in this world.” Even if this xenophobic extreme is to be avoided (for political reasons), one should not deny that this has been an equally ubiquitous staple of societies everywhere. The same can be said about indigenous cultures. Just as one should recognize those articulations that have given rise to native renaissance, there are just as many examples of assimilation and collusion that appropriate corrupt and fictive traditions as part of their ongoing indigenization.

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The diversity of political experiences, despite our politics, is also an undeniable reality. Clifford’s politics explains in part my dissatisfaction with his essay “Varieties of Indigenous Experience.” He repeatedly stresses the diversity and open-endedness of such articulations and experiences, which contrast, on the other hand, all-or-nothing reductionisms, but the diversity that remains omitted is the range of collusion and co-optation on both sides that falls within those two extremes. At the same time, I still get the sense that his varieties are rather limited. Indigenous experience is varied, especially when juxtaposed against a monolithic external force, but I also see little variety (or internal contradictions) within his description of indigenous. Clifford’s refusal to analytically classify reminds me of the artist Laurie Anderson’s remark, “There are ten million stories in the Naked City, but no one can remember which is theirs.” Foucault’s articulation of the multiple layers in modern discipline was much richer. Part 2, “Contacts,” consists of a single essay, “Ishi’s Story,” a narrative that itself weaves through multiple narratives to paint a richly varied picture of the so-called last wild Indian in America. What makes the narrative complex is not simply the several sides of Ishi that are manifested but also the succession of different narratives about his life that has become the template for different meanings long after his death. For Clifford, it is an example of how a story of indigenous disappearance has become one of renewal, while in the process eliciting the ongoing legacy of colonial violence, the history of anthropology, efficacy of healing, and prospects for postcolonial healing. I have little problem seeing how history of this sort, with or without the mediation of text, engenders many levels of meaning; I find Clifford’s agenda to reduce such histories to master narratives about indigenous death/renewal heavy-handed. In Part 3, a commentary on the work of Epeli Hau’ofa, “Hau’ofa’s Hope,” precedes two final essays pertaining to collaborative heritage work done at the Alutiiq Museum in Alaska. The first, “Looking Several Ways,” focuses on the Looking Both Ways exhibition, and the second, “Second Life: The Return of the Masks,” discusses the new meanings invoked by the return of masks to Alaska loaned from a museum in France. Both essays represent a further elaboration of museums as contact zones, introduced in Routes, with more detailed attention to the institutional practices and cultural politics surrounding these events. In “Looking Both Ways,” the interests of heritage preservation were pitted against neoliberal developmentalism, but this case resulted in positive claims made toward cultural renewal. The return of the masks described in the second essay took place in the context of a cultural revival of mask making in particular. The masks found their second life in their overlapping contexts. In retrospect, Clifford’s history of anthropology has come a long way since the days of Writing Culture. He has expanded his emphasis on cultural

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articulation beyond the writing of ethnographies and made it the methodological framework for engaging with contact zones in social practice. While being a product of and informed by the changing transnational cultural economy and the politics of postcolonialism, among other things, his focus has always been on how people at the ground level negotiate disjunctures and hegemonies at a higher level, which has produced its own diversity of experiences and constituted the basis for ongoing revival. Behind his critique of Hobsbawmian inventions of tradition is a fervent defense of tradition’s inherent authenticity and indigenitude’s essential vitalism. I agree that, in many instances, the death of the indigenous is premature, exacerbated to some extent by the specter of universal global culture, the domination of market capital, and the evolution of both into “Empire.” However, his perception of indigenous diversities is understandable largely and simply in reference to the West as a hegemonic, unitary force, which underscores a notion of tradition that refers largely and simply to the uniqueness of non-Western “others.” I find it equally dubious that Clifford tends to perceive the indigenous as a single collective conscience, as though immune from its internal divisions and contradictions of class, strategy, or practical interest. These internal divisions usually form the basis for diverse and contested strategies covering a range of collusion and cooptation, in addition to opposition and renewal, which is inherent to any society. Authenticity is not necessarily a relevant issue for many societies, given the diversity of strategic interests. Moreover, tradition is a systemic, conscious manifestation that deserves qualification. Societies can maintain themselves and change without a manifest (often politicized) notion of tradition. This is closer to Fernand Braudel’s notion of the longue durée than Clifford’s polemic promotion of indigenous ones. In fact, it is probably not necessary to call Clifford’s history “of anthropology.” It goes without saying that he no longer writes about anthropology and anthropologists as his “other.” In light of his direct, sustained concern with the indigenous, it is hard to imagine him writing for anything other than an anthropological readership, if not as an anthropologist as well. In actuality, does it matter at all? Clifford’s “new history” shows that to speak for indigenous pasts (and futures) is possible but still predicated by maintenance of the fixed existence of a native tradition-as-against-the-world. His staunch defense of the indigenous is a direct function of his aversion to narrative closures, essentialisms, and totalizations of any kind, engendered especially by neoliberal and postcolonial theories, which is, if anything, still a crude dualism. Can this be of significant interest to anyone else other than anthropologists? By contrast, even subaltern studies is much more nuanced. The critical dialogue it engaged in was not simply with Western historical Marxism but also with schools of Indian nationalist writing as well as British Orientalism (especially in the form of Cambridge imperial history).

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As a kind of anthropology, Clifford’s historical approach and writing, especially with his reliance on articulation, dislocation, and translation, can be seen as distinctive to other genres of anthropology, but I maintain that it has serious limitations as a mode of critical political discourse. At the local, indigenous level, politics is much more complex than how he has reduced it to the innate, ongoing renewal of an indigenous longue durée, or real traditions. Finally, although Clifford now writes as one of “us” (anthropologists), this raises some deeper, unchallenged questions about the definition of anthropology itself. I have always wondered why anthropology is ipso facto the study of “other societies.” Given its residual relationship to mainstream social science, where one studies one’s own society by default, it would seem that Clifford’s defense of indigenous tradition is consistent with anthropology’s cultural relativism in general or its relegation to the margins of the world. As anthropology has developed to a point where non-Westerners routinely study their own society, if not those in the West as well, and where fieldwork is no longer a provincial, localized terrain but can now encompass cities, modern nations, and abstract fields such as history or thought, I find it ironic that Clifford, once considered the vanguard of postmodern theorists, has subtly remade himself into a practitioner of a discipline still defined by a century-old Eurocentrism. Returns being what it is, one might also ask, what does or can “becoming indigenous” in the twenty-first century mean to those who work outside the ethnographic field, to the agents of neoliberalism and other grand theories that he criticizes, and in comparison to the articulation and translation of other sorts of cultural or social struggle? The fact that he now talks predominantly to (not about) anthropologists seems to be a sign of shrinking authority.

The Fate of Geertz: “Culture” and Beyond The work of Clifford Geertz was the primary object of criticism for contributors to the influential collection Writing Culture, edited by James Clifford and George Marcus (1986).26 What made Geertz’s work particularly prone to criticism by literary theorists was his understanding of what constituted the forms of cultural difference, how he went about discovering these differences, and how he articulated these differences in his own language of literary eloquence. Far from trying to make culture into an art, he wished instead to make it into a science,27 following a tradition passed down from Talcott Parsons and promoted by other symbolic anthropologists who advocated “the native’s point of view.”28 In this sense, he was hardly alone. His overt humanism disguised the fact that his interpretative approach to the study of culture was still social scientific in form. Geertz’s definition of culture raised problems not only for interpretation but for writing as well. First, his use of symbols is much more

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restricted than might be expected by the broader definition of symbols as native facts. In other words, he was interested in not just any set of words, images, institutions, and behaviors but rather those that were embedded in social experience and were seen to project a distinctive ethos or worldview. His method of defining what is an acceptable set of cultural values is clearly lacking in his writings. Second, rather than justifying the steps by which he is able to abstract or distill the finished product from the social discourse, he simply gives the reader the finished product, letting the examples “speak for themselves,” take it or leave it. I have dwelled at length in this chapter on one aspect of postmodern sensibility, namely authorial subjectivity, deliberately using the unrepresentational nature of Geertz’s approach to culture theory, primarily to highlight certain salient trends of this postmodern approach to discourse, namely its aversion to systemic totality and narrative closure, its focus on authorial intention, and its emphasis on the study of culture as communicative engagement with subject-actors.29 This does not exhaust the full list of possible tendencies, but I bother to reiterate some of the more obvious aspects of this polemic debate in order to suggest for the moment that other questions have not been asked in this context, namely why anthropologists in particular have viewed the postmodern critique of its authorial subjectivity as a relevant theoretical critique. If a major contribution of “the new ethnography” was to address certain failures that are endemic to the social scientific writing of culture, why did anthropology consider it particularly relevant, while other disciplines, such as the sociology of culture, appear largely immune to it?30 Focus on anthropological “discourse” did not simply expose the subjectivity of the “author.” Some have also extended discourse theory to reify the nature of the anthropological gaze. Said’s Orientalism (1978) represents a politicized take on discourse, as well as a more radical critique of authorial identity. Being predicated on the objectification of a cultural other, it focuses more on the politics behind the construction of otherness. This “spectacularization” of difference is sublimated by a neutral language of scientific discourse that has also detached the authority of writing from its embeddedness in what Said (1989) bluntly calls “the imperial contest.” This celebration of difference (between representations and reality) thus magnifies distance (between the self and the other), which in turn effaces the other in the authority of scientific writing. The embeddedness of authorial subjectivity in practice has thus led Rabinow (1985) and Johannes Fabian (1990) to advocate a microphysics or praxis of writing,31 while Said’s attributing of Orientalism as a discourse to its origins in and to the maintenance of colonial domination has effectively problematized the politicizing motives of the author vis-à-vis his absent subjects as an overt theoretical agenda. His critique has been classified quite correctly as postcolonial, and its impact on the advent of postcolonial literary study has been immense, largely

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accenting narratives of resistance, the rewriting of histories from an indigenous point of view, and so on. Certain disciplines, literature and history in particular, have been greatly affected by postcolonial “theory,” even when reference to actual colonial contexts was at best imagined or dubious. Its impact on anthropology, especially in its collusion with Third World colonialism, has not been insignificant, but its scope has been limited by the ability of critical reflexivity to extend beyond colonialism in the concrete. Postcolonial reflexivity, in strict terms, should be applicable exclusively to colonial situations (or situations so “defined”). Yet, on the other hand, if postcoloniality is above all a subjective (imagined) mind-set, which is what discourse alludes to, despite its content, one must wonder why it should not become the basis for a universal critical theory. Is this relevant at all to Geertz’s cultural interpretation? In contrast to both Clifford and Said, the influence of Bourdieu’s work, as a variation on the theme of practice, has been rather different. Needless to say, his notion of culture and the role it plays in the strategies of practice and social domination are different as well.32 While sensitive to the subjectivity of the theorist, he appears less inclined for any reason to engage in dialogue with subject-actors. Imagination does not seem to figure anywhere as a mode of writing or analysis, since his primary focus is on the autonomy of practice and the embeddedness of the actor within strategizing regimes in opposition to orthodoxies of value. His particular use of practice raises comparison with Foucault, but his status in social science as post-theory is mostly a function of how we see him as transcending structuralist teleology. I argue that practice is relevant not in Bourdieu’s sense but in expanding the context of text. I point to postcolonial reflexivity and the notion of practice to reiterate two points that seem obvious in the literature on Geertz but eventually combine them to advocate a different take on authorial subjectivity. Politics has been notably absent from Geertz’s hermeneutics of cultural interpretation. Postcoloniality is not the only form of politics but is clearly a product of a discursive approach to authorial subjectivity. At the same time, the practice that I allude to is not the habitus within which the social actor is situated but rather the context in which the author is situated and from which his text is produced. Clifford was not concerned with either of these issues in his critique of ethnographic allegory, but they are related to culture. The attacks on Geertz’s authorial subjectivity and his use of literary method to interpret culture may have diminished Geertz’s respectability, at least among some anthropologists, but they did not affect his significant influence beyond anthropology. Among theorists of culture, debates over its meaning, use, and value apparently did not advance greatly beyond Geertz’s peculiar definition of it. Clifford’s alternative approach appealed to a different notion of native fact, but it did not really resolve, even for anthropologists, the debate over which “native’s point of view” was epistemologically more valid.

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Despite Clifford’s strong advocacy of multivocality, it was not clear how much of it was necessary for interpretation, or whether the latter was relevant at all. And to what extent was the efficacy of interpretation dependent on the utility of Geertz’s specific concept of culture? Did this resonate differently elsewhere? To put it in different perspective, the critique of Geertz’s authorial subjectivity focused on its literary character but did not directly impact the efficacy of his interpretation of culture, contrary to appearances. The salience of a cultural approach for Geertz was already evident in early works, such as Agricultural Involution (Geertz 1963a) and Peddlers and Princes (Geertz 1963c), and in many senses the literary elaboration of his definition of culture clarified its substantive nature without reducing culture to an exclusively literary phenomenon. At the same time, his notion of “thick description” clearly articulated his methodological differences with pure humanistic analyses and other genres of social science. The fact that his conception of “native’s point of view” did not inherently rely on what natives actually say or think could have been raised as a problematic value judgment rather than be summarily dismissed by “the new ethnography” as essentially flawed. All schools of anthropological theory from functionalism to structuralism and beyond have always been more abstract than Geertz, so why was he unrepresentational? There has been a plethora of reflective works on Geertz that span a variety of disciplines, the most comprehensive being the compendia edited by Sherry Ortner (1999), Richard Shweder and Byron Good (2005), and Jeffrey Alexander and colleagues (2011). They reveal certain parameters of interdisciplinary diffusion, as well as disciplinary usages in the culture concept. The volume edited by Shweder and Good (2000) is undoubtedly an empathic treatment of Geertz’s work. Since his colleagues cover the span of his intellectual career from student to professional through diverse institutions, such as social relations at Harvard to anthropology at Chicago and the School of Social Science at the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton, in light of his eclectic interests in the humanities, social science, and Indonesian studies, it is easy to map out the diversity of interdisciplinary influences. As most people have profusely noted, the eclecticism of his philosophical background profoundly shaped almost all his writings until the end. What extraordinarily amazes is the diversity of other fields of expertise he managed to transform in his transition from the Parsonian era of social relations to the modernization debates of old societies and new nations, comparative studies of Islam and religion, and the culturology of the state, not to mention his many more interpretive turns. In light of the fact that his involvement in shaping “symbolic anthropology” constituted only a small part of a much wider range of research interests, it is somewhat ironic that his theory of culture is often referred to as classically anthropological, when it is probably more accurate to say his particular theory was an accretion of extra-anthropological concerns that filtered

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into his work from an early stage. Especially in the context of Geertz’s diverse interests, the attack on his literary method represents an exaggerated misreading of culture, even in anthropology. As all the essays in Shweder and Good (2005) amply demonstrate, it is easy to read into Geertz’s voluminous writings broader ramifications for cultural pluralism, ethical humanism, moral judgment, interpretivism of meaning, psychological symbolism, relativistic thought, historical time, social action, cultural communication, religion, societal trauma, cosmopolitan integration, and personhood. So little of his work is narrowly “anthropological,” so it is not really appropriate to describe his approach as such. Even a strict reading of his definition of culture could easily demonstrate how it might be applied to contexts beyond the ethnographic “field,” if this is what anthropology refers to primordially. While Geertz’s “local knowledge” is without doubt based on words, images, institutions, and behaviors (instead of formal theories), rooted a priori in culture as given, one should ask to what extent interpretation actually relies on native knowledge of those facts (vis-à-vis that of the analytical observer), especially in the construction of a cultural system. Taken at face value, it would appear that, in Geertz’s interpretive approach, native knowledge does not in fact necessarily account for much. This may not really affect the state of interpretation in psychology, philosophy, history, sociology, and other disciplines. Moreover, unlike Clifford’s “exceptionalism,” anthropology is not seen as different from any other social science. On the other hand, how is it possible to neglect, albeit benignly, how natives define their world, which is their basis of action and politics? The collection edited by Ortner (1999) also explores Geertz’s widespread influence across different disciplines but focuses more on what she terms the fate of “culture.” Despite Geertz’s prominent voice in the “interpretive turn,” there was little reason to view his approach as uniquely pathbreaking in this regard. Yet, one cannot say the same for his role in radically redefining the concept of culture, both inside and outside anthropology. Unlike the notion of ethnicity, which was a recent phenomenon, and hence object of gazing, in anthropology, the concept of culture had been synonymous with the long history of anthropology. There has been no shortage of efforts to define it, and even in light of Geertz’s eloquent ruminations, in this regard it would be accurate to say that such definitional debates will continue with no end in sight. What set Geertz apart from other theorists in this respect was the multidimensional concerns that conditioned his conceptualization and application of culture, which for authors in this volume, initially a special issue in Representations, made his brand of cultural analysis amenable to anthropology as well as literary writing, history, social action, and public media. His reflections on the cultural “system” were similarly the product of multidisciplinary conditions that were inherent to his specific definition of culture,

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which clearly distinguished it from other anthropological notions of system. The fact that religion, art, ideology, and so on could be perceived as cultural systems meant, of course, that this systematicity should not be confused with the institutions per se, as they were inherently defined. It was an interpretation par excellence. If anything, this systems teleology was more Parsonian by origin. The stricter focus here on Geertz’s explicit definition of culture seemed to privilege his later work relative to his early, more explicitly social scientific work, but Geertz’s neglect of practice, politics, and the changing state of the world became more manifest here as implicit critiques. Agency here serves as the intersection between meaning and power, while others have pointed to the impact of transnationalism in expanding Geertz’s understanding of culture beyond the local and the need to expand the conception of public culture to include mass media representation. The dialogue between the authors in this volume showed on the one hand that Geertz’s approach to culture resonated in other disciplines, but its anthropological commentators on the other hand tended to advocate its ongoing relevance to the real world as it changed. This latter appeal to actor agency (Ortner), complicity in the fieldwork process (Marcus), and the need for any thick description to compete with the power of institutionalized popular media in both the production and reception of culture (Abu-Lughod) all curiously shifted away from the interpretive turn (the authority of the anthropological gaze).33 Unlike Clifford’s Writing Culture, subjectivity here subtly accented that of the social actor, the relationship between the observer and observed, or institutions-at-large in which people and its culture were embedded. In contrast to the essays edited by Shweder and Good (2005), which deliberately extended the salience of Geertz’s work beyond disciplinary boundaries, and those edited by Ortner (1999), which attempted to filter the multidimensional aspects of culture in order to assess its relevance for anthropological understanding in general, the contributions edited by Alexander and colleagues (2011) claimed to rescue the culture concept from its anthropological “fate” through promotion of its “strong program” in cultural sociology. The collection’s preface and introduction reiterate the “neglect” of Geerz’s work by a later generation of anthropology that contrasts his widespread inspiration elsewhere, where his humanistic approach came under attack by postmodern and postcolonial criticism. The scope and structure of the essays reveal much about the appropriation by this brand of sociology of Geertz’s approach in terms of theory and culture. The editors openly proclaim that Geertz has played a distinctive role in the cultural turn, which includes Émile Durkheim, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Victor Turner, Mary Douglas, Roland Barthes, and Mikhail Bakhtin. Clearly, then, the focus of culture in this sense is essentially rooted in its search for meaning. Despite the superficial resemblance to symbolic anthropology, which

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endeavored to perceive culture as an autonomous system vis-à-vis other aspects of society and actually embraced a rather different roster of “theorists,” one also gets the impression that culture in sociology is tangibly defined in ways that do not really overlap with any school of symbolic anthropology. Postmodern and postcolonial critique may have influenced the nature and relevance of culture in anthropology, but the fact that the former can be casually dismissed by cultural sociology indicates that culture in sociology is still defined as functionally different from other aspects of society, while galvanized around a firm belief in the social scientific objectivity of theory. Cultural theory in sociology seems not only immune from attack on its authorial subjectivity but also less sensitive, if at all, to the cultural modernity of its theories and practices. The volume is then organized around Geertz’s hermeneutic interpretation, the semiotic nature of his cultural analysis, meaning as a cultural, system and the relevance of all the above for a distinctive approach to sociological theory and other disciplines, even scientific cultures. Toward the end, it becomes apparent that, in the context of this “strong program” in cultural sociology, Geertz’s approach ultimately represents a theoretical language for cultural study. As a language, Geertz’s semiotic interpretation of culture provided a concrete methodology that paralleled other meaning driven frameworks, which is what cultural sociology aspires to be. On the other hand, one might question whether Geertz’s role in cultural sociology mirrors his impact in symbolic anthropology. One can detect a curious aversion to political critique in current mainstreams of cultural sociology, which might explain why Geertz seems to be more welcome than British cultural studies, even Bourdieu. The division of labor within sociology that characterizes the distinctive nature of culture in cultural sociology also seems to be more functionally defined than in anthropology. As a theoretical movement, symbolic anthropology, especially of the Chicago school, was essentially fighting for autonomy as a systemic mode of analysis, especially vis-à-vis utilitarianism and British functionalism (which explains why Mary Douglas was not included within that school). The possibilities of reading combined with the delimiting of the discursive community have important ramifications for how and why certain concepts and theories are able to cross disciplinary boundaries. The concept of culture is an exemplary case in point. Despite their unrepresentational character, Geertz’s various writings on cultural interpretation have earned a reputation for their adaptability to be absorbed in different disciplinary niches, in addition to being a synthesis of symbolic meaning, social experience, and hermeneutic interpretation. This is a case not where diffusion was made possible by looseness in definition of the concept itself but rather where the very complexity of the culture concept involved a level of interpretation that could invoke multiple methods or have multidisciplinary consequences. In the end,

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the influence of Geertz’s approach to culture is extraordinary. Culture has always been defined and used by different practitioners in different fields, not to mention its uses in different cultures as well. In this regard, the transdisciplinary influence of Geertz’s approach is representative not of anthropological definitions overall but of his particular definition of it. At this point, one can also ask why politics has been curiously absent from discussions over authorial subjectivity and whether a cultural approach, either in symbolic anthropology or cultural sociology, is in fact immune from politics, either as critical reflexivity or systemic phenomenon. It has commonly been recognized that the culture in British cultural studies is defined more by identity politics than a pure concept of culture and used mainly as a critique of cultural hegemony instead of in the service of a general study of culture. In a similar vein, Bourdieu has promoted a critique of social domination and class value within his framework of practice but in ways that have been more compatible with anthropological cultural theory. If culture in the form of ethnicity, gender, thought, morality, class, religion, and so on in any society proves to be unavoidably politicized in fact, how can a theory of culture avoid politicization in its conception or practice? Geertz’s study of the “core symbols” that drive thick description really assumes a dimension of culturality that is able to transcend popularly mediated, and hence politicized, notions of “public” but cannot prove that the author, or polity, is immune from it. It is easy to show how seemingly pristine notions of culture that contribute to “civilization,” history, and law are in fact hegemonic constructions. Especially in the era of the modern state, they have become monuments of value and inventions of tradition. Even Geertz’s analysis of Negara, the theater state, raises the question, must it be politically neutral to qualify as “cultural”? In a different vein, Said’s critique of Orientalism has suggested that the politicized nature of this discourse and similar supporting mind-sets may be collusive agents of colonialism, even after the death of colonialism in fact. Even as it mutates into a more generic area studies, it has not been free of suspicion that it is in fact the product of the Cold War. Can theories characterized literally as cultural, such as “The Clash of Civilizations” and neo-Confucian models of Asian modernization, really be proven to be politically neutral? Geertz’s sophisticated deep play has undoubtedly elevated cultural interpretation to a higher level of cognitive standard, but his choice of symbols and the evaluative process of determining which ones are privileged or just core are not wholly free from the corrupting forces that influence culture in a public domain. Despite its absence in theoretical discourse, politics as a matter of context never disappears. Clifford’s critique of anthropology’s “authorial subjectivity” presents in the end problems of a different dimension. All social science theories have authors or can be viewed as such. If so, the crisis of “authority” should be general to all social sciences. Yet, why has anthropology been so devastated by such critique,

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while other disciplines seem relatively immune? I would argue that the thing that made the crisis of authorial subjectivity endemic to anthropology had little to do with the poverty of ethnography as writing genre per se, despite appearances to the contrary. At a deeper level, it had to do with certain sacred axioms that drive anthropology as a peculiar discipline vis-à-vis other social sciences. If anthropology was not taken for granted as being the study of other cultures, where the author is forced to “Orientalize” an intrinsically alien culture, I doubt whether the crisis of authorial subjectivity could assume the widespread impact that it did. Moreover, one of new ethnography’s correctives, namely dialogical texts and cooperative authorship with natives, takes for granted that the alien author requires native collaboration in order to make sense of culture and that ethnographic knowledge relies above all on “correct” factual description. That is to say, it is not necessarily the kind of interpretive project that Geertz and other symbolic anthropologists have taken cultural analysis to be. Behind the anthropological crisis of writing culture, then, are problematic assumptions: why should anthropology be by nature “the study of the other,” and who says that the study of culture is primarily a project of factual ethnographic description? Is anthropology necessarily “fieldwork”? Are they not the institutional axioms and practices that demarcate anthropology vis-à-vis the other social sciences? More importantly, where do these axiomatic assumptions derive their theoretical legitimacy? Clearly, the practices drive theory rather than vice versa, because they have the power to influence what concepts or theories are relevant to the overall community of discourse that defines its significance. This is what has made “writing culture” a theoretical problem in anthropology but not necessarily in other social scientific disciplines. In making culture a problem of writing, what does this say about social scientific “author-ity”?

Notes This chapter was first published as Allen Chun, “From Roots and Routes to Returns: Is There a History of Consciousness Here?” Boundary 2: A Journal of Postmodern Literature 42, no. 2 (2015): 161–76, but has been further revised and expanded to fit the broader themes in this book.  1. Clifford acknowledges that he cannot escape those structures of authority, too.  2. Despite its subtitle, the focus was on poetics, not politics.  3. Marcus and Cushman (1982) is a literature review. See also Marcus and Fischer (1986).  4. Clifford’s (1983) “On Ethnographic Authority” was later reprinted in Writing Culture.  5. By highlighting the role of the author, Clifford implicated the anthropologist’s subjectivity.

78  On the Geopragmatics of Anthropological Identification  6. I argue that, while Foucault’s critique of authority should be general to social science, Clifford’s critique is specific to an arbitrary definition of anthropology as study of the other and its fieldwork enterprise (Chun 2005: 535).  7. Griaule’s style was more precisely one of active, theatrical creation.  8. As Clifford puts it, intertextual dialogue produces “cultural translation and interference.” Some anthropologists view their work as cultural translation, which accents the literal nature of anthropology as a study of the other and downplays the tradition of anthropology as social scientific interpretation and theory.  9. As Hutnyk (2004: 24) put it: “When it comes to presentation of progressive postcolonial, post-exotic Others, Clifford’s text does not fall for any of the old ways of representing difference, his version of anthropological ventriloquy occurs through representing himself, and his predicament, through that of the other. That this is done on the basis of explicit self-reflexive post-structural high theory credentials may be all the more troublesome.” 10. Oxford Dictionaries Online, s.v. “theory,” accessed 23 September 2018, www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/theory. 11. Ethnographic writing has evolved from travelers’ accounts, missionary descriptions, and folklore analyses of various kinds, but this runs parallel to its evolution as academic discipline. 12. As Friedman (2002: 22) aptly criticizes, “Clifford is less concerned with the real social issue of displacement than with the metaphor of fixity or dwelling vs. movement.” I view Clifford’s ambivalence less in the way he tries to bridge roots and routes than in relation to the way he suggests culture-in-motion can serve to bridge the anthropologist in his movement toward theorizing and people’s boundary-crossing movements through culture. 13. It is no surprise that Appadurai’s characterization of disorganized capitalism as decentered, heterogeneous flows taking the form of scapes easily fits Clifford’s efforts at tradition and paradigm breaking. 14. Hutnyk (2004: 35) terms this “Fort Ross Mystifications.” One might also question to what extent Clifford’s intervention is influenced by a postapocalypse anxiety about the future, one that is disabling and/or complicit in a (neo)colonial anthropology, which unsurprisingly should invoke questions about Clifford’s underlying politics. 15. He adds, “Currently, the changes look more like realignments, recenterings.” 16. There is nothing particularly ethnic about diaspora, either. I argue that “if an ethnic group ceases to become diasporic, because it has transcended its socially marginal status, then there is nothing ethnic about diaspora” (Chun 2001: 100). Diaspora is a strategy engendered by a context of marginality, where one opts to articulate difference. 17. As Wang (1995: 13) pointed out, “I do not agree to the word diaspora being used for the Chinese because it has implications which may have applied to some aspects of the sojourners in the past but do not apply to ethnic Chinese today.” See also the discussion in the last section of chapter 2 in regard to subjective positioning. 18. Needless to say, there is a large critical literature on neoliberal developmentalism. 19. Giving marginal “between” places and voice a tactical centrality undermines, to be sure, the very notion of a center, but only as a discursive move, as an extension of his critical reflexivity.

The Predicament of James Clifford  79 20. See the Foundation’s announcement at Annenberg Foundation, “The Hopi Objects Repatriation,” accessed 23 September 2018. https://www.annenberg.org/ annenberg-now/hopi-objects-repatriation. 21. Clifford adds, “‘tradition’—site of thousand essentialisms—he must ‘wrench it open.’” 22. Clifford adds, “call this change, for short, the decentering of the West.” 23. He quotes Ezra Pound here, who said translation is “making it new.” 24. His aversion to any narrative closure and totalization remains unwaveringly the same. 25. In Oceania, kastom was a similar invention of colonial rule (see Keesing and Tonkinson 1982). 26. The work by Marcus and Fischer (1986) was also influential, especially in anthropology. 27. He fit the larger mind-set that Rabinow and Sullivan (1979) called “interpretive social science.” In the next section, I argue that his interpretive methodology was what prompted a Geertzian turn elsewhere. 28. According to Geertz (1974: 225), the relevant symbols are “words, images, institutions, behaviors—in terms of which, in each place, people actually represented themselves to themselves and to one another.” Moreover, these symbols need not be contextualized in the form of native discourse. This permits him to show, for example, that the concept of lek (which Geertz likens to “stage fright”) is expressive of the dramatic quality of Balinese personhood, while the concept of nisba (a syntactic transformation in Arabic of noun to adjective by means of suffix addition) articulates a different quality of cultural uniqueness in Moroccan life. In each case, “the native’s point of view” is an effort to synthesize the Other by giving credence to native concepts but within a framework of culture that derives its legitimacy ultimately from somewhere else (namely social scientific discourse). 29. The most prominent examples are Crapanzano (1980), Dwyer (1982), J.-P. Dumont (1978), and Tedlock (1983). 30. Perhaps the most comprehensive volume in this regard is Alexander and Seidman (1990). 31. Another example is perhaps Spencer (1989), who views anthropology as a kind of writing. 32. For present purposes, the clearest statement of his theoretical position is found in Bourdieu (1990). 33. As Abu-Lughod (1999: 128) put it, “anthropology for whom?” Geertz’s thick description was not “negotiated.”

Chapter 4

n Writing Theory

Rethinking the Emancipation of the Author from His Function

T

hose of us in the “social sciences” who take theory “seriously” have been taught to treat ideas as ideas. The history of theory is thus the history of ideas as they have evolved from or in contradistinction to other ideas. Some disciplines even have “classical” theory, a wellspring of concepts and analytical frameworks that have served to produce ones that are more contemporary. Theory may be seen as a special form of discourse in the sense that most authors appear to attach a firm degree of belief in the factual content of theory or theoretical explanation. At least, I do not know anyone who takes their theory seriously and would at the same time admit that it is a deliberate fiction or imagined narrative. On the contrary, I argue that theories in the first instance are precisely that: imagined relationships that are grounded in mind-sets and experiences, which are socially and historically constituted. Moreover, I maintain that these mind-sets and experiences are unconsciously constituted in the context of changing institutions that have directly conditioned the subjectivity of theorists as agents. Academics above all would like to think that their writing is “free” from strictures that define its form or content, but I think this is an illusion that has ramifications, most of all for “theory.”

Theory, Literarily Speaking: Authorial Subjectivity from Text to Context Meaning is just another name for expressed intention, knowledge just another name for true belief, but theory is not just another name for practice. It is the name for all the ways people have tried to stand outside practice in order to govern practice from without. Our thesis has been that no one can reach a

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position outside practice, that theorists should stop trying, and that the theoretical enterprise should therefore come to an end. — Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, “Against Theory”

It is strange to begin a chapter by hinting at its conclusions. It is doubly strange to cite a text that one fundamentally disagrees with, despite certain similarities at the level of “words.” Moreover, Knapp and Michaels (1982) deal with theory as a “special project” in literary criticism that has little relevance to the use of theory in the social sciences. Nonetheless, I deliberately invoke their conclusion to make a somewhat different argument about the nature of theory, literarily speaking. To extend an argument promoted largely by historians and literary critics, such as James Clifford and Edward Said, about anthropological and civilizational discourses, I think there is a reasonable basis for viewing any theoretical discourse as the product of literary imagination. It also seems relevant to problematize the nature of authorial subjectivity and its underlying politics. However, I think the status of theory, as a peculiar genre of writing made sacred in the social sciences generally, deserves to be equally scrutinized and problematized. In essence, theory is not just an act of writing; its boundaries of thinking can also be viewed as constrained by the institutional parameters that allow it to think. But the fundamental point is that the institutional parameters have been changing all along, and few observers have noticed how such changing institutions have actively and radically shaped the way in which theory is articulated and practiced. The subjectivity of the ethnographer, who was the prime object of gazing in Clifford’s critique of ethnography, is simplified by the role or function as writer he played in his social or historical context at the time. He was not at the outset necessarily a trained intellectual; in fact, many “classical” ethnographers were missionaries. His status and role dictated the degree to which his subjectivity could be viewed simply as an act of writing. Authorial subjectivity in a contemporary era, shaped not only by the disciplining of professional rituals of achievement and publication standards in writing but also by more diverse notions of the scope of the anthropological enterprise as a visibly recognizable field of inquiry, makes the whole notion of subjectivity a more complex issue. I would even say that the author-function is a secondary one, or one that must take into account the nature of the author as agent of or role player in a whole complex of institutions. Similarly, I argue that there is a fundamental difference in how social thought in the classical era, such as that of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, was articulated in reference to their own sociopolitical and intellectual context and how their work has been appropriated in the context of contemporary disciplines as “theory.” Theory can be discipline-specific as well as interdisciplinary, but it has always been “systematized” in ways that reflect its use or realm of possible meaning for a relevant niche or community of specialized readers.

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The history of anthropological theory, by most orthodox accounts, reads like a heroic narrative of rational progress: evolutionism versus utilitarianism, utilitarianism versus functionalism, functionalism versus structuralism, structuralism versus postmodernism and postcolonialism, and so on. Each stage of progress represents a more refined or different paradigmatic interpretation of sociocultural reality based on rereadings or redefinitions of previous theory. At face value, there are significant merits in viewing theoretical revolutions in these terms. Each important turn in anthropological theory and empirical method has revolved around reinterpretations of theoretical substance. For example, Claude Lévi-Strauss’s (1963) epistemological critique of utilitarian and functionalist theories in Totemism, written as an introduction to The Savage Mind, provided the basis for his structuralist theory of “the mind” as a framework of sociocultural analysis. Louis Dumont’s (1977) approach to the cultural principles of hierarchy and egalitarianism was buttressed by his later critique of latent individualism in Western social theory in From Mandeville to Marx: The Genesis and Triumph of Economic Ideology, and Marshall Sahlins’s (1976) rereadings of Durkheim and Marx in Culture and Practical Reason served to substantiate his own approach to symbolic anthropology. In each case, revision of previous theory has taken the form of an epistemological proof: only theories can beget other theories. Revisions of theory are important contributions to knowledge, but they appear to give primacy to the content of theory as the basis for paradigmatic breaks. We already know that the influence of classical “grand” theories has crossed into many disciplines, but it does not explain why certain disciplines appropriate particular theories in specific ways or why certain theories, despite their general applicability, are deemed relevant to some fields of inquiry and not to others. I take this up seriously toward the end of this chapter, but one must take seriously what content is in the first instance in order to show why it might then be seen as relevant or possible, given the axioms of a particular epistemic mind-set or disciplinary practice. For this purpose, I have chosen to focus primarily on Émile Durkheim’s work for two related reasons: (1) Durkheim’s concepts have, in anthropology at least, been sanctified by functionalist and culturalist theory, even though these readings of Durkheim are mutually incompatible; and (2) a literal comparison of Durkheim’s ([1902] 1933) The Division of Labor in Society and Foucault’s (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, two superficially incommensurable narratives of modernity, offers, in my opinion, an important insight into the nature of paradigmatic revolutions and their limitations in particular niches. The names most frequently cited as the leading figures of classical social theory are Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Émile Durkheim. Perhaps in stark contrast to Marx and Weber, whose distinctive styles of thought have engendered Marxist and Weberian “schools,” Durkheim’s influence in sociology and

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anthropology occupies a strangely sacred place in the canonical histories of the discipline. No matter how deeply one reads into it, Durkheim’s project was a constant obsession to prove the existence of society, generally speaking. As a result, few sociologists or anthropologists can claim to be non-Durkheimian; that is to say, they all seem to be guided by an irrefutable belief in the reality of “social facts.” It is perhaps out of redundancy that social scientists find little need to label themselves Durkheimian either. It is simply, to mimic one of Durkheim’s many famous phrases, a disciplinary fact sui generis. It is certainly not necessary to trace everything back to Durkheim. Yet, the legitimacy of classical theory has no doubt lent a certain air of authority to an entire complex of concepts and methods. Underlying the functionalist theory of social structure, for example, is not the legitimacy of its formal attributes as a model but rather the utility of a whole host of derivative subconcepts such as classificatory grids, segmentary lineage systems, liminality, and so on, which has made possible new domains of empirical study in fields ranging from kinship to religion. Different theories have prioritized different domains of social significance. The core issues thus revolve around the reality of society and how it is concretely defined. At this point, one must distinguish the reality of social facts as epistemological construct from those methodological constructs that social scientists use to explain the systematicity of society. For the most part, the different schools of interpretation that have resulted from the work of Durkheim are a function of diverse definitions as to what constitute the significant elements of “society” and how they supposedly engender a “system.” But this methodological factionalism is tied together by a shared belief in the epistemological reality of society, that is to say, in the unquestioned belief that there exists in all societies a body of things, which can be called social facts, as Durkheim put it. This unquestioned belief in the epistemological reality of social facts has given social science its unique air of authority as an intellectual project, as well as its disciplinary license to practice. The epistemological reality of social facts must be carefully distinguished from the notion of society as an all-embracing totality that is systemically engendered by social facts. The distinction between social facts (as things opposed to individualistic elements in a utilitarian sense) on the one hand and society (as that totality engendered by social facts) on the other is the precondition for viewing the relative autonomy of culture vis-à-vis social organization. Their methodological separation as objects of study has been a core feature of most schools of sociocultural theory (functionalism, structuralism).1 Talcott Parsons’s (1937) homage to Durkheim was explicitly articulated in his monumental book The Structure of Social Action, and Parsons’s focus on norms and values, as derived from Durkheim, Weber, and others, established the intellectual pillar for functionalist analysis in sociology. In anthropology,

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on the contrary, diverse schools of thought were established largely on radically different readings of the work of Durkheim. Clifford Geertz and David Schneider, albeit anthropologists by profession and major proponents of culturalist-symbolic anthropology, were both students of Parsons and developed theories of culture based largely on Parsons’s moral-ethical notion of values.2 The British school of functionalist anthropology, best epitomized by the work of A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, was based on Radcliffe-Brown’s concept of social structure, which generated studies of primitive kinship, notably in search of stratified segmentary lineage systems. The functional persuasiveness of Radcliffe-Brown’s (1948) theory of kinship based on the social structural paradigm of society popularized kinship as a “natural” methodological point of reference for the study of domains of social life from the economy to politics and religion. Radcliffe-Brown attributed his understanding of social structure to Durkheim’s ([1902] 1933) primordial theory of segmental and clan societies in The Division of Labor.3 Mary Douglas’s (1966) classic work on symbolism explicitly adopted Radcliffe-Brown’s functionalism by virtue of her application of classificatory social grids to the structure of symbolic meaning.4 In direct contrast to British functionalism, advocates of symbolic structuralism, best epitomized in the work of Lévi-Strauss, have essentially regarded structure as a symbolic rather than as a sociological construct. Being influenced by Ferdinand de Saussure’s argument regarding the arbitrariness of signs and symbolic systems, French structuralism has also been driven by an interpretation of Durkheim emphasizing the latter’s proof of the epistemological priority of symbols vis-à-vis social organization.5 To say the least, different schools of thought have drawn on different parts of Durkheim’s work. Generally speaking, the canonization of Durkheim by various functionalist, culturalist, and structuralist schools of thought differs significantly from the intellectual developments of Durkheim and his immediate disciples in several basic respects. First, later schools of social scientific thought had fully developed notions of culture and society as a “system,” and it is perhaps more accurate to say that these various interpretations of Durkheim’s work were mobilized instead at the service of “systems theory” in a way that contrasted sharply with the various ruminations about “total social fact” in a previous generation. These later synchronic, internally regulative notions of system were in many ways fundamentally incompatible with the evolutionary frame of analysis that drove most, if not all, of Durkheim’s work. Second, these highly developed notions of system represented the result of institutional developments in anthropology and sociology as new fields of inquiry with distinct identities and boundaries driven by novel axiomatic principles. These systemic notions and disciplinary practices were the same organizing principles that made possible social scientific appropriations of Marxist and Weberian theories. In other words, different theories grounded in the same discipline, despite

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explicit differences in content, can share common assumptions and systemic mind-sets. The emergence of systems theory in the diverse incarnations of social scientific thought subsequently devalued many aspects of Durkheim’s social paradigm that were prominent in all his writings, one of which was the moral dimension of social facts and Durkheim’s almost religious attitude regarding the sanctity of collective consciousness (as symbols or normative rules). While these differences did not detract from the contributions Durkheim made to sociocultural theory, they pointed rather to the larger parameters of institutional mind-set and practice that drove theory in actuality. From an authorial point of view, theory seems to make sense in content, but such contestation of meaning is situated within changing institutional regimes that frame in reality its significance. Thus, the invention of both classical and modern theory was a product of systems teleology as an evolving institution, not the imperative of reason, as though sui generis in nature. Later theory must then be a product of other regimes.

Theory as Narrative: The Birth of Society and the Norm from Durkheim to Foucault An assumption that drives the social “sciences,” notably anthropology and sociology, is a firm belief in their epistemological and methodological objectivity, or the sui generis nature of “social facts,” as Durkheim phrased it. However, objectivity here can refer to many things that have been confused in actuality. First, it refers to a belief in the inherent neutrality of its methodology of observation and modes of systemic analysis. Second, this neutrality is predicated on the assertion that its object of study is considered external to the observer. Ultimately, this sense of distance (between observer and observed) contributes to the sense of detachment (of the values of the observer from their own cultural milieu) that is necessary to the analysis.6 In this regard, it is interesting to note that functionalism has its “natural science of society” (as coined by Radcliffe-Brown) and that structuralism has its “science of the concrete” (as coined by Lévi-Strauss), both of which reiterate from different (if not opposing) methodological perspectives the same “gaze” that underscores all social scientific epistemologies. Moreover, I argue that the epistemological and methodological assertions that are essential to the social scientific enterprise, ideally stated as they are, are themselves based on a mythical narrative about the nature of “society” (as both external social facts and systemic reality). In other words, the sociological “imagination” is just that: a set of fictions whose hypothetical assertions have never been proven, except in other logical terms. In this regard, Michel Foucault’s impact is clear, especially when juxtaposed

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against classical sociological narratives of modern society, by showing how the scientific claims about society made in this “imagination” are themselves a peculiar historical-cultural product of a broadly defined Eurocentric modern imagination. From Foucault’s narrative of the birth of the social sciences as a function of modern society’s disciplinary will to power emerge the epistemic conditions that give rise to the curious illusion that culture and social organization (or ideology and praxis) are analytically distinct, when their fates are in fact intertwined. The notion that society exists in and of itself (independent of individualistic rational, calculating action) is a relatively recent discovery in the history of sociological thought. Just as modern sociology distinguished itself in contrast to other disciplines through its monopoly over what is now called the “sociological imagination,” anthropology was also no less founded in reaction to the anthropocentric illusion of humankind’s control over civilization (see, e.g., Mills 1959; White 1948).7 The extent to which Durkheim was able to sanctify the reality of society among individuals reflects the extent to which society as an analytical construct has become an unquestioned reality in the minds of social scientists.8 Viewed in this light, Durkheim’s works are in essence attempts to articulate a “myth” or ideological proof about the reality of society in opposition to what was the prevailing utilitarian rationale of the day. However, continued ambiguities in his definition of key concepts then paved the way for divergence in methodological terms as to what actually constituted the objectively real or significant descriptive units of analysis. Although The Division of Labor in Society was Durkheim’s ([1902] 1933) first major work, it has become quite apparent from the now voluminous secondary literature that there was already at the time of publication ample foundation in philosophy, psychology, and sociology for even his simplest assertions about the sui generis nature of social facts. Predominately because of the later influence of Parsons, Durkheim’s critique of utilitarian positivists such as Adam Smith and Herbert Spencer was accorded overdue emphasis in relation to other potentially significant frames of reference, but his persistent critique of methodological individualism, which served as the basis of defining the collective conscience in its various manifestations, was replicated in all his later works. Although social theorists all agree that The Division of Labor provided the foundation for Durkheim’s sociology, in its various manifestations, they rarely note that it, unlike his later works, was not based on “empirical” research. It was an evolutionary narrative of the emergence of individualized division of labor in modern society, which relied on concepts that were not substantiated by “facts.” It was a fiction, in the literary sense of it. The Division of Labor is essentially a book-length critique of utilitarian theory that can be divided into two aspects: an epistemological proof and a historical-empirical proof. The epistemological proof consisted of logical

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propositions that endeavored to justify the a priori nature of social rules vis-àvis individualistic wants. The historical-empirical proof was more an attempt to show, in the evolutionary scheme of things, that the division of labor as a social fact sui generis actually preceded the emergence of individualistic rational calculation. The social factors Durkheim used to rationalize the a priori existence of social rules (collective conscience as embodiment of moral sentiment) were not necessarily the same as those he invoked in his evolutionary argument (population change and material causality), and the epistemological rationalization was in the long run much more influential in inculcating the sociological imperative in the minds of later social theorists than the evolutionary argument ever was. If anything, the historical-empirical proof was flawed by undocumented facts, even though, by the standards of his day, it was not an atypical research thesis. Seen in this light, Foucault’s narrative of the birth of disciplinary society fills in many of the empirical lacunae. It is necessary to summarize here the core aspects of Durkheim’s critique. Utilitarian positivists claimed that the social division of labor was a rational outcome of individualistic desires to attain maximal fulfillment of material ends (i.e., “the happiness theory”). As an economically motivated strategy, such rational division of labor predicated that, under ideal conditions, individuals acted to attain maximum satisfaction of their goals, which became in turn the motor for increasing rationality in society. The a priori existence of individualistic enlightened self-interest and an inherent tendency to use rational means to attain one’s ends thus comprised the primary axioms of utilitarian social theory. Within this framework, social institutions were also the cumulative result of individualistic contracts. They acted to constrain and redirect individual efforts (by sanction and force) toward common social ends. In opposition to utilitarianism, Durkheim argued that social reality, as representative of the common good, determined a priori the course of individual actions. This prompted his assertion at the outset of The Division of Labor, which posited the objectivity of social facts sui generis. Parsons (1937: 352) correctly pointed out that Durkheim’s treatment of social facts as things had a double entendre. On the one hand, it provided a radical methodological framework for Durkheim’s “science of sociology,” where social phenomena were considered external to the sociological observer and analyzable in turn as objects of scientific study. On the other hand, these same social facts constituted a reality that was external to, and hence independent of, individual (subjective, self-interested) wants.9 In his attempt to demonstrate the objectivity of social facts sui generis, Durkheim asserted that individual wants were the consequence of socially predetermined needs, and not vice versa, thus giving rise to “individual” and “collective conscience,” which was defined as a set of commonly shared beliefs, sentiments, and rules. This latter set of socially defined rules and the moral authority invested within it constituted what Durkheim

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([1902] 1933: 189) aptly termed the “non-contractual elements in contract,” and it was precisely at this point that Durkheim’s paradigm of social reality met utilitarianism head-on. According to Durkheim, these noncontractual elements in contract, namely the moral authority imposed on the rules, beliefs, and sentiments embodied within the collective conscience, involved only an ad hoc conciliation of interests, which was greater than the sum of all contractual relationships made by all individuals in society. It predicated, not resulted from, the latter. According to his argument, individual wants were then an abstraction of concrete social needs, insofar as individuals in society were subject to the same system of implicit rules, values, and obligations instead of vice versa. The gist of his anti-utilitarian critique and sociological paradigm was articulated in logical terms. However, in order to “empirically” prove his logical argument, Durkheim had to show in hypothetical-historical terms how individualistic wants were created as a consequence of the functional division of labor, by growing out of autonomously evolving social institutions. The greater part of this book, then, was a narrative (myth) of how human society was governed by repressive law and characterized at a most primitive stage by mechanical solidarity, which he defined as a state of shared beliefs through (individual) likeness. Such an undifferentiated primitive society eventually gave way to a diverse stratified society, governed by restitutive law and characterized by organic solidarity, which unified society based on its inherent functional specialization. With the growing complexity of its institutions, individual wants became correspondingly more differentiated. In this regard, the main result of this societal evolution was not greater fragmentation of the social order but instead greater functional interdependence through greater individuation and, more importantly, the cognizance on the part of individuals of their dependence on social order, from which came the (moral) forces that kept people in check, in effect providing a solidarity stronger than in simple societies (Durkheim [1902] 1933: 401).10 This evolutionary narrative was a fiction, because it relied on a duality between what Durkheim and others at the time took for granted to be undifferentiated “primitive” societies and differentiated “complex” societies, for which he used hypothetical notions of mechanical and organic solidarity and abstracted imaginary notions of repressive and restitutive law. He cited no empirical examples to show that any of these social ideal types existed in reality, nor did he provide concrete historical data to substantiate his evolutionary claims for any society. Unlike his epistemological critique, which relied on interpretation of acknowledged facts, his historical-empirical argument relied on general beliefs and common knowledge of his time. The unfolding of Durkheim’s exposition of the historical evolution of the division of labor in society is obvious to most students of social science, even

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those who have not read the book. Nonetheless, this “empirical” proof merely served to complicate the “hypothetical” assertions put forth in his epistemological critique of utilitarian theory in ways that eventually exposed certain ambiguities in his use of key concepts. The foremost pertains to the concept of collective conscience. On the one hand, it refers to that set of socially determined and commonly shared beliefs, sentiments, and rules constitutive of the moral authority, which Durkheim argued was necessary for the maintenance of social solidarity. On the other hand, as should be apparent in his exposition of mechanical and organic solidarity, it refers to that consciousness that is directly reflected in the constitution of persons according to their mechanical likeness or organic diversity. In the latter sense, collective conscience obviously refers then to the moral collectivism of mechanical solidarity, which was replaced later by the moral individualism of organic solidarity. But in order for his “sociologic” to be generally valid, it was necessary for him to show in a society, regardless of its structural constitution, what kinds of institutions embodied those commonly shared beliefs and sentiments, which he claimed contributed to social solidarity. In The Division of Labor, it is clear that repressive and restitutive law, within their respective societal types, could conceivably embody those “non-contractual elements in contracts” that were constitutive of a higher moral authority, but many other things in principle could have served this same moral function. In fact, Durkheim had no precise definition for a social fact or institution. That is to say, it could refer to any set of sentiments and beliefs that led to social solidarity, as long as it was not based on utilitarian self-interest.11 At least at this stage of his work, the concept of the “social” was for Durkheim a residual category (by its opposition to the “individual”).12 This “definitional” problem was ironically what obsessed him in all later works, from Suicide ([1930] 1951) to the study of religion. Another ambiguous concept was Durkheim’s notion of solidarity. His definition depended to some extent on how he defined collective conscience. On the one hand, it could refer to a solidarity relationship between persons (e.g., conjugal solidarity), but this was a secondary usage. On the other hand, it tended to refer more often to the individual’s commitment toward morally defined ends. This relationship of solidarity (with the collective conscience as moral good) was hence a social contract, between not individuals but rather an individual and society. After all, a solidary relationship with the individual conscience was a utilitarian contract and not what Durkheim had in mind. While Durkheim was able to argue in logical terms that individuals were abstractions of concrete social institutions within which they were situated, this was analytically distinct from his tendency to view the individual as a methodological point of reference for social solidarity. Durkheim’s emphasis on solidarity as the strength of one’s moral commitment to society (rather than to others) explains why he had at best an embryonic notion of society

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as a coherent system and how he differed from later social theorists who were obsessed with social systems and structures.13 This commitment or moral respect for the social good was an explicit, not simply an implicit, aspect of his critique of utilitarian individualism. Given his evolutionary frame of analysis, social institutions were continually changing, but these events did not contribute to social solidarity, as he understood it in a primordial sense. In this regard, the difference between Durkheim and latter-day social theory should be more radical than contemporary scholars have acknowledged so far. In sum, the text can be read in many ways, but usually as a function of different axiomatic principles. In short, one can say that there are two faces in The Division of Labor. First, the epistemological priority of maintaining moral authority (as the embodiment of a collective conscience) in the face of utilitarian self-interest was a prerequisite for bringing about social solidarity. Second, the evolutionary priority of social facts over individualist ones was the rationale underlying his narrative account of the emergence of modern society that also gave birth to individualism. The first of the two critiques of utilitarian theory was more consistent with his sociological approach.14 Among other things, it explains how all his subsequent works constituted sustained attempts to specify in empirical terms the possible manifestations of social facts and institutions (i.e., altruistic norms in Suicide, sacred symbols in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, moral norms in ethics and educational discipline).15 In the end, readings of theoretical texts do not even have to be the “right” ones. This is certainly the case for latter-day reinterpretations of The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Durkheim’s (1915) supposedly more mature work. Rereadings of this text laid the basis for functionalists and structuralists alike to put forward mutually opposed theories of society (for anti-functionalist readings, see esp. Needham 1969: xxvii; Sahlins 1976: 117). It became an arena for advancing “social” vis-à-vis “symbolic” theories of society, even though Durkheim’s distinction between sacred and profane was used to contrast moral versus utilitarian attitudes and to show how religion, as the realm of the sacred, was above explanation in physical, economic, or psychological terms, that is, it had to be a social fact sui generis.16 As a social fact sui generis, religion engendered a set of commonly shared beliefs and sentiments that contributed to the sacredness of symbols and representations, which was closer to what Radcliffe-Brown (1948) termed “ritual attitude” (of respect).17 As we know from the polemic debates regarding The Elementary Forms, the effort Durkheim made to conclude that the system of collective representations was identical with its social organization in terms of clans and tribes merely allowed different schools of thought to interpret this equivalence in different ways.18 The difference between collective representations and collective conscience, totem and clan, religion and law, and so on, was less a difference

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between moral vis-à-vis social value (in Durkheim’s original formulation) than one of analytical perspective. In other words, they are different terms for different people. In this regard, the sociological approach, accenting notions such as clan, tribe, and social organization, is an objective reality only in the mind of the analytical observer, while the symbolic approach is one that reflects the reality of native constructions and understandings of meaning.19 These readings do not exhaust all the possibilities of text or address the problem of what Durkheim really meant to say, but I note the different readings mainly to highlight the discursive space they are grounded in. Foucault was no social scientist, much less a Durkheimian. At face value, Foucault’s work was a blunt rejection of both the sociologism and scientism of modern social science. His refusal to spell out in theoretical terms a methodology or explanatory framework for the general study of “other places” and “other times” is well known. In works such as The Order of Things (1971) and Discipline and Punish (1977), he argued that the notions on which social scientists relied for their objective methodology, namely ideology, structure, and power, were in fact peculiar historical products of a modern mentality. The same could be said about the notion of society, as understood by social scientists, in turn raising serious doubts about the latter’s epistemological claims over the meaning of social institutions and cultural practices. Thus, a detailed comparison of Durkheim’s and Foucault’s narratives is worth careful scrutiny. In order to properly situate Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison in relation to the foregoing themes, one should point out that Durkheim and Foucault were concerned with the same general problematic, namely the evolution of modern society and rational ideology, and both created narratives to explain the nature of that transformation. For Durkheim, the concrete agenda was one of explaining the birth of individualism, which necessitated explaining the role of the division of labor in society. Durkheim then argued that rational individualism was the product of social change rather than vice versa. For Foucault, the concrete agenda was one of explaining the birth of structuration in modern society, which constituted for him a dual process of totalization and individuation. This was reflected in the historical evolution of criminal treatment from a regime of torture to a generalized system of punishment that slowly diffused throughout society. In this narrative, Foucault showed how the ideology and structure of discipline in modern society was the product of change at the level of social-institutional practice. Both narratives reflect in many respects mirror images. In the context of Foucault’s other writings, Discipline and Punish could be seen as an extension of an ongoing concern to understand the birth of human sciences, or structuralism, broadly conceived, in the history of thought. His methodological emphasis on genealogy represented a breakthrough vis-à-vis his archaeology of knowledge, insofar as it located the production

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and distribution of knowledge in the institutional locus of social practice rather than the field of pure ideological discourse. As pointed out previously, Durkheim’s definition of social facts meant different things to different people, and this ambiguity gave rise to many versions of contemporary social theory. Yet, one primordial aspect of social facts in The Division of Labor was neglected by later social scientists and ironically mirrored the kind of locus that Foucault inevitably placed on social-institutional practices. This aspect of The Division of Labor involved the birth of societal institutions, such as from repressive law to restitutive law. Durkheim was not able to document persuasively how such institutions evolved historically, except to say they were part of the overall evolution that gave birth to the division of labor, which in this case meant the change from a mechanical, less differentiated society to an organically solidary one. In other words, in the case of law or religion, institutions changed not as a function of changing theories or changing ideologies of religion. They were the end result of changes occurring at a global social level, the latter of which being sui generis. Since Durkheim offered no convincing theory of social change, a later generation of social theorists recognized this as the weakest part of his overall argument. More importantly, this clear weakness in Durkheim’s narrative can be seen as the explicit concern of the evolutionary narrative articulated in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. Another significant parallel concern for Durkheim and Foucault involves Durkheim’s emphasis on the moral foundations of social institutions. All social facts were, according to Durkheim, moral insofar as they represented social values and were not products of utilitarian self-interest. Durkheim reiterated in all his works that his sociology was essentially a science of moral facts. As such, social solidarity and social integration for Durkheim were ultimately the sum coercive force exerted by moral institutions in society, such as law, religion, family, school, workplace, and community. The degree to which these moral institutions reflected the power of society was in turn a function of the obligatory nature of normative rules that bound the individual to institutions or the collectivity.20 The parallels with Foucault are instructive. In effect, Foucault’s work filled in those unresolved and unquestioned areas of analysis opened up by Durkheim’s moral definition of society. The first involves the nature of moral obligation, as engendered by the individual’s commitment to social solidarity. For Durkheim, the irreducibility of morality, especially in the case of religion, was governed by a tautology. As he put it, the obligatory character of moral rules derived from the fact that the acts they forbid were forbidden. Similarly, the sacredness of religion epitomized moral authority, just because it was socially obligatory or beyond question in utilitarian terms.21 This tautological and unquestioned belief in society, then, was what underscored the individual’s commitment to moral authority as a necessary

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precondition for social solidarity. Second, one finds that the historicity of the division of labor was governed by a similar tautology about the supposedly sui generis nature of social facts. Both tautologies take the form of axioms, and it is in the unquestioned nature of these axioms that one discovers the root of sociological rationalism. But at the root of Durkheim’s tautologies, one finds the basis of Foucault’s knowledge/power. In essence, this unquestioned set of assertions about moral obligation that underscored Durkheim’s teleology of society was the explicit domain of what Foucault neatly termed the microphysics of power.22 For Foucault, the obligatory, binding power that Durkheim claimed was at the heart of moral institutions was first clearly located in the practices themselves. A history of moral institutions (of the kind that prompted Durkheim’s sociology) was for Foucault reflected clearly in the evolution of the various technologies of power that formed his narrative account of disciplinary society. In modern society, the binding force of discipline was applied throughout the body social in the practice of institutions, such as the workplace, school, family, and hospital. As Foucault put it (quoted in Morris and Patton 1979: 65–66): The apparatus of sequestration fixes individuals to the production apparatus by producing habits by means of a play of compulsions, teachings, and punishments. This apparatus must manufacture a behavior that characterizes individuals, it must create a nexus of habits through which the social “belongingness” of individuals to a society is defined, that is, it manufactures something like norms … . It is there that Durkheim will find the subject matter of sociology in which he says that what constitutes the social as such—in opposition to the political, that is, the level of decisions, and the economic, which is the level of determination—is nothing but the system of disciplinings, through which power works but only insofar as it conceals itself and presents itself as the reality.

At a historical-descriptive level, the framework of Foucault’s evolutionary narrative is clear. The evolution of punitive mechanisms from a regime of torture to one of punishment represented a transformation of an entire technology of power. In methodological terms, this technology could not be simply reduced to theories of law or identified solely with apparatuses or institutions, strictly speaking, and they were not the result of moral choices alone. These theories, institutions, and moral choices formed different modalities according to which the authority to torture, punish, or discipline was exercised. As technologies of power, they were embedded within the practices themselves. As with Durkheim’s social facts, these modalities and technologies of power were not isolated phenomena. Changes in the overt ritual nature of these concrete practices (from a public spectacle to that of self-contained supervision) paralleled or reflected changes in the larger social environment. The spectacle and art of torture corresponded largely with the authority of kingship and notions of property and ceremony subsumed therein. This evolution represented

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a strange displacement of visible social power ultimately to the hidden normativity of individual thought and action. Foucault’s approach, in situating power at the descriptive-historical level of institutional practices, enabled him to point out the effects of their systemic distribution, not only among individuals but also as a body of knowledge that was created to maintain the system. Thus, the sociology that Durkheim advocated became for Foucault a product of these moral practices, as well as the discourse that grounded, analyzed, and specified the norms whereby such practices became prescriptive. By viewing discipline as “a political economy of detail,” as Foucault (1977: 139) put it, and not just a moral institution, the individual was in Foucault’s narrative the fictitious atom of an “ideological” representation of society, as well as a reality created by technologies of power. The negative sanctions of Durkheim’s external constraint and moral obligation took on positive functions: “It produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production” (Foucault 1977: 194).23 Discipline was thus a “social” concern that was not so in the past. It was a cultural mechanism by which modern society constituted social solidarity. In Foucault’s narrative, the notions of culture and social structure that latter-day social scientists take for granted as the constitution of societies in general is in essence a modern invention, making the human sciences unwitting tools of a political theory of violence. Even if one does not accept Foucault’s political reading, it is clear that culture, as “the autonomous play of representation,” and social structure, as “a totalizing process of individuation,” are not concepts that objectify the modern experience and the theories built on them. I think it is also possible to examine these and other notions within the context of specific intellectual disciplines, as institutions of practice. Just as theories of law can be seen as the product both of a changing body social (and its attendant ritual institutions) and of diverse local level institutional micropractices that have given rise to a whole complex of routines and behaviors, of which law is a codification or attempt to administer a certain kind of order, social scientific theories can also be viewed as an engagement with the disciplinary institutions within which they are situated. Insofar as knowledge is seen to play a role in stating, codifying, educating, publicly prescribing, or critiquing some aspect of the society or state in which it is embedded, its content and form must thus reflect to some extent the underlying experiences to which it makes reference and constitutes itself. As knowledge, disciplines can differentiate themselves according to specialized institutional functions. The axioms that delineate their boundaries, drive their central beliefs, and regulate their internal system of ideas must at the same time condition how theories appropriate ideas and shape themselves. Especially in this era of “grand theory” and beyond, one can easily recognize the interdisciplinary influence of certain

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theories, whether they are classical or postclassical, across different places and intellectual niches. However, we have generally viewed such specialist interpretations as niche revisions of content rather than as a result of differential disciplinary appropriation or accommodation.

The Limits of Imaginative Discourse within the Boundaries of Disciplinary Practices Foucault’s depiction of the emergence of disciplinary institutions and discourses gives a clear idea of how knowledge constitutes a regime of mind-sets and practices. One can see in what sense institutional mind-sets and practices constitute unconscious processes that become generally diffused over various domains. Yet, at the same time, specific discursive institutions (of the kind that differentiates our intellectual disciplines) can be understood as constituting individualized regimes that distinguish different intellectual mind-sets and practices. In this sense, sociological and anthropological theories differ in terms not only of ideational content but also of how provincial disciplinary mind-sets and practices frame epistemological relevance and concretize objects and fields of inquiry. I shall follow up on this theme later. Theory, by any definition of it, has always been born out of social reality. Its content and forms have always been to some extent derived from attempts to codify experience. Its internal structures simulate if not recreate epistemic paradigms from a realm of possibilities already defined by its specialized community of practitioners (communicative producers and consumers). What the social sciences generally recognize as classical social theory (Marx, Weber, Durkheim, among others) began in fact as systematic attempts to critically assess the nature of social experiences that dominated the world in which they lived, namely capitalism, modernity, and rationality. In this regard, modern theories are not theories of modernity per se but rather social theories that mimicked to some extent the underlying structure and axioms of modern experience in their codification of the world. The era of grand theory, as I define it here, was thus a certain period of high intellectual modernity, which understood theory as a neutral (disinterested) set of generally applicable principles. It sanctified an era of thought as “classical” by stripping its reference to its concrete experiential context and systematizing its unique epistemological or methodological approach to things as a broadly applicable set of ideas. In other words, we remember classical theory not as an interpretation of a particular time or place but rather as a primordial set of notions that became “systematically” refined by later thinkers. As such, all sociological and culturological theories are in effect modern, even though they are certainly not limited to the study of modernity. The idea that theory can take on a detached

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subjectivity is not unlike Foucault’s archaeology of the human sciences, where the radical cognizance of man’s external reality parallels the evolution of systemic paradigms. What modern theory is in fact is still open to interpretation. Foucault’s understanding of the human sciences is a broadly conceived one whose temporality and boundedness may be difficult to ascertain in precise terms. It also encompasses but does not attempt to differentiate specialized disciplines according to their peculiar or distinctive features. Yet, one consequence of Foucault’s work was that it helped to spawn recognition of something called postmodern theory. In light of how I defined modern theory (a redundant term to say the least), postmodern theory refers, then, to some extent to theories that are critical of theories they regard as being (uncritically or unconsciously) embedded in modern values. There are many versions of postmodern theory, and Foucault can hardly be called the first postmodern theorist, but postmodern theory has unique traits deriving directly from Foucauldian critique. One obvious consequence of a postmodern critique of theory has been an overt emphasis on viewing knowledge or ideology as discourse. With discourse came the idea that knowledge was a literary genre with distinctive form-functions, an intentional act of writing that invoked the subjectivity of an author, or an objectifying project of gazing engendered by the moral regulation of socializing or politicizing institutions. Knowledge was not neutral or disinterested, by such accounts, although the continued belief in theory, at least within certain disciplinary circles, persisted largely unscathed, subject to various modifications. Clifford’s (1983) attack on “ethnographic authority” was first viewed as a postmodern critique of anthropology, in the sense of exposing aspects of its methodology and writing as discursive acts.24 Ethnography not only effaced the Other by muting indigenous voices, from whom data was actually collected and then dissected, systematized, and reconstituted; it also tried to consciously efface the presence of the authorial subject in the act of writing, replacing it with seemingly value-free (neutral) modes of observation, techniques of analysis, and genres of description that epitomized its objective project. In its will to neutrality, the ethnographic endeavor as a whole contributed to the illusion that the people and local society were actually speaking for themselves. Clifford advocated multivocality as an alternative corrective to this. In chapter 3, I criticized Clifford’s new ethnography not for its general flaws in its argument about authorial subjectivity but instead for its failure to recognize the peculiar nature of anthropological subjectivity, vis-à-vis other disciplines. The fact that anthropology is by textbook definition “the study of other cultures” should have in principle problematized the competence of any alien anthropologist to understand a culture (without prior knowledge of its language, history, and locality). By comparison, cultural sociologists and

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cultural studies scholars (who typically study more familiar societies) seem relatively immune to this critique. In principle, all theories have authors. In addition to flawed epistemes, which was the brunt of Foucault’s (1971) earlier critique of the “human sciences,” there is no reason why authorial subjectivity of any kind could not be problematized, especially given the birth of institutional disciplines in modern academia and the way in which boundaries and mind-sets have in fact been galvanized and policed. If anything, these practices and theories have hardened in time.

Unthinking the Disciplines: Steps toward an Ecology of Practice Immanuel Wallerstein’s ([1991] 2001: xii) call to “unthink social science” was based on his contention that nineteenth-century social science, “once considered liberating of the spirit, serves today as the central intellectual barrier to useful analysis of the social world.” Briefly stated, the intellectual division of labor that created the social science disciplines was largely institutionalized and maintained by the dominant liberal ideology of the nineteenth century that reflected the separate domains of state and market and their particular logics. The specific concepts that emerged in these fields of inquiry were themselves the products of a complex social and political economy that ultimately informed the vision of a historically based world systems analysis that Wallerstein now promotes as an intellectual remedy for this prison house of social science. In many regards, the dilemma of the disciplines and interdisciplinary theory is aptly encoded in observations made by Wallerstein and Foucault, albeit in different terms. We recognize that the disciplines are themselves the product of unique or autonomous institutional developments, and we recognize that the forms of such knowledge, at least in broad terms, have emerged as a result of interaction with those institutional developments, yet we largely continue in our own intellectual histories or theoretical debates to understand the concepts of resultant theories simply in terms of their inherent content, without reference to how those concepts are selectively constrained and molded by underlying institutional boundaries and axioms of practice. Up to this point, I have shown that theories can, of course, be understood in terms of content, not so much as truth propositions but rather as imagined discourses that have direct reference to historically constituted social experience. Moreover, I argue that the relevance of specific concepts in any theory is already predicated by boundaries of acceptability and practice that define the specific community of discourse in which practitioners read, write, and otherwise participate. Theory “travels” from one context or discipline to another, but the conditions of its use should be seen not just as the product of “revision,” as though of substantive content

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alone, but more importantly as a function of reception, appropriation, and accommodation in terms of how certain inherent axiomatic principles regulate the boundaries and standards of discourse within which theory becomes contextualized. Under the umbrella that perpetrates the illusion of interdisciplinary theories and all-embracing intellectual movements such as classical social theory, postmodernism, and postcolonialism is the fact that diverse disciplines have always appropriated different theories in different ways. The rigidity of disciplinary boundaries in the present should serve as an apt framework for decoding these different modes of conceptual selectivity and accommodation. Classical social theory will continue to be an object of detailed scrutiny, with goals of authenticating roots. However, quite apart from the traditions of intellectual inquiry that have emerged and spawned Marxist, Weberian, and Durkheimian scholarship, the way in which a later generation of social scientists has classed them into classical social theory represents a radical mode of appropriation that must be viewed in the context of disciplinary mind-sets. In terms of systems teleology, anthropology and sociology have many similarities in how they have appropriated various theoretical traditions, but there are also significant differences. Contrary to the ways in which sociologists have addressed Marxist and Weberian issues in reference to the concrete historical and social contexts in which they have developed initially and presumably continue to have bearing, anthropologists have generally developed their models by stripping them of their intrinsic Eurocentric origins and adapting them in ways that can be applicable to all human societies. Marxism has in this sense become a fulcrum for conceptualizing general models of political economy, while Weberianism has been used to assess the general function of cultural values in spurring economic development, especially in premodern, non-Western societies. In each case, one might say that theoretical “revision” has also been guided by underlying axiomatic principles that define and guide the identity and parameters of the discipline. In order for any theory to be “relevant,” it must be to some extent sensitive to the underlying value system, in this case anthropology’s project of cross-cultural comparison or applicability. Moreover, there should be many such axioms. This chapter’s point is not to dwell on all the possible axioms that drive or regulate anthropology, except to say that few if any observers have attempted to locate the relevance, appropriation, and mutability of theory in such terms. Since anthropology as both institutional regime and underlying axioms of practice has been changing, I argue that, at different points in this evolution, anthropology has engaged with various theories in ways that have relatively little to do with the truth propositions of these concepts. In my reading of Durkheim, I went to great lengths to spell out the actual divergences in contemporary readings from its original meaning, partly to show that these interpretations did not really exhaust the realm of possible readings. Theories can

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be appropriated differently in different disciplines, even to the point of being mutually incompatible, but this appropriation takes place within a presumed mind-set or practice. In other words, the limiting factor is the boundaries of the discursive community within which appropriation is situated. Selectivity here follows as a function of relevance. While cultural or symbolic approaches in anthropology have generally been attacked by “postmodern” critiques on their authority for being conservative or “hegemonic,” they have at the same time become the object of postmodern and postcolonial reinterpretation in other disciplines. How else can one explain the Durkheimian renaissance in cultural sociology (Alexander 1988), or politically radical uses of (anthropological notions of) culture in critical pedagogy (McLaren 1999)? I deliberately raise these incongruous examples merely to suggest that much more than the force of ideas drives the development of theory in any discipline: the internal dynamics of the discipline itself. The systematicity of any body of ideas may be what makes any theory what it is, but the formative parameters of the field are what drive the discipline, which in turn enables theory as a body of ideas to make itself successfully relevant to the parameters of that field. Theory often travels from one discipline to another and in the process mutates, but cases of mutation unconsciously passed off as diffusion are much more common than we care to acknowledge. We all know that Said adopted Foucault’s notion of discourse, but the politics of identity underlying Said’s critical revision of Orientalism is inherently un-Foucauldian. Similarly, we know that governmentality is Foucauldian, but creating a science of governmentality to demarcate and regulate cultural practice would have been contrary to Foucault. Revision is the norm of disciplinary practice. The axioms that drive anthropology are not limited to textbook definitions, which may, of course, change. Anthropologists, for better or worse, have typically viewed themselves as the keepers of culture (as a concept). One can hardly imagine anthropology not being the study of culture, for all kinds of reasons. We also know that, despite a century of ruminating about the nature of culture, anthropologists still do not agree as to what it is. They can often detect which notions of culture are not acceptable as scholarly anthropological definitions, but they have a much harder time specifying what these standards are or why there should be any neutral standard. Moreover, nothing seems more irritating to anthropologists than to extol the virtues of “cultural studies,” as though to suggest that “they” were the first to study culture. Cultural studies, especially of the Birmingham school, which has dominated the use of the term in most scholarly circles, has to its credit established itself into an identifiable field of inquiry with an equally explicit theoretical agenda. Yet, for anthropologists, little about cultural studies seems “cultural.” We know that what is usually subsumed within the rubric of cultural studies is

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not everything under the sun. We tend to see more attention to contemporary cultures and less on premodern or even prehistoric cultures. Thus, an esoteric New Guinea cult would excite cultural studies less than a Madonna pop cult. Film and media scholars tend to be more welcomed in cultural studies than are art historians. Much of this has to do with the class critique of elitist European notions of culture that subsequently shifted the focus of empirical attention to subcultures, mass cultures, or just working-class culture and favored social practices over pure ideological value. The boundaries of this epistemological critique opened up new avenues of investigation but at the same time delineated the limits of acceptable discourses and methodologies. From the perspective of anthropology, it is evident why the culture in cultural studies is unavoidably Eurocentric, yet one can turn the tables and ask, what makes anthropologists think that there should or must be neutral notions of culture that can transcend provincial limitations of any particular culture or enable anthropologists as analysts of culture to assess societal beliefs and practices cross-culturally? The axiomatic fictions that drive anthropology as a discipline are no different from the social imagination that gave birth to sociology, except that I find little theoretical justification for many of these axioms other than that they just happen to be overall products of the professional evolution of anthropology as a set of disciplinary practices and mind-sets. I also see no reason why other disciplines are any different. Would the field of literature exist or even make sense without any notion of authorial subjectivity? If authorial subjectivity and intention are so taken for granted in literary creation, then one can easily understand why any direct attack on such notions of authorial identity might not be very welcome. This is akin to saying to sociologists that society does not exist or to anthropologists that a cross-cultural understanding of culture is an illusion. If theory is fictive, then how real are institutions? The achievement of British cultural studies is not really that it developed a new notion of culture or theory per se for the study of culture but that it effectively institutionalized the new fields of inquiry that emerged from its critique of literary culture. The predominance of media studies and popular literature in cultural studies reflected its emphasis on a wider mass culture or public sensibility. The methodology by which culture was analyzed followed as a function of how the epistemological parameters of the discipline defined and prioritized its object of study. In this sense, disciplines function and demarcate themselves as “schools of thought.” This is one aspect of the disciplinary divide. However, with the rise of Research Assessment Exercises25 and other pressures of academic neoliberalism, one can also increasingly witness, in Foucauldian terms, the institutional disciplining that has hardened the boundaries of existing disciplines as institutional facts sui generis. This is the other, stricter aspect of the disciplinary divide.26

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The interdisciplinary nature of cultural studies, like broad-based intellectual currents in postmodern and postcolonial theories, has led some observers to advocate interdisciplinary initiatives per se as the simple solution to the hardening institutionalization of the disciplines. But what are the limits of interdisciplinarization per se? British cultural studies, not unlike the notion of anthropology as a multivalent and synthetic social science, tends to view itself as inherently interdisciplinary. However, this interdisciplinary facade disguises the fact that it is a field of inquiry that privileges particular empirical domains of investigation and particular modes of analysis and political perspectives. Even the hope of attempting to develop a more broad-based cultural studies that is socially critical, symbolically imaginative, and humanistic would seem to be a tall order. On the other hand, despite the influence of broad intellectual currents such as postmodernity, postcolonialism, and transnationalism, which have shaped the theoretical terrain in many fields, I would argue that the actual effect of such theorization at the “local” disciplinary level has been mostly polyphonic and not necessarily harmonious. It is probably not productive in the long run to continue grouping theories or schools of thought as part of broader intellectual movements, aside from the commonly acknowledged wisdom that labels mean little. The universalizing virtues of theory, in the form of an all-embracing cultural studies, postmodern theory, or postcolonial critique, all reveal at a deeper level the staying power and provinciality of institutional disciplines and their communities of discourse. It is possible for us, as thinking and practicing subjects, to synthesize in our own discursive spaces the framework for interdisciplinary approaches that are more constructive. However, this still disguises the fact that institutional spaces represent repressive or counterproductive forces that impede change. In order to “unthink” the disciplines, to extend Wallerstein’s line of thought, it is necessary to first see how disciplines “think” and how disciplinary mind-sets are rooted in specific regimes of methodological practice. As an anthropologist, I still cling to the fiction that culture must be broadly applicable; theory and disciplinary values are interlinked.

Notes This is a rewritten version of Allen Chun, “Writing Theory: Steps toward an Ecology of Practice,” Anthropological Theory 5, no. 4 (2005): 515–41. Despite common recognition that discourses are products of institutional practice, the history of theory in social science continues to be viewed as bounded entities whose meaning must be read as face value.   1. In the social sciences, Bourdieu’s approach is a major exception in this regard, but the dualistic opposition that emerged between “materialistic” and “ideological” aspects of society (superstructure vs. base, culture vs. social organization) is largely the

102  On the Geopragmatics of Anthropological Identification result of reinterpretations of classical theory. Alexander (1990: 3) phrased it aptly in heralding the importance of culture in sociological studies when he noted, “to this day, for example, the opponents of mechanism have defended a subjective approach by maintaining that culture has at least a relative ‘autonomy’ vis-à-vis more materialistic forms.” Schools of sociology built on Marxist as well as non-Marxist (mostly functionalist in the mode of Parsons) traditions have been predicated on such core definitions. In anthropology, the emergence of culture as a focus of anthropological theory has primarily been the influence of Geertz (1973a), Schneider (1980), and Sahlins (1976), all of whom have advocated the autonomy of culture as an object of study. Ironically, the Marxist influence that spawned “cultural studies” in the United Kingdom, as developed by Stuart Hall (1980), William Hoggart, Raymond Williams, and E. P. Thompson, has advocated less the autonomy of culture than its integration within a mode of production.   2. Dumont ([1966] 1980), a student of Lévi-Strauss who was trained in French structuralist anthropology, also attributes his concept of ideology to Parsons’s concept of value.   3. Kuper (1985: 235) argues that, in his analysis of totemism, Durkheim’s theory of kinship had already been shaped heavily by the sociological approach to religion practiced by Robertson Smith and others, in effect suggesting a direct line of descent to Radcliffe-Brown, who formalized it.   4. Fardon (1987) argues in this regard that Douglas was accurately a “faithful disciple” of Durkheim through her application of the principle of social morphology to the study of symbols.   5. In his introduction to Durkheim and Mauss’s Primitive Classification, Needham (1969) advocates the a priori, sui generis existence of intellectual categories over social ones, despite Durkheim and Mauss’s rhetoric to the contrary. Sahlins (1976) reiterates Needham’s position and draws parallels in Durkheim’s more mature work The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life.   6. This latter point was articulated most clearly perhaps by Todorov (1988).   7. Other authorities such as Alfred Kroeber and Robert Lowie advocated a study of culture that should transcend individual psychology and biology.   8. The notion of eidos is not an inaccurate way of characterizing this social scientific ethos (see Madge 1964). Castoriadis ([1975] 1987) developed essentially the same thesis in a different way.   9. The latter of the two definitions was more relevant to his critique of utilitarian theory and should have been a central aspect of his overall paradigm. His first definition of externality (which was the least developed aspect of his “sociology,” despite his attempt to articulate it in The Rules of Sociological Method) eventually became the point of departure for a later “empiricist” social science, dominated by quantitative methods and opinion surveys. 10. In other words, the whole is greater than the sum of its constituent parts. 11. For example, Durkheim championed the economic history of Gustav von Schmoller and Adolph Wagner against the utilitarianism of the Manchester school, as the former viewed economic activity in relation to social needs. This emphasis on social embeddedness can also explain Durkheim’s defense of using “mentalistic” concepts such as representation as long as they did not share their implicit psychologism. One can then contrast his idealism in this regard to the psychologism of Wundt. For insights into this point, see Gisbert (1959) and de Wolf (1987).

Writing Theory  103 12. Parsons (1937: 350) also makes this point to demonstrate the undeveloped state of Durkheim’s sociological methodology, despite his repeated declaration to view social facts as “things.” 13. Giddens’s (1976: 193) emphasis on social agency exaggerates the role of the conscious willing actor in Durkheim’s schema. Nonetheless, Giddens’s discussion of the threefold social-moral-purposive dimension in all of Durkheim’s writings reflects the methodological framework of social action that Durkheim actually used. 14. Lukes (1975: 35) exposed this methodological flaw in Durkheim’s “sociology” that talked of society “as a reality distinct from the “individual” which led him to reify, even deify society . . . all the while denying any desire to hypostasize society, and was thus inclined to ignore aspects of social life not easily assimilable into the society-individual schema, such as interaction and relations between individuals, and relations between sub-societal groups and institutions.” Moral solidarity was distinct from social institutions, thus its conservatism. 15. Turner (1984) has also raised questions about Durkheim’s causal argument. 16. Strictly speaking, Durkheim was not against viewing social facts as a mental state despite their status as “things.” His main emphasis was on collective instead of individual representations. In a 1901 letter to an old enemy, Gabriel Tarde, Durkheim ([1895] 1985: 6) wrote, “social life is a system of representations and mental states which are sui generis, different in nature from those which constitute the mental life of the individual, and subject to their own laws which individual psychology could not foresee.” As Turner (1984: 53) cogently argued in much stronger terms, “this is really the key to Durkheim—if he had succeeded in generating a significant set of strict regularities between “social facts,” we would find no special difficulty in accepting the relevant feature of an institution was its ideational aspect.” Religion could also be viewed in these terms. Durkheim (1915: 62) defined it as “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.” This is in actuality synonymous with that set of “non-contractual elements in contract” first mentioned in The Division of Labor, which he argued was a condition for social solidarity. 17. As Durkheim (1915: 15) put it: “There are no religions which are false. All are true in their own fashion; all answer, though in different ways, to the given conditions of human existence.” 18. Perhaps contrary to popular misconception, the pioneering work of Douglas (1966, 1967) on religious symbolism really belongs to the British functionalist school rather than other genres of symbolic anthropology or structuralism for its emphasis on a priori social classificatory grids. 19. To Evans-Pritchard (1956: 313), “it was Durkheim and not the savage who made society into a god.” 20. As R. Hall (1987: 23) noted, “it is probably not inaccurate to conclude that Durkheim tended to see all social facts as moral facts: what he then designated as the primary characteristic of social facts, their coercive power, he later saw as an essential feature of the moral domain.” This explains why Durkheim ([1895] 1985: 59), in The Rules of Sociological Method, defined social fact as “any way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising on the individual an external constraint.” Moreover, behavior that was independent of the individual consciousness was by necessity a form of external constraint.

104  On the Geopragmatics of Anthropological Identification 21. As Durkheim ([1906] 1974: 43) put it in “The Determination of Moral Facts,” “we refrain from performing the acts they forbid simply because they are forbidden. This is what is meant by the obligatory character of the moral rule.” This echoes the tautology of social facts sui generis. 22. Kroker (1984: 100) summarized the parallels between Parsons’s “macrophysics” and Foucault’s “microphysics” of power by saying, “I might wager that it is possible, just possible, that in the almost serpentine twisting of Parsons and Foucault as they confront one another across the space of a common, but reverse, image of power, they, too, are locked together like jailer and prisoner in the modern Panopticon.” 23. Contrast this description with Lacroix’s (1979) materialist explanation of power in Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. 24. This is basically the same argument made earlier in Foucault’s (1976) “What Is an Author?” 25. The review of universities, departments and programs conducted in the United Kingdom every four to five years, the results and ranking of which become the substantive basis for government funding. 26. S. Weber (2001) was perhaps first to point to the need for theory to “pragmaticize” in light of the increasing domination of the institutionalized academy and its professional cultures of knowledge.

n

PART III

C an

the Postcolonial Speak in Sociological Theory?

Chapter 5

Studies as n Subaltern Historical Exception / Postcolonialism as Critical Theory

T

his chapter is a reflection on two approaches to postcolonial “culturalist” critique. It has been prompted by problems in the recent literature on postcolonial theory, which is fraught with disciplinary inconsistencies of definition and complicated by the specific niches that have given rise to disciplinary mind-sets. Its critical trajectory is on the surface different from subaltern studies, which is rooted in a different historicity and thematic context. Nonetheless, I suggest there is common ground for a broader critique of Eurocentric theory at an epistemological level, one that transcends the study of colonialism as a literal or historical phenomenon, as well as the politics of difference. Michel Foucault has impacted differently on different lineages of postcolonial critical thought: (1) Edward Said’s (1978) Orientalism has turned primarily on Foucault’s notion of discourse, which in turn spawned postcolonial theoretical imaginations of all kinds. Essays by Anne McClintock, Ella Shohat, and Arif Dirlik argued that this latter postcolonial theory ironically gave rise to the advent of a new Euro mind-set more than anything postcolonial, literally defined. (2) The notion of colonial governmentality on the other hand emerged in the formation of subaltern studies as a postcolonial critique that has extended beyond the context of colonial India into a critique of universal historical temporalities. Despite their incompatible origins, they have relevance beyond a literal level of interpretation and beyond the concrete phenomenon of colonialism.

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Postcolonial Theories in the Concrete Contrary to definition, postcolonial theory is not even about colonialism in literal terms. The advent of postcolonial critique as a broad based theoretical mind-set may have developed full scale in the 1990s, but its meaning and ramifications for scholars working in different disciplinary contexts were very different. Mutually incompatible discourses have accounted for much of the debate and confusion that resulted, but definitional problems are in fact a crucial point of departure for how one should understand the potential of postcolonial critique and its broader ramifications for theory. Definitions do matter, not by virtue of their force of imagination but rather to the extent to which one can effectively outline the abstract contours and operations of social reality. When the postcolonial began, then, is a function of how one defines the advent of postcolonial theory.1 Criticisms raised by McClintock (1992), Shohat (1992), and Dirlik (1994) regarding the pitfalls of the term postcolonialism show that one is dealing less with literal definitions of the phenomenon, which produced its own lineages of political and intellectual discourse in the postcolonies, than with a peculiar epistemological or methodological frame of reference that should be understood in its own terms, albeit flawed by its inherent academic metropolitanism and subtle Eurocentricness (in the sense that it was sparked by a crisis of mind within Western literature, not issues endemic to fields of colonial studies per se). McClintock criticizes the narrow, distorted usages of “postcolonial” to assert that the phenomenon of colonialism is more rampant than scholars recognize, in order to suggest the wider relevance of postcolonial critique, while Dirlik distances “Euro” postcolonialism from native traditions of postcolonial critique, which on the contrary have always been rooted in local struggles, and thus a different genre of postcolonial theoretical agenda, in order to advocate the priority of thought in praxis. Earlier, more literal or socially rooted postcolonial critique (postcolonialism1), notably in the form of critical Fanonism, subaltern studies, and so on, prompted and gave new impetus to the advent of a recent postcolonial theory (postcolonialism2), especially in the form of literary criticism and cultural focus, but I submit that one must view the merits of both in light of their mutually distinct epistemological goals. I have criticized the overt overemphasis on identity in the emergence of postcolonial2 critique (Chun 2008: 707), which made it the object of facetious criticism by Dirlik but which more importantly obscured the novel nature of such critique in epistemological substance and methodological practice. Despite the diverse voices that have emerged in a later literature, it is still not obvious, however, what exactly is new about postcolonial2 theory. That is to say, while it is always possible to have new critical Fanonisms or to transform subaltern studies into a more generalizable critical theory, I think a minimal

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criterion for any claim to postcolonial theory should be its relevance to phenomena and issues relating to the field of colonialism in a more literal sense. Why else call it postcolonial?2 Critique of colonialism in political, intellectual, or other terms is nothing new; a plethora of anticolonial discourse has fueled movements everywhere colonialism existed historically, in addition to theories based on anti-imperialist critique, such as Third World dependency theory, that emerged after the demise of colonialism and became part of a wider vision of modern world systems theory. One way to define the advent of postcolonial2 theory is to view it as a sophisticated take on the politics of difference, enhanced with reference to its articulation of a notion of colonial subjectivity. It is not coincidental in this regard that the Frantz Fanon (1967) of Black Skin, White Masks in particular serves as the conceptual template on which a subjectivity of racial difference becomes generalized. Whether one understands this in terms of Homi Bhabha’s poststructuralist reading of Fanon’s colonized subjectivity in the mirror of self, Abdul JanMohamed’s rendition of Fanon’s Manichean allegory, or Gayatri Spivak’s tendency to view all discourse as colonialist, among other diverse interpretations, the symbolic dynamics of difference that are abstracted from a presumed situation of absolute power that is colonial domination become in turn the basis of a global theory.3 This at the same time magnifies the role of culture in this postcolonialism2. In other words, culture in difference or the culture of difference becomes the language for a new postcolonial2 speak. To some extent, this is what scholars working in the field of colonial studies understand as the main attribute of postcolonial2 theory, all else remaining equal. In a sense, it has given an earlier generation of Marxist political theory new meaning while remaining consistent with its critical bases. While this constitutes a dominant strain of thinking within the broad discourse of postcolonialism2, I do not consider it the most sophisticated or pathbreaking version of a postcolonialist2 paradigm. In many regards, the influence of Said’s Orientalism in redefining the field cannot be underestimated. Aspects of culture and difference are salient also to his interpretation of Orientalism and its relationship to colonialism, but the collusive relationship between discourse and power or of the role of discourse in obfuscating and sublimating the violence of domination adds a rather different dimension to the presumed dialectics of difference pitting colonizer and colonized. While Orientalism operates at one level of creating difference through the gazing of the Other in legitimizing the authority of self, it operates at another level of negating difference or domination by colonizer of colonized through the neutrality of discourse. The Orientalist describes and orders reality through systemic observation, coding, and writing. The extent to which the Orientalist successfully dominates the Other and sublimates the violence of

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colonial power is a function of the extent to which the Other acquiesces to the system of knowledge within which the Other is inscribed, not unlike how people in a modern disciplinary society govern themselves in reference to their conformity to or adoption of institutional norms of thought and behavior. In short, postcolonialism2 can be about the dynamics of cultural difference in the articulation of a critical theory. However, I suggest also that postcolonialism2 can be about the critical articulation of difference, where difference has already been discursively neutralized.

The Disciplinary Divide: Why Can’t the Postcolonial Speak in Sociological Theory? Sociology is a field in which the influence of postcolonialism is negligible.4 My thoughts in this regard grew out of an unpublished conference paper entitled “Can the Postcolonial Speak in Sociological Theory?” In mimicking Spivak’s (1988) “Can the Subaltern Speak?” I deliberately posed a question about the relevance of postcolonialism to sociological theory. The role of voice seems to be of seminal importance to literary scholars in particular, insofar as it invokes the significance of authorial subjectivity in the construction of meaning. In sociology in general, authorial voice and discourse seem less salient. If invoked at all, subjectivity refers primarily to that of the agent-actor. When Spivak asserted that the subaltern could not speak, she was suggesting, of course, that discursive representation was determined less by modes of articulation per se than by the power to speak. In this sense, postcolonial speaking refers to a kind of counter-hegemonic thinking predicated by a disenfranchisement of access to power. It should be natural to think that postcolonialism as theory is quintessentially applicable to postcolonial societies, of which there are many. But literal definitions seem problematic, insofar as there appears to be a serious disconnect with accepted usages in practice. In most Third World countries, where colonialism gave way to national independence, “postcolonial” should literally refer to its condition after independence, namely nationalism. Third World nationalism has already been recognized in most (Western) textbooks of world history as the pivotal turn in the transformation of traditional societies into modern nations; postcolonialism in literal terms should thus be a theory of modern nationalism in non-European context. To add to this confusion, many instances of blatant colonial imperialism are hardly recognized as such. The frontier expansion of the United States by Western settlers, like the colonization of Australia, was also a literal process of colonialism that relied ultimately on the successful domination of native and aboriginal populations through forced removal and wholesale genocide, eventually leading to an era

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of pacification. Yet, few scholars in the United States refer to the advent of this stage of social evolution in an age of peace, prosperity, and rationality as one of postcolonialism. If anything, postcolonialism1 tends to refer more to conditions arising from experiences with British, French, Dutch, and other colonial rule that peaked and ended in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries and less to earlier colonialism by the Spanish and Portuguese in South America and globally that seemed less predicated on maintaining radical distinctions with a racial Other and where the relationship between empire and nationhood or religion is culturally different. As an intellectual discourse, postcolonialism2 or postcolonial theory seems to have become prevalent especially in the 1990s, that is, well after the demise of colonialism as a historical phenomenon. As theoretical formation, it has emerged mostly in writings by scholars situated in the metropole rather than in the postcolonies and has tended to be most influential in literature or related cultural studies, and then to a lesser extent history, anthropology, and other humanistic fields. In some disciplines, it has claimed wide, if not universalizing, appeal similar to the earlier popularity of postmodern and globalization theory, exacerbated in effect by the global (seemingly inevitable) spread of underlying social forces. In the case of colonialism1 and postcolonial2 theory, there is thus ironically an essential disconnect between the historical phenomenon and the conceptual framework that derives from the former, as well as a disconnect between postcolonial theory, as conceived, and how it has been diversely practiced in various colonial venues. This disconnect is perceived differently in different disciplines as well. In each case, there is no reason, strictly speaking, why there cannot be a postcolonial approach in sociology. In a more literal sense, this might involve the sociological study of colonial societies, which in the case of former colonies may also be historical in orientation. This is at best a niche field in sociology, and I attribute this mainly to the mainstream focus of sociology on contemporary, modern, if not Western, societies, despite the growth of sociology globally. This is not a question being posed here. I wish to ask specifically, why can’t the postcolonial2 speak in sociological theory? If anything, this general mode of thought should be worth scrutiny in sociological circles. To recapitulate the unique contributions of a postcolonial2 theory in plain terms, postcolonialism2 as an intellectual movement has at least two distinctive features: (1) in contrast to an earlier generation of anticolonial critique, it accented the cultural dimensions of colonialist domination; (2) as postcolonial critique, it located, in its overt focus on identity, both the source of and resistance to such cultural domination in the subjective imagination of the colonizer and colonized subaltern, in a manner that gave new voice to the disenfranchised through critical discourse. It drew on earlier forms of native anticolonial criticism (political dissent of colonial regimes, Middle Eastern critiques of Western Orientalism, dependency theory, and subaltern studies)

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but more importantly molded them as epistemological critiques of implicit Eurocentrism in mainstream currents of humanistic thought and literature. In methodological terms, postcolonialism resonated in cognate fields of area studies, feminist theory, history, and anthropology, among others, by creating a language that supplemented radical traditions of political economy. It may have started with literary criticism, but such criticism expanded its object of critique to include all kinds of institutions (economy, political institutions, and various forms of knowledge that buttressed them) by enabling analysts to see the cultural dimensions of these institutions as a function of interpretation. I must underline interpretation in this regard, because it was based largely on value judgments and not merely on observation per se. That is to say, literal facts of political and economic oppression mattered less than one’s interpretation (thick description) of them. What are the ramifications of this? As an intellectual movement that began in the bowels of mainstream Western literature and humanities, albeit promoted by ethnically non-Western scholars giving subjective voice to native identity of various kinds, postcolonial2 theory produced peculiar forms of backlash as well. Dirlik, in a critical essay of what he called “The Postcolonial Aura,” sarcastically noted that, since such discourse was made possible unwittingly by the gradual accommodation and championing of non-Western intellectuals teaching within Western academia, one can also see here limitations in the nature of any such postcolonial theory. My concern here is less with the limitations of postcolonial identity than with the limitations of interpretation. In the development of such thinking, one discovers that while historical colonialism is subject to cultural interpretation or critique, regimes not literally defined as colonial can at the same time be interpreted as such, leading to liberal uses of colonialist and semicolonial. But, in my opinion, the constructive uses of postcolonial thinking far outweigh the abuses of it. Interpretation, that is, the value judgments that ultimately underlie the critical analysis of colonialism, have made it possible to view indirect rule (in its various guises), systems of “objective” knowledge that are often rooted in the colonial imperative and eventually become appropriated by modernity and the state as integral elements of the new order, and discursive negations of colonialism and imperial domination in the name of rational Enlightenment, rule of law, democracy, Christian civilization, and so on as legitimate objects of postcolonial critique. In fact, it is not limited to just these examples. If the notion of humanitas can be viewed as a source of Eurocentrism, then why not other forms of theory and knowledge, even within mainstream sociological theory? In sum, one can ultimately ask, what would it take for the postcolonial to speak within sociological theory? In fact, does sociological theory need decolonizing at all? Given how postcolonial2 theory has been specifically described above, the applicability of postcolonial critique should quite naturally

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be most relevant in formerly colonial societies, but it is certainly not limited to them, strictly defined. I take for granted that a postcolonial sociology should be most developed in Africa, South Asia, South America, and other similar regions where its methods can be directly applied. The emphasis on culture and imagination should also add an important dimension to colonial sociologies of an earlier generation. Yet, on the other hand, my ultimate interest does not reside in this kind of postcolonial1 analysis. If one takes the epistemological critique of postcolonialism2 to its extreme, it implies in effect that all social theory can be subjected to culturalist critique. Especially when applied to the study of other non-Western, traditional, or pre-national societies, how can one be sure that the concepts and methods of analysis that one employs are really value free or not adulterated by Eurocentric definitions and assumptions about their usage in practice? We know that social theory, as we practice it today, beginning from its classical origins, was rooted in the critical analysis of concrete institutions, mind-sets, and processes that transformed the fabric of society at that time, namely capitalism and modernity. Such paradigmatic breakthroughs provided the foundation for all modern social theory, but can one turn it on its head and say that any such theory is at the same time limited by the cultural and social embeddedness to its origins? In order to answer this question, it is important to qualify how postcolonial2 theory has evolved within academia as a whole, first within the field of Western literature and then from the metropole to academia in the postcolonies. Despite giving voice to the silent other, much of the initial wave of postcolonial criticism focused first on decolonizing imperialist literature and Orientalist scholarship by deconstructing the Eurocentric mind and civilizing imperatives implicit in the Western language literature. This made less of an impact on native traditions of literary and historical scholarship in the postcolonies. Critical essays by McClintock, Shohat, and Dirlik in particular have already pointed out much of this superficial disconnect between nativist scholarship (in the sense of postcolonial1) on the one hand and the kind of postcolonial2 theory advocated by diasporic intellectuals such as Said, Spivak, and Bhabha on the other. In large part, the influence of diasporic postcolonial2 theory on the postcolonies, which was supposed to have given authority to native voices and nativist scholarship, became most deeply felt, ironically, in English or Western literature departments, which also, not surprisingly, happened to be the point of diffusion for Western theory overall. In East Asia, fields that tend to be most receptive to postcolonial theory include literature, gender studies, history, and other cultural studies. In contrast, sociology, anthropology, political science, and similar social sciences tend not to be heavily affected by the influence of postcolonialism as a general theoretical movement. Nonetheless, particularly in reference to postcolonialism2, why is its influence felt more strongly in some disciplines and less so or not at all in others? I see

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less difference between disciplines in cultural methodologies than in epistemological mind-sets. In short, despite the disciplinary origins of postcolonial2 critique in literary criticism, its novel focus on cultural representation, its overt focus on authorial subjectivity, and its critique of implicit Eurocentrism in apparently neutral genres of discourse and imagination, all of which can be seen as collusive hegemonic aspects in the maintenance of colonial domination, there is no reason in principle why these same factors or phenomena should be regarded as exclusive to the study of colonial societies, especially when it can be shown that other modes of social or political domination rely on similar genres of cultural representation, discursive authority, identity formations, and knowledge functions. In other words, there is no reason why postcolonialism2 cannot be regarded as a critical framework for any theory or institution. In the context of sociological theory, it would involve, among other things, the recognition of authorial subjectivity, the acknowledgment of the embeddedness of culture in the definition and use of concepts, and the ability to reflexively deconstruct its epistemologies, methods of observation, or analysis and modes of writing as integral aspects of discourse production and not just theory. Even if this is possible or thinkable, what domains of sociological theory could postcolonial2 critique be applied to? What are the limits of interpretive imagination? If one takes seriously Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (2000) argument about provincializing Europe, one way to demystify the universalizing status of European history and experience is to view it as just another local. To some extent, culturalist critiques of modernity or rationality perform precisely this function. One can add to this the sacred status of theory, which is transposed seamlessly to the study of all societies as though its concepts and definitions contribute to the abstract articulation of an objective structure. Far from being immune to politics, they are all legitimate targets for postcolonial2 gazing; at issue, then, is where one locates hegemony.

Subaltern Studies in the Abstract At this point, one can put aside the prospects of a postcolonial2 theory and reexamine the question from the other side. To what extent can a postcolonial1 critique, grounded in local practice, become the basis for a generalizing critical theory? I have chosen to focus on subaltern studies not just because it has become explicitly adapted to other colonial situations and influenced the formation of postcolonial thinking in some disciplines but also because its distinctive features as a mode of thought far outweigh in my view its status as local critique. Perhaps unlike the case of critical Fanonism, where Fanon’s political writings later became a template for all manner of theoretical transformation,

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subaltern studies—epitomized not only in the work of its founder, Ranajit Guha, and his closest associates such as Partha Chatterjee and Gayatri Spivak, just to name a few—had always been embedded in ongoing critical theoretical debate, despite its explicit attention to Indian history and society. Spivak’s intellectual background is well known to most, and Chatterjee’s early Naxalite or Maoist roots are not irrelevant, but Guha’s vision is undoubtedly the guiding force of subaltern studies as a school of thought. Despite its embeddedness in debates on Indian history and society, there has always been an ongoing dialogue with Marxism. Thus, it would be overly simplistic to call subaltern studies just a critical area studies paradigm. The ongoing continuity between its theoretical critical concerns and the specificities of social practice within which these thematic concerns play out are in fact the defining characteristics of subaltern studies as intellectual movement. More exactly, it is this particular dynamic between theory and practice that must be assessed when we view its applicability to other societal contexts or potentiality as postcolonial theory. Guha’s (1983) first book, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, can be viewed not just as a literal response to the history from below tradition of Eric Hobsbawm and E. P. Thompson but also as an explicit position that accented the historical exceptionalism of India, especially in regard to the role of the “pre-political people” in societal transformation. It is possible, of course, to interpret such an intervention as a bold critique of Marxism’s implicit Eurocentrism and the failure of Western Marxism to transcend its myopic rootedness to its own cultural context. Chakrabarty’s (2000) book Provincializing Europe is an elaborate extension of precisely this argument, beginning with the resistant peasant and culminating in a critique of Europe’s universalizing epistemology. However, Guha’s explicit emphasis was more on Indian exceptionalism—in fact, all historical exceptionalisms. The peculiar position of the peasant in India is largely a consequence of India’s societal constitution, but, more importantly, it brought about a nuanced articulation of what Guha termed “dominance without hegemony.”5 The role Guha played in orchestrating the formation of subaltern studies in Indian academia, as well as outside it, at Sussex and then Australian National University, paralleled his own broad vision. Vivek Chibber’s (2013) book Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital is a systematic critique of subaltern studies’ argument about Indian exceptionalism and in turn a veiled defense of Marxism, but the most exceptional aspect of India that has made subaltern studies a postcolonial theory in the making is really the undeniable effects of British colonial rule. The same exceptionalism is at the core of Chatterjee’s (1993) critique of Benedict Anderson’s (1983) Imagined Communities, especially The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. The seminal question then is, how do we conceptualize colonialism, not only in practice as a social and historical phenomenon

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but also in broader terms as a cultural mind-set that can be both the subject and object of epistemological method? Chatterjee spars critically with Western political theory but always in terms of what he calls the rule of colonial difference. The way in which he has underscored the advent of nationalism in most of the Third World in direct response to a colonial situation accents not only a historical exceptionalism but also colors his perception of modern nation-states and Anderson’s assertion of modular nature. There are, to say the least, significant talking points underlying all these debates, just as there are important battle lines that were drawn between subaltern studies as a school of thought in contrast to other Indian scholars, as well as schools of Indology at Cambridge and elsewhere. They are undoubtedly legitimate concerns for any intellectual historian. In much the same way in which many have viewed postcolonial2 theory as being influenced by the so-called poststructuralist or postmodern turn, the transition from early to late or historical to totalizing postcolonial subaltern studies can be read in similar terms. In any case, such readings are at best a diversion from definitional questions key to understanding colonial and postcolonial as concepts embedded in practice but ultimately applicable at a higher level of interpretation. If there is a legitimate difference between postcolonialism1 and postcolonialism2 that has always distinguished the interests of scholars concerned primarily with colonialism as social and historical phenomenon vis-à-vis those of scholars interested mainly in abstracting from a situation of practice notions of coloniality, then I am suggesting that the relationship between colonialism and coloniality can be constructive, albeit not in the way they have been hitherto discoursed. Perhaps contrary to the pretensions of postcolonial theorists criticized implicitly for their Eurocentricness, as Wallerstein and Foucault have astutely argued in different ways, epistemes are all grounded in sociohistorical practice. All theories, from the classical era of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, began as critiques of local phenomena, such as capitalism and modernity, which eventually became reified erroneously as universal theory. What is it, then, about colonialism as exceptional phenomenon, which can enhance our development of a full-fledged concept of coloniality, that has applicability beyond local experiences and practices? It is worth noting that subaltern studies, despite the strict concerns of the group’s various practitioners, has expanded beyond India and Indology. In 1996, Eva Cherniavshky wrote an article in Boundary 2 entitled “Subaltern Studies in a U.S. Frame.” Having boldly described early US settler history as broad colonialism, marked by genocide of its indigenous peoples and formation of a race-based capitalist regime of labor, she pursues seriously Guha’s notion of dominance without hegemony as axiomatic framework of colonial rule in the United States. After situating US colonialism in these terms, she explores its ramifications for post-American narratives, within which, following Said,

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imperialism as an ideology has figured mysteriously by its marked absence in accounts of US culture, politics, and history. In the context of this cross-cultural comparison, many questions can be posed as to whether “bourgeois culture hits its historical limit in colonialism,” as Guha posed it, or whether there are other ramifications for the subaltern as subjective position, viewed as race or gender, which is how Cherniavshky phrases her argument eventually, but there is clearly a postcolonial turn (in conceptual terms). The second example of traveling subaltern studies is its embrace by Latin Americanists. From the literature in English, the main voices in this discussion appear to be John Beverley, Florencia Mallon, Alberto Moreiras, and Walter Mignolo. In a collection entitled The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader, editor Ileana Rodríguez (2001) notes that the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group was founded at George Mason University in the early 1990s, in the aftermath of the Sandinistas’ defeat in Nicaragua, and over time expanded to include Latin Americanists, critical Marxists, and others. Not surprisingly, its founding members were mostly leftists of the 1960s generation, and many had participated in the Marxist Literary Group meetings organized by Fredric Jameson, to which Beverley and Spivak also belonged. In the introduction to this collection, Rodríguez (2001: 6) asserted that the Latin American subaltern studies project involved a radical critique of culture and of its “forming, informing, and deforming disciplines in relation to representations of the subaltern.” Viewing subaltern as a heterogeneous, pre-Western subject, the scholars were at the same time conscious of the inadequacies of the concept of class in Marxism and race in ethnic studies. Subaltern appeared to be a more useful notion that, as a strategy, showed how, in the logic of hegemony and domination, the popular-democratic project became subordinated, especially in face of a repressive state. It was necessary here to spell out these underlying concerns, because in both US and Latin American cases, the adoption of the subaltern was based on a congruence at the level of social practice, rather than just semantic mimicry, which in turn promoted a specific critical agenda. Colonialism in Latin America has had a much longer history than elsewhere in the world, yet its relative insignificance in postcolonial2 theorizing prompts inadequacy of a different order. In his chapter in The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader, Guha (2001) notes that although roots of the subaltern studies project were indelibly linked to the South Asian experience, the relevance of this concrete experience to other places is not based on territoriality but has links to the common experiences of “our time,” in particular global temporalities. One can in this regard question what postmodernity is, in the earlier spirit of what enlightenment is, but, in a South Asian context, this global temporality really has to do with the role of the colonial state in propagating and sowing the seeds for a historical failure of reason. This failure of reason mirrors the subordination of the

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popular-democratic project in a Latin American context, but the postcolonial turn for Guha is embedded above all in the politics of India’s colonial state. One final example of subaltern studies beyond an Indian context is East Asia, Taiwan in particular. One of the most ardent promoters of subaltern studies as postcolonial critique is Kuan-hsing Chen (2010). His personification of subaltern studies cannot really be divorced from the promotion of postcolonialism within his own inter-Asia cultural studies movement. Despite what Chen (2000) calls the “imperialist eye,” it is perhaps more accurate to say that postcolonial theory has serviced his political promotion of inter-Asian movements more than vice versa. Although not so recognized by scholars working on established colonial societies such as India, Africa, Middle East, and so on, East Asia has been an active site for the application of postcolonial2 theory. In addition to Chen, Tani Barlow’s (1997) critique of US postwar Asian studies and Wing-sang Law’s (2000) northbound colonialism in post-1997 Hong Kong all fit criteria of what is called here postcolonial2 theory. Barlow’s postcolonialism takes the form of an unconscious “repression” (sic) of real imperialist, colonial, capitalist, or revolutionary violence in sanitized writings of history and functional theories of society. The object of criticism in Chen’s imperialist gaze and Law’s northbound colonialism is not colonialism itself but rather global capitalism that has underlined Southeast Asian trade expansion and China’s economic transition, both fueled by a kind of sub-imperialist desire. In other words, literal reference to colonialism in this genre of postcolonialism seems less relevant than its underlying critical politics and culturalizing mode. One should not be surprised to know that subaltern studies seems to fit Chen’s theoretical agenda more than other possible genres of postcolonialism2 do. In retrospect, what is the point exactly? In contrast to the Eurocentric postcolonial2 theory, subaltern studies adequately fits Dirlik’s definition of native postcolonial critique. Although subaltern studies has always been embedded in intellectual discourse that is ultimately not local, its serious diffusion into other area studies camps shows that its influence has been not really nativist-qua-localist but broadly politically critical by nature. Yet, this manifest politics raises deeper questions about how politics, if grounded, can be made theoretical, if general. By general, I mean not universal in a territorial or historical sense but instead more precisely conceptualizable, as a matter of language. The lack of groundedness in the so-called Eurocentric postcolonial2 theory subtly explains why it does not necessitate the existence of colonialism as an a priori condition; it is largely a matter of definition. If global capitalism can be seen as an object of postcolonial gazing, any concrete historical fact or institutional phenomenon not defined as colonial per se can be so imagined and legitimized in theory. Yet, on the other hand, any form of subaltern studies that is explicitly grounded by definition will confront inherently different problems

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in its application as conceptual framework. The main voices of subaltern studies, namely Guha, Chatterjee, and Chakrabarty, if reflective of a generalizable postcolonial turn, tend to substantiate their position in terms of historical exceptionalism, not only of India but also of Europe and elsewhere. Despite Spivak’s active involvement with subaltern studies, her epistemic mind-set still has more in common with Said and Bhabha than with subaltern studies, as a group of scholars. In the long run, one can also argue that principles other than historical exception can drive native postcolonial critique’s transformation into a generalizable theory. As an aside, one should note that not all Indian postcolonial thinkers are associated with subaltern studies. Ashis Nandy and Aijaz Ahmad are the most prominent examples that come to mind. Moreover, participants in the Subaltern Studies series publications were not limited to Indian intellectuals. David Arnold and David Hardiman (1994), both historians of India at the University of Warwick, were active contributors who coedited volume 8 of the Subaltern Studies series. Yet, one Western intellectual who influenced subaltern studies greatly was Bernard Cohn, an anthropologist and historian of India at University of Chicago. In his introduction to Cohn’s (1987) collection An Anthropologist among the Historians, Guha noted that Cohn was one of the first to problematize the role of colonialism in Indian history, which provided the legitimate basis for the articulation of indigenous histories and perspectives to challenge colonial forms of knowledge. Even if Cohn was not subaltern by name, his approach lent credence to the critical trajectories of subaltern studies by unpacking the collusion of colonial power and knowledge from above. One of Cohn’s early students, Ronald Inden (1990), promoted a ritual-symbolic approach to Indian history, as well as an anti-Orientalist one, Imagining India, while one of his later students, Nicholas Dirks (2001), developed in more systematic terms Cohn’s postcolonial approach to history and anthropology, the most influential work being Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India. Dirks played a major role in reshaping Columbia’s anthropology department by hiring Partha Chatterjee and Mahmood Mamdani, and then later, as provost, Sudipta Kaviraj in political science. If anything, the subaltern studies roots of Dirks’s postcolonialism have provided the framework for a variant critical theory too. In short, by giving concrete legitimacy to analyses of peasant resistance in colonial India, the subaltern studies paradigm revealed distinctive features of Indian societal constitution and hegemonic aspects of colonial rule while addressing broader issues of social transformation. It was evident that the usefulness of the general argument transcended far beyond India and thus should not be construed simply as a nativist critique. But the theoretical critique has overtly taken different trajectories. Subaltern studies could be mobilized as the renewed face for class struggles everywhere, especially in the

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Third World, in its extension of established Marxist concerns. It could be used to shed new light on Orientalist theories of various genres or those that have masked the hegemonic violence of colonial rule, especially the role of the state in it. Through its anticolonialism, it could serve as a rallying point against the Eurocentric nature of theory in general, thus providing alternative avenues of critical thought. Despite unrelated origins as mode of thought and methodological differences with other strands of postcolonial2 theory, there is on the other hand clearly an epistemological convergence. Both have pointed to the provincial nature of prevailing theories of culture and society, wherever they are, that is still historically and subjectively rooted in Western (or modern) experience (as default/norm). In this regard, the main issue asks, to what extent is any theory or concept prone to Eurocentric critique, and how does one go about determining whether it is inherently tainted or flawed? It has been relatively easy to expose anti-Muslim terrorist hysteria, notions of religious fundamentalism, and clashes of civilization as extreme politicized projections of Eurocentric policy and theory. However, the controversy over Orientalism has not only problematized the nature of cultural representation in a colonial context but also prompted unending debate over intellectual collusion in the rule of law, social science, and even anthropological studies of the “Other.” Nonetheless, I argue that many tendencies to view societies “neutrally” as though they are inherently related as regional affines (the basis of area studies) or the natural product of civilizational traits (as in neo-Confucian societies) are equally subjective, if not also flawed. In fact, how does one know that “the native’s point of view” is an accurate understanding of one’s own culture and society, especially if it is the ongoing product of inherently politicized, self-serving (and hence solipsistic) popular discourses (which is still the basis of anthropology’s cultural relativism)? Given also the pressure to make our own research and knowledge today increasingly “relevant,” the scope of suspicion should be larger than admittedly recognized.

Decolonizing the Fog of American Identity: Lessons from Chineseness in Critical Reflexivity In an opinion piece in The New York Times on 10 May 2017, Jill Abramson wrote: “The Chinese know that one of the best ways to curry favor with any ruler is to shower riches on his family members. There are so many millionaires among the children of its leaders that they have a moniker: the Princelings.” China watchers have made such phenomena staple features of news reporting and social scientific writing on the PRC for decades, so it is not surprising that the concept of guanxi is considered so difficult to render into English that

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it is often left unglossed, further underlining its intrinsic Chineseness.6 The scholarly literature on guanxi also shows few signs of diminishing. A conference organized by Thomas Gold at the University of California, Berkeley in March 2015 on “The Field of Guanxi Studies” saw papers and comments by two dozen experts in this cottage industry. Guanxi indexes the rot in society and its system. However, Abramson’s piece was not about China; it was about the “Princeling in the West Wing,” Jared Kushner. It appeared a day after the “unseemly spectacle” of his sister, Nicole Kushner Meyer, hawking golden visas to Chinese investors as a prize for $500,000 investments into its family’s real estate projects in Jersey City, and a week after US President Donald Trump signed a renewal of the EB-5 visa program. Never mind the conflict of interests in the emoluments clause: the First Family has set up shop directly in the White House; pay for play is the norm at the top. If this took place in the PRC, one would be crying regime change. So why is everyone in the United States so complacent? I suppose one can blame party politics for the reluctance in Congress and respect for the rule of law for the public’s impotence to take action in this regard. After criticizing lesser countries for their lack of democratic process, it is ironic and disappointing that the American populace elected a con artist bully who insulted everyone in his path and shamelessly flaunted his moral indecency. In his defense, Trump has blamed fake news, by others, of course. The blurred lines between reality TV and reality has become the new news. When it comes to critical introspection, one tends to look the other way. To the contrary, the creation of fictions, inventions, and exaggerations to legitimate our own views and actions is actually a basic aspect of institutional normalcy. The political sociologist Philip Abrams once remarked that the state is not the reality that stands behind the mask of political practice but rather the mask that prevents us from seeing political practice as it is. As he phrased it, the state is “a third-order project, an ideological project. It is first and foremost an exercise in legitimation—what is being legitimated is, we may assume, an unacceptable domination” (1988: 76).7 Taking my cue from a recent book on “Chineseness,” this should have ramifications for Americanness.8 One tends to view culture as neutral, identity even more so; the fact that we are obliged to have a national identity and that even the definition of a nation is sanctioned at the highest levels of international relations says much about its necessity, even though it was clearly an invention of modernity and for reasons that remain unclear. But as Erik Erikson (1950), who made identity crisis a keyword for our time, has astutely noted, identity is literally about “sameness”; in laypeople’s terms, shared values or relatedness to a group. The fact that the Chinese rendition of identity is rentong (assimilation) says much about identification to

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a group and its values, never mind identity as “status.” If one also considers the content of culture that is inculcated as a product of socialization of all kinds, then its literal meaning is less important than the fact that people are blind to the subjective values that they are tied to, as in taken for granted. Chinese everywhere have had different notions of Chineseness. One must ask, how do definitions of culture, worldview, and behavior directly shape societal construction and interpersonal experience? These differences at a literal level are still objects of ongoing debate, but I submit that they were products of entanglements with modernity, coloniality, and nationalism at an underlying level. At the same time, the (discursive) fictions of identity that people constructed for themselves as part of their own experience were no less unreal than those that we as outsiders have imposed on them through media representations and scholarly “theories.” How do we know that East Asian regionalisms, neo-Confucian lineages, or clashes of civilization are more pertinent as frameworks for explaining the above? There is thus a need to deconstruct Orientalisms on both ends as a point of departure for unraveling politicizing processes central to identification. “The native’s point of view” is innately flawed. I have called the Republic of China (ROC) in Taiwan a “politics of the unreal,” but Hong Kong, PRC, and other societies can be viewed similarly, if viewed literally from “the inside.” The evolution of official discourse in postwar Taiwan to this day tends to give the impression that Taiwan has successfully contested its prior claim to the legacy of traditional China and is on the way to becoming a multicultural, Taiwanese nation in ways that warrant its inevitable separation from the mainland. Moreover, much of its Cold War history had been rewritten to emphasize that it has in fact been a product of its autonomous development as an island from imperial times, colonized by Han settlers, European traders, and Japanese empires long before its return to China under KMT rule. According to this view, Taiwanese consciousness is thus a justifiable ethos of self-determination rallied toward the aim of national independence. The reality is, however, more complex, even as people at the same time cling to the reality of the Republic of China (ironically, the PRC’s rejection of Taiwan’s independence efforts is based on official recognition of the ROC, albeit as rebel regime). The uneasy, contradictory coexistence of a real Taiwan within an unreal ROC is exacerbated even more by the extent to which all politics is concretely ethnicized and then rooted sacredly to the mythic unity of two thousand years of Chinese civilization. In the heat of the Taiwan Strait missile crisis in 1996, I argued sarcastically that, for many on each side, five hundred years is not a long time to wait for reunification. One familiar Chinese myth says that, after the fall of the Qing dynasty, someone discovered in the attic of a pagoda a placard declaring, “Restore the Ming dynasty!”—as if to suggest that it was worth waiting 268 years. When Chinese on

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both sides contest reunification/independence in terms of such myths, especially in a (post)modern era, how unreal can politics really get? Hong Kong identity is a similar fiction that was invented less than fifty years ago. Before then, Hong Kongers identified simply as Chinese; its culture was a satellite of Guangdong. Despite its colonial status, borders with China were open. The free trade port that eventually galvanized Hong Kong’s later image to the world was the result of the colonial regime’s effort to defuse Cold War strife in preceding decades that made the colony a battleground for competing nationalisms. The advent of its cosmopolitan hybrid mass media culture industry that famously created its utilitarian ethos, where lifestyles were commoditized to project the illusion of “apolitical man,” was a direct consequence of a policy of depoliticization. But, in reality, it created new identities divided by class. Eugene Cooper (1982: 25) phrased it best, arguing that free market development in Hong Kong was “a veritable proving ground for Marxist theory, where enterprising students of Marxist political economy can literally watch chapters of Das Kapital unfold before their eyes.”9 Social scientific “theories” that extolled Hong Kong’s “administrative absorption of politics” and ethos of “utilitarian familism” were thus post hoc rationalizations that eventually became taken for granted and mistaken for native “tradition.” The current metamorphosis of the PRC has also seen the emergence of “discourses” too often dismissed as pure propaganda, namely “one country, two systems” and “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” However, it has undergone serious transformations that transcend the superficial breakup of Maoist socialism and the open embrace of free market capitalism. Buttressing these developments has been the subtle emergence of a cultural nationalism that has become synonymous with an “unbroken” history of civilization and its collusion with the new politics of state. The fact that Hong Kong’s “handover” in 1997 is routinely phrased in Chinese as “return to the motherland” should not be viewed trivially. Similarly, despite the ongoing friction that divides independent-minded Taiwan from the PRC, few note or would disagree that Taiwan had at least two opportunities to claim independence: in 1949, after its retreat from the mainland, and in 1971, after its ouster from the United Nations (one can add the PRC’s isolationalist Cultural Revolution era), which cast now-distant Cold War mind-sets on both sides. I would argue that Taiwan could more easily realize its aim of independence by rewriting history, starting with its expulsion from the UN, and then flaunting its uprootedness, its tabula rasa history, even its eccentricity, that is, anything but its inherent Taiwaneseness, which would, like a Star Trek tractor beam, draw it back inescapably to two thousand years of Chinese civilization. Chinese everywhere are clouded by their own fog of identity, which is in fact a product of its rootedness to specific historical experiences that have

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been taken for granted as norm. I think, by way of comparison, this might say much about Americanness as well. The shock of Trump’s election victory should have been a point of critical introspection. The revenge of a worldview rooted in an era of primordiality sauvage has shaken the progressive vision of the same America, threatening now to reshape reality to new heights of unreality.10 What would it take for Americans to critically reflect on their own cultural ethos? In the case of Chinese above, to think beyond the geopolitical box and contest the fact that their identities or frames of mind have constantly mutated, despite their apparent rootedness in cultural myths, has proved difficult. Thus, the ability of neutral analysts to demystify native fictions in order to interpret a deeper level of meaning (in the best Geertz tradition) should be even more challenging. The ongoing discord provoked by the Trump presidency in a public sphere has similarly highlighted the deep divisions of opinion among the populace within regard to cultural values. But the strength of what might be considered a nativist cultural ethos here is more likely to be taken for granted as “natural” by Americans than non-Americans. What does this say then about the possibilities of critical reflexivity, especially in a postcolonial2 sense? It is easy for a theory to reject politics in the substance of its own concepts, but this neglects the fact that the practices that form disciplinary boundaries of thought also “naturalize” them. In practice, we as academics are influenced no less by how the system “neutralizes” thought.

From Historical Exception to Theoretical Exceptionalism What do we learn in comparing the formation of postcolonial2 theory, presumably rooted in an elaborate critical Fanonism, with one abstracted from a native based critique grounded in anticolonial practice? Contrary to Dirlik’s sarcastic comment, directed mainly at Said, Bhabha, and Spivak, to the effect that the postcolonial2 began when Third World intellectuals became accepted and championed as mainstream theorists within First World academia, the complex transformation of subaltern studies in area studies and into mainstream postcolonial thinking shows that there has always been a long history of two-lane traffic in this regard. The compatibility of these two approaches to postcoloniality has less to do with their modes of theorization than with the fact that they inherently accommodate different disciplinary mind-sets. In principle, there is an illusion that general theoretical mind-sets can provide a common interdisciplinary language or discursive platform, but the debate over postcolonialism reveals incommensurable terrains practiced by different thinkers or subject-agents. In deliberately distinguishing between

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postcolonial1 and postcolonial2, there appears to be one divide that is never bridged here. Regardless of how the postcolonial turns, these turns will be perceived differently by those who view colonialism literally, as grounded phenomenon, and those who view it in essence as a mind-set amenable to imagination and interpretation. Of course, these crises of definition can/will always disrupt boundaries between the two. Said’s Orientalism showed that colonialism exists in domains not literally defined as such, and McClintock showed paradoxically that the phenomenon of colonialism itself is a problematic definition. Yet, at the same time, such interventions resonate differently in those disciplinary contexts within which we happen to be embedded. In the literary field, Said’s postcolonialism carves out a specific domain of conceptual relationships and ramifications. But for those who define colonialism literally rather than literarily, the same relationships and ramifications have limited relevance. McClintock’s definitional critique should have made colonialism a generalized phenomenon too, but for those who regard the same phenomena as grounded regimes of practice, this more likely provoked a call for splitting instead of lumping theoretical discourses. After all, is not British colonialism different from French, Dutch, or US ones, not to mention British regimes in Africa, India, Oceania, and settler colonies such as Australia? In other words, theoretical relevance has its limits, and the limits are already to a large extent unconsciously constrained by disciplinary mind-sets. Despite my presumed open receptivity to anything, I cannot deny that I will still view things as a social scientist whose main interest is institutions, within which culture plays a particular role, whose relevant definitions are limited. At the same time, I am admittedly critical of literary scholars who seem to relegate free autonomy to imagination or subjectivity. Most of us are wedded to narrower disciplinary mind-sets, which should make the relevance of postcoloniality, however defined, correspondingly narrower. At this point, I can explain why there are prospects for postcolonial theory as generalized mind-set but one that is not necessarily driven by historical exceptionalism. Despite my firm belief in the groundedness of practices, institutions, and cultures, I am not a historian and have little interest in defining research problematics around critical area studies, which is what the axiom of historical exceptionalism cultivates ultimately, even though we will continue to do local concrete research. The critical agenda that drove subaltern studies scholars from Guha to Chakrabarty to problematize universal narratives of social evolution and modernity inherent in the social sciences and humanities generally is a worthy one for the promotion of any area studies. It is certainly better than one that blindly promotes nativism as corrective to Eurocentrism, which can include solipsistic, nationalist interests. At the same time, there are things other than historical exceptionalism. Not being a sociologist by calling, why did I ask if the postcolonial can speak in

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sociological theory? Following perhaps the lead of Cohn and Dirks, who argue that structures of modernity and Eurocentric experience permeate many of our objective, value-free concepts routinely used in our modes of observation and analysis, one can infer that social science is not immune from such humanistic critique either. Marx, Weber, and Durkheim’s theories all started as critiques of capitalism and modernity, that is, local phenomena. Since when did social scientists, from the classical era on, abstract theory from anything other than modern Western culture and society? If theory is universalizing, then it might need decolonizing. One can finally add the postcolonial critiques of Cohn and Dirks, who argue that traditional caste (or social structure) is a colonial invention, which has in fact corrupted cultural modes and social groups that may have existed in the past. In conclusion, one should really declare that the task of postcolonial theory in this regard is probably more complex than recognized so far. Historical exceptionalism is merely a point of departure. One can also ask here, what does this have to do with the relevance of governmentality or practices of order in colonialism? First, the application of governmentality in the study of colonialism has had a long history. In invoking both Foucault and Talal Asad, David Scott (1995: 191) explicitly pointed to the “governmentalization” of the state as the fulcrum for understanding the importance of modernity and the processes of imperial, colonial, and postcolonial construction/destruction. Scott attempts to extend Chatterjee’s argument about colonial governmentality by showing how its intrinsic politics of cultural difference is really a stage in the evolution of modern power. The implicit contradiction that Chatterjee sees between the inner and outer domains of colonial politics becomes for Scott a basic change in the nature of governmentality, where modern power is characterized by its shift in “point of application” from the economy to the body social. I would argue instead11 that the modern project inherent to late Victorian British colonialism has revolved more around its discursive content and practical instrumentality than its point of application. Among other things, what needs to be explained is why tradition, which is a culturally peculiar facet of late nineteenth-century British colonial imagination, becomes meticulously codified or administered through the rule of law and then systemically regulated or maintained by elaborate technologies of state policing. This intersects interestingly with the subaltern “theorizing” that Cohn and Dirks promoted by subtly underscoring the influence of high Victorian colonialism in postcolonial generalization. If anything, this governmentality is itself out of order (Fabian 2000). Perhaps not unlike how neoliberalism has become a keyword to underscore a general crisis of global capitalism, theorization, it is important to note, is limited by its rootedness in sociopolitical practice. One must go beyond postcolonialism, literally, to recognize its entanglement with knowledge.

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At this point, one should take stock of how anthropological identification is defined and constituted, not simply as a discursive imaginaire on culture and society but more specifically as an authorial subjectivity that invokes practical spaces of dispersion characteristic of our speaking position, which demarcates a space of conceptual relevance, as well as a politics for critical reflection and disciplinary worldview. As theoretical content, concepts of culture and society appear to acknowledge interdisciplinary influences, which epitomize anthropology’s relative position within social science as a hybrid synthesis, but one can ask to what extent the particular boundedness of those concepts and methodological practices is influenced by axiomatic assumptions and implicit norms, as well in ways that frame their actual relevance. As an extreme definition of ethnic consciousness, the uses and underlying values of diaspora directly reflect disciplinary perceptions and practices. By expanding our understanding of this underlying authorial subjectivity, one can argue furthermore that the ethnographic authority invoked by “writing culture” debates was rooted exclusively in a narrow sense of authorial (ethnic) origin literally that neglected to account for the totality of practices that governed our identification as anthropologist. This regime of disciplinary practices or standards can explain why James Clifford’s critique of ethnographic authority was perceived as a general theoretical attack in anthropology, which contrasts with its insignificant impact in other disciplines. At the same time, the alleged “unrepresentional” character of Clifford Geertz’s approach to cultural interpretation in anthropology did not prevent its appropriation by and ongoing influence in other disciplines. Yet, to the contrary, all social sciences have authors; there is every reason to believe that the legitimacy of any such analytical enterprise should be questioned in regard to its authorial subjectivity and the presumed neutrality of its concepts. We have been led to believe that theory in the social sciences was founded on and systemically developed from classical origins in thought. If anything, these classical ancestral thinkers developed their approaches as critiques of social phenomena rooted locally and culturally (capitalism and modernity) in their time in ways that are no different from our political critiques of contemporary problems and social phenomena. We tend to neglect that our systemic theorization has taken place in the context of evolving institutional disciplines, which has over time hardened. Diffusion of ideas across disciplines has nonetheless continued and has been appropriated unconsciously by disciplinary selectivity. The debate over postcolonial theory aptly exemplifies how theory has traveled, producing incompatible disciplinary discourses. At the same time, postcolonial2 critique of authorial subjectivity represents a valid attack on the conceptual neutrality of the social sciences in ways that have hitherto not been legitimately recognized in general terms.

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Notes  1. Needless to say, much significant research in various fields on colonialism after colonialism has not labeled itself postcolonial, which is distinct from the literature that explicitly promotes postcolonial theory or any such approach. Even in regard to the latter, there are significant differences among scholars as to who might be included within such a label. Nonetheless, it is possible to highlight traits common to this trend.  2. I should emphasize here that my intent is not to exclude the theoretically rich work done on colonialism in recent years, for example, by Johannes Fabian, Nicholas Thomas, Ann Stoler, and Jean and John Comaroff in anthropology, as well as Frederick Cooper in history, among others, but rather to single out a self-proclaimed theoretical label.  3. For an account of all these variations on a Fanonian theme, see esp. Gates (1991).  4. In sociology, there has been recent attention to the relatively undeveloped influence of postcolonialism, most notably in a review of the literature by Go (2013) and a collection edited by Steinmetz (2013). As in anthropology and history, where there has been ongoing significant research on colonial societies, the impact of sociological thinking on postcolonial “theory,” as depicted above, has been minimal, for reasons that have more to do with how “that” literature has defined itself. While there are differences in how the sociological, anthropological, and historical literatures have appropriated relevant concepts, colonialism here is still rooted in the study of such concrete historical phenomena, which is distinct from its recent theorization, whatever it is.  5. The latter became published as Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Guha 1997).  6. Guanxi literally means “relationship,” same as in English. Its glossing has to do with not its meaning but rather its prevalence as a phenomenon and its peculiarities of behavior that observers have found blatantly alien.  7. A fuller explanation of Abrams’s thoughts in this regard appears in chapter 6.  8. These case examples have been summarized from and are more explicitly detailed in Chun (2017).  9. Cooper calls Hong Kong here “Karl Marx’s Other Island” (to counter Stuart Mill’s utilitarianism). 10. Needless to say, Trump’s “America First” refers to not its first peoples but rather a colonialism made native. 11. See the discussion presented in Chun (2000: 435–36), which aptly problematizes the subjectivity of the state.

Chapter 6

as Norm, State as n Nation Exception Unseen Ramifications of a Hyphenated Modernity

W

hat is the unseen presence of the nation-state? What is so mystifying about the state of social theory that has effectively masked the nature of its cultural hegemony? Starting with Geoffrey Benjamin’s ruminations on these themes and then examining the prevailing literature, many of these conceptual mysteries remain unresolved thirty years afterward. And like the advent of neoliberalism from governmentality to biopolitics, the omnipresence of national imagination and violence of state power mysteriously continue to occupy theory’s unseen presence and thus warrant serious reflection. Cultural critique in anthropology must transcend “defamiliarizing strategies” to contest hegemonic norms.

On Geoffrey Benjamin’s Deep Sociology of the Nation-State This chapter begins with an overdue commentary on an essay that remained unpublished for too long: Geoffrey Benjamin’s ([1985] 2015) “The Unseen Presence: A Theory of the Nation-State and Its Mystifications.” When it appeared, it was pathbreaking in many regards, but it did not progress beyond its working paper status for many reasons. Benjamin’s perfectionism aside, the length and breadth of the paper alone undoubtedly made it difficult to find an appropriate outlet for such a publication. In many obvious respects, it was an atypical anthropological topic, even in the context of the author’s prevailing interests, although one can see in retrospect how his argument about the nation-state complemented his earlier notion of tribality. On the other hand, the paper’s anthropologically unappealing nature in general was invigorated by a

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broad, interdisciplinary approach that Benjamin brought to what was clearly an impoverished field of study. The resurgence of debates over nations and nationalism in the 1980s prompted by the work of Benedict Anderson, Ernest Gellner, Anthony Smith, and Liah Greenfeld, among many others, should have made this essay a timely and relevant contribution. And despite the unpublished nature of this working paper, I have used it as standard reading in my course on nation-state formation. In short, many issues in this essay are worth serious scrutiny. At the same time, it is necessary to situate our discussion of these issues not only in reference to the context of larger debates as they appeared at that time but also in view of the numerous other writings that evolved in the decades after the 1980s. The Asian nation has been a prevalent theme as well, invoking its own variants, such as Stein Tønnesson and Hans Antlöv (1996). First, the novelty of Benjamin’s essay had to do with its direct attempt to confront the complex nature of the nation-state, which was aptly reflected in the title by the idea of an unseen presence and its focus on mystification in the theory of nation-state. That is to say, this was not the first such comprehensive attempt to theorize the nation-state. Nationalism was a well-known social and historical phenomenon that had already undergone a generation or more of theorizing, most of which had been long forgotten. Early works by Carlton Hayes (1931), Edward Hallett Carr ([1945] 1968), Hans Kohn (1945), Boyd Shafer (1955), Elie Kedourie (1961), Kenneth Minogue (1967), Rupert Emerson (1967), Eugene Kamenka (1973), Charles Tilly (1975), and Hugh Seton-Watson (1977) were Eurocentric theories flawed even more by their superficiality. Benjamin assumes for the most part the European origins of the modern nation-state as well but attempts to frame its evolution within a more rigorous structural, processual framework. More importantly, much of this earlier historical theorizing could never divorce itself from political ideologies of nationalism. Starting with nationalism’s ideological roots, theories began to accent more its sociopolitical concreteness. Benjamin ([1985] 2015: 550) clearly proposes at the outset “a macrosociological theory of the modern nation-state as an artefactual, imitable and ideological institution, set up within an industry-based world system of international relations, and maintained through processes of ideological mystification in which conventional scholarship has served as an accompaniment to the overt politics.” It was quite a mouthful, especially in 1985. Read in literal terms, this statement has many noteworthy aspects. The first is its recognition of a preexisting international system that standardized the definition of a nation-state, which has through institutionalization served to make certain features of it politically enforceable. This largely facilitates his isolation of four features that people tend to unambiguously accept as standard components of a modern nation-state: citizenship; a single, standardized national language;

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access to a state-provided educational system; and a uniform, money-based economic system embedded in an industrial mode of production (551). These four features were in sum the product of societal evolution that became institutionalized in international political practice, which was the context of primary nation-state formation. A second aspect that accented the artifactual, imitable, and ideological nature of the nation-state has obvious ramifications for cultural studies that explicitly contrast politically scientific and functionalist approaches in general. His focus on ideological mystification seems to make scholarly theory politically complicit in ways that similarly invoke Edward Said’s (1978) Orientalism, but mystification can easily make political ideologies and all forms of cultural representation that are tied to state hegemony equally complicit. Finally, the macrosociological theory that Benjamin presents can largely be characterized as an effort to uniformly condense all the above within a framework of primary and secondary nation-state formation. If this is what the theory boils down to, then I argue that its actual accomplishment is mixed at best. I cannot understate the novelty and importance of the various aspects of Benjamin’s position, as stated earlier, which clearly countered mainstream approaches at the time. However, in the end, he does a rather inadequate job of spelling out the abstract ramifications and concrete manifestations of each of those aspects, with little or no convincing explanation of how they can be reconciled as part of an interdependent system/regime. Worst of all, he barely cites Gellner (1983) while neglecting other standard bearers such as Anderson (1983), Greenfeld (1992), and Smith (1986), even where there are relevant areas of engagement and difference. In the field of cultural studies, what Gellner views as the cultural mind-set of the nation is largely embodied in the four standard features of the modern nation-state that Benjamin isolates. Gellner attempts more constructively to argue how industrial societies constitute the precondition that makes possible and necessary the role of mandatory educational systems in reinforcing a common mind-set usually called national identity (e.g., E. Weber 1976). Benjamin also clearly intersects with Anderson’s focus not only on the imagined constitution of the nation but more importantly on its rootedness in colloquial language and the empty, homogenous time-space of mass literature and its structures of feeling, where print capitalism institutionally makes possible its dissemination throughout a national consciousness. There are in short clear avenues for constructive dialogue, especially in Benjamin’s revision; the omission of obvious references to then alternative voices that have now become part of a mainstream theoretical literature is counterproductive. In terms of macrosociological theory, his pathbreaking endeavor has been surpassed by other recent writing, most notably Etienne Balibar (1991) and Paul James’s (1997) Nation Formation: Towards a Theory of Abstract Community.

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Many areas opened up by Benjamin (and others) have continued to be active terrains of debate. Primary nation-state formation has become the most contested issue. Benjamin’s appropriation of longue durée history and the modern world system to buttress his account of global political relations to show that European imperialism was in reality an integral part of the modern nation-state “almost from the start,” which eventually validates the adoption of the nation-state as the staple unit of the “official” system of international relations in the twentieth century, is ironically a reverse reading of world system theory’s historical narrative. World systems theory is mainly interested in showing that capitalism has historical roots; the system then engenders its global expansion, and thus so-called imperialism, but it overlaps with a regime of territorial expansionism that has separate ideological roots. Benjamin ([1985] 2015: 561) quotes Immanuel Wallerstein (1979: 105), who says: “Both groups—the indigenous bourgeoisie and the professional strata— look upon the state as their negotiating instrument with the rest of the capitalist world economy. In that narrow sense, they are ‘nationalist.’” But in the context of world systems theory, the state is hardly a privileged factor. There is, of course, collusion between the state and imperialist trade, but this hardly proves that they necessitate each other. Yet, for Benjamin, the nation-state still originates in Europe. Anderson (1983: 50) questions its Eurocentric origin when asking, “Why was it precisely creole communities that developed early conceptions of their nation-ness—well before most of Europe?” He then distinguishes this creole nationalism from linguistic (so-called popular) nationalism in Europe and official nationalism in Europe, to which he attributes its modular quality. His restructuring of the modular nature of the nation form has prompted evaluation of the cultural and sociohistorical dimensions of nationalism (cf. the perspective of Cheah and Culler 2003 with that of Goswami 2002). At the same time, its harshest critique comes from Partha Chatterjee (1986: 21), who faults European historical models for their “objective, inescapable, imperative” qualities. Benjamin’s interpretation of primary nation-state formation is grounded in its apparent European, universalist modern, modular nature in a way that subsequently colors secondary nation-state formation as a deterministic reaction to a universalizing modern West. There is room here for viewing anticolonial experience as the main context for secondary nation-state formation, but this makes Benjamin’s omission of Chatterjee unjustifiable. To be sure, Chatterjee’s counterargument that anticolonial nationalism initially developed in the inner domain (of cultural identity) before it became manifested in society’s outer domain (of the economy, state, and politics) represents a strange derivative of a subaltern studies critique, but the literature has given rise long ago to more sophisticated articulations of secondary process. In the literature on colonialism, the advent of the state has been an

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explicit object of attention, invoked most clearly perhaps in Bernard Cohn and Nicholas Dirks’s (1988) programmatic manifesto relating the nation-state and colonialism to technologies of power. Paradigmatic analyses of the census in India (Cohn 1984) and creation of state power in Fiji (Thomas 1990) have lent Foucauldian overtones of governmentality and Eliasian notions of corporeal control to the emergence of the state. The importance of colonialism aside, secondary nation-state formation can also be the product of other intercultural encounters and politicizing processes of various kinds. If anything, Eurocentric narratives of world history have been structured too simplistically on the transition from traditional to modern, which conveniently accents the role of nationalism as a knee-jerk reaction to Westernization of all kinds, be it political, cultural, or economic. Returning to Benjamin’s “macrosociology,” it is interesting to note that, amid his evolutionary narrative, he argues that “we shall get nowhere in attempting to explain nationalism without first understanding the modern state” ([1985] 2015: 558). Inexplicably, he fails to follow up systematically or profoundly on this point. Indeed, this was the point of departure for Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer’s (1985) book The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution. Benjamin makes little effort to explain how the four features of nation-statism are tied to or become the object of the state’s project of moral regulation. Similar to how the census in Cohn’s colonial India had become the nodal point for the objectification or social structuration of cultural identity through the intervention of the modern state’s administrative imperative, the rituals of rule that Corrigan and Sayer point to constituted the nodal point for a regime of governmentality that was ultimately normalizing in Durkheimian terms. That is to say, one can easily see how citizenship, language, and other constituents of identity represent the artifactual face of the nation-state’s unseen presence. More importantly, identity is not just a neutral signifier; it has already become the routine object of state control and policing. It is part of the state’s proprietorship of culture in relation to community and territoriality. As we all know, the passport is a modern invention; it corresponds in the first instance to the nation-state’s invention of borders. But as John Torpey (2000) rightly emphasizes, identity is not just the legitimation of being in a legal sense but also the politicized formation of a state regime of surveillance. One can understand the nation’s relation to borders as the product of a modern geographical imagination (Winichakul 1994) or as an epistemic moment in the birth of biopolitics (Elden 2013). Either way, the state’s investment into maintaining this unseen presence through regulation of routine life, demarcation of territory, boundedness to roots, and the sanctity of ideologies of all kinds is mindboggling. As Corrigan and Sayer (1987) put it:

134  On the Geopragmatics of Anthropological Identification This routinized pleasurable legitimation work all too often goes unremarked— tax forms, census returns, landownership registries, passport photographs, signatures and the murmuring volume around “I.D.” (a word we should always speak in full: Identification) are part of the taken for granted mediations of modernity. They compel (there is frequently no choice about it) us to represent ourselves in certain, often minutely specific, ways; taken as a whole cartography of power they freeze us through these programs of power into mythic statuses of sedimented language. We become our I.D.

The most sophisticated attempt to articulate the role of state formation in galvanizing its collusive relationship with the combinatory of territory, people, and focus of loyalty, and hence the taken-for-granted nation-state, is Corrigan and Sayer’s (1987) unpublished manuscript “From ‘The Body Politic’ to ‘The National Interest’: English State Formation in Comparative and Historical Perspective (An Argument Concerning ‘Politically Organized Subjection’).” As the title suggests, the English state evolves in the broader transformation of societal form, like Foucault’s analysis of the genealogy of practices that characterized traditional kingship, and then in the emergence of a modern disciplinary society. This evolution has without doubt become more subtly constructive than Benjamin’s reliance on Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft. Despite unambiguous recognition of the features that constitute modern nationhood, efforts to explain the interdependent relationship linking the hyphen have been mixed at best. Corrigan and Sayer are dissatisfied with literal efforts to define these features simply in neutral legal terms. By linking them to the process of state formation, they inevitably take on a politicizing flavor. Their focus on rituals and routines of rule reflects the nature of this “cultural revolution” in a way that can also explain the hegemonic nature of the state’s politically organized subjection. Is identity hegemonic? Benjamin offers no answer, but I say yes. In addition to being a modern fiction, the boundedness it invokes is part of the state’s proprietorship of culture and its enforcement of a constructed ethos and other loyalties. The tendency for theorists to emphasize boundedness to ethnic roots adds another dimension of inescapability and standard uniformity to identity. We can choose our identities (within limits), but we are compelled to have one. This is precisely what the system of international relations regulates and enforces. In the final analysis, what does the unseen presence really refer to? It can refer to the taken-for-granted “mediations of modernity” referred to earlier. More importantly, I would add that this cultural face of nation-statism (in Herzfeld’s [1997] sense) masks a hegemonic regime of state structuration and control. What else should “mystification” really refer to? It is nice, as Benjamin ([1985] 2015: 548) says at the outset, that “a politically constructed institution has been made into the ‘natural’ archetype against which all other phenomena

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are measured,” but this does not sufficiently explain why there should be mystification, except to insinuate that the state is by nature unnatural, even illegitimate. He adds, in the process of culturalization, mystified, the nation-state becomes so much more potent a force for the subversion from the top down of the individual citizen’s consciousness. Mystification— the symbolic condensing of an idea so that it becomes a diffuse notion rather than a thinkable or talkable-about, focused-upon concept—would thus appear to be the prerequisite for turning an erstwhile overt ideology into covert common sense. (564)

So said, ideologies are thus fictions that serve to naturalize or sublimate the exploitative violence of the state. I have little problem associating, as he does, the various rites and icons of nationalism with this process of mythologizing, but he stops short of saying that national identity itself is a fiction, perhaps the ultimate form of “naturalization,” especially in relation to invented boundaries, if not the mind-set and very ethos of citizenship. But what is all this ideological investment about, if not what Max Weber has famously termed a process of state legitimation? Benjamin limits his attention to the anthropology of mystification but does not seriously examine the complex diversity manifested by ideological investment while largely neglecting in turn the macrosociology of the state’s process of hegemonic legitimation. He cites my account of “the would-be nation-state of Taiwan” (Chun 1994) while adding in effect that “Taiwan, of course, is a nation-state in all respects except for its failure to attract a significant degree of formal diplomatic regulation” (Benjamin [1985] 2015: 580). In actuality, I have been concerned less (if at all) with Taiwan’s official status as a nation or with nationalism as emergent process than with the process of nationalizing (cultural politicization). As for the politics of national recognition, I have no illusion about it being a “politics of the unreal” to the extent of forging a mind-set and ethos of cultural nationalism as a symbolic framework of political legitimation.1 This process of nationalizing was a systematic politicization crafted at the level of policy and orchestrated in practice as social movement. Further permutations of definition in policy had in the long run deeper ramifications for the emergence of ethnic consciousness, the rewriting of history, and the commoditization of tradition in other regards, all of which could be “mystification” in Benjamin’s terms. But more importantly, all these fictions are also standard rituals of nationalizing elsewhere (see, e.g., Kapferer 1988). I illustrate in greater detail how nationalist ideology later becomes the blueprint for inculcating identity through education (Chun 1995). Like the fourlevel transformation in Frederic Jameson’s (1981) interpretation of Biblical narrative, the writing of nationalist ideology in Taiwan reflected at the lowest level of elementary training a focus on cultural practices of the individual

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body, personal hygiene, and individual welfare, as well as the routine acquisition of common sense. At the intermediate level, courses focusing more heavily on civics and society represented an ideological investment of values from the individual-experiential level to one where knowledge of interpersonal relationships in society as things in themselves became the focus of education. The displacement of learning from a collective-experiential domain to the level of collective-theoretical knowledge became complete at the high school level with the teaching of Sun Yat-sen’s political thought (guofu sixiang). It is interesting to note that the system of mandatory education is called sanmin zhuyi jiaoyu (Three Principles Education), but it refers less to teaching of the Three Principles of the People by Sun Yat-sen than to the fact that the core precepts of this ideology, more exactly as interpreted by Chiang Kai-shek, had been modified and repackaged to structure the framework of a mandatory curriculum. As a socialization rite of passage, education then represented one of many axes of moral training. By contrast, Benjamin’s mythologizing of the nation-state remains mired largely in the linguistic nuances of nation-statism (e.g., the cognate notion of country), rites of national celebration, and the politics of national sport, which overlap more with Michael Billig’s (1995) banal nationalism than anything inherent to a deep sociology of the nation-state. Such ideological mystifications and the constructed nature of standard language policy that reify the classical fallacy in politics demonstrate why “interference is the very essence of modern techniques of state management” (Benjamin [1985] 2015: 568), but is that all? Anyone who has experienced the bureaucracy of any state can cite many more instances of “interference.” The mystification of theory that Benjamin alludes to has more to do with not only the general lack of attention to the state in social science but also the tendency to take for granted the neutral existence of society, subsequently misrecognizing the real presence of the state (especially in Singapore). Ironically, this notion of mystification is the weakest aspect of Benjamin’s essay, despite its prominence in the title. In contrast, Philip Abrams in an aptly titled essay, “Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State,” has confronted directly the role of ideology in mystifying and sublimating state power by criticizing basic flaws in our notion of political sociology and omissions in the Marxist theory of the state. Not unlike Benjamin, Abrams pointed to the misplaced reification of state institutions but primarily by underscoring the role of the state idea in masking the reality of political practice. He cites the particular influence of Nicos Poulantzas’s (1973) claim of the state’s unreality and summarizes his overall argument as follows: The state is not an object akin to the human ear. Nor is it even an object akin to human marriage. It is a third-order object, an ideological project. It is first and

Nation as Norm, State as Exception  137 foremost an exercise in legitimation—and what is being legitimated is, we may assume, something which if seen directly and as itself would be illegitimate, an unacceptable domination. Why else all the legitimation-work? The state, in sum, is a bid to elicit support for or tolerance of the insupportable and intolerable by presenting them as something other than themselves, namely legitimate, disinterested dominion. The study of the state thus seen would begin with the cardinal activity involved in the serious presentation of the state: the legitimating of the illegitimate. . . . The state is then in every sense of the term a triumph of concealment. It conceals real history and relations of subjection behind an ahistorical mask of legitimating illusion; contrives to deny the existence of connections and conflicts, which would if recognized be incompatible with claimed autonomy and integration of the state. The real secret, however, is the secret of the non-existence of the state. (Abrams [1977] 1988: 76–77)

Abrams’s claims about the state have important ramifications regarding mystification in the construction of political hegemony. More than just interference with individual free will, ideology plays a crucial role in masking this disinterested domination. There is a Foucauldian aspect to this as well: the more political scientists present it as a neutral structural-functional entity, and hence disinterested, the more it is able to conceal its illegitimacy. He does not spell out concretely what this ideological project entails, but it presumably includes all those cultural aspects of nationhood. The key to explaining state formation, then, is to understand how in the process it entails an interdependent relationship with the nation—hence the hyphen. But this does not exhaust the possible collusive relationships between nation-state and social theory. Tom Nairn (1997: 17) said this about the complicity of nationalism and philosophical thought: The true subject of modern philosophy is nationalism, not industrialization; the nation, not the steam engine and the computer. German philosophy (including Marxism) was about Germany in its age of difficult formation; British empiricism was about the Britons during their period of free trade and primitive industrial hegemony; American pragmatism was about the expansion of U.S. democracy after the closure of the Frontier; French existentialism manifested the stalemate of 1789 Republicanism after its twentieth century defeats—and so on. What philosophy was “about” in that sense has never been just “industrialization” (contra Ernest Gellner) but the specific deep-communal structures perturbed or challenged by modernization in successive ethnies, and experienced by thinkers as “the world.”

Through this notion of unseen presence and the role of mystification, Benjamin provides the basis of a critical theory of the nation-state but fails to follow up seriously. The advent of other important writings in the literature has concretely surpassed his deep sociology. His decision to make minor updating revisions and not to modify parts of the argument ironically now makes this paper out of touch. I doubt many people read this novel working paper at

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the time it appeared, but how many will actually read it in light of the evolution of a more sophisticated literature? Other mysteries await exploration, but the literature has moved on.

The Emergence of the State as Signifying Apparatus in the Practice of Modern Institutions Disciplinary practices have conveniently carved out relatively distinct conceptual niches. As an economic phenomenon, capitalism should be a problem ideally for economic theorists. The state seems to be a concrete institution par excellence whose origins can be historically and ideologically traced and thus has tended quite naturally to be an object of gazing for political scientists. As a societal form of the modern polity, the nation has generally attracted attention more from sociologists than others. Colonialism, at least historically, seems to be rooted in racial dualism, so one should not really be surprised that recent postcolonial theory has in essence endeavored to abstract a critical theory on the foundation of such cultural difference. Significant exceptions, of course, have broken given disciplinary boundaries, such as Wallerstein’s project to link capitalism to a history of global imperialism, culminating in the modern world system, Anderson’s effort to transcend standard theories of nationalism by demarcating its emergent possibilities within cultural and literary imagination, Chatterjee’s alternative critique to view nationalism as the product of colonialism, and so on. Even in the case of interdisciplinary linkages, one must start with a literal definition of a phenomenon as a precursor for viewing its collusion with other things. Benjamin’s admirable attempt to offer an interdisciplinary framework for understanding the nation-state nonetheless began with four unambiguous features of its existence before establishing deeper connections between and beyond them. What Benjamin calls the “unseen presence” in a regime of cultural mystification refers to the nation, but the state behind it endeavors to reinforce its hyphenated integration with the nation through a totalizing process of legitimation. A reading of Benjamin’s “theory” of the nation-state has shown in retrospect that it is more difficult to rationalize the modus operandi of the state based on how the nation is constituted than vice versa. A comparative study of nation-states would ascertain the relative role of the state in diverse societal contexts, as would a study of comparative colonialisms. The state has in fact been the source of cultural stratification, social restructuring, and political identification that has reinforced disciplinary modernity as societal institution and high Victorian colonialism. In the case of other complex institutions such as colonialism or the state, one usually assumes that their origins and evolution follow first as the product

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of their inherent features. Abrams ([1977] 1988) has argued that studying the state is “difficult,” even while you look at it in the face. If, as Corrigan and Sayer (1985) argue, state formation is about rule rather than mastery, one can then see how it must entail a process of legitimation—which is at the same time discursive, symbolic, ritual, and moral—that must make ongoing claims to authority, illocutionary effect of order, monopolization of loyalty, and routinized management of knowledge. The neutrality of cultural discourse or representation is embedded in this complex of practices and institutions. Despite the plethora of writing on colonialism, problematic definitions of it as a phenomenon overshadow the poverty of serious scrutiny of it as institution. Most self-proclaimed theories of postcolonialism are founded on the centrality of race as the signifying cultural difference. As variations of critical Fanonism, as Henry Louis Gates (1991) terms it, the extreme dichotomies of self and other in postcolonial theories drive colonialism as a system of political domination and cultural hegemony. However, cultural difference based on ethnic or racial distinction is hardly new to humanity. Most societies in history have been multicultural; empires have embraced multiethnic populations within its cosmological order, some quite harmoniously. The concept of race in the nineteenth century was a seminal part of all social theories of evolution (and progress) that later became the theoretical blueprint for theories of modernity. As a concept, its webs of significance go far beyond how it has become reified by postcolonial theorists, especially in how it eventually became embedded into political institutions, colonialism above all. The politics of race or ethnic difference is not simply the product of colonialism. Ethnic conflict of all kinds, not just between the West and the rest, based on social restructurings and cultural reifications that gave rise to new bounded identities, is really a modern phenomenon. It may seem most exacerbated in formerly colonial societies, but it has in fact been a staple of modern political institutions in general and thus should really be a product of that complex of processes as a whole. Racial stratification that has been generalized into critical theories of identity difference that have in turn become the basis of a broad based postcolonial2 mind-set is, in similar terms, a particular manifestation in a total regime of practice. How do we know if such difference is a function of a Lacanian mirror, a Manichean allegory, or another aspect of that institution of practice? I have argued that the poverty of the postcolonial is most evident when it is used in its most vulgar sense—as a statement of identity alone—yet most theories of postcolonialism are predicated precisely on the centrality of this difference (Chun 1996a: 138). Chatterjee (1993: 26) claims that colonial rule was always about “something else,” as if to deny the obvious fact of political domination. The more nationalism (anticolonialism) tried to contest colonial power in the outer or material domain of politics, the more it met efforts by colonialists to harden

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the boundaries of cultural difference to keep the inner or spiritual domains of self and other separate and sovereign. David Scott (1995) has tried to extend Chatterjee’s view of colonial governmentality by showing how its intrinsic politics of cultural difference and reconstruction is actually the evolution of a rule of modern power. The implicit contradiction that Chatterjee sees between the inner and outer domains of colonial politics becomes for Scott a change in governmentality, where modern power is characterized by its shift in point of application from the economy to the body social. This deliberate process of cultural mystification is in my opinion general to the emergence of state power rather than peculiar to the colonial regime. Thus, the modern project inherent to late nineteenth-century British colonialism has revolved around its discursive content and practical instrumentality instead of its point of application. In this regard, the peculiarity of British experiences, vis-àvis other colonialisms and the role of state hegemony in such rule, differs explicitly from French, Dutch, and other models but in ways that might also explain the relative salience of religion, law, and so on. “Black skins and white masks” may have been the stereotypical template in literal terms of a colonial regime, but the subtle emergence of the state became the signifying apparatus and enabled a dialectic of cultural difference to become the dominant face of colonial rule. Similarly, it is harder to explain how racial stratification in any colonial society engenders the nature of state rule than to show how the state directly constructs or regulates relations of race vis-à-vis class, gender, and other social groups or interests within the polity. In institutional practice, the operation of the state, especially in conjunction with nations, can be seen to overlap with the historical formation of colonial regimes, trade expansion that is at the core of an ongoing global capitalism, and the evolution of modernity, although its role and importance differ according to historical context, type of regime, and other circumstances of place. I wish to suggest that the source of postcolonial difference, as well as modern ethnic violence and mystifications of national identity, may reside elsewhere—why not the state as a signifying apparatus? The collusive relationships between colonialism, capitalism, state, and modernity show that a concept can take on meaning and force through its embeddedness in a complex of institutions and is in fact engendered by any number of things. More importantly, in each instance the state as institutional nexus of practice has enabled cultural difference to be magnified and structured in novel ways. This is really the crux of both practice and theory. The crisis of global capitalism today has accented not only the mutation of an economic system per se but also the rise of neoliberalism as state policy. As Rajesh Venugopal (2015: 165) interestingly put it, “neoliberalism is everywhere, but at the same time, nowhere.” The debate over neoliberalism

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as a recent phenomenon in the West, especially in the context of a mutating modern world system, is complicated by the fact that the literature on neoliberalism is clouded by its own conceptual ambiguities. In a strict sense, as Ha-Joon Chang (2003: 47) correctly defines it, neoliberalism was “born out of an unholy alliance between neoclassical economics and the AustrianLibertarian tradition.” This definition of its school of thought overlapped over time with political ideological trends in the 1980s that began to favor market deregulation, privatization, and retrenchment of a welfare state. Then, the phenomenon of free market capitalism began to converge with state control (despite being typically viewed as dualistic opposites). This resulted in divergent theoretical approaches, one focused on newly emerging capitalist systems and the other focused on regulative aspects of governmentality. In this regard, Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff ’s (2000) “millennial capitalism” and Colin Crouch’s (2011) evolution of the corporate state differed from approaches accentuating free market trade that had centered more on the broader restructuring of regulatory processes of the state and regimes of fiscal discipline, such as Gordon Burchell (1993), Nikolas Rose (1993), and Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval (2013).2 Despite the unambiguous relationship between market deregulation and governmentality, the literature on neoliberalism has been fraught with conceptual ambiguities and contradictory generalizations. To defy systemic totalization, Jamie Peck (2010: 7) has argued that neoliberalism is a decentralized force that produces heterogeneous outcomes and “can only exist in messy hybrids.” Aihwa Ong (2007: 1) has also emphasized that it is actually an amorphous phenomenon, “a migratory set of practices … that articulate diverse situations and participate in mutating configurations of possibility.” I argue that there is more to suggest that the welfare state, or governmentality in general, has been the product of the state’s appropriation of market capitalism rather than the collusion of capitalist interests in shaping state policy. The state still serves as a signifying apparatus. In retrospect, as a matter of theory, we have tended to view the state more as a passive agent than an active player in institutional practice. We take for granted racial stratification in a colonial regime, yet few have questioned the role of the state in structuring and exacerbating cultural division. It has been easier to start with the tangible reality of the nation than attempt to explain its hyphenated relationship to the state. Neoliberalism is seen as a natural result in the evolution of free market capitalism. But the state has played more than an enabling role. In fact, its influential presence has been greater than acknowledged hitherto in the literature. As a matter of methodology, it may be more fruitful to scrutinize the state not in vitro but rather in situ, in the context of its interaction with the nation, colonialism, capitalism, and other institutions as a precondition for understanding its inherent process and functions.

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Governmentality in the Critique of Social Theory, or the Return of Postcolonialism2 The flip side of the state as signifying apparatus is the substance of the signifying regime that constitutes the source of cultural hegemony in institutional practice. Ironically, the goal of postcolonial theory as literary critique, especially à la Homi Bhabha, was not to develop to an alternative theory of colonialism but rather to provide the language for a different critical theory, one based on the culture of racial difference, which can be broadened to include the politics of difference between self and other. Even in those colonial regimes where he situated his critique, identity not only differentiated but also more importantly bound people to a regime of structuration that categorized subjects and then in turn created difference, often where reified identities did not exist. Race was not simply the colonized other. Racial stratification differed significantly in different political regimes and was a product of ideological policies and larger civilizing ethos. Racial hierarchy became a foundation of colonial biopolitics in nineteenth-century British, French, and Dutch colonial regimes not surprisingly during a time when race was seen as part of a scientific theory of social evolution. In contrast, race was more nuanced in Spanish and Portuguese colonial regimes, especially in their earlier settlement of the New World, which was also relatively overshadowed by the influence of religious conversion as civilizing ethos. In a colonial context, race was only one of many cultural categories, which included gender and class as well, that became legally codified, socially institutionalized, and then systematically regulated as process. This dynamics in its totality should constitute the cultural framework for the study of colonial rule (not just the dialectics of race), which can serve as a critical theory. Moreover, structural regimes of difference were not limited to colonialism. It was also at the root of ethnic conflict ubiquitous to modern nation-states in general. The hardening of ethnic dualisms has become the blueprint for postcolonial2 imagination and has outlasted both colonialism and nationalism. In recognizing the contribution of postcolonial2 theory in giving new meaning to cultural analysis, with its specific emphasis on the politics of subjectivity in discursive construction and symbolic articulation, one should in turn realize that there is little difference between culturalizing regimes that have defined and driven colonial rule on the one hand and those that have engendered other historically modern political institutions in general.3 In short, national identity has not only galvanized the relationship of one nation to another but also become a product of the same process of codification, structuration, and regulation in terms of ethnicity, gender, class, and so on. In those nations emerging out of colonial rule, such regimes were imposed from above and have in the long run been mistaken for tradition. Even in “modern” nation-states, these

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identities had to be newly constructed and constituted ground rules for societal conduct that did not necessarily exist in the local, traditional past. As a theoretical problem, I think the experiences of Singapore have been overlooked in the literature. Dennis Wrong (1961) criticized sociological theory for its overly socialized conception of the individual, but he never looked at Singapore. Foucault’s genealogy of the disciplinary society made it the paradigm of Western modernity, but few mention Singapore, where disciplinary regulation has been fine tuned to a degree of efficiency unseen elsewhere, largely as a project of the state. Gellner’s (1964) argument that nationalism creates nations where they do not exist finds a perfect example in Singapore, whose search for identity has prompted unending reconfigurations of culture in materialist and abstract senses. Singapore has in many cases worn out established theoretical paradigms of all kinds while spinning life into higher states of unreality. Yet, few scholarly observers seem to notice or care. Singapore, like other nations, is conscious of its “being in the world,” in Jonathan Friedman’s (1990) terms, but an abstract understanding of its sociocultural processes should proceed from the ground up, distinctive excesses above all. As Singapore moves into the next stage of development, much can be said about its combination of microeconomic laissez-faire, macrosocial regulation, and illiberal democracy, which are staple constituents of its distinctive capitalist mode, but certain aspects of this overdetermined nature of modernity and the role of the state in engendering and maintaining the semblance of rational order ultimately deserve detailed critical scrutiny. It is not surprising to discover that serious attempts to understand Singapore unavoidably confront the state as the prime object of gazing. Cherian George’s (2000) account of “the air-conditioned nation” represents a subtle critique of the state from the level of political practice. Souchou Yao (2007) psychoanalyzes Singapore, and his critique of state is personified largely in his diagnosis of “the sick father” whose sickness is ramified through the excesses of culture and spectacles of society. C.J. Wan-Ling Wee’s (2008) narrative of “the Asian modern” grounds his critique of state in Singapore’s entanglement with modernity as global capitalism. Singapore’s experience, despite being overlooked in the literature, has been paradigmatic of many theoretical trends. To say that Singapore is a modern disciplinary society in a Foucauldian sense would be an understatement; efficiency is explicitly a project of the state. At issue ultimately are the nature of domination and the role of critical theory in unmasking, through cultural representation, the bases of social and political power. In Singapore’s case, all roads lead inevitably to the state. For better or worse, the omnipresence of the state is the product of its specific formative history; the embeddedness of ethnicity, economy, and culture to each other; and everyday life regimes. They make the state part of a disinterested process of moral regulation, and its relationship

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to capitalism and democracy is correspondingly related. Singapore may be unique, but it underscores the complexity of the state’s signifying regime. In chapter 5, I noted that postcolonial2 critique has in actuality more often than not been used as a critical theory of capitalism and that through its definition as mind-set can be extended to any situation of “empire.” Colonialism1 had already served a seminal role in promoting dependency theory in the 1960s as an extension of Marxist critique, where systemic exploitation was rooted in political economy. British cultural studies, under the banner of Stuart Hall, married identity politics to class critique mainly as parallel aspects of the system at large. Wallerstein’s modern world system argued that the internal dynamics of historical capitalism were imperializing by nature in ways that culminated in a project of global domination, but it can also be read as an economic system enabled by absolutist states that licensed and empowered trading monopolies, such as the East India Company, to achieve capitalist exploitation as agents of territorial domination. The advent of postcolonial2 critique in various forms extended radical critiques of global capitalism by providing a framework of cultural resistance to an ongoing political project. Colonialism in some form had always been part of Marxist critical theory. The language of colonial critique had over time subtly evolved. In all these cases, does it really matter that territorial expropriation and alien rule, which have in the wake of the demise of colonialism and its old world system become anachronistic, are referred to at all, when they are meant only to reference broad genres of political domination? I suspect that postcolonialism2 in some form will continue to serve as a cultural critique for an ever-expanding global capitalism in ways that in turn enhance class critique rather than conflict with it. Based on Scott Lash and John Urry’s (1987) claim of “the end of organized capitalism” and breakdown between core and periphery in the modern world system, Arjun Appadurai’s (1990) depiction of disjunctures in the global cultural economy, and Kenichi Omae’s (1990) account of the borderless world have in different ways accented the metamorphosis of global capitalism in the late twentieth century into one driven by chaotic flows. Culture has become the site of transnational hybridization (Nederveen Pieterse 1995) as well. But one might question whether cultural hegemony has disappeared altogether or just mutated into something more sublime and complicated. Yet, despite its best intentions (in deliberate blurring boundaries), it has still created differences, not only between rich and poor countries but also between rich and poor classes, thus producing even sharper social divisions. How else can one interpret the recent escalation of social movements against free trade globalization (as though the latter solely represents large corporate interests against the average citizen and the dispossessed)? In effect, the cultural facade of chaotic flows and transnational hybridity has served a seminal role to neutralize in discursive terms the underlying

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exploitative nature of global capitalism. This also clearly suggests that culture can in turn become the basis of a critical social theory. Arif Dirlik’s (1994) critique of “the postcolonial aura” facetiously questioned the identity of “diasporic” intellectuals who contributed explicitly to the popularity of postcolonial theory as a pretext for more seriously problematizing the crisis of global capitalism as the condition in fact that engendered its eventual emergence or perceived acceptability. While this did not entirely dismiss the relevance of identity as a signifier in postcolonialism’s cultural critique in a general theory of racial difference, it still underlines the potential relevance of culture’s role in the social construction and systemic maintenance of political hegemony, The institutional production of hegemonic ideologies and practices can involve imaginative genres of writing, discursive revisions of thought, strategic manipulations of policy, and routines of everyday practice. Sociological theories—which legitimize rule by law, administrative efficacy, or other “objective” standards of identification that inculcate all these above senses of culture as norm instead of as part of a microphysics of mystification—should represent the primary target of a critical anthropological theory. As a matter of epistemological reflexivity, this should be not only pertinent to native (vis-à-vis metropolitan) scholars but general to all social scientists.4 In other words, postcolonialism2 can constitute a viable methodology for cultural analysis. If postcolonialism2 is in sum the cultural representation of a broad genre of domination not necessarily dependent on the a priori existence of colonialism1, then its defining criteria should have less to do with the nature of such domination than with the distinctive features of that signifying apparatus. To an extent, this involves the process of hegemonic construction that has the goal of masking and sublimating domination. In this regard, I reiterate that the state still plays a seminal role in (post)colonial domination that has been benignly neglected. In the evolution of colonialism, state governmentality has served as the fulcrum not only for political rule but also for the emergence of modern regimes that have continued well beyond the demise of colonialism per se. In the context of historical colonialism, the state established institutional routines of rule by effectively structuring society and codifying culture through the construction of identities that became the basis of self and other. These institutions were in turn the instruments of disinterested domination and moral regulation, as they relied above all on ideologies or fictions that in effect mask its inherent illegitimacy and violence of rule. But as I noted at the outset of this chapter, the theory of the mystifications of the nation-state is still incomplete. The prevalence and ubiquity of the nation-state in modern life has already become an unquestioned fact of existence. More importantly, the unquestioned nature of such identification has also become reproduced and maintained as theoretical norm. Like Nairn’s (1997: 17) observation that the

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true subject of philosophy is nationalism, one can also argue that cultural mystification is an equally pervasive presence in social thought and action today. One of the lesser-cited virtues of George Marcus and Michael Fischer’s Anthropology as Cultural Critique was not its explicit promotion of interpretive, reflexive, literary, political-economic, postcolonial, and other eclectic theoretical approaches to anthropology but rather its parallel contention that the critical ethos driving such reflexivity had always existed in anthropology. The anthropological tradition that Franz Boas passed on to a generation of students, which included Edward Sapir, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict, was not just his historical relativism but a deep-seated social critique that pervaded their scholarly work and view of contemporary society.5 Marcus and Fischer (1999: 130) point to implicit criticisms of British society in the work of Malinowski and Evans-Pritchard, to which one can add LéviStrauss’s Totemism and Dumont’s Homo Hierarchicus, which were founded on or developed systematic critiques of scientific or Eurocentric theories of society. Marcus and Fischer (137) argue that the difference between earlier critical visions of anthropology and contemporary techniques of cultural critique in anthropology resides in the latter’s strategy of “defamiliarization” through epistemological critique and cross-cultural juxtaposition, which entails an equal anthropology “among us and them,” one that leads to the eventual dissolution of exoticism indicative more of earlier traditions in the study of other cultures. In short, it is during its “repatriation” (to the home of the authorial self) that anthropology becomes cultural critique. Epistemology is the language of cultural defamiliarization, and ethnography serves as the method that instantiates anthropology through its cultural relativism, as a critical epistemology. Or as Marcus and Fischer (117) put it, “this insistence on a fundamental descriptive realism is what makes ethnographic techniques so attractive at the present moment in a number of different fields that claim cultural critique as their function.” In other words, ethnographic method actually distinguishes anthropology from the cultural critique of other disciplinary theories. Marcus and Fischer’s advocacy of cultural critique in anthropology is admirable, but it takes for granted the inherent nature of anthropology as the study of other cultures while more importantly sanctifying values of its implicit cultural relativism. The dialogical nature of ethnography is the reconciliation of outsider and insider points of view in their respective constructions of ethnographic reality. There is, on the other hand, little consideration of what might constitute a critical perspective from a symbolic (Geertzian) native’s point of view or for a native studying one’s own society. Cultural relativism is a virtue, to be sure, but it has its limitations in practice. The neutrality that is attributed to an understanding of the cultural and social system, even in the best traditions of interpretive and reflexive anthropology, reflects in my

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opinion our normative definitions of the system. They attribute the inadequacy of earlier schools of critical thought to the detachment of intellectual theorists from their object of empirical inquiry, which amounts to a mode of “demystification.”6 The ungroundedness of critical theory in reality is exaggerated, but contrary to their contention that anthropology’s cultural critique is the product of the defamiliarizing strategies of a reflexive ethnography, I argue that cultural critique is an indispensable element of, if not point of departure for, any ethnographic inquiry. Critical approaches are available to all and not dependent on “dialogue.” In fact, subjective identification with the norm is a direct obstacle to detached judgment.7 What has been missing from cultural criticism and interpretive approach in anthropology is not an ethnographic method but rather a critical theory of society. In this case, the cultural relativism inherent in our neutral (ultimately normative) definitions of culture and society is in the final analysis an obstacle to understanding the disciplinary, morally regulative nature of the modern state—in fact other culturally constituted polities found elsewhere and historically. This critical theory of the polity must be coupled with a concrete articulation of the collusive relationship between cultural mind-sets, behaviors, and practices in the maintenance or process of societal reproduction. Cultural critique is thus not limited to the struggle of the socially disenfranchised or economically exploited. Institutions operate at many levels of abstraction that engender the production of discourse, transformations of ideology into practice, and the regulation of people in place and time. The manifesto of cultural critique is necessarily one that links the total institution to the functioning of a matrix of other relevant phenomena. In his essay on “Anti Anti-relativism,” Clifford Geertz (1984: 268) coolly remarked: “Papuans envy, Aborigines dream. The issue is, what are we to make of these undisputed facts as we go about explicating rituals, analyzing ecosystems, interpreting fossil sequences or comparing languages.” The intrinsic merits of cultural interpretation on the one hand expose on the other hand its belief in the presumed autonomy of cultures. Geertz’s personal aversion to politics might explain why, in his writings, culture tends to be unadulterated from both the inside and the outside. While the work of Eric Wolf (1982), among others, should have shown that few, if any, societies have ever been totally isolated, which would seem to have ramifications for the relative autonomy of culture, further emphasis on colonialism, modern world systems, and global capitalism has tended to highlight the prevalence of external intervention over internal conflict or native politics. Ironically, the cultural critique of Marcus and Fischer is consistent with the interventionist nature of politics from the outside or above. The role of comparative, ethnographic analysis in heightening reflexive sensitivity at the core underscores even more the ethical relativism guiding cultural interpretation per se. I argue instead that the discursive

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content and practical instrumentality of state rule and moral regulation can provide a critical framework for interpreting hegemony at the core in ways that should be general everywhere. In the final analysis, I would submit that the largest obstacle to a critical anthropology is its implicit ethical relativism. Its ongoing entrenchment in mainstream thought has largely heightened the need or desirability to view culture as an autonomous system, which is also seminal to the hermeneutics of interpretation. One can conceivably do interpretive social science from a neutral, detached point of view, but such modes of cultural analysis conflict with a view of social and cultural institutions as being discursively imagined and practically constructed by the natives themselves, where it is difficult, if not impossible, to view culture and society as analytically distinct. Corruption and contradiction, not to mention preexisting orthodoxies of all kinds, are a normal part of every culture and society. Relative respect and detached values are essential foundational principles, but it should not be ethically incorrect to advocate that any place sucks. One must instead be relatively grounded in the institutions in situ and values in practice, which constitute the point of departure and ground rules for any social analysis. Especially in light of the era of Donald Trump, it would not be improper to argue that American society has become unreal and unhinged, which would provide a more constructive basis for critical cultural analysis. Moreover, this genre of analysis should not be different for insiders and outsiders, which is the usual point of departure for anthropological sensitivities. Cross-cultural comparison has contributed immensely to anthropology’s critical reflexivity, but the sui generis relativity that I advocate is grounded in the local context itself. In my own intellectual journey, I have found it useful to move away from anthropology as a discipline to practice a broader based cultural studies, even though I still acknowledge the ongoing influence of its conceptual training and worldview. However, the immersion into so-called cultural studies has represented less an emancipation from than a substitution of one prison house of knowledge for another. Nonetheless, the experience of detachment has made it easier to view disciplinary wholes and boundaries in clearer disinterested terms. To be sure, the geopragmatics of identification inevitably involves the deconstruction of those axiomatic principles that define theory and drive the discipline in practice, but I have argued above all that concepts beget other concepts only in a literal sense. There has been and will continue to be diffusion of ideas between schools and fields of thought, but the shaping and appropriation of ideas have unconsciously been influenced more by disciplinary assumptions and practices, as defined and enforced by institutional relevance. Just as relevance can be molded by folk definitions of anthropology as “the study of the other,” methodological legitimacy can also be assessed in terms of its verifiability as fieldwork. Such practices are subjectively defined and

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axiomatically taken for granted, but how can/would changing the discipline change theory?

Notes This chapter is based on a commentary, Allen Chun, “On Geoffrey Benjamin’s Deep Sociology of the Nation-State,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 17, no. 2 (2016), and has been further developed to explore implications of the nation-state to disciplinary thought.   1. See Chun (2007), especially about independence hysteria in the 1996 Taiwan Strait missile crisis.  2. As Peck (2010: 9) phrases it, “neoliberalism, in its various guises, has always been about the capture and reuse of the state in the interests of shaping a pro-corporate, freer-trading ‘market order.’”  3. In my work on Taiwan, I have argued that postwar KMT rule represents in many senses a legitimate example of a colonial regime (Chun 1995). By making postcolonialism2 a matter of interpretation, I aim less to legitimize the advent of Taiwanese cultural identity as form of postcolonial resistance vis-à-vis the cultural hegemony of KMT rule than to underscore the legitimate use of postcolonialism2 as critical theory of KMT nationalism. This empowers one to interpret the imposition of civilization and discursive constructions of tradition as hegemonic agents of political violence instead of the value-free institutions of culture that they claim to be. Perceptions can explain why subjects resist such impositions as culturally alien; this offers a methodological means for allowing one to critically question the value-free status of any objective institution, even sociological theory’s neutrality.  4. In the social sciences, one can speculate why many have been culturally critical of institutions ranging from modernity and capitalism to nationalism while others continue to practice fields of knowledge that are basically complicit with maintenance of those hegemonic institutions. It is a value judgment or a matter of interpretation.  5. Murphy (1991) pointed to this critical tradition as the distinctive aspect of the Columbia “school.”  6. As Marcus and Fischer (1999: 114) remarked, “demystification as an emphasis in cultural critique has been pursued within Marxist and Weberian social analysis, Freudian psychoanalysis and Nietzschean cultural analysis. More recently, semiotics, the study of contemporary life as systems of signs, has been a major tool of demystifying cultural critique, as in the hands of its master, Roland Barthes.” This also distances Geertz, whose culture was normative.  7. In Todorov’s (1988) terms, this sense of distance (between observer and observed) contributes directly to the sense of detachment (of the values of an observer from his own cultural milieu) necessary to any critical theory.

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n Index Abrams, Philip, 121, 136–37, 139 African diaspora, 35–36, 37, 48 Alexander, Jeffrey, 72, 74, 79, 99, 102 Anderson, Benedict (on imagined community), 22, 66, 130–32 Anthropology as Cultural Critique (on ethical relativism), 146–48 Appadurai, Arjun (on transnational disjunctures), 28, 62, 78, 144 Barth, Frederik (on ethnicity as culture difference), 14–15, 24 Bayart, Jean-François (on identity as imaginaire), 1, 29–30, 32 Benjamin, Geoffrey (on the unseen presence of the nation-state), 129–38 Braudel, Fernand (on French national identity), 29 Bendle, Mervyn (on crisis of high modernity), 21–22 Brubaker, Rogers (critique of groupism), 11–14, 15, 23, 25, 30, 37 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 30, 102 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 64, 114, 115, 119, 125 Chatterjee, Partha, 115–16, 119, 126, 132, 138–40 Chinese diaspora, 35–36, 49–50, 63, 78 Chineseness, 16, 120–22 Clifford, James, 37, 57–69, 71–72, 73–74, 76, 77, 78, 79, 96, 127 Cohn, Bernard, 22, 119, 126, 133 Corrigan, Philip and Derek Sayer, 133–34, 139

Critical Fanonism, 108–9, 114, 124, 128, 139 Dirks, Nicholas, 119, 126, 133 Dirlik, Arif, 63, 107, 108, 112, 113, 118, 124, 145 Discipline and Punish, 82, 91–95 Discourse (as spaces of dispersion), x, 2–3, 20–21, 26, 34, 91, 101, 127 Dumont, Louis, 82, 102, 146 Division of Labor in Society, 82, 86–93, 103 Durkheim, Emile, 74, 81, 82–85, 86–91, 92–95, 98–99, 102, 103, 104, 116, 126, 133 Erikson, Erik, 13, 121 Foucault, Michel, 19, 20, 31, 59, 60, 63, 67, 71, 78, 85–94, 96–97, 99, 104, 107, 116, 134, 143 Geertz, Clifford, 17, 18, 26, 31, 58, 69–77, 79, 84, 102, 127, 147 Gellner, Ernest (on nations and nationalism), 20, 66, 130–31, 137 Geopragmatics (as speaking position), x, 3, 50, 127 Gilroy, Paul (on Black Atlantic), 37, 50–51, 53, 63, 64 Gleason, Philip (on identity as idem), 12 Globalization (transnational), 15, 26, 27, 28, 32, 37, 38, 51, 64, 111, 144 Governmentality (colonial), 99, 107, 126, 129, 133, 140, 141, 145 Guha, Ranajit, 115–19, 125, 128

164 Index Hong Kong (identity), 23–25, 32, 118, 122–23, 128 Identity crisis, 13, 21–22, 31, 121 Invention of tradition, 20, 24, 30, 65, 66, 68, 76, 126 Izenberg, Gerald, 29 James, Paul, 32, 131 Jameson, Frederic, 117, 135 Jewish diaspora, 34–36, 47–48, 63 Japanese diaspora in Taiwan, 39–50, 53 Kapferer, Bruce, 26, 135 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 74, 82, 84, 85, 102, 146 Longue durée, 28, 29, 68, 69, 132 McClintock, Anne, 107, 108, 113, 125 Nairn, Tom, 66, 137, 145 Neoliberalism, 65, 67, 68, 69, 100, 126, 129, 140–41, 149 Ortner, Sherry, 1–2, 72–74 Parsons, Talcott, 69, 83–84, 86–87, 102, 103, 104

Patterson, Orlando (on cosmopolis), 51–52 Postcolonial aura, 63, 112, 145 Provincializing (theory/disciplines), 11, 16, 95, 101, 114–15, 120 Safran, William (on diaspora), 34, 38 Sahlins, Marshall, 82, 90, 102 Said, Edward, 19, 63, 70, 81, 99, 113, 116, 124 Sameness, notion of, 11, 12–14, 15, 22–23, 25, 121 Settler colonialism, 110, 116 Singapore, 32, 136, 143–44 Sollors, Werner (on invention of ethnicity), 20, 22, 26 Subaltern studies, 68, 107–8, 111, 114–19, 124–26, 132 Taiwan (identity), 23–26, 32, 118, 122–23, 135, 149 Tololyan, Khachig (on diaspora), 33–34, 39 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 28, 97, 101, 116, 132, 138, 144 Wang Gungwu (on Chinese diaspora), 50, 53, 78 Writing Culture, 58–61, 67, 69, 74, 77, 127