Critic a Handel Man

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Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics

Critiques of Anthropology: Literary Turns, Slippery BendsAuthor(s): Don HandelmanSource: Poetics Today, Vol. 15, No. 3 (Autumn, 1994), pp. 341-381Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1773314 .

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Critiquesof Anthropology:LiteraryTurns,SlipperyBendsDon Handelman

Sociology and Anthropology, Hebrew University, Jerusalem

Abstract Postmodern anthropologists advocate the deconstruction of an-thropology through its writings by importing theories of cultural and lit-erary criticism. These critiques point up implicit strategies of text-buildingin anthropological writing that arrogate to anthropologists the judgmentalpower to authorize the natives captured in these texts. Among these strate-gies of textual persuasion is the use of neutral, scientific vantage points fromwhich to observe and to hegemonize truths about others. These strategiesconveniently ignore anthropology's colonialist heritage and its use of totalismand universalism to monopolize the right to speak objectively in the nameof native others. However, this essay argues that fieldwork anthropology isunlike any of the humanities and other social sciences in that it is not a text-mediated discipline in the first place. Consequently, it is the sole discipline thatstruggles with the turning of subjects into objects rather than the turning ofobjects into subjects. This is the experimental strength of anthropology, whichshould be conserved. This ethos of experimentalism in self/other relation-ships is why anthropologists should concentrate on reflexively deconstructingtheir discipline from within. The alternative is to fall prey to the expansion-ist aims of cultural studies that would resurrect a hierarchy of disciplines inwhich anthropology becomes hegemonized by history and literary criticism.Conventionalized in the name of radical critique, the experimental momentof anthropology would then cease to exist.My thanks to Smadar Lavie for her comments on an earlier version of this essay.This work began as a review article of five books chosen by the editors, and thesevolumes have remained the focus of the issues I raise on relationships amonganthropology, literary criticism,and history.PoeticsToday15:3 (Fall 1994). Copyright? 1994 byThe PorterInstitute for Poeticsand Semiotics. CCC0333-5372/94/$2.50.


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342 PoeticsToday 15:3Howmanypostmodernistsdoes it take to changea lightbulb?

A tale is told of Clifford Geertz doing fieldwork in Sefrou, a smallMoroccan city near Fez. In the morning he takes to the street andbazaar, observing, listening, chatting with friends and acquaintances,taking the metropolitan pulse. Through the afternoon he reads-philosophy, literature, history. In the evening he reflects, weavingtogether practices of the town and thoughts of other theories. What-ever else the story may be (apocryphal, made up on impulse, accurate),it is allegorical on several levels that mirror the present-day dilem-mas of sociocultural anthropology and its problematic relationships toneighboring disciplines of literary criticism and history.I will take up these allegorical readings, where relevant, during mydiscussion of the issues raised by the anthropological works coveredhere. For the moment, consider also Gabriel Garcia Marquez'sdescrip-tion of his day while working on Lovein the Timeof Cholera.During themorning he writes. In the afternoon he relaxes at the beach, followedby a siesta. After sundown he goes out into the city, tracking his char-acters through personae, language, atmosphere. He sleeps on it all. Inthe morning, he writes.Geertz and Marquez, fieldwork anthropologist and novelist, con-front and embrace, each in his own fashion, the immediate experi-ence of living otherness that many fieldwork anthropologists and somewriters of fiction value highly. In this they are distinct and distant fromall text-mediated disciplines-these include most of the social sciencesand virtually all of the humanities. By "text-mediated" I mean workwhose materia and products are both literally textual. But Geertz andMarquez engage in projects to create presence from absence, throughwriting. In this, fieldwork anthropology and fiction are no less text-mediated than other disciplines. Here, issues of ideology take form:the realism and authority of representation, its canons and bound-aries, its truth-value and politics. Here too, fieldwork anthropologyand fiction conventionally veer apart: most practitioners of anthro-pology insist on the truths of its metonymic relationship to the lived-inworlds of others, while writers of fiction perceive this relationshipmore as a matter of genre. Nevertheless, their texts are likewise drawninto the orbits of disciplines that study textuality.

In Worksand Lives, the 1983 Harry Camp Lectures, Geertz (1988)exposes implicit strategies of discourse in anthropological writings laidbare by textual criticism. James Clifford (1988b), in The PredicamentofCulture, and the contributors to WritingCulture(Clifford and Marcus1986) hone their critical penetrations on contextual as well as textualconsiderations. The authors and editors of these three books are allactive in what is now called "critical"or "postmodern" ethnography,


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Handelman * Critiquesof Anthropology 343and the forms of their texts-polemical essays and brief studies-arein keeping with these claims. Postmodern ethnography advocates thedeconstruction of anthropology, especially from without, particularlythrough literary theory.Michael Herzfeld's work will also be discussed here. The Poetics ofManhood (Herzfeld 1988), a more conventional ethnography, arguesfor the centrality of rhetoric and poetics in a Cretan village, whileAnthropology hroughthe Looking-Glass(Herzfeld 1987) contributes toan alternative, critical agenda for the deconstruction of anthropologymore through its own rubrics. Herzfeld's work also demonstrates whymonographs are valuable, regardless of postmodern claims for theessayed fragment of hard angles and soft edges, trailing double en-tendres. ("Who now sets out to write an ethnography?" rhetoricallyexclaims Stephen Tyler [1984b: 335], a contributor to WritingCultureand an exponent of evocation in ethnography.)

Clifford Geertz: TheWay of Saying Is the What of SayingNotably absent from the tale of Geertz in Sefrou, as it has beenthroughout much of the formation of modern anthropology, is thevery act of ethno-graphy, of what Lee Drummond (1983: 201) calls"graphing the ethnos," the inscription of humanity through text-building: the anthropologist as writer. By contrast, the Marquezianvignette is about writing. The creation of fictive otherness is Marquez'svocation. In Worksand Lives, Geertz (1988) tells anthropologists thatthey are creators of otherness, not its reporters. Naive scientism inwriting is no longer acceptable. Through their writing, anthropologistsbring human worlds into being with more or less conviction and per-suasiveness. Because these constructed worlds are identifiable versionsof real people in real places, anthropologists are cosmologists withspecial responsibilities to their texts. As writers, they should be highlyaware of how they author, and thereby authorize, in their own names.(The most prominent feature of this volume's dust jacket consists ofGeertz's initials, three inches high: the anthropologist auteur [see alsoHutnyk 1989: 92]. For those who enjoy iconic games, the initial "G"here resembles the more involuted progression of the initial "C,"pro-cessually creating the hermeneutic circle that has so influenced Geertz.This imagery is as close as Geertz has come to portraying himself, hislife, in his texts . . . C. G.)Works and Lives teases apart the writing styles of Claude Levi-Strauss (who has revolutionized analytical thinking in anthropology),Sir Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard (the most influential of the Britishsocial anthropologists, known as "E-P" in the trade), BronislawMalinowski (whose forced stay in the Trobriand Islands, near the coastof New Guinea, during the First World War conventionally signposts


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344 PoeticsToday 15:3the genesis of fieldwork anthropology), and Ruth Benedict (an Ameri-can success story, given the popularity of her scholarly works). Theirwriting styles, argues Geertz, are emblematic of their metadiscourses.So, "the way of saying is the what of saying" (Geertz 1988: 68). Howone says whatever one says is what one says. To compose a text is toempower it-to set it loose in the world as an autonomous force withthe intent to persuade its readers of something. How much better,then (Isn't it? The question is not entirely rhetorical), if anthropolo-gists know how it is that they do what they do. Consciously or not, allwriters are stylists. Once paid attention to, the writing always has itsconstructed voice(s). Knowing how one writes forces one to confrontwhat one writes. (Geertz has commented that he tries to write eachsentence as a signature line; one may add, for that matter, as if everysentence were his last-a literal economy of style.')Geertz takes up TristesTropiques,Levi-Strauss's self-referential ac-count of his Amazonian experiences, and its purpose-to display itsown existence as a "made thing." TristesTropiques,Geertz tells us, isfashioned as a French Symbolist text whose logic enables Levi-Straussto construe Amazon natives as other Symbolist mentalities. Their de-coding reveals in them the fundamental replication of the text-thatis, of Levi-Strauss's vision of humanity. The totality of the work isthat of a myth, Levi-Strauss's own Ur-myth, the totem of his greatMythologiquesproject, a quest story that is unpacked only in travelingthrough the entirety of his oeuvre. TristesTropiques s Levi-Strauss'smost abstract intellectual program, his "syntax of syntax," despite itsoff-and-on masquerade as travelogue. For Levi-Strauss, "being there"is impossible. There is no unmediated experience of otherness.In Evans-Pritchard, Geertz finds a glazier artfully angling windowsin his ethnographic edifice to show otherness in its entirety, strippedof secrets. Otherness is approachable and attainable since "what yousee is what you get" (ibid.: 61). E-P's text-building strategy is one ofsuch reasoned and reasonable description that no one should disagree.He uses simple, subject-verb-object sentences and flat declaratives.There is no syntactical space for semantic ambiguities or uncertainties.The style is intensely visual, cohering more like landscape than myth,"dedicated, above all things, to making the puzzling plain" (ibid.: 68):ethnography as a "just so" story. By contrast, Malinowski bases hisethnographic persuasion on being a credible I-witness (I was there ...I saw ... I inform). His sensibilities are made to engage otherness, and1. Some readers find Worksand Lives simply garrulous (see Leach 1989: 139). Thelate Sir Edmund Leach loved to shock through blunt declaratives of difference, theantithesis of Geertz's style.


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Handelman * Critiquesof Anthropology 345therefore his persona must be made believable. This strategy requiresconstituting the author "as an object of desire" (ibid.: 90).In Benedict's work, Geertz discloses a Swiftian rhetorical strategy-that of social critique accomplished byjuxtaposing the familiar and thewildly exotic. As they change places, the known is made strange. Bene-dict's style is spare, assured ("definite views, definitely expressed"),that of a truth-teller with one fundamental truth to tell. The domi-nant trope of her writing is that "we have met the not-us and they arenot-us" (ibid.: 113).Geertz posits the anthropological text in the gap "between engag-ing others where they are and representing them where they aren't"(ibid.: 130)-there and here, the ethnographic text as inseam of theanthropological garment. In his own writing, style is not merely that-neither gloss of mannerism nor turn of phrase. Instead, his sense oftext construction is closer to one of context, in the way that GregoryBateson uses this term. In Bateson's thinking, context is not a con-tainer to be filled with whatever is then contained, in context, andthereby shaped by it. To the contrary, as its etymology implies, con-text is whatever there is, the weave of relatedness of all there is aswhat there is (cf. Bateson 1972). Geertz writes contexts (and calls themtexts), tempting the reader to follow the strands of the weave, to be-come entangled in their persuasions. This sense of context is close towhat he intends more generally by the concept of culture. Context alsounderlies his extremely influential popularization of the metaphor ofculture as text (Geertz 1973, 1980). Yet the sense of context describedabove puts the use-value of the metaphor in question for the anthro-pologist. Culture as context and culture as text clash, and this is partof the unspoken, discursive rationale for Works nd Lives.

Over the years, Geertz has authored or advertised many memo-rable phrases: "models of... models for," "thick description," "fromthe natives' point of view," "blurred genres," and others. These arecatchy-something like scholarly jingles, erudite slogans, scholasticpop tunes-and they have entered the folklife of anthropology andcognate disciplines. As I read these phrasings (hum them? chant them?recite them?), their project is not that of concept formation nor oftheory-building. If we relate to them as refractions of a perspective,an attitude, a point of view, a subtle sensibility, then there is often pro-fundity in Geertz the essayist. But this is tightly tied into the way manyof his texts are constructed as context-constructed to alter mind-setsbyjust that bit that might make a difference.Geertz's style as essayist is unsettling, subversive. In Works nd Liveshe comments that Evans-Pritchard avoids clause-embedding in sen-tence construction, which contributes to the brilliant clarity of the


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346 PoeticsToday 15:3prose. But Geertz himself is a master of the embedded clause, of inlayand involution in sentence composition. Reading Works nd Lives, oneis caught within a stream of fluently flowing words, then suddenlyyanked and enveloped by the deep uncertainties of an undertow. Hereis one example of such a sentence: "To argue (point out, actually, for,like aerial perspective or the Pythagorean theorem, the thing onceseen cannot then be unseen) that the writing of ethnography involvestelling stories, making pictures, concocting symbolisms, and deploy-ing tropes is commonly resisted, often fiercely, because of a confusion,endemic in the West since Plato at least, of the imagined with theimaginary, the fictional with the false, making things out with makingthem up" (Geertz 1988: 140).While floating along the stream of words-taking that kind of trip-one is shockingly caught in a vortex, the stream flowing into a whirl-pool that sucks the reader in, down, spitting him out elsewhere (andelsewhen)-it's become that kind of trip: the kind that reacts recur-sively against the reader's attempts to fix and stabilize the text. If onereads Geertz closely, the embedded clauses, the inlays, become aper-tures, often openings within openings, all leading elsewhere, at timesagainst the current itself. Reading the sentence in its fullness, one iscast onto other shores, carried to other destinations, with all the re-flection this can evoke. As the text builds a stable presence, its innermoments take a radical turn, decentering the reader's stability andcertainty. So too is there a distinct absence of the poetistic symmetriesthat enchant structuralists and deconstructionists alike, on the orderof the structure of symmetry and the symmetry of structure, sincethese are self-sealing couplets of closure.There is much deconstructive power in Geertz's essays. Yet I suspectthat he also decenters those of his writings that draw us to the meta-phor of culture as text. This analogy, drawn in the interests of blurringgenres and extolling cultural relativism, is the single worst move ofhis distinctive, highly creative, often brilliant scholarship. Context, inthose very Batesonian intentions that should make sense to Geertz, iscontinuously in flux, its weave rewoven as elements accrete and detach.There is no fixed framing to context, and so neither its parametersnor its substance is ever stable.With each reading, each interpretation, the literal text is involuted,groping within to reach beyond. Still, the frame does not change, nordo the characters or the mise-en-scene. Regardless of the variety ofreadings, the parameters of the text are closed, unless it is literallyrewritten. Applied to culture, in effect to context, the text metaphormakes these overly rigid and inflexible in their boundaries and sub-stance. One anthropologist comments that "to see culture as an en-


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Handelman * Critiquesof Anthropology 347semble of texts or an art form is to remove culture from the processof its creation" (Roseberry 1982: 1022).Some say that Worksand Lives is peripheral to Geertz's intellec-tual projects, yet I think it central to understanding certain tensionshe has embedded in his texts. These tensions often pit monographagainst essay. Geertz the essayist deconstructs the stabilities built intomany of his monographs. But the essayist-as-fabulist is not the pains-taking monographer. Geertz's avid experimentalism is less evidentin the numerous monographs. (Thus, The Religion of Java [Geertz1960], AgriculturalInvolution:TheProcessof EcologicalChangein Indo-nesia [Geertz 1966], and others are strongly analytical ethnographies,much more concerned with the production of knowledge than withhow knowledge is produced.) Where he plays with monographic formthe effort is labored.

Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-CenturyBali (Geertz 1980)is a case in point. The monograph is constructed something like aspectacle, for Negara is a forestage/backstage construction. The textis onstage, the endnotes backstage. There are 121 pages of endnotes,containing much of the technical detail and expertise needed to stagethe text of 136 pages. This structure of the monograph resonates withits argument about the ethos of the theatre state. But there are diffi-culties in setting the stage. Bali is a complex society, and the conscien-tious ethnographer supplies complicated directions (social structure,history) for its staging. These take up most of the script, leaving onlytwenty-three pages of stage text for "spectacle and ceremony," theactual enactment of the theatre state. Such strategic problems do notburden postmodern ethnographers who dismiss monographs as posi-tivist "holism" in search of unattainable truths.2 Neither is Geertz theessayist burdened in seeking to put, as he has phrased this, "a patch ofa weave on a patch of a weave," playing with his own textual framing,perhaps also to deconstruct Geertz the monographer.The essayist, not the monographer, actively engages in how dis-course and rhetoric are effected through textualities. The essayist tellsus "what anthropology has been all about.... We have with no littlesuccess, sought to keep the world off balance; pulling out rugs, up-setting tea tables, setting off firecrackers. It has been the office of2. In his Writing Culture paper, George Marcus contends that the essay rather thanthe monograph is best suited to today's paradigms in disarray. (The monographgenre, argues James Boon [1983: 137], is the mainstay of realist, functionalist writ-ing in anthropology.) In Marcus's view, the essay absolves the writer from holisticanalysis and from the need to tie up loose ends, enabling the essayist to assume arhetorical posture of "profound half-understanding, half-bewilderment with theworld" (Marcus 1986: 191).


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348 PoeticsToday 15:3others to reassure; ours to unsettle. . . . We hawk the anomalous,peddle the strange. Merchants of astonishment" (Geertz 1984: 275).The anthropologist as trickster (although a rather prim, domesticatedone at that-witness the rug and tea table), perhaps astonishing him-self as well; the evocative rather than the analytical (see also Handler1991: 611).Geertz has worked to nullify the persuasions of formal theory,of straightforward objectivism in cultural analysis and comparativestudies. Yet on another level his work reproduces something of thesetensions in the surreptitious dialogue of monograph and essay, of con-text and text, of standing for something (the natives' point of view?)and asking, Why this, why any, particular point of view? The authorbeset within himself, his alterity hidden by the guise of a fortifiedstand against scientistic certainties.At the close of Works nd Lives (Geertz 1988: 148), there is the hintthat Geertz too would do away with the monograph form-"some-thing new must appear on the page." This may leach the creativefocus of tension from what I read as his textual binarism; yet it mightopen the way to his moving more easily between distinctive culturalloci, enabling the comparative work with which he is less comfortable.This was my impression on listening to his Harvard-Jerusalem lecturesat the Hebrew University in 1990, when he brought Indonesia andMorocco into conjunction more as a travelogue of that conjuncturethan as a formal comparison.If there is something to my reading of Geertz, then it reflects hisdecades of fieldwork anthropology and scholarly erudition as well:something achieved through time, not acquired programmatically,ideologically. Despite his sloganeering ("thick description"), he offersno recipes (regardless of what humanists may think [cf. Veeser 1989:xi]). Rather, "one of the advantages of anthropology as a scholarlyenterprise is that no one, including its practitioners, quite knowsexactly what it is" (Geertz 1985: 623).3 Commandeering this ambigu-ous space, the "writing culture" crowd (many of whom are descendantsof Geertzian interpretive hermeneutics) insists that modern anthro-pology has developed canonical forms that are blind to the constitutivegrounds of their own formation in the worlds of postmodernity. Theseforms must be taken apart and made more responsive to historical con-tingency and dialogic textuality. Verbal metaphors of discourse mustreplace visual metaphors of seeing (Tyler 1986a: 23).3. There are numerous discussions and critiques of Geertz's work. For those inter-ested, the following works, among others, address this corpus from various per-spectives, polemical and substantive: Walters (1980); Roseberry (1982); Shankman(1984); Schneider (1987); Kapferer (1988a); Biersack (1989); and Hutnyk (1989).


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Handelman * Critiquesof Anthropology 349"Crowd,"in my usage, sometimes refers to the contributors to Writ-ing Culture and sometimes to a wider aggregate. The intention of"crowd" is to indicate that these scholars belong perspectivally to-gether much more than apart, that there are significant differencesamong them that cannot be identified in this condensed space, andthat the boundaries of their collectivity are fluid.

The"WritingCulture"Crowd:EthnographyIsToo Important o Be Leftto AnthropologistsAt the 1986 Wenner-Gren Foundation conference on "Symbolismthrough Time," James Clifford declared in his congenial, laid-backstyle, "Ethnography is too important to be left to anthropologists."4Geertz advocates blurring the boundaries between anthropology andother disciplines: anthropology is his subject. Clifford finds his orien-tations toward anthropology in other disciplines: anthropology is hisobject. Clifford is a historian of ideas, strongly influenced by literarytheory and cultural critique. He brings these to bear on the writingof anthropology, as one genre of the textual inscriptions of humanity.Together, these genres constitute a wider ethnography in modernistaesthetics and postmodern politics.Arthur Danto (1988: 15) refers to Clifford as a "practicing anthro-pologist," and Bruce Kapferer (1988a: 95) calls him "an anthropolo-gist of anthropology." He is neither. Clifford is a scholar of anthropo-logical textuality in its historical formations. His domains of discourseinclude text (literary theory) and the interface of text and social order(cultural critique). He is relatively uninterested in how anthropologistsarrive at a knowledge of others or their own analytical understandingsof these other worlds. The production of anthropological knowledgeis made the staged performance of ethno-graphy, with Clifford thecritic reviewing that performance. At issue are textual persuasions,and, here, other genres exhibit more competence at ethnography thandoes anthropology. Here too, text is not a metaphor for culture but,rather, for living. Therefore, Clifford and other advocates of post-modern ethnography extoll the political power of textual poetics. Hissterling outsider credentials, creative intelligence, and breadth of eru-dition make Clifford a key figure in the articulation of the "writingculture" crowd's perspective on American anthropology.In the Marquezian vignette, experience is turned into writing medi-ated by the fantasies and mysteries of sleep, accessible perhaps topsychoanalytic semioticians. Marquez is not obligated to explicate thepremises of his textuality, apart from producing the text itself, the4. My hearing. Selected conference papers were published in Ohnuki-Tierney(1990).


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350 PoeticsToday 15:3authorization of his authorship. As author, his relation to life may beposited as the text he writes. Unlike Marquez, Geertz cannot sleep onit, but must explain himself. His work expounds argument. For fieldanthropologists in general, the embattled formations of ethnographicrepresentation take shape in the lived spaces between there and here,now and then, other and self. Unlike the text-mediated sources of theliterary theorist or historian, the field experiences of anthropologistsare embodied sensorially, and the absence/presence of these embodi-ments in their written work is integral to its textualization.In his introduction to WritingCulture (Clifford and Marcus 1986)and in the essays of The Predicamentof Culture(Clifford 1988b), Clif-ford complements and extends Geertz. Clifford focuses on a quint-essential dilemma of the field anthropologist-how to authorize theauthority of subjective knowledge by inscribing it persuasively as objec-tive, thereby endowing the immediacy of fieldwork with the status ofa transparent template of the scientific method. (This is also the topicof Vincent Crapanzano's [1986] essay in WritingCulture and is raisedin Paul Rabinow's [1986].) Until recently this dilemma was treated as adivisible and therefore invisible problem. Either anthropologists tookthe constructed character of their texts for granted, and therefore asunproblematic, or they focused on questions of intersubjectivity in thefield without the sustained analysis of data. Rarely were both aspectsof the dilemma given penetrating voice within the same work. From itsinception, fieldwork anthropology has been pervaded by these dialec-tical tensions between subjectivity and objectivity, tensions that are re-produced in the oxymoronic, near-parodic formulation of the methodof "participant observation" (Does this mean observing participants?Participating in observation? Observing self-participation? Observa-tion/participation?).5Yet the oxymoron is highly generative of perspectives and ideassince anthropological epistemologies emerge to an important degreefrom subject/object tensions in participant observation. Nevertheless,Clifford and others maintain that these tensions are manageable onlyby textual sleights-of-the-writing-hand. Accordingly, Tyler (1984a: 84)likens ethnography to "a textual practice intended to obscure its tex-tual practices in order to present a factual description of 'the waythings are,' as if they had not been written and as if an ethnographyreally were a 'picture' of another way of life." Prominent among thesepractices, according to the "writing culture" crowd, are the masking ofanthropology's colonialist visage as well as anthropology's scientisticclaim to the representation of others, appropriated through holistic5. In Anthropology through the Looking-Glass, Herzfeld (1987) is perhaps the firstanthropologist to label participant observation "oxymoronic."


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Handelman * Critiquesof Anthropology 351concepts like culture and social structure. Such practices excise thevoices of those others from the text. Yet there are no stable, neutralvantage points. Exposing this, adherents of postmodern ethnographyinsist, must result in the reorganization of the writing (What else isthere?) of anthropology, under the critical yet benign aegis of historyand literary criticism.6These critics argue that anthropology is constituted through histori-cal formations and in turn constitutes projects of writing in history.These were the grounds of its authorship, of its authority to autho-rize its accounts as authoritative during periods of Western hegemony.These too are the grounds of anthropology's loss of the authori-tative representation of others, once it is reconstituted as historicaland therefore processual and unfinished, rather than ahistorical andmythic. Academic anthropology is a Western construct premised onstable, superior centers of knowledge/power (here ... now) that exer-cise camouflaged control over colonial peoples who are reconfiguredin Western tropes and images (there . . . then) (cf. Fabian 1983). Butin these times of perpetual displacement, of the fragmentation of sup-posedly fixed social orders, and of movements of people and goodswithin world systems, the monological ideologies of anthropology arecrumbling, and a new ethnography is emerging.The dust jackets of The Predicamentof Culture and WritingCultureiconize the intentions of their project. The cover illustration of ThePredicamentof Culture is of back-to-back images of White Man, a char-acter in Igbo masquerades. The face of the Igbo performer is swathedand concealed. On his own head he carries another, that of a sculptedwhite colonial official (or anthropologist?) under a topee. The per-former holds an open notebook and a pen, ready to inscribe andcapture the other. The Igbo, muffled and effaced by colonial power,is silenced and dominated in the construction of the conventional text(this interpretation is Kapferer's [1988a: 96]).The iconicity of the cover photograph of WritingCulture is moreinvoluted: Stephen Tyler "in the field" (the photograph's caption),hunched over his notepad and engrossed in writing (the author iswhat he writes-a letter to his parents? his grocery list? field notes?),oblivious to the natives squatting behind him and staring at his backas it curves obliquely away from them (on this dust jacket, see alsoPaine 1990: 43). The anthropologist is doubly in the text-within thebook and in his writing-and quadruply ambiguous, stretched be-6. In an extreme case, Tyler (1986a: 45) advocates either giving "up on writingaltogether" or achieving "by written means what speech creates without simplyimitating speech."Tyler'scall for the praxis of the evocativein ethnographic writ-ing would do awaywith both dualism and dialectic,and therefore with the powersof the oxymoronic participantobservation.


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352 PoeticsToday 15:3tween irony and parody. Is he an irony of the modern (writing histext objectively, as if the living natives were irrelevant to this)? A delib-erate parody of the modernist (the text is what counts since writingis the praxis that matters)? An unintentional parody of the postmod-ernist (the natives are in the picture, the field, yet are excluded fromtext-building)? Or, back to irony, but now of the postmodern (thereare only fragments, of which the ethnographer is one, but what ofthe photograph?)? As a character in the noir thriller Blindside says:"Photographs lie; diagrams tell the truth" (Bayer 1990: 98). Is this thereason for the photograph? Or is this indeed an unintended parodiccommentary by postmodernists on themselves? Is it at all importantthat such differences are made to exist?

Probably it is, since Clifford and the WritingCulture crowd arguethat new understandings of ethnography open up the text to thepolyphonic voices and dialogic contestations of those who reclaim theright to represent themselves textually. One major premise is thatall persons are ideologically and historically constituted beings whoexist through changing contexts of power. Since all persons produce(rather than interpret) themselves and one another, they take posi-tions of emergent political import, of creativity and resistance, thatreposition themselves and others in relation to asymmetries of power.Because anthropological texts exclude or orchestrate these clamoringvoices under the pretext of the truth-values of realism-science, ob-jectivity, theory-anthropology has represented otherness as overlyholistic, timeless, stable, integrated, and homeostatic. Absent fromtheir own texts (cf. Handelman 1993), their omniscient gaze peer-ing from everywhere but from nowhere in particular, anthropologistsblock out the ambiguities, ironies, and allegories that constitute livedrealities. Given these anachronisms within postcolonial historical for-mations, conventional anthropology has lost its ideological mandate tocontrol ethnography.Introducing WritingCulture,Clifford states that postmodern ethnog-raphy is "an emergent interdisciplinary phenomenon," spreading tohistorical ethnography (thus "the new cultural history" [Hunt 1989]),to cultural criticism (thus "the new historicism" [Veeser 1989]), and soforth. The ethnographer's "distinctively intimate, inquisitive perspec-tive turns up in history, literature, advertising, and many other un-likely places" (Clifford and Marcus 1986: 23). Described generally andingenuously, ethnography is "simplydiverse ways of thinking and writ-ing about culture from the standpoint of participant observation . ..a form of personal and collective self-fashioning" (Clifford 1988b: 9).Since present-day truths are fragmentary, politically contesting oneanother and historically unfinished, the ethnographic standpoint is a"historical site of narrative authority" (ibid.: 99).


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Handelman * Critiquesof Anthropology 353Clifford takes up, in scintillating ripostes, a variety of ethnographicendeavors and writings, as would the literary critic take up works of lit-erature, but less in terms of style (unlike Geertz) and more as allegoriesreflecting the historical formation of their fashioning. Marcel Griaule,the great French ethnographer of West Africa, is shown to premisehis work on the existence of cultural information that the natives keepsecret. These hidden truths were brought to light first through rhetori-cal modes of interrogation that extracted "confessions" of knowledgefrom the natives and then by Griaule's undergoing native initiations,thereby partaking of their cultural revelations. In the process, thisethnography was made more dialogical since both ethnographer andnatives actively participated in its production.Clifford compares Joseph Conrad's cultural liminality in the Congoand Bronislaw Malinowski's in the Trobriands. Conrad comes offbetter, not just differently, since textually his perspective toward rep-resentational truth is ironic and reflexive. He recognizes the fictive-ness of his fictions, thus knowing himself through the limited practiceof storytelling. He thereby fashions compelling relationships of selfand other. By contrast, Malinowski is grandiose in his textual designs,

devoting himself in all apparent earnestness to inventing "realisticcultural fictions" that are, after all, expressions of and solutions tohis own dilemmas. These fictions take "Trobriand" forms because hehappened to be there, a European at the eroding edge of colonialistdisintegration. Modern anthropology expresses the dilemma of theloss of colonial hegemony and attempts to fix domination in placeby textualizing natives ahistorically through scientific objectivity. Thiswas done by professionalizing fieldwork and by installing Malinowskias the apical ancestor of fieldwork methods.

In his contribution to Writing Culture, Clifford (1986b) contends,further, that anthropological ethnography is narrative, implicitly akinto the ritualistic performances of symbolic action that Geertz (1973:448) limns in relation to the Balinese: "a Balinese reading of Balineseexperience, a story they tell themselves about themselves." However,Clifford's storytellers and audiences are European; their stories areneither symbolic nor interpretive, but allegorical, and the postcolo-nial objects of their ethnographic desire are no longer localized andpassive.A number of contributors to Writing Culture read scholarly textsin complementary ways. Most prominent is Renato Rosaldo's (1986)comparison of an Evans-Pritchard work on the Nuer, a Nilotic people,and Le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou.Rosaldo discloses that Ladurie sup-presses the will-to-power pervading the textualities of Inquisition con-fessions in order to invoke their will-to-truth about fourteenth-centurypeasant society. This "truth" turns out to be also that of Annales his-


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354 PoeticsToday 15:3toricity, of the longue duree of French history, that enables Ladurie toposition himself and the Montailloux within a fictive, mutual spaceof psychological kinship. Rosaldo finds "troubling" parallels betweenthe fourteenth-century inquisitor and Evans-Pritchard. E-P surveysthe Nuer from the doorway of his tent, under the all-encompassinghegemonic gaze that Rosaldo compares to panopticon surveillance, inFoucault's use of Bentham's model.

However, the knowledge/power juncture popularized by Foucaultholds only if knowledge compels the use of power. The Inquisitionwas predicated on this conception. So too is the panopticon gazepower not because it sees all, but because it torques this vision intothe individuation of the person, into an imposed division of labor,into relations of production that connect the two, and into the proto-bureaucratic domination of the anonymous officials who control thismachine (Handelman 1981: 6-12; Shamgar-Handelman and Handel-man 1991: 307-9). E-P's power to view and inscribe the Nuer, hardlyKafkaesque, pales by comparison. Like many of the Writing Culturecontributors, Rosaldo conflates the power of the textualized, literarygaze with power in the world of living beings. Nevertheless, this con-flation reflects the present-day intellectual hyperbole that inflates themarketing of scholarly knowledge in the humanities.If textualizations shape the believable persuasions of the ethno-graphic work, are these enchantments the limits of knowledge thatthe text conveys? Other critical ethnographers (so long as they arecommitted to anthropology) are uneasy with the issue, their responsesambivalent. But Clifford is downright uninterested, since his project isan ethnography of ethnography in which the textuality of both levelsrepresents expressions of authorship in historical moments. Yet whenthe enterprise of history is questioned in analogous ways, he evincesdiscomfort with a reflexive position that subordinates objective knowl-edge to ideological claims, as I will indicate below.Five chapters of The Predicamentof Cultureabandon academic eth-nography for modernist displacements of cultural artifacts withintwentieth-century realities (surrealism, Georges Bataille, MichelLeiris, Victor Segalen, Aime Cesaire, collage). And Clifford's talentsare fully displayed in an incisive chapter on exhibitions ("Primitiv-ism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern") atthe Museum of Modern Art and in the Hall of Pacific Peoples at theAmerican Museum of Natural History.MOMA's modernism parallels that of anthropology, appropriatingand redeeming otherness by remaking non-Western artifacts in theimage of universal, ahistorical features of humanity. Principles of artare made to transcend politics and history in order to posit affinitiesof classification between tribal and modern. These taxonomic shifts in


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Handelman * Critiquesof Anthropology 355definitions of art correlate with colonial expansion and the structur-ing of Western markets for "primitive"art. The Hall of Pacific Peoplesis a different anthropological tale, a visual narrative of the death ofcultures and of their redemption through museum salvage. This "nar-rative" reifies and freezes the idea of culture in a nonexistent, un-changing "ethnographic present" (itself a prominent anthropologicaltrope, discussed in Marcus [1986]). Like museums, anthropologicalethnography is a form of culture collecting, the authenticity of which"is produced by removing objects and customs from their current his-torical situation" (Clifford 1988b: 228).There is much to appreciate in these critiques of anthropology (I willreturn to the closing chapter of ThePredicamentof Culturebelow): therepositioning of privileged constructions of reality; the evocation ofreflexivity through radical juxtaposition; and the calls for egalitarianpolyphony and dialogism in text-building. Experiments with innova-tive forms of textuality should awaken anthropologists critically to thepremises of what they do matter of factly (in this regard the essays inWritingCultureby Michael Fischer [1986] and Stephen Tyler [1986b]are noteworthy). Anthropology needs skeptical self-examination, notcanonical scholasticism. Nevertheless, important issues are paperedover, dissipated, or even excised. Some should be introduced into thisdiscussion of critique.

TheDistinctiveness f AnthropologyModern anthropology emerged from the conjuncture of two radicalformations, on their surface utterly incompatible with one another.One was the implementation of an absolute hegemony over othersthat denied the relevance of otherness, except through the imagina-tion and practice of domination-romantic selfhood as the templateof otherness, of otherness backgrounding selfhood. This was the colo-nialist vision of the universal stratification of humankind under Euro-pean control, one that led to the extermination of otherness in praiseof selfhood. The second, converse formation was the intense yet noless romantic interest in puzzles of intersubjectivity, and therefore ofunique differences in constellations of otherness and selfhood-ofotherness foregrounding selfhood.In the twentieth century, fieldwork anthropology cohered underthe hierarchical protection of the first, though often in oppositionto colonial domination.7 Anthropology also took shape through the7. Works nd Liveshighlights Evans-Pritchard's olonialist attitudes during his ir-regular army service in a time of crisis, the first years of World War II, whencolonial powers, British and Italian, confronted one another in the Sudan. How-ever, those works, such as E-P's study of the Sanusi order in Cyrenaica, that arecritical of imperialism are ignored.


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356 PoeticsToday 15:3pervasive relativism and coevalness of the second. These tensions-the uneasy rootedness in and confrontation with Western social for-mations, together with the quest for egalitarian intersubjectivity-aredissonant sources of the strong antinomian streak that has pervadedanthropology. Having served as wellsprings of creativity, these tensionsshould not be reduced, polemics aside, to facile oppositions betweenuniversalism and relativism, objectivity and subjectivity, science andhumanism.The development of fieldwork anthropology in Britain and theUnited States constituted a radical break with all other academic disci-plines that studied the human condition, in relation to the apprehen-sion (the threefold meaning is intended) of otherness in its collec-tive dimensions. The point is important to emphasize because criticalethnography glides over it in blurring genres to historicize and tex-tualize the production of ethnographic knowledge. Fieldwork anthro-pology insisted on living presence-indeed, played with presence andabsence (there . . . here/here . . . there)-on trying to know aboutothers as members of living collectivities that they themselves compre-hended as such. This entailed imagining a discipline in which the eth-nographer's perceptions of others were formed interactively throughrelationships that subjected each party to the other. All in all, field-work anthropology has evinced a commitment to living persons andliving collectivities.But I would go much further than this. By trying to emphasize pres-ence in its contacts with others, fieldwork anthropology became thesole academic discipline of the human condition to objectify and toreify living beings as collective subjects. As a result, anthropology hasstrained ever since to straddle the enigmatic shifting of others fromactive subjects in their own lives to passive objects in ethnographictexts. But otherness has been so crucial to fieldwork anthropology onlybecause this collective otherness is human and alive. More so than inany other humanistic discipline, the paradoxical relationships betweenthe presence and absence of otherness have vexed anthropology fromits beginnings. "Graphing the ethnos" may be too important to leaveto anthropologists, but the ethnography that emerges from fieldworkshould be deconstructed by anthropological critiques of anthropo-logical epistemologies, not by those of literary theory. For the latter,human living is too often a metaphor for text, even a parody of theview of culture as text.The dimensions of this experimental moment (and it is one, despitethe polemical efforts of the "writing culture" crowd to reduce it tomonographic monologic) are evident on reflection. Within the socialsciences, psychology made the individual an essential unit of being


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Handelman * Critiquesof Anthropology 357in his/her own right, one that could be examined under controlledsemiotic conditions, often through representations like tests and othermeasurement devices. While sociology in the United States did de-velop fieldwork perspectives, grounded in the Chicago school of the1920s, in present-day sociology these are vibrant but decidedly minorchords. Mainstream sociology emphasizes the absence of scholars fromthose sites where others live by replacing presence with mediatingdevices of interrogation, measurement, statistical analysis. Fieldworkanthropology itself broke with the disciplines of history and literarystudies since their production of knowledge was always mediated bywritten texts, indeed by textism.Practitioners of all these disciplines either begin with or quicklypass on to texts of various kinds-they start from constructed ob-jects whose fictional qualities may be highlighted or suppressed. Theirinitial premise is the necessity of distance from otherness. This re-duces otherness to the status of passive object, one whose nearnessand subjectivity are hypothetical and so may be reimagined at will.All these disciplines move information from one kind of text (archive,diary, biography, statistic, questionnaire, poem, novel, etc.) to another(monograph, book, article, essay, study, etc.). Mediation between theobjectively existing text and its fabrications is an ever-present baselineactivity of reading and interpretation.Fieldwork anthropology works contrarily, from the enigmatic au-thentication of alterity to its problematic objectification; from immedi-ate experiences of otherness to their distanced textual representation.In contrast to history and literary criticism, only anthropology is madeto insist, by its practitioners, that the representation of objects of studyis interactive and intersubjective. In other words, representation isnecessarily the re-presentation of subjectivity.8Unlike subject/objectrelationships, there is no stable focus among subjects.The anthropologist is a person of parts, and these personae contra-dict one another during the process of research. Somewhat like"Sefroui Geertz," the anthropologist moves from paradoxes of inter-subjectivity in fieldwork, through predicaments of historicity in re-lating to field materials that necessarily refer to a past, to dilemmas8. This hyphenation foregrounds the necessity in anthropology of consciouslytextualizing the experience and knowledge of fieldwork. In this regard, every rep-resentation is indeed a problematic re-presentation. More generally, exposing thehidden hyphen demonstrates that representation is always open to external forcesand, therefore, to changes within and among representations through time. Thehyphenation is not merely graphical indulgence, but an opening of space by whichto indicate that representation entails moral choices-that the aesthetic and theinstrumental alike are imbued with moral dilemmas.


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358 PoeticsToday 15:3of textual representation and reading that index all of these prob-lems. In practice, unlike the Sefrou tale, all of these interpenetrateand jumble. Nevertheless, to handle them all demands high craft,and most of us are more likely to stress some and suppress others.The point is, however, that anthropology based on fieldwork standsalone, distinct from other social sciences and the humanities. Withperipheral exceptions, all of these are text-mediated disciplines in thefirst instance and thus shielded from otherness by choice or necessity.Making text-building and textualization the heart of the anthropo-logical enterprise can destroy fieldwork anthropology. Genres will beblurred, the experimental moment terminated. Is the cost worth thestill unlit candle?Not if fieldwork is reduced ingenuously to "interested people talk-ing with and being interpreted by an interested observer" (Clifford1988b: 340). Even without the emphasis on language (What else willtext-mediated scholars relate to?), this facile representation (akin togood talk in a coffeehouse) is a parody of fieldwork. Yet it follows easilyfrom the capacity of literary theory to appropriate anthropology onthe grounds that the latter is merely another text-mediated discipline,another textually fashioned self-representation. Thus Clifford is ableto summarize the complex processes of intersubjectivity as follows:"The anthropologist as outsider and participant-observer (existentialshorthand for the hermeneutic circle) is a familiar modern topos"(ibid.: 263). So is the literary critic as hegemonic cultural arbiter, lurk-ing under the guise of textual explicator.In the blurring of genres, a hierarchy of academic disciplines ismade evident. Literary theory can swallow anthropology, but not theconverse. This too is implied by that Geertz in Sefrou. Such a hier-archy is integral to the jockeying for position among disciplines, inwhich a prominent sub-text (its status as pre-text concealed) is whocontrols the text. This is no less so for advocates of critical anthro-pology, given their reliance on textual critique, and despite their rhe-torical aims of dissolving all stable centers of power in the name of thegreater egalitarian good.Perhaps the Western anthropological exercise is impossible. Perhapsinequality in intersubjectivity is as necessary to turning life into field-work as it is to turning fieldwork into text. Perhaps the perfect praxisof self and other would create an utter lack of interest in researchresults. But perhaps its impossibility is the very strength of the enter-prise. I quoted Geertz to the effect that an advantage of anthropologyis that no one knows what it is. I prefer it this way. Outside of majoracademic centers there are no canonical anthropologies, despite whatthe "writing culture" crowd says. Anthropology was and is a dynamicfield, its boundaries amorphous, allowing many of us the autonomy


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Handelman * Critiquesof Anthropology 359to fashion our own ways so long as we do not become satellites of theintellectual oikumene.

The Fictionsof AnthropologyIt is not surprising, given their excoriation of claims for authenticrepresentation in anthropology, that a favorite trope of the advo-cates of the literary turn is ethnography as fiction. Marilyn Strathernpoints to the realization that ethnographers too were "playing games,"but didn't know it. Thus the use of the word "fiction" suggests a"self-conscious playfulness" that is particularly postmodern (Strathern1987: 264, 265). The rhetoric is provocative, challenging objectivistclaims to truth in representations of otherness. Clifford insists thatthis usage foregrounds ethnography's made qualities, unmasking itsprovisional, contingent status. The use of "fiction"places authenticityin question. The anthropologist must recognize and reflect on thepremises of her own framing.9Stephen Tyler (1984b) shows just how problematic this sort of tex-tual formulation can be by making honesty in ethnographic writing theissue rather than truth. He identifies the latter with science, with ar-chaic thought in the world of postmodernity (Tyler 1986b: 123). Tyler,a refugee from 1960s cognitive anthropology, with its mathematicsand formal logic ("for the cognitive anthropologist cultural anthro-pology is a formal science" [Tyler 1969: 14]), pushes for ethnographyas fantasy, not merely fiction (Tyler 1986b: 139). Since the aim ofethnography is discourse, it can no more be representation (an ide-ology of control over the appearance of otherness) than it can beinterpretation (the imputation of selfhood to otherness). Neither, onemay say, is other-wise. Ethnography must be poesis since othernessmay be neither known nor experienced textually, but only evoked9. This reaction has produced the trope of the reflexive anthropologist, writinghimself or herself into ethnographic texts as a nexus of active voices, real pres-ences, in dialogue with informants, with social situations, with one's projects andmoral dilemmas, and with oneself (cf. Crapanzano 1980; Dominguez 1989; Lavie1990; Shokeid 1989; Swedenburg 1992). Ironically, their authors present thesepolyphonic voices as true revelations of self and other, of their intersubjectivity,oftheir own inner grapplings with dilemmas. At times, such voices make me cry outfor truth in self-advertising. Yet the one thing that the postmodern reader can-not do is accept these revelationsand meditations as truths about anthropologist-authors in relation to their existential selves and phenomenal conditions. Theseethnographic voices of selfhood are artful positioningsof impressionmanagementrelated to strategiesof textual construction.Even when postmodern ethnographersclaim to unveil their agendas, this claim too is authored by the hidden strategiesof hypothetical selves as they operate in fictional texts. The trope of the reflexiveanthropologist is the artifice of artful self-disclosure, and the trajectory of thattrope is one of infinite regress.


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360 PoeticsToday 15:3(Tyler 1984a: 95). Poetic evocation, the fantasy of cooperative story-making between ethnographers and natives, is a therapeutic aestheticthat restructures experience. Knowledge is anachronism.10All abstraction, any fixing of social life in description and analysis, ismade. But Clifford's reliance on fiction's made qualities to deconstructethnography slips frictionlessly into its standard usage as "made up,"hence make-believe, untrue, not to be believed unless rhetorically andstylistically persuasive. Ethnography need have no articulation to any-one beyond itself so long as it persuades that it does. Sustained field-work then becomes optional if one knows how to write persuasively.Fragments of others (interested people talking to interested people)are conjoined in fragmenting essays. With the boundary between themade and the made-up effaced, ethnography and novel conflate. Col-lage, pastiche, montage . . . and George Marcus: "It is not importantthat [Raymond] Williams is talking about the novel, whereas we aredealing with ethnography and interpretive analysis. With the latter infashion, practical problems of description and exposition have becomemuch like the problems of the socialist realist novel in the twentiethcentury" (Marcus 1986: 190).

One difference between ethnography and fiction is, of course, ac-countability. Ethnographers may be committed to others, writers offiction to otherness. But to whom is the ethnographer of fiction ac-countable? (Who gets the royalties? Why don't the plaints over textu-ally appropriating the voices of others extend to monetary benefices,when a U.S. scholar's salary may be the last detail he is willing to dis-close about himself?). Or is ethnography just another story-good,bad, indifferent-when hegemonized by fiction? In borrowing fromtext-mediated disciplines, there is no commitment to anyone beyondthe text. These disciplines begin with texts and so are predicated onfictions, rather than beginning with living beings, who are not.None of the writers discussed here does sustained work on how "fic-tion" is intended. Clifford, for example, uses "serious fiction," "savingfiction," "collective fiction," "savinglie,""enabling fiction," "performedfiction," and "realistic cultural fiction"-but makes no serious effortto distinguish among these. Yet this terminology raises a host of ques-tions: What is the epistemological status of fiction? Is "fiction" a formof fact, "fact" of fiction? Might they be continuous with one anotherrather than opposites? Are textualizations that fictionally make the10. Tyler's ethnographic aesthetic should be distinguished from Psychedelic An-thropology, founded by the late Allan Coult in 1960s California. Coult argued thatthe anthropologist's first field trip should be into the hidden, primitive layers of hisor her own mind, revealing archetypes of the history of consciousness (see Whiteand Joseph 1972).


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Handelman * Critiquesof Anthropology 361dead live different from those that inscribe the living? Is the formermore like imagining play as "free play" (see Strathern 1987: 267), thelatter as playful? (On play, see Handelman 1990: 63-81; 1987b, 1992.)The ingenuousness of facile turns to fiction boomeranged on criticalethnographers during a 1988 American Anthropological Associationsymposium, "Unveiling Agendas: Person and Power in the Creationof Anthropological Knowledge." Ted Swedenburg's fieldwork on theWest Bank prior to the 1987 intifada concerned the 1936-39 Pales-tinian revolt against the British and led him to adopt a Palestinianposition which modified that history. He found that older Palestini-ans were reluctant to speak of that period, given the bloody infight-ing occurring then among rival Palestinian factions and the present-day desire to show a united front to the world. Swedenburg insistedthat "out of solidarity," he felt "compelled to participate in those veil-ings and resist a full revelation [of that history] before the holdersof power." IClifford commented that Swedenburg's stance was that of "posi-tioned objective knowledge . . . not something invented or fictional,not suppressing important evidence .... These are historical facts.They are objective, but they're generated by a specific research stand-point." Yet he and others then worried about the limitations of such"positioned knowledge," urging that it not lead anthropologists too farfrom the truth. Clifford continued, "This very partiality . . . raise[s]strong questions about the truth of the account we're getting. I'm wor-ried about our objectivity" (Coughlin 1988: A5, A8). Of special inter-est here is that Clifford, a historian who advocates the fictions ofanthropology, responded as he did to this enactment of the framingof history.1211. Swedenburg (1992: 483) has since elaborated his position, stating, "I inevitablymust select my evidence to make my argument ... for ... all academic discourse isselective, conducted through arbitrary closures," through what Clifford (1988b: 7)calls "powerful 'lies' of exclusion and rhetoric." The argument of theory precedesthe evidence of data. Theory is ideological. Scholarly work consists of documentingthe ideologically expected. The author legitimates this self-fulfillment of prophecyby being self-conscious about his ideological commitments and by taking respon-sibility for them. Intellectual discourse becomes a contest between ideologies, withits outcome decided by some sort of historically situated popular consensus: thatversion of history written by the winners.12. The concept of "positioned knowledge" veers very close to the problem of whocontrols the writing of the past as a key to the interpretation of the present. Cliffordsteers clear of this morass by implicitly positing the historian as an encompassing,value-free researcher in the contingent present. But this continues to implicate thecontradictions between relativism and truth. Tyler, as noted, solves this by plump-ing for honesty rather than truth in ethnographic writing. Just how problematicthis maneuver is for the historian who (honestly) claims to control all of the avail-


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362 PoeticsToday 15:3Clifford's response abruptly foregrounds the hidden role of hier-archy in the claims made by postmodern ethnography for the democ-ratization of the text. I want to take up two aspects of hierarchy here.The first interjects the criticism that scholars of textuality have liter-ally ignored one of the most elementary constitutive grounds of textsand how they are constrained: namely, the logic of organization of thebook. The second addresses the hierarchy of disciplines that is im-plicit in the claims made by critical ethnography and that follows fromClifford's reaction, as noted above.

Text Is Not BookAll of the scholars discussed here advocate shattering hegemony overthe ethnographic text and decentering the authority of its textual prac-tices, yet all ignore the hierarchical premises of the book, premisesthat literally hold the text together. The following brief excursus ar-gues that once these premises are recognized, their effects on the textmust be taken into account. This influence constrains the extent towhich the text may be opened to the polyphonic and the dialogical."The book" here is a euphemism for any single, published scholarlywork (monograph, article, essay, etc.). One must ask whether the logicof the book's structure is merely that of a practical device, a containerthat serves and is identified with the text, or whether it is an episte-mology for locating the text in spatial and sequential (and thereforetemporal) coordinates that influence how the text may be read.The structuring of the book fits well with theories of hierarchicalorganization (e.g., Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell'sTheory of Logical Types).The overall space of the book as an object isproduced and usually owned by a publisher. The publisher encom-passes the book; the book encompasses whatever is within it. Most ofits exterior space, the borders that separate it from entities of the sameand other classes of phenomena, is called the "binding" and includesthe "cover." As befits boundaries, the binding is of a different weight,thickness, and composition than the interior of the book. Parts of thebinding (typically, the cover and "spine") are occupied by the "title"or name of the book. It is a particular, named entity. The primaryname of the book may also be supplemented by a secondary, subor-able evidence is demonstrated by the ongoing disputes over the historicization ofGerman National Socialism(cf. Broszatand Friedlander 1988; Himmelfarb 1992:13) and the analysis of folklore studies (Volkskunde)nder the Nazi regime (Dowand Lixfeld 1991). These controversies brutally intrude powerful dilemmas oftruth in writing in waysthat are simply not accounted for by the "writingculture"crowd. (Contrasting moral attributions in fictional and historical representationsof the Nazi genocide are discussed by Berel Lang [1990: 117-61].)


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Handelman * Critiquesof Anthropology 363dinated name, or "subtitle." The title is often more abstract or poetic,the subtitle more specific or factual.A named book usually has a named author or editor, or a groupof these. Although a named book may exist without a named author(i.e., "anonymous"), it is much more difficult for an author to publishan unnamed book (this is indeed playing with frames-think of thereferential paradoxes of classification thereby generated). The authoris responsible for the text contained within the covers of the book.The text is subordinate to the author; the author is subordinate to thebook as a named entity with an independent, printed existence; thebook is subordinate to the publisher.This logic of hierarchy drives the text into lineal organization: titlepage, table of contents, chapters numbered I to N, pages numbered 1to n. Chapter I is an introduction of some sort that signifies its func-tion of beginning and contextualizing. Chapter N is a conclusion ofsome sort that signifies its function of closing and contextualizing.If the book is thought to be well-organized, each successive chapterwill depend for its coherence and comprehension on the chaptersthat precede it. Jacket illustrations and photographs or other artworkembedded in the text are integral refractions of the organization ofthe book.The entire structure of the book overdetermines hierarchy, encom-passment, subordination. The general and the particular are rarelyconfounded. The book is a logical construction for the suppressionof the paradoxical and the enigmatic, which are produced by theconfusion of levels of abstraction, by the erasure of borders of clas-sification. The text lives within these strictures. The text, one mightsay, is tyrannized by the book-by a mechanism for the appropria-tion of discourse, one that is compatible with our cultural ideas ofauthorship and proprietorship of knowledge.13So too does the book'sinexorable sequencing, carried to the extreme in the modern scientificpaper (cf. Beer and Martins 1990: 172), set the grounds for the writ-ing of Western narrative, with its reliance on the temporal structuresof beginnings and endings. (Among conventional genres, poetry has13. Proprietorship over the authoring of textual production is not universal. AboutBengali jatra playwrights, for example, Carole Farber comments that "while theyare paid to write plays and while they relinquish claims over them, [they] do notkeep copies of their plays, do not expect to be cited when the play is either re-written or sold for 'movie or performance' rights, do not remember the titles theyattribute to their plays, and do not assert the right to control the deployment oftheir literary energies" (Seguin and Farber 1978: 343). Farber attributes thesecharacteristics of authorship to Bengali conceptions of creative energy as part ofcosmic energy, which cannot be owned but merely possessed or shared.


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364 PoeticsToday 15:3the greatest freedom from the constraints of the book. Here, Tyler'sadvocacy of poetic evocation is more interesting.) Postmodern ethnog-raphers can promote the fullness of the dialogical and the polyphoniconly by ignoring context-here, the interplay of book and text-thereby contradicting their own principled intentions to contextualizetheir texts.Short of a revolution, technological and epistemological, perhapsrequiring alternatives to writing, I cannot see doing away with thesestructural tyrannies that constrain the ethnographic text. In this re-gard, as stimulating as it may be, opening the ethnographic text tothe dialogical and the polyphonic amounts to merely flying a prettystreamer of aesthetic protest that in fact reaffirms the very premisesof hierarchy that organize our texts as they do.

BlurredGenres or Hierarchyof Disciplines?The boundaries between anthropology and both literary theory andhistory have become blurred. The Society for Humanistic Anthro-pology, a section of the American Anthropological Association, spon-sors competitions in the writing of short fiction and poetry by anthro-pologists and gives an award for ethnographic writing in the name ofthe late Victor Turner. Geertz and his "thick description" have beentaken up not only by cultural historians (Walters 1980), but also by lit-erary theorists, as fragments of Geertzian anthropology have becomethe New Historicism (Veeser 1989). James Clifford (1988b: 94) hascalled Stephen Greenblatt a "participant-analyst." (Greenblatt can'tobserve Shakespearean England, yet he can participate in its textualrepresentations, can't he? Does the anthropologist do any more, anydifferently?) Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak refers to herself and EdwardSaid as "wild anthropologists": "anthropologists" because they wentto live, to do "field work," and to go native in the West; "wild" be-cause they then turned on "the scandal of [their] production" (Spivak1989: 290).In these text-mediated disciplines and factions, theory is in dis-course with theory, texts with texts. Living persons, living collectivitiesget uneasy, sidelong glances, for they are out of sync with abstract ideo-logical programmatics. The Western intellectual game, to paraphraseFoucault (1979: 148), is to appropriate and subjugate the discoursesof other literati, creating new genres of textual mastery. If, to cul-tural criticism, every difference of opinion is political (see Mitchell1983), is anything political, in the sense of making a difference in theworlds that follow different drummers? Is reading doing? Do text-mediated disciplines know much else? Is this what fieldwork anthro-pology should turn into? People are, at times, the passion of fieldworkanthropology. What are the passions of the new histories and liter-


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Handelman * Critiquesof Anthropology 365ary theories for which a key metaphor is strategy, life as game? Inthe worlds of fundamentalisms, nationalisms, mass death, "the decon-struction of society is way ahead of the deconstruction of literary texts"(Friedman 1987: 40).The advocates of literary turns in anthropology are naive if they donot recognize the intentions of historians and cultural critics towardanthropology-or, for that matter, their own political agendas in theirefforts to restructure anthropology's priorities. At the moment, liter-ary theory and history are hungry disciplines, with numerous practi-tioners driven to self-advertisement in the purveying of their wares.This is especially so for literary criticism becoming literary theoryturning into cultural criticism, which is still limited methodologicallyto textual analysis, but needs a larger corpus to inflate its symboliccapital as arbiter of intellectual substance. In the intellectual faddismthat flourishes in the United States, authority over textuality is con-flated with societal power (see Sangren 1988: 411). The embeddedpremises of political praxis are weak indeed.Given its colonial conjunctures, its unreflexive textualizations, an-thropology has become a good acquisition for the merchandising ofpoetic practices in the American academic marketplace. The aims areblunt, as Gayatri Spivak blurbs (the neologic verb evokes the comic-strip quality of dust-jacket endorsements) that Smadar Lavie's (1990)admirable work, ThePoeticsof Military Occupation,"calls into questionthe very game of anthropology." In keeping is Edward Said's (Are younow or have you ever been a card-carrying ... anthropologist?) pro-nouncement: "It will be said that I have connected anthropology andempire too crudely, in too undifferentiated a way; to which I respondby asking how-and I really mean how-and when they were sepa-rated" (Said 1989: 214). Thus formulated (I hold here in my handa list . . . ), the question is unanswerable, as Said intends (ibid.: 217,220).The story of Geertz in Sefrou reproduces the hierarchy of disci-plines that lurks around only a few more bends along this route, asgenres are blurred and we traffic more in one another's advertising.That little narrative is framed in the progressive phases of Geertz'sday, metaphorizing the maturation of intellect and the actualizationof self in relation to scholarly hierarchy. The morning crush of livingothers in the bazaar is supplanted by intellectualized distance as theday grows older. The self withdraws from outside encounters withothers, first into home and the mediation of text, and then further intothe interior of self, the scholar communing with himself. So too, his-tory and literature supplant fieldwork anthropology in their maturityand mediated distance from otherness.In the work of Clifford and others of the "writing culture" crowd,


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366 PoeticsToday 15:3anthropology is subordinated to history and literary theory in accor-dance with these disciplines' respective capacities to deconstruct thegrounds for the representation of otherness. History's premier place isa function of the temporal gaze, and therefore of displacement. How-ever the temporal gaze may be qualified or made reflexive, it remainsnecessarily out-of-context, detached from the times into which it mustlook. The disavowal of metanarratives notwithstanding, the tempo-ral gaze is always more or less encompassing because the past thatit would apprehend cannot be experienced, except through conceitslike that of Greenblatt as participant-analyst. The historian appropri-ates the past, turning objects into subjects. History is empowered byits temporal displacement to master the past. Since everything occursthrough time, history is the master template for the deconstructionof all tropes, all fixations in time, all formations through time (see,however, MacCannell and MacCannell 1982: 155).Consider an advertising leaflet for the trendy interdisciplinary jour-nal History and Anthropology the lineal sequencing of this journal'sname, of course, tells the whole story of hierarchy between these disci-plines). The blurb states that the journal will stress the "mutually de-stabilizing relationship" between history and anthropology, and con-tinues: "History demonstrateshe contingency of anthropology, and themultivocality of anthropology can question he authoritative claims andnarrative forms of conventional history" (my emphases). This spellsout the meta-message of hierarchy: history's capacity to deconstructanthropology is unconditional, its rhetoric imperiously declarative;while anthropology's capacity to deconstruct history is qualified, morepossible than actual, and in any case partial.Clifford (1988b: 112) expands on the hierarchical relationship ofhistory to anthropology: "The truths of cultural description are mean-ingful to specific interpretive communities in limiting historical cir-cumstances." Moreover, "unlike a historian, an anthropologist draw-ing on fieldwork cannot-even in theory-control all the availableevidence" (ibid.: 235). Since ethnography is formed through histori-cally constituted moments, its epistemological status is in the histo-rian's grip.Postmodern literary theories claim the capability of deconstructingall texts precisely because these are understood as constructions-fic-tions-and therefore as contingent on periodicity. That is, the processof construction-building is necessarily structured through time. Com-prehended this way, postmodern literary theory need not eschew vari-ous structuralisms, while being conspicuously evocative of change. Butaccording to the "writing culture" crowd, conventional anthropologyis ahistorical and insists on the factuality, rather than the facticity,of its findings. This produces synchronic models of functionalist clo-


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Handelman * Critiquesof Anthropology 367sure that have little power to deconstruct themselves. Critical ethnog-raphy proposes an alternative, hierarchical model: in the name ofrepresentation, of ethnography and textuality, anthropology shouldbe colonized, domesticated, and dominated by history and culturalcriticism. The ironic upshot would be the reproduction and preserva-tion of a hierarchy of nineteenth-century disciplines from which theexperimental moment of anthropology took flight. Different fabric,same dress.In the concluding and longest chapter of ThePredicamentof Culture,Clifford, the historian of ethnographic representation, turns ethnog-rapher, sitting through a lengthy 1977 trial in which the MashpeeTribal Council of Cape Cod sued for possession of lands lost throughnineteenth-century legislation. The real purpose of the suit was todetermine whether the collectivity calling itself the Mashpee Tribewas a tribe and therefore entitled to tribal land. The trial was a com-plex discourse on the constitutive grounds of collective self-fashioningthrough the negotiation of "Indian" and "American" identities. Clif-ford uses published accounts of Mashpee history, social life, and liti-gation as well as the trial record and his notes.

His choice of the courtroom context is strategic: the venue, theissues, the information permitted to be introduced as evidence areall determined by dominant cultural categories. It is in these officialterms and in this judgmental place that the Indian accounts will bejudged as persuasive self-inventions. Thus he prefers to keep his dis-tance from the participants ("acourtroom is more like a theater than aconfessional" [ibid.: 291]). Yet Clifford is a historian, and his distancefrom the living happens to resonate with the research styles of text-mediated disciplines. Then, too, a courtroom is one of those Americancultural locales where narrative is crucial, where interaction is easilyframed as transcript and text, where saying is in very large measuredoing: the kind of place where a cultural critic can feel at home. (Thecourtroom is also not unfamiliar with assertions of historical truth-"swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but....")Clifford intersperses his account with sections on history and soci-ology, references to witnesses ("she looks like any American teenager"[ibid.: 301]), testimony, critical musings and commentary, and ironicasides (such as the following, during a discussion of totemic symbols:"suddenly some of us notice, just above [the judge's head] on thewall of the federal courtroom, a large eagle" [ibid.: 321]). We pre-sumably know just how "any American teenager" looks, just what thebehavior of people simultaneously noticing something is like, and soforth. The technique is collage/pastiche, with registers of voice, openor indeterminate borders, a contingent segment of a contested his-torical struggle. As fieldwork anthropology, as ethnography, the re-


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368 PoeticsToday 15:3suits are ordinary, the conclusions conventional, the techniques (forall their fashionable veneer) a half-century old, borrowed or bartered,second- or thirdhand, from Max Gluckman's (1940) "situational analy-sis," which later flourished at the University of Manchester, throughthe "social drama" perspectives of Victor Turner and others.Is this what we anthropologists are being asked to accept in thename of remaking disciplines, in exchange for ethnography, this andprogrammatic rhetoric? What indeed is involved here on the anthro-pology side of things? WritingCulture came out of a 1984 seminar atthe School for American Research in Santa Fe. The participants hadpowerful ideological commitments to converging theoretical perspec-tives, and the group formation of the seminar reflected personal andintellectual networks (Clifford and Marcus 1986: 20; Rabinow 1988:430). Brilliant reflexive ethnographies, like that of Jean Briggs (1970),were given little attention since they had not foregrounded the cor-rect ideologies. In 1986 there appeared the first issue of the journalCultural Anthropology, he official organ of the newly founded Societyfor Cultural Anthropology, a section of the American Anthropologi-cal Association. CulturalAnthropology peedily established itself as thepremier arena of cultural criticism in American anthropology, aimedparticularly at anthropology's productions of knowledge, includingthose of ethnography.14 In this regard the journal medium was under-stood to have strategic value, as was the formation of a working alli-ance of anthropologists, historians, and cultural critics (Marcus 1991:122-23). Of the nine contributors to WritingCulture,seven joined theeditorial board of CulturalAnthropology, nd one (George Marcus) hassince completed his term as the journal's first editor.1514. The social and institutional development of critical ethnography may bestbe contrasted to that of ethnomethodology in 1960s American sociology. Ethno-methodologist scholars bounded and bonded themselves as a select, secludedgroup, privy to a radical program (whichit was),whose members distributed theirstudies and lectures in mimeographed form among themselves (see Mullins 1973:183-212, for an early account).Ethnomethodologysnuck into sociology by its backdoor. Postmodern ethnography'sseductions are blatant, however, its assaultsmorein keeping with 1980s academic agitprop.15. The journal publishes unintentional parodies of anthropology, thereby paro-dying itself in the first editor's postmodernist enthusiasm for importing modelsfrom other disciplines. Thus an anthropologist (Weiss 1990: 419, 427) canonizesa (Radcliffe-Brownian) anthropology that has rarely been mentioned in the lastthree decades in order to counterpose her own source of inspiration, Bakhtin. Yetshe uses Bakhtin as a wayof thinking about social relationshipsthat was developedpowerfully in anthropology during the 1960s and 1970s (actor, agency, strategicinteraction and transaction, conflict theory) from sources unrelated to Bakhtin.These works are ignored both by the author (strategically?out of ignorance?) andby the journal's editor (not out of ignorance). Their complicity amputates signifi-


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Handelman * Critiquesof AnthropologyIn a sweeping critique of critical ethnography, Steven Sangren(1988: 406) comments that the "endeavor necessarily constitutes aplay for socially constituted authority and power." He adds that the"authority" created in textuality has its strongest effects not in the he-gemonized Third World, "but in the academic institutions in whichits author participates" (ibid.: 412). Among the contributors to Writ-ing Culture, only Paul Rabinow (1986) seriously raises such issues.The "writing culture" crowd avoids addressing the socially constitutedgrounds of its own historically contingent endeavors,16displacing theseby the acceptable academic trope (hardy swimmers, all) of intellec-tual crosscurrents. Clifford (1988a: 425) responded to Sangren's cri-tique by insisting that there are ideas and changes abroad "that cannotbe reduced to disciplinary border wars," while Fischer, Marcus, andTyler (1988: 426) pontificated that "multiple readerships and uses ofanthropological ideas outside the academy make [our] concerns withethics, reflexivity and the like far more important than Sangren's my-opic concerns with power and authority within anthropology depart-ments." Yes, indeed. Cui bono? (No question.)

AlternativeAgendas:DeconstructingAnthropologyfrom WithinThere are massive ironies submerged in the views of postmodernityessayed by the "writing culture" crowd and their collaborators in cul-tural criticism. Emphases on historical contingencies, discursive for-mations, and other relativisms are most timely just as the Rest comeWest. The hegemonic authority of the West over the Rest is now saidto be fragmented, made egalitarian. By the same token (and conve-niently, for Westerners), the Rest coming West are denied any such

authoritative perspectives on the West. The political and aestheticdiscourses of Western postmodernity grant voices to the Fourth andThird Worlds, but deny that these voices can speak authoritativelywithin Western postmodern formations. From this perspective, it istoo late for the Rest to become a dominant formation in the postcolo-nial West since such otiose absolutism is crumbling. Accorded respect,the voices of the Rest will have to compete nonetheless for prime timealong with everyone else. The deconstruction of anthropology's otherscant productions from the body of anthropological knowledge as if these had neverdeveloped. Instead (in this version), anthropology is made to descend from a newancestor, Bakhtin, whose conceptions of sociation were much more simplemindedthan those of the anthropologies thus dumped into the garbage can of history, butwhose cultural-studies credentials are considered correct.16. Interestingly, only one of the contributors to Writing Culture is a woman, MaryLouise Pratt (1986), and feminist theory has almost no place in the volume.

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370 PoeticsToday 15:3will hold no less in the future for another anthropology's inscriptionsof the West.

Michael Herzfeld's work on Greece is especially interesting in theserespects. Herzfeld is an anthropologist and a semiotician, trained inclassics. In Anthropology hroughthe Looking-Glass Herzfeld 1987), hedeconstructs anthropology as a European discipline that occasionallystudies its own Grecian periphery. Anthropology is modeled here inits entirety according to European parameters. Looked at in this way(with the help of Vico, Herzfeld's intellectual forbear here), anthro-pology becomes a Eurocentric product of European formations ofnationalism and their discourse of domination. Anthropology beginsat home, not elsewhere, as do its relationships to otherness. Eurocen-trism and anthropology foreground one another, enabling the decon-struction of both in relation to each other.The theoretical practices of anthropology reproduce those of theEuropean nation-state. Both propagate hierarchy. Anthropology's dif-ferentiation of modern from primitive parallels that of center fromperiphery in statist thought. So too does anthropology's valuing ofahistorical structure over historical process reproduce nationalist pref-erences for mythic origins and eternal verities over the local, contex-tualized pragmatics of social action. The absolutist attempts by Greekstatism to shape Greek identity are echoed in anthropology's posit-ing of definitive otherness. The delineation of collective identity, andtherefore of otherness, is the project of both nationalism and anthro-pology.Herzfeld's model depends on the appropriation of time and thesegmentation of social order. Thus, in return for their political inde-pendence, Greeks were cast by the European powers as primordialancestors of European civilization who then became, in modernity, de-graded descendants of themselves. Eurocentric historicity suppressedtime (as does myth) by co-opting the origins and histories of others,all the while postulating unbroken "cultural continuities" between pastand present. In relation to the European powers, Greeks were madeEuropean aboriginals-passive, fatalistic, frozen in absolute time withno capacity for agency. On a lower level, these relationships were re-produced within the Greek state, with the latter arrogating to itselfthe role of the European powers and projecting that of the aboriginalsonto rural Greeks. Greece internalized those problems of othernessthat are so central to anthropology's visions of humanity.Herzfeld's model is one of hierarchical segmentation in social order.Unity and inclusion at the higher level

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