On The Edgesof Anthropology(Interviews)

James Clifford

PRICKLY PARADIGM PRESSCHICAGO

Third Thoughts

Five interlocutors invite me to reflect on differentaspects and moments of my work. Their questionsprovoke a kind of thinking-out-loud: ideas restatedand revised, second thoughts. One interviewer is aBrazilian ethnologist who asks about my backgroundas a historian and how I approach the history ofanthropology. Another is a British cultural theoristconcerned with site-specificity and the “ethnographic”turn in contemporary art. A third brings questionsfrom comparative literature, and a Portugueseperspective on North American identity politics. Ananthropologist from Hawai’i elicits my thoughts ondecolonization and cultural change in the IslandPacific. A Japanese anthropologist, now working with

© 2003 James CliffordAll rights reserved.

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Mayans in Guatemala, pursues similar issues in thecontext of contemporary indigenous struggles.

Interviews can reveal how one’s work emergesfrom particular times and places. Reading thesesecond thoughts now, it’s apparent that during theyears they address, 1970-2000, profound changeswere underway. In the universities, newly diversepopulations filled the classrooms; canons came underscrutiny; academic genres and disciplines blurred. Andeven in the relatively insulated intellectual milieuxthat I frequented, there was a pervasive sense of beingdisplaced, undermined, provoked by world historicalforces: unfinished business from the global “sixties,”social movements, new politics of representation andculture, the rise of neo-liberalism, novel forms ofempire, communication, government and resistance.Many stop-gap terms registered the changes: “post-modernity,” “late capitalism,” “globalization,” “post-industrial” society, “decolonization,” “multicultur-alism,” “transnationality,” “the world system ofcultures”...

We struggle to locate ourselves in a tangle ofhistories, without benefit of overview or hindsight.There are more things in modernity than aredreamed of by our economics and sociology.Everywhere global forces interact with local andemergent projects to make and remake culturalarrangements, discrepant orders. Teleological, ethno-centric, visions of globalization or developmentcannot grasp this complexity. We need a more contin-gent, multiply positioned realism. Working the edgesof anthropology—self-reflexive, ethnographic and

historical—these interviews search for critical open-ness. Even as, inexorably, they begin to sound rather“late twentieth century”...

I would like to thank my interlocutors, JoséReginaldo Gonçalves, Alex Coles, Manuela RibeiroSanches, Robert Borofsky, and Yoshinobu Ota, fortheir generous efforts. I have edited the interviews forrepublication as a group, adding an example here,sharpening a point there, but never departing fromthe basic content of the original versions. While elim-inating some repetitions, I have allowed importanttopics to recur, to ramify, in different exchanges.

These interviews originally appeared in thefollowing places:

1. Boletim da ABA (Associação Brasileira de Antropologia)No 25, March 1996, pp. 6-11. (In Portugese)

2. “An Ethnographer in the Field.” Site-Specificity: TheEthnographic Turn, Alex Coles, ed. De-, dis-, ex.(London: 2000) No. 4, 52-71.

3. “The Art of Tacking.” Etnográfica (Lisbon: 2000) 4 (2):371-388.

4. “Valuing the Pacific.” In Remembrance of Pacific Pasts.Robert Borofsky, ed. Honolulu: University of HawaiiPress, 2000: 92-101.

5. Afterword to Japanese translation of The Predicament ofCulture, 2003. Kyoto: Jimbun Shoin. (In Japanese)

1. Interviewer: José Reginaldo GonçalvesRio de Janeiro, December 1994

RG: I could start by asking how you became a histo-rian.

JC: By chance—or so it seems now. In college, I tooka course, got a good grade, and continued. But when Iwas in graduate school it became clear that I wasn’tgoing to be a “real” historian, because I was too inter-ested in anthropology and literature. At Harvard I didsome teaching in the History and Literature programand found myself more attracted to the literary textsthan to the historical ones. Meanwhile I got interestedin anthropology because I had a girlfriend who was an

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decolonization, becoming global in scope after WorldWar II and gathering force in the sixties. I havetracked the decentering of European authority and ofcertain modes of work and rhetoric in anthropology inthat historical conjuncture.

RG: Were you particularly influenced by some Frenchor British historian?

JC: The new model for writing social and culturalhistory was, of course, E. P. Thompson’s The Makingof the English Working Class (1963). It was a reallymoving book, especially for our politicized sixtiesgeneration, and a number of my friends who becamesocial historians went that way. I remained committedto being an intellectual historian in some form,trying—as I’ve said—to do for the anthropologicalculture idea what Williams had done in Culture andSociety. It was a time when historical and ethnographicstyles were beginning to come together. I rememberthe revelation of reading Thompson’s essay called“Time, Work, Discipline and Industrial Capitalism,”where he talks about how time was experienced andmeasured before and after “factory time.” He quotesEvans-Pritchard on how the Nuer use measures suchas “pissing time,” a rather relative standard. And heshows how seasonal, diurnal, physical intervals andcycles were rationalized in the process of trainingmen, women, and children for industrial work. Theseare the kinds of issues that any anthropologist wouldimmediately recognize, but I was getting themthrough a form of social/cultural history. It’s an inter-

anthropologist. There were also, of course—or so itseems in retrospect—intellectual reasons.

An important book for me in graduate school,where I was studying modern European social andintellectual history, was Raymond Williams’ Cultureand Society (1958). It showed me a way of talking aboutideas like “culture” and “art” not simply at the level ofintellectual influences, but as complex responsesentangled with historical processes: the legacy of theFrench Revolution, mass democracy, the IndustrialRevolution. Williams saw ideas as complex socialresponses in a way I wasn’t used to seeing in intellec-tual history. Culture and Society brilliantly historicizedthe idea of culture in its more literary or humanistversions. But there was a major strand of the idea thatit didn’t discuss: the anthropological or ethnographicalnotion. At the end of the nineteenth century, culturewas still generally thought of in the singular: peoplehad higher or lower degrees of culture. It was a veryimportant change when it became possible to say“cultures” in the plural—a specific moment, inEnglish at least, toward the end of the nineteenthcentury. I thought that what Williams had done forthe humanist and literary culture idea maybe I coulddo for the ethnographical and anthropological version.I’d explore its continuity with and difference from thehumanist idea, adding a historical context thatWilliams didn’t develop in Culture and Society: thecolonial situation. That has remained a fundamentalbackground for my work as a historian, and I supposea critic, of anthropology. The important change, thehistorical hinge, has always been the uneven process of

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Durkheim—Mauss—Lévi-Strauss. But when I got toFrance I found there was much more to Frenchanthropology than that, and I started to discover aworld of other people, some of whom I’ve writtenabout. Leenhardt was a kind of chance occurrencereally; I had never heard of him, I hardly knew whereNew Caledonia was. But I was working in the libraryof the Musée de L’Homme, which is one of the fewlibraries that has any open shelves, where you canbrowse. I was looking for something about Lévy-Bruhl, and I glanced along the shelf—one of my best“methods” of research. Beside the thing I was lookingfor there was a set of essays in homage to MauriceLeenhardt. So I took it back to my desk, thinking:“Hum.… This is interesting.… The French weresupposed not to have done intensive fieldwork.Leenhardt must be the exception that confirms therule.” He did long-term ethnography, but as an evan-gelist, only later becoming a professional ethnologist. Ithought Leenhardt would make an interesting digres-sion—perhaps part of one chapter. Well, after almosttwo years, at the very end of my stay in Paris,Leenhardt’s son heard through the grapevine that Iwas interested in his father and invited me to lunch.Raymond Leenhardt presented me with a large pile oftranscribed letters his father had written in NewCaledonia, from about 1902 until 1926 (when he wasforced out of the colony). I said: “But I can’t read allthese letters, I’m leaving Paris next week.” He said:“Take them home. I have a copy.” I spent a wholesummer reading and was trapped. The digressionbecame a whole book: a fascinating, exemplary story.

esting and ongoing question for me how muchanthropology E.P. Thompson had read. Some to besure. I’ve been interested in how anthropological ideastravel in the disciplines. How are they translated andblocked? Why, for example, was there so little directinfluence by British social anthropology on the devel-opment of “cultural studies,” at least in the U.K.?

RG: Your first book is Person and Myth (1982). It’s awork about Maurice Leenhardt. Why and how didyou come to choose it?

JC: More chance. In a way the project chose me. As agraduate student I was awarded a traveling fellowshipto work on the history of anthropology in France andBritain. I still thought I was going to do a rather clas-sical intellectual history: you know, pick three promi-nent figures, maybe in three national traditions, andwrite a chapter or two on each. I think my researchproposal focused on Malinowski, Boas, Durkheim,something like that. Rather naïve: and anyway, GeorgeStocking was in England at that time researching whatwould become Victorian Anthropology, and he sort ofcolonized that area. He was very helpful to me, but itwas perfectly clear that he was way ahead, and this washis turf. So I ended up focusing on French anthro-pology.

RG: When was that?

JC: Mid-’70s. I went to Europe with the lineage in myhead that we all knew in the United States:

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pling with alterity, which for Leenhardt meant tradi-tional Melanesian socio-mythic forms rooted in aspecific terrain. His work was an exercise in creativereligious translation and also a confrontation with thelimits of translation. I was raised in a free-thinkingProtestant milieu, an ecumenical, almost deist family.What were my limits, the limits of a universalizing,progressive ecumenism? I am not a believingChristian, but my liberal humanist subjectivity hasbeen structured by Christianity. I had to confront that.And I also had to wrestle a bit with the assumptions ofthe biographical genre I had adopted, the Westernconceptions of the self that were built into it.

RG: How would you describe the difference betweenyour work as a historian of anthropology and the workof people like George Stocking?

JC: George Stocking is the premier historian ofanthropology, and his work is extremely complex anddeep. I’m a historical critic of anthropology, one mightsay. And while I hope there’s a real sense of historicalcontext and location in what I do, I don’t do the kindof archival work Stocking does. The Leenhardt bookcomes closest. Stocking has been an important influ-ence and alter-ego. He was very encouraging to me, ayounger scholar, and I have depended on his work.But as historical accounts of anthropology our worksdiffer in how we define our “object.” Stocking basi-cally takes the broad range of definitions by anthro-pologists of their field—a contested domain—and thenwrites the history of that domain as a very full intellec-

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To understand the letters I got out the maps, to followLeenhardt, valley by valley; and I read up on NewCaledonia’s colonial history.

This unexpected project turned out to be veryvaluable, because it allowed me to see the productionof anthropological knowledge in a concrete colonialsituation: the ugly, complicated, and ambivalent powerrelations this missionary-ethnographer was strugglingwithin and against, that both limited and empoweredhim as a historical subject. Leenhardt died in 1954 justas the anti-colonial movement in France was heatingup, and so his life was circumscribed by the heyday ofimperialism. Within this particular moment, he wasconsidered to be a radical. But seen from post-colonialor decolonizing perspectives, he seems a liberal,someone implicated in the system. SituatingLeenhardt historically allowed me to see howradical/liberal knowledge within a colonial situationwas complexly determined. Leenhardt was in manyways a critic of colonialism, but he was also very muchpart and parcel of the milieu he worked in. So I wasbeing forced to contextualize his relativistic knowledgein a very concrete way: good training for an intellec-tual historian becoming a cultural historian.

In retrospect I can also see a more personalagenda. Leenhardt’s life showed me the limits of acertain ideological horizon—in his case very broad—akind of liberal Protestant, syncretic vision. He came torecognize, and to accept, the Word of God takingexotic forms, some of them very strange for aEuropean. Historicizing this vision helped me to seethe limits of a monotheistic spirituality seriously grap-

But other, more absolute, statements of what anthro-pologists are not, more categorically define the disci-plinary community, its habitus, and I have tended toposition my work on those borders.

One such border is marked by the non-nego-tiable statement: “We’re not missionaries.” But thebook about Maurice Leenhardt deals with amissionary who can’t be distanced in that way. Like allborders the boundary is, in practice, both crossed andmaintained. Another disciplinary edge: “We’re notcolonial officers.” We’re not here to rule. And a thirdconstitutive “no”: “We’re not travelers or travelwriters.” Three important, changing, frontiers. Whenanthropologists say “we’re not missionaries,” they maybe asserting: “missionaries change the culture, wedon’t.” Yes and no. There’s a blindness in the insight,in the process of taking a position “outside” culture-contact and change. Elements of cultural interactionmay be marginalized or hidden by the self-locationwhich says “we’re not part of the changes.” Indeed,during much of the twentieth century missionariesmay have been less likely than anthropologists to reifyan “ethnographic present,” a static, pre-contact, tradi-tional culture. Missionaries—some of them at least—were more likely to be interested in matters ofsyncretism and cultural process. That’s certainly trueof Leenhardt, for whom change is culture, culture issyncretism.

Now, for all these “we are not” statementsthere’s currently a kind of return of the repressedgoing on. Cultural contact, change, religious conver-sion, etc. are no longer the disruptive, constitutive

tual and institutional history. In addition to tracing thelives and works of prominent anthropologists heinvestigates funding sources and practices like field-work and travel. His goal is a rich cultural history ofthe discipline in its various contexts—as anthropolo-gists have defined themselves. There’s a way in whichStocking is, from the standpoint of anthropologists,“our historian.” And I don’t mean to imply that he’scaptured by “his people.” He works hard to keep hisdistance. But he’s close to professional anthropologistsin a way that fieldworkers are to their hosts. He workswithin an anthropology department, at the Universityof Chicago, a “central” location in the discipline.

I’m more marginal to the field. I frequent theborders. And that’s my basic methodological principle,if one could call it that: Never accept, never take as abeginning or ending point, what the discipline says itis. Ask instead: What do anthropologists, for all theirdisagreements, say they are not? Then focus on thehistorical relationship that is being policed, or negoti-ated—the process of “disciplining” that goes on at theedge. There are a lot of ongoing, perhaps unresolv-able, internal debates within anthropology. Forexample, I think the question of culture vs. biology, anargument with a long history, is internal to the field.An opposition to “nature” is built into the idea of“culture.” There are also perennial issues such as: howmuch like natural science and how much like historyare we? And how much like sociology? Questionsrecur about anthropology as a hyphenated discipline,worries about the field’s fundamental identity. Theseare normal, “internal” arguments and negotiations.

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places, especially concerning ethnographic liberals likeLeenhardt, Marcel Griaule, Michel Leiris and others,pointing to a rather complex history of anthropologyin colonial contexts. As with the missionary frontier,there’s a crossing and policing of roles, a history ofchanging border relations.

And the third disciplinary edge: “We are nottravel writers.” What’s thrown out of anthropologywith travel and travel writing is, of course, the“literary,” and with it the “subjective.” Literary repre-sentation is personal, embodied, rhetorical. It’s thatplace where people talk about their feelings; they usethe first person singular a lot; their bodies are visible,present. Think of all the discomforts, the sensualperceptions of the traveler—very different from thoseof the field worker, who in the classic ethnographiesbecomes invisible in the text, at least after the preface.This is all in question now. What is sometimes called“reflexivity” or “experimentalism” in current ethno-graphic writing—which can involve more use of thefirst person singular, more explicit use of rhetorical orliterary devices, more attention to the writing ofanthropology—all these trends can be understood as akind of return of that expelled “travel writer.” Travelwriters typically pass through situations quickly andthus lack the fieldworker’s depth of perspective. Butthe border can become fuzzy. Some travelers stay along time and their accounts may say more about raceand power relations than ethnographies focused onculture and social structure. They may reveal more ofthe capital city, and the technology of how one gets toa “field,” than texts like Malinowski’s Argonauts of the

outsides of anthropological authenticity. The secondclaim: “we are not colonial officers” says, in effect, “weare not part of the colonial system, we are scientists,liberals, who preserve our critical independence.”Again, yes and no. We are all familiar, now, withcritiques of anthropology as, not exactly a tool of colo-nialism, which is much too simple, but as a set of prac-tices embedded in a context of power, part of a system.These critiques, and the often disconcerting hostilityto “anthros” by mobilized natives, show that anthro-pology has, indeed, played a role in colonial situations,whether consciously or not. For example, one is nowstruck by the not-so-simple fact of Evans-Pritchardgoing to the Nuer—who didn’t want him there andwho had quite recently been the object of a punitivemilitary expedition—and surviving. Evans-Pritchardwrites quite frankly about this in the Introduction toThe Nuer: he is unwelcome; at first no one but the kidswill speak to him. The question is: “why was he notkilled?” Well, when white people go into situations ofthat sort—and this is true of many of the placesanthropologists have worked—there’s a prior historyof pacification. The locals have understood themessage: don’t harm white folks, because if you domany more of your own people will suffer. The anec-dote points to a historical location, often based onwhite skin privilege, that guarantees an importantdegree of safety. The statement “we are not colonialofficers” is a way of positioning oneself as marginal tothe colonial regime, in a place of relative innocencewhich is itself a position within an unequal field ofpower relations. I’ve written about that in several

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“postmodern anthropology” people sometimes love tohate. But the books, and the ferment that made thempossible, did raise a set of critical questions thatremain on the agenda of cross-cultural representation.

RG: How has this work been received by anthropolo-gists?

JC: To speak personally, my writing has been warmlyreceived in some quarters, and violently rejected inothers. Its appeal may not always have been for thebest reasons. For example, I suspect that more than afew anthropologists are writers or novelists, poètesmanqués. They have a novel filed away somewhere. So,when one says “really what you are doing is like litera-ture,” there’s a kind of too easy assent: “Oh yes, that’sright! Writing ethnography is like writing a novel.”But that was only a very small part of the message.The “literariness” of anthropology that was beingraised in Writing Culture was more like that whichsomeone like Hayden White ascribes to historicaldiscourse: the tropological pre-encoding of “the real,”the rhetorical constitution of facts at the very level oftheir facticity. What phenomena emerge from theplenitude, the overabundance of things that could beconsidered facts? And how do they emerge as alreadynarrated, already historicized objects, through theprocesses of rhetorical condensation and narrativearrangement? Facts come already narrated, and thenare re-narrated in the process of conscious interpreta-tion. This strong version of “literariness” is a threat tomany concepts of scientific objectivity, and so Writing

Western Pacific which says about his arrival in theTrobriands simply, “imagine yourself sat down on abeach.” Dreamlike. How did he get to that beach?The travel writer will tell you about the boat, themissionary airplane, or the Land Rover. The ethnog-rapher classically will not—you are dropped in. I’vebeen interested in working on the ways that variouspractices and rhetorics of “travel literature” are held atbay (and sometimes unofficially invoked) by anethnography that in the twentieth century struggles todefine itself as a science, which means defining thefield as a site of controlled, “deep,” interactiveresearch.

In recent years what was kept out bydistancing the travel writer is returning. This is not tosay that anthropology is only travel (or evangelism orcolonial power), but to say that the border is beingrenegotiated. In this perspective, the book WritingCulture, which involved bringing into view literary andrhetorical practices in ethnography, remakes theworldly border with travel and travel writing.

RG: How do you describe the effects of these kinds ofquestions on the American anthropological commu-nity? What about the consequences of these ques-tions?

JC: Books like Writing Culture and The Predicament ofCulture have been part of a ferment, part of somethingalready going on, that has, I think, significantlychanged anthropological practices. Certainly thoseworks did not introduce some new paradigm, the

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RG: How would you describe the relationshipbetween “cultural studies” and anthropology in theU.S.?

JC: That’s a borderland I’ve been crossing a lotrecently. A lot of exciting work is going on. But let mejust focus on the question of disciplinary identity. Theheterogeneity of anthropology is well known. If youlook at the range of contemporary departments, it canbe hard to imagine that these are part of the samediscipline. There is a crisis in the field. I think it is apositive crisis, on balance, but like all crises it leavespeople anxious about borders and about disciplining.An everyday example: Suppose you are asked to teacha graduate seminar introducing the field of socio-cultural anthropology. What do you include? I keep aneye out for what goes into those courses, and it variesenormously. For some there would be no question butthat Marx has to be there. Marx is not an anthropolo-gist. But there is a strand of current anthropology inwhich the relation of culture and political economy iscrucial, for example, the work of Eric Wolf, WilliamRoseberry, etc. We might ask “is Radcliffe-Brownessential in this course?” Thinking about a courseforces you to prioritize, because you may only havefifteen weeks or less. Do kinship studies have to berepresented? Lewis Henry Morgan? Does MeyerFortes have to be there—and the early Lévi-Strauss?And what if this means not having space for Simonede Beauvoir? If you include Lévi-Strauss, why not deBeauvoir, a founding figure in feminist discourseswhich have played a crucial role in postwar anthro-

Culture was accused of “hyper relativism,” “nihilism,”and (a favorite) “navel gazing.” That’s because in thisview, once a certain centrality is given to rhetoric,once recognition is accorded to the positioned subjectin a discourse, and once processes of representationbecome constitutive of socio-cultural life, the result isdefined as a “subjective reality.” In these responses Isee deployed a kind of objective/subjective machine, asorting device for parsing things according to a sharpontological dichotomy. But most discourses occupyintermediate positions along a continuum. The objec-tive/subjective machine works to keep things clear. Forexample, in recent decades the machine has beenattuned to how the first person singular is used in atext. If you transgress a certain (invisible) line, youmay suddenly find yourself relegated to the “subjec-tive” side. When and where, exactly, the parsing takesplace I find rather intriguing. As a relative outsider toanthropology, I wonder why certain personal, poetic,or narrative moves are suddenly seen as “merelysubjective,” or “self-absorbed” while others remainwithin the proper domain of science.

But at the same time that these, and other,defensive reactions have been deployed, there hasbeen a positive response. In practice there’s been aselective appropriation by various people of elementsof the critique. This is happening from a lot of direc-tions. People take certain elements and combine themwith other projects. Feminist anthropology, forexample, has been both resisting and borrowing criti-cally from books like Writing Culture.

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distinctive element. But considering the range of whatcultural anthropologists actually do, including archivalwork, how exactly are they different? Cultural anthro-pology used to have a special object, the “primitive”—those folks out there or down there and back then: exoticsocieties, folklore, rural society, lower classes, etc. Butnow anthropologists study everything, from tribes tophysics labs.

Anthropology used to have a defining para-digm, “culture.” But now everybody talks aboutculture, and it’s hard for anthropology to claim openlywhat they sometimes do informally. “We are the oneswho properly understand culture, unlike those literarytypes.” It’s not hard to dismiss literary criticism assuperficial, as not having the depth and complexitythat fieldwork gives. It’s more difficult to dismiss“cultural studies” which has its own ethnographictradition: the Birmingham Center for ContemporaryCultural Studies, the British tradition, which didethnographies of urban subcultures, youth cultures,music, etc. Is it ethnographic enough? Is it real field-work? This has become an important defining issuefor anthropology. The discipline doesn’t have theprimitive or the exotic other; it doesn’t have culture, aparadigm it claims as its own; it doesn’t have “Man,”that mythic telos, unifying, somehow (at least inAmerica) the rather arbitrary “four fields”: archae-ology, linguistic anthropology, socio-cultural andphysical anthropology. “Man,” a science of man, seemslike a kind of weird anachronism now—after Foucault,after feminism. It makes no sense anymore as a telos,as an end point for what we are all doing in this disci-

pology? How choose between Weber and Saussure?Fanon or Foucault? And so on.

Where does anthropology begin? Look at thedisciplinary histories. Sometimes they start with Platoand the Greeks. Many begin with the birth ofEuropean rationality: some in the Enlightenment,some earlier. Others like Robert Lowie in his Historyof Ethnological Theory give centrality to fieldwork, andso begin with early travelers. The strategies vary a lot.In practice, one can’t build one’s introductory coursearound an agreed canon. Does one have to includesome feminist or postcolonial theory? Doesn’t onehave to have some semiotics? Can one really dowithout a certain range of literary theory orpsychology? Can one bypass political economy? socialhistory? cognitive science? Can one really do withoutgay and lesbian studies, now that questions of sexualityare emerging in ethnographic and anthropologicalwork? I could go on. In practice, people usuallycompromise by invoking a few founding fathers (andsometimes now mothers), and then they focus on whatthey think is most relevant today. There are many adhoc solutions. But the problem of inclusion is asymptom of the way that anthropology, which wasalways an interdisciplinary field, is now awash in inter-disciplinarity. The question becomes a rather crucialone: what’s still distinctive about the discipline?

There are many anthropology departmentsthat are much closer, in most of what they do, to socialand cultural history. Would it be enough to say: “Wewrite the social history of places where we go and dofieldwork.” Here fieldwork remains perhaps the last

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understood? How is this displacement negotiatedwhen the field might be just down the street, whenyou may go in and out of your field on the subway?All of this is being hammered out in anthropologydepartments in ways that are still unclear.Anthropological ethnography is a site of negotiation,reinvented traditions, creativity, and disciplining. Andfor now at least, fieldwork remains an importantborder marker vis-à-vis “cultural studies,” a fluidinterdisciplinary formation that potentially shareseverything else with socio-cultural anthropology.Indeed, even that mark of difference is in danger ofdisappearing, dissolving into a more general range ofresearch practices and representational styles. So I seethis as a site of creative border crossing and also ofintense disciplining. I try to follow these processes assomeone recently associated with “cultural studies”who has worked in the borderlands of anthropology.

RG: How would you describe the relationshipbetween the so called “First World” and “ThirdWorld” anthropologists? I mean French, British,American anthropologists, and Brazilian, Indian,African anthropologists, etc. How do you describe thiskind of field?

JC: The relationships you’re describing are emergentones, and very important. I feel, actually, not welllocated to map a changing terrain, because I workwithin the Eurocenter—in a somewhat marginal place,but definitely within the Eurocenter. It’s evident thatvoices, analyses, interpretations, theories are now chal-

pline. So that’s gone too, along with the “primitive”object and the “cultural” paradigm.

What’s left? I’ve already suggested that onecan’t appeal to an accepted canon of exemplary texts.So we are left with a distinctive research practice.Fieldwork is itself under considerable discussion,because it’s much less clear how you define a “field”and what it means to “go into” the field. Indeed, lotsof people in many contexts are doing work that can bedefined as “ethnographic.” But fieldwork is, arguably, aspecial kind of ethnography, a spatial practice of inten-sive, interactive research organized around the seriousfiction of a “field.” This site is not so much a discrete,single place as a set of institutionalized practices, aprofessional habitus. What counts as fieldwork is arather large can of worms these days, and there’s a lotof leeway in practice. But in the U.S., at least, itremains a critical norm that gets deployed in definingmoments such as when a graduate student develops athesis project, or in hiring and firing. In many depart-ments, even the most interdisciplinary ones, the pres-sure to do something called “real fieldwork” is strong.How long? With whom? Which languages to use andhow well? How do you circumscribe your place ofwork? There are many grey areas to negotiate. Andsuppose you are a person who wants to study his orher own community? An “indigenous ethnographer.”That project may not count, because fieldworkremains linked to distancing, a history of travel, ahistory of the spatial practice of going out to a field insome way. Fieldwork can’t be “homework.” But how isthe crucial distance defined and negotiated, how is it

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Buenos Aires? I am not evading your crucial questionwhen I say that I don’t think I’m well placed toanswer. It’s really a moment, now, in which I need tolisten more than to talk.

RG: How would you connect all these questions aboutdisciplinary borders and disciplining with the ongoingsocial and political debates in the United States sincethe ‘80s about monoculturalism and multiculturalism?

JC: Well, there’s no doubt that the authority of manydisciplines to talk about marginalized peoples iscontested to an unprecedented degree. Members ofthose cultures or societies are saying, publicly: “it isnot enough for you to give us voice, to represent us,we wish to represent ourselves in the academy.”Anthropology, which for so long spoke for difference,is caught up in, challenged by, the process by whichthe academy in the U.S.—and it is an unevenprocess—is becoming more diverse. What’s at stake isthe inclusion of people of diverse historical back-grounds, people who have been racialized differentlyand kept in subaltern social positions. Moreover, Iwould underline the major impact that women, andfeminist perspectives, have had in my context. Wesometimes forget how male-dominated the academyhas been since the medieval university, how recent theemergence of a critical mass of women is. All of thesechanges, these multiplications of what my colleagueDonna Haraway named “situated knowledges,” under-mine the ability of disciplines to naturalize theirknowledges. Authority is fundamentally contested.

lenging and displacing “Western” anthropology.These challenges are coming from other centers ofwork and from differently positioned scholars—whether they want to be called “anthropologists” ornot. In a way, the matter of definition isn’t crucial forme, because I think anthropology is not a field whosesources, audience or interlocutors are solely orprimarily anthropologists or should be. In recentyears, important issues have been raised around theproblematic figure of the so-called “indigenousanthropologist,” a perhaps already outmoded termwhich marks a moment both of contestation andassimilation. In any event, we are no longer speakingof simple “natives,” a term that suggests a pure indige-nous “inside,” the reflex of a certain authority of the“outside.” It used to be accepted that real anthropolo-gists were “outside” and informants or local historians“inside.” That inside/outside relation has beenexploded in practice, and the “indigenous anthropolo-gist” is turning out to be something complicated andmultiply located with respect to the sites of study, ofintellectual production and reception. But the ques-tion of who would get to be called an “anthropolo-gist,” and who would want to be called an anthropolo-gist, thus contending with or contributing to “proper”anthropological knowledge, is a big question whichhas very much to do with colonial, post- and neo-colonial histories and institutional arrangements indifferent countries. What are the actual arrangements,who are the audiences for anthropology located inNew Delhi, located in Suva, for example, at theUniversity of the South Pacific, or in a place like

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2. Interviewer: Alex ColesLondon/Santa Cruz, Fall 1999.

AC: Three main factors have made your work vital todebates around art over the last decade and a half. Firstis your critique of the 1985 Primitivism exhibition atthe New York Museum of Modern Art, published inArt in America. Second is your interest in the activitiesof dissident Surrealists such as Bataille and Leiris andperhaps Benjamin too. And third is the way you fore-ground methods of textuality in the book you co-edited, Writing Culture (1986). In many ways yourwriting in the early 1980s prompted the fascinationwith ethnography in art practice and criticism (firstly

When Evans-Pritchard wrote The Nuer heknew exactly who his audience was and it was the“common room,” it was those who would be admittedto the university world. He didn’t have to worry aboutNuer intellectuals reading over his shoulder. Nowevery anthropologist has to think about that, and itmakes a profound difference. I’m certainly not sayingthat the Native is always right, that inside authority isbetter than outside authority. All you have to do is tothink about your own society, your own limited abilityto generalize within your society, to realize that’s fartoo simple. What has been going on—and that I haveworked in the midst of—is a kind of repositioning ofauthorities: not exactly replacing or contradictingauthorities, but negotiating new forms of differentialauthority. The current crossing and policing of disci-plinary borders is part of this crisis—with the sense ofanxiety, of being displaced, that many of us feel. Oneof the reasons I am so interested in anthropology, andcontinue to study it after my fashion, is that anthro-pology has been unusually exposed, publicly vulner-able, in this area. It’s a discipline where decolonizationhad to make a difference, questioning and reposi-tioning virtually all academic practices. Anthropologyis exemplary, I think, in struggling to transform itsobjects and modes of authority…unfinished, open-ended transformations.

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and looking for ways to be off center, but connected. Ithink this wavering, this fragmenting, of the spatio-temporal centrality of modernism and of “the West” inthe ‘60s (the greater ‘60s, one might say, followingJameson) has a lot to do with the appeal of “ethno-graphic” dispositions across a wide range of activities.Writing Culture, and the writings from the late 1970sand 1980s which were stuck together in ThePredicament of Culture, were part of a proliferatingstyle.

I was surprised at first by how quickly thosetwo works were taken up by artists, writers, perfor-mance and media people. And I can only situate thisinfluence with reference to a moment in the modernistcenters and their satellites when Williams’ dicta “noideas but in things” and “the universal through theparticular” took on new kinds of meaning. People nolonger saw themselves making “art” or contributing toa cumulative “culture.” Art and Culture seemed likelocal acts now, provincial definitions (an “art-culturesystem,” I called it). And the response wasn’t to rush tosome new, emergent, historical center of avant-gardeactivity. Where was that? The world seemed to secretemany, divergent, arts and cultures, discrepant moderni-ties. One’s task as an “ethnographer” (defined, predom-inantly, as cultural critic, a defamiliariser and juxta-poser) was to mine the museum, in Fred Wilson’sterms, to probe the cracks, search for the emergent:Benjamin’s messianic time, without any particularmessiah.

I think we can see, now, that this was aresponse to decentering, and perhaps a preliminary

by Craig Owens, and more recently by, amongstothers, Renée Green and Fred Wilson); in others itdraws on it. So, with particular emphasis on the wayyour work has driven much of the exchange, what doyou think of the traffic between art and ethnography?Do you think that it has benefited both sides?

JC: First I’d like to just add one name to your list ofquasi-surrealists who inspired me: William CarlosWilliams. He was an early, and continuous, influence—a modernist writer who made the choice, againstEurope’s pull on his generation, for America. And notfor New York City, either. For an obscure place,Rutherford, New Jersey, and for the peculiarly inti-mate/distant ethnographic perspective and habitus of afamily doctor. His poetic documentary and socialcritique, mixed with populism, and a visionary streak(vision at ground-level, among real people, their voicesand ethnic, gendered, quirky bodies), all this was ofgreat significance for me as a source for an expansivenotion of the “ethnographic.” Williams’ Patersonbecame a model, a provocation for a new kind ofrealism. This was a situated knowledge, freed from theconstraints of scientific objectivity and the Lukacsian“type,” a path through even the most particular andsubjective facts to a kind of general view, a “bigenough” vision.

It was, perhaps, just the right kind of localism(Williams was, of course, very much in touch with themodernist “centers,” Paris and New York) for someonelike me in the 1960s and 1970s beginning to feel hewas no longer at the progressive center of the world

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JC: Of course all methodologies, which in the inter-pretive/historical studies are always modes of partialtranslation, first get you somewhere and then run outof gas. “Ethnography,” whether in its strict anthropo-logical or expanded cultural-critical sense, is no excep-tion: it involves recognition and mis-recognition. HalFoster, reacting against its sometimes uncritical popu-larity in art practices of the early 1990s, cuts “ethnog-raphy” down to size. And in this he’s part of a neces-sary counter-trend. (There have been regular flare-ups, too, in a border war between anthropology andcultural studies over what counts as real ethnography.)But I would caution readers of Hal’s several pages (inThe Return of the Real) on “the new anthropology” thathe provides a very truncated account. His direct refer-ences to the movement under discussion are limited toa couple of my essays from the early 1980s. And in acommon dismissive move, the new anthropology isreduced to textualism and hyper-reflexivity. Thisfreezes a particular moment of what has been acomplex, ongoing critique and decentering of culturalrepresentations and relations of power. There’s somuch more to the ferment in socio-cultural anthro-pology during the ‘80s than a (selective) reading ofThe Predicament Of Culture can register.

Even that book’s most “textualist,” and often-cited, chapter, “On Ethnographic Authority,” is acritique of the modes of critical authority Hal properlyquestions. To see it as reducing everything to text or—a rather different thing—to discourse, slides over theessay’s central proposal that anthropology’s former“informants” be thought of as “writers.” This proposal

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millenialism, by people in a historically displacedcondition. Not a universal prescription or normativepostmodernity. To be sure, the ethnographic disposi-tion partook of a certain privilege, a luxury to exploreone’s own coming apart, to work with fragments. ButI think it would be wrong to reduce this set of criticaland quasi-documentary attitudes to a negative stereo-type of “postmodernist” relativity and self-absorption.For those representing marginal, or populist, modesof life and expression it offered a place, albeit circum-scribed, in the wider, public debates. And for thosecoming from sites of relative privilege there was, andis, a genuine openness to a broader world of popularand non-Western possibilities and agencies here. Iwould like to think that, at its best, the “ethnog-raphy” which emerged across many fields in the1980s rejects quick and dirty symptomatic analyses. Itreflects a willingness to look at common sense,everyday practices—with extended, critical and self-critical attention, with a curiosity about particularityand a willingness to be decentered in acts of transla-tion.

AC: One thing that you have been slightly brought totask for, at times by those same art critics, particularlyHal Foster in “The Artist As Ethnographer,” is theway you loosen up the notion of what an ethnographycan be. In other words, you re-define the parametersof what constitutes fieldwork, participant/observation,etc. But are the methodologies of ethnography infi-nitely expandable? Or do they snap when pushed toofar?

cultural representations. And so expanding the range ofactivities qualified as ethnographic, or as art/culture-collecting, was an attempt to decenter canonicalWestern styles. And if this was all done from within achanging “West,” and with theoretical tools of self-critique, it was done with an ear out for non-Western,and partially-Western, voices.

Routes, a 1990s book, assumes this mix of loca-tion and receptivity, tracking the conjoined practices oftravel and translation. It assumes that while one’s geo-political, worldly itineraries and encounters are power-fully constrained they are not ultimately determined.Location isn’t a prison; it’s comprised of material, butunfinished, maps and histories. In this book the ethno-graphic trope is replaced by a “travel” metaphor—simi-larly a source of insight and blindness, a translationterm that needs to be cut down to size. Displacement,forced and voluntary, exists in an always-unresolveddialectic with different forms of dwelling, of stayingput. Clearly this all has to do with the phenomena toohastily gathered under the rubric of “globalization,” amatter of transnational flows, the making andremaking of cultures and places. Routes argues againstclosures in our struggle to understand the presenthistorically. The structuring context of “late capi-talism” troubles (but does not erase) the context ofdecolonization that organized The Predicament ofCulture. Routes tries to inhabit a tension, an antinomy,of neo- and post-colonial narratives.

AC: In recent years there has been a resurgence ofinterest in artists who developed an understanding of

argues that the space of cultural representations ispopulated by differently situated authorities, producers,not simply conduits, of self-reflexive “cultural” knowl-edge. For there is no longer a standpoint from whichone can claim to definitively administer, or orchestrate,the textualization of “identity,” “tradition,” or“history.” A heteroglot, overlapping and contestedpublic culture—including indigenous writers, readers,and performers—characterizes the post-/neo-colonialcontext which the self-critical work of the late ‘70s wasbeginning to reflect, in Western academic contexts. Bythe late 1980s it was inescapable that anthropologicalfieldwork would never again be a matter of an outsiderscholar interrogating insider natives and emerging withneutral, authoritative knowledge. The “textual”critique of older, classic ethnographies showed thatthere had always been more going on: more negotia-tion, translation, appropriation. But now the politicsand the poetics were in the open—not only because ofthe new theoretical self-reflexivity, poststructuralconcepts of textual indeterminacy and dialogism, butmore profoundly because of pressures from decolonisa-tion and feminism.

The chapter in The Predicament of Culture onMarcel Griaule was centrally focused on the colonialcontext, seen from the post-war perspective of itscontestation, and emphasizing the issue of Africanagency in a negotiated ethnographic co-productionspanning four decades. The book’s later sectionscritiquing modernist primitivism and the history ofcollections were equally focused on bringing into viewthe socially and politically fraught nature of cross-

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placing the names of Indian groups in a Caracasbotanical garden, or Ana Mendieta burning her body’soutline on the earth. Nowadays a video camera is anintegral part of any site-specific, or local, performance,whether it’s Guillermo Gomez-Peña and Coco Fuscoinfiltrating major museums as caged New World“savages” or the opening of a tribal museum in Alaska.The same goes for any ethnographic work, alwaysalready caught up in modes of representation andreception. I suppose that’s still Writing Culture’smessage: we are talking about concrete, relational,articulations of “specificity.”

You suggest that something similar applies totemporal contextualizations. The cultural and histor-ical circumstances of “ethnographic surrealism” were,I argued, a Europe putting itself together after a warof unprecedented scale and brutality, and a modernismwhose access to the non-Western “primitive” wasgoing through quantitative and qualitative shifts.“Ethnographic surrealism” named a critical formationwhich made sense in this conjuncture—not an avant-garde method or a precursor of postmodernism. Butby recognizing and naming it, I was positioning myselfand my readers in the culturally-decentered, corro-sively self-critical, post-‘60s. Specificity, whether ofsite or historical moment is always relative to itsrepresentations. A local formation, or a temporalconjuncture, is part of some larger projection of rele-vance or meaningfulness which makes sense in“contact relations” which are never transparent or freeof appropriation. This is the basic performativitywhich an ethnographic poetics and politics assumes.

an ethnographic site in their practices in the late 1960s(particularly Robert Smithson and LotharBaumgarten). Today the notion of the ethnographicsite is being further expanded by a number of artists.This is interesting given that a grasp of site-specificityhas always been crucial for ethnographic fieldwork andtextual ethnographies. Indeed, in “On EthnographicSurrealism” you attest to the fact that “exploration ofethnographic activity” must always be set in “specificcultural and historical circumstances.” Is this a defini-tion of an ethnographic understanding of site-speci-ficity?

JC: It’s interesting to connect an “ethnographic”approach with “site-specificity” in art. Both are waysof decentering established centers of art/culturalproduction and display, and so I would be tempted tolocate them in the general context I’ve just outlined.But it’s important to recognize that turns to thespecific and the local occur in contexts of “complexconnectivity,” to adopt John Tomlinson’s substitute forthe diffusionist term “globalization.” I’d always wantto stress, as in the case of Paterson, the entanglementof the particular, not with Williams’ modernist“universal,” but with networks of power and commu-nication. If this means we can no longer speak of the“merely” local, then we need to interrogate theperformative specificity of any ethnographic or site-specific production. Such productions make sense onlygiven audience access (physical access, or written,photographic representations). People have to know,somehow, about Spiral Jetty, or Lothar Baumgarten

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phenomena. As I’ve already suggested, the occasionsof ethnography have come to be articulated in waysthat necessarily include discrepant and ongoingprocesses of cultural representation and reception.Given these developments in socio-cultural anthro-pology, I find myself now more a participant than anobserver. I particularly value the textured perspectivesfrom geo-political “peripheries” and “marginal” placesthat anthropological ethnography still delivers. Thediscipline offers a critical corrective to global-systemicprojections of the planet and its future. I’m alwaysastonished and chagrined to find how little ethnog-raphy and ethnographic history people in the academyand art world at large actually know. (Some read me—or Johannes Fabian’s Time and the Other, but never hismany ethnographies—and think that’s all they need.) Ikeep running into sophisticated scholars, artists, andintellectuals who still assume that the spread ofMcDonalds in many world cities, or the arrival ofEnglish, Coke, country music, anthropology andtourists in places like New Guinea results somehowautomatically in a wholesale destruction of local affili-ations, a homogenized world culture. Cross-cuttingagencies, and the contradictions of everyday life, justdisappear. Such a partial, Eurocentric view...and sosatisfyingly tragic!

AC: In your most recent book, Routes, you develop theidea that a site is not necessarily defined by fixedspatial and temporal boundaries. Specifically, yousuggest that a site can be a “contact zone;” i.e. a placelocated between fixed points, one that is constantly

AC: In your writing you often take the ethnographer(and the discourse of anthropology) as your primarysite. A neat quote from Paul Rabinow attests to this,“Clifford takes as his natives, as well as his informants,anthropologists.” (You even quoted this passage in ThePredicament of Culture.) What do you think of if? Is itless true now than it was a decade ago?

JC: Well, my relations to anthropologists, whom Ihave never considered to be “my natives,” have beencomplex. A kind of fraught, shifting colleagueshipwould be more like it. Paul’s quip was meant to saythat I couldn’t, as a critic, escape the structures ofauthority I analyzed in anthropological fieldwork. Towhich I responded, by making his text an epigraph: “ofcourse.” Nor were the predicaments I thought I couldsee with special clarity in a changing anthropologypeculiar to one discipline. But socio-cultural anthro-pology—perhaps because of a certain historical expo-sure, because it was so inescapably located in changing(decolonizing, recolonizing, modernizing, re-local-izing, etc.) cross-cultural domains—lived throughcrucial problems of authority in a very public way. Andanthropology’s experience, its “crisis,” became a para-digm for other fields where similar pressures werebeing felt.

I think that anthropology has grappled withthe historical changes in its relations with its “objects”of study in a generally positive way. The process hasnot led, as some feared, to self-absorption and hyper-relativism, but to much more complex historicalaccounts of an expanded range of socio-cultural

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we know them were integral to the expansive “West,”its imperial and national projects. The wholesalemovement of exotic collections into “artistic” and“cultural” centers, involved appropriations and transla-tions now being re-inflected, and even, to a degree,reversed. In a contact perspective, which complicateszero-sum relation between “tradition” and “moder-nity,” museums become way stations rather than finaldestinations.

AC: This is different to the way you discussedmuseums in the 1980s. Can you flesh out this develop-ment in your thinking a little more?

JC: In The Predicament of Culture I was primarilyconcerned with a critique of Western institutions.This took two general forms: 1) questioning modes ofauthority both in academic ethnography and inartworld contexts such as the Museum of ModernArt’s provocative exhibit, “‘Primitivism’ in TwentiethCentury Art;” and 2) looking for counter-discoursessuch as the “ethnographic surrealist” work of MichelLeiris, or the Caribbean surrealism of Aimé Césaire.The book tried to destabilize Western traditions anddiscourses from within—though the decolonizingpressures it registered (from without) had alreadyundermined this location and, indeed, any permanentinside/outside border. The career of Césaire, passingthrough Paris, in and out of the West, makes thisclear. Looking back on The Predicament of Culture in1990, I tried, with limited success, to mark some of itslocations—by geography, race, and gender—by

mobile. How did you arrive at this expanded defini-tion?

JC: “Contact zone” is, of course, derived from MaryLouise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes. She adapts the term fromsociolinguistics, the notion of “contact languages”(pidgins and creoles which emerge in specific histor-ical conjunctures) as well as from the work ofFernando Ortiz on “transculturation.” These areperspectives that do not see “culture contact” as oneform progressively, sometimes violently, replacinganother. They focus on relational ensembles sustainedthrough processes of cultural borrowing, appropria-tion, and translation—multidirectional processes. Andif the productions of modernity are exchanges, in thisperspective, they are never free exchanges: the work oftransculturation is aligned by structural relations ofdominance and resistance, by colonial, national, class,and racial hierarchies. Nonetheless, a “contact zone”can never be reduced to cultural dominance or (morepositively) education, acculturation, progress, etc. Theconcept deflects teleologies. In Routes I found it usefulto think of museums (and a wide range of heritage,cultural performance sites) as “contact zones” becauseit opened them up to contestation and collaborativeactivity. It helped make visible the different agendas—aesthetic, historical, and political—that diverse“publics” bring to contexts of display. The sometimesfraught politics of representation that now troublemuseums, particularly those which feature non-Western, tribal, and minority cultures, appeared aspart of a long, always unfinished, history. Museums as

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And I think there’s no doubt that a globalizing systemof cultural commodification is at work. But it’sterribly inadequate to reduce the emerging subalternand local productions that articulate with museums,cultural centers, and (inescapably) tourism to epiphe-nomena of a late capitalist, postmodern or“Americanized,” world system of cultures.

Tribal museums, a proliferating movement,fulfill distinct, if connected, functions. They oftenperform heritage for both “insiders” and “outsiders,”differently. They are part of markets in native artwhich are unlike the older, ongoing economies in“primitive art”—exclusively governed by Westerntaste and distribution. The new “tribal” culturalproductions are often significantly under nativecontrol. (One thinks of Aboriginal acrylics and video-making.) They are “articulated” (a term I much preferto “invented”) traditions: specific linkages of old andnew, ours and theirs, secret and public, partialconnections between complex socio-cultural wholes.To perform identity, to play the culture-game, is to bealive in postmodernity. But the terms of this livelinessvary. And it’s possible to articulate quite old, non-Western things, through the new languages of cultureand identity. If a good deal of this becomes commodi-fied, isn’t it capitalist hubris to assume that’s the endof the story? A closer, more ethnographic, look atparticular sites of heritage collecting and performancethan one gets from the political-economy system-atizers often tells an ambiguous, open-ended story.There is, undeniably, a systematic aspect to the prolif-erating politics of heritage, ethnicity and tourism. But

decomposing and recollaging the “EthnographicSurrealism” essay.

And I worked to deepen the shift of perspec-tive that was latent in the book’s last chapter devotedto the Mashpee Indians’ inconclusive “tribal” identitytrial. There I had confronted an ongoing NewEngland contact history and a native reality thatconstantly escaped anthropological “culture” andcontinuous “history,” categories that formed mycommon sense. Moreover, there was nothing radicallynomadic, deterritorialized, or rootless about theIndians who persisted in and around this Cape Codtown. I wasn’t portraying “postmodern” prototypes. Iwas trying to bring my primary audience—enlight-ened, Western-educated skeptics like me—to a real-ization that we were missing something: a reality ofNative American existence that our received notionsof culture and history couldn’t grasp. The trial mademe a lot more sensitive to indigenous movementswith their complex rearticulations of tradition andhistory. One of the first things I published after ThePredicament of Culture was an essay comparing “FourNorthwest Coast Museums” in Vancouver. Two ofthese were “tribal” museums/cultural centers. Theessay, reprinted in Routes, marked a crucial discoveryfor me. I began to see the museum, that most stodgyand Eurocentric of institutions, as a dynamic, dissem-inating institution which could take a diversity offorms in particular local/global conjunctures. Ofcourse the critics of “heritage industries” and “iden-tity politics” see this development as a characteristicof the superficial cultural politics of postmodernity.

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About Art: Conversations With Susan Hiller. It wasHiller’s anthropological/archaeological background,and her incorporation of issues from those disciplinesin her painting, photography, videos, and installations,that most interested me. I suppose I assimilated her tomy utopian category of “ethnographic surrealism.”She is deeply concerned with “cultural” grounds forways of perceiving and feeling, for the real that’s takenfor granted. She has worked with dreams, as everydayforms of knowing, in ways reminiscent of Leiris in his“oneirographic” writings from Nuits Sans Nuit (Nightsas Day, Days as Nights). Hiller is interested in expandednotions of writing and inscription. Her work draws—in anti-primitivist ways—on tribal and other non-Western sources. Moreover, she has been very inter-ested in matters of taxonomy and collecting, some-times in ways similar to what Bataille and Co. weredoing in the journal Documents, at least as I recon-structed it. Crucially, for me, she adds a strongwoman’s perspective to this very masculinist tradition.I don’t know whether Hiller would be happy or not tobe aligned this way. There are plenty of other sources.But it’s how I came to her beautiful and unsettlingwork.

You say my piece on Hiller is about a kind of“fictional museum.” Maybe it seems so because of itsfragmented, subjective voice. But I see her presence inthe Freud Museum as helping transform a shrine intoa “contact zone.” So the stakes there are the same asin the other museums visited in Routes. And thechapter is actually quite documentary in all its evoca-tions; it doesn’t make anything up. I happened to be in

it’s a system of worlds in contact rather than a world-system.

Tribal museums/cultural centers, I argued inRoutes, are innovations in a long history of cultural(re)appropriations—situations of ongoing, but alwayscontested, inequality. My contact perspective alsotouched on sites of discrepant heritage like Fort Ross(the reconstructed Russian/Alaskan outpost inNorthern California), on performed heritage andmuseum-collecting in highland New Guinea, and onthe Mayan ruin and tourist site of Palenque. In eachcase I tried to focus on histories of acculturation—local, regional, global articulation—rather than onsystemically produced, commodified identities anddifferences. The “world of museums” whose byways Ibegan to follow (not just an expanded “museumworld”) led me out of places like Paris and New York,modernist centers, and into a range of contemporarysites that can’t be rounded up historically under thestop-gap language of “posts.”

AC: In Routes you devote an entire “experimental”chapter to the Susan Hiller installation you saw inLondon, “From the Freud Museum.” How did youarrive at Hiller’s work? As a fictional museum it is verydifferent to the other museums you visit in Routes:were you consciously trying to play off the differencesbetween the two?

JC: I first learned about Susan Hiller in the early1980s through the American poet, Barbara Einzig,who has since edited an important collection, Thinking

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that undermined race purity (Moses the Egyptian), hisstruggle to sustain a kind of lucidity in the gatheringobscurity, and the need to find a home, a garden, inexile—all this is intensely moving. It’s moving even as,indeed because, one knows that the civilizationalworld Freud collected and cherished was crumblingaround him and would be forever altered by world warand its aftermaths. (I feel similarly about another great“end of the West” work of erudition written in exileduring the war, Eric Auerbach’s Mimesis.)

And then London itself—“postcolonial,” “dias-poric”—crowded into the essay, which was alreadyfaceting almost out of control. I had to find a place,somehow, for Blake’s transformative vision, and foranother museum, of the city of London, which wasjust then holding a special exhibit called “ThePeopling of London” (nothing but immigrants fromthe Romans on). So the piece turned into a kind ofintersectional meander which, I’m afraid, is formallyquite precarious, but where most of my book’s obses-sions are going on. All the balls in the air—for thereader to catch! Routes makes some demands onreading. It changes voice, rhetoric, and genre from“chapter” to “chapter.” Reviewers have complainedabout having to shift gears all the time; and of coursedifferent critics like half the pieces and hate the otherhalf—for opposite reasons. But I thought it worthrisking some confusion in order to—as my friend JedRasula put it—“aerate the academic text” whilemaking explicit the different, serious registers(analytic, poetic, subjective, objective, descriptive,meditative, evocative, etc.) of thinking. We operate on

London and read about Hiller’s installation in thenewspaper. She used objects and texts arranged inarchaeological collecting boxes to interrupt Freud’sfamous collections of Egyptian and Classical antiqui-ties. She provided other “origins,” other “sources” ofmeaning and “civilization.” Drawing from Australianaboriginal materials, from female cults in Greece,from Joanna Southcott, from water-witching, fromMayan traditions, from African tourist art, fromSephardic Jewish history, etc. Hiller supplementedFreud’s masculine, European, world view in a way thatgently, firmly pried open that tradition. It was never aquestion of consigning Freud to the junk heap ofhistory, but rather of placing him in a complex inter-section of histories. I felt immediately at home withthis project, and thought it was a model of what I had,in different ways, been trying to do with Westernanthropological discourses and institutions such as themuseum.

I started out just trying to describe and appre-ciate Hiller’s intervention. But, under her spellperhaps, I became as interested in the Freud Museumitself as in her poignant collection boxes. I heard awoman’s voice wafting across from another room.Anna Freud, narrating home movies about herparents—films shot by Marie Bonaparte. Freud atBurlington Gardens, dying, surrounded by women. Inthe present Museum, Anna’s workroom rivals herfather’s. And her own life—with its travels, friend-ships, and clinical, intellectual work—pervades thespace. Freud’s own death here, a victim of Hitler’sethnic cleansing, writing a book, Moses and Monotheism

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3. Interviewer: Manuela Ribeiro SanchesSanta Cruz, Winter 2000

MRS: Rereading your work I became quite aware ofrecurring themes in it, from your monograph onMaurice Leenhardt, Person and Myth to Routes: themessuch as a non-static, non-essentialist concept ofculture, the refusal of dichotomies, the attention tolocal cultures, avoiding at the same time the risk ofreifying them in their difference. Your operational,descriptive concept of culture as bricolage, or ascollage, seems to be already latent in Person and Myth.

In Routes you are still dealing with the tensionsbetween the homogenizing tendencies in an ongoing

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many levels, waking and dreaming, as we make ourway through a topic; but then we foreshorten thewhole process in the service of a consistent, conclu-sive, voice or genre. I wanted to resist that a bit.

tion of culture,” or the “invention of tradition.” Thoseare the titles of two works: one by the anthropologistRoy Wagner, the other a famous edited collection byEric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger. Today I wouldtend to use the language of articulation rather than thelanguage of invention. I derive the notion articulation,of course, from the British cultural studies traditionand the work of Stuart Hall, reaching back originallyto Gramsci. Articulation is the political connectingand disconnecting, the hooking and unhooking ofelements—the sense that any socio-cultural ensemblethat presents itself to us as a whole is actually a set ofhistorical connections and disconnections. A set ofelements have been combined to make a cultural body,which is also a process of disconnection, throughactively sustained antagonisms. Articulations anddisarticulations are constant processes in the makingand remaking of cultures.

MRS: Does it then make any sense to speak of“authentic” or “inauthentic” cultures?

JC: This way of seeing things seems to me to escapethe notion of inauthenticity which comes with the ideaof invented or reinvented cultures and identities. Andso, if one thinks of what I studied in some of my firstwritings on religious conversion, Melanesian peoplesengaging with Christianity, one has to give up notionsof before and after, leaving the old life behind andbeing reborn in the Christian faith and so forth. I’minclined to rethink all that now in terms of articula-tion, so that in the conversion process elements of

globalization process and local ways of dealing withthem, and you address this continuity quite explicitly,when you write that what you are proposing is “less abounded topic than a transition from prior work—aprocess of translating, starting again, continuing,”“prolong[ing] and continu[ing].” Do you agree withthis? What has persisted, what has changed or ratherbeen dislocated?”

JC: When I wrote the passages you quote, I had in mymind a work that has been important for me, butwhich has been largely forgotten: Edward Said’sBeginnings, where he takes on the whole problem ofstarting up afresh, and shows that it’s never possible tobegin cleanly, to begin in a whole new way. One isalways working with given terms, always working one’sway out of certain entanglements into new entangle-ments. So in many ways, Routes is a kind of continua-tion, retranslation, or recontextualization of ThePredicament of Culture. As you’ve said very well, thereis this kind of continual worrying of the culture idea,this sense of culture as a predicament, as somethingthat I’m stuck with, in a way, that’s deeply compro-mised, but that I cannot quite do without. It’s a bit likethe Derridean idea of something under erasure, thisidea of culture that I begin again with in Routes. Oneof the strands where I think I have changed or movedin a new direction is my more qualified sense ofculture as an open process, and as something made orinvented.

When I was writing Routes and Predicament Iwould be more likely to use a phrase, like the “inven-

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perhaps a cyborg or perhaps a political alliance, acoalition in which certain elements of a populationhave connected with other elements, but with thepossibility—which is always there in articulation—ofdisarticulation. There is nothing written in nature orin history that this particular group must include whoit does, or be allied with that particular group. Even atime-honored kinship system will look more like a setof political alliances than something with the natural-ness of an organic body.

MRS: Could you explain in a more detailed way howthe concept of culture as articulation you are nowproposing may be a helpful tool to think about thechanges we are facing nowadays?

JC: Articulation for me changes the way one has tothink about cultural change. For example, in theIsland Pacific area there is a well established way ofthinking sometimes called the fatal impact story. Ittakes as pivotal the arrival of Western societies inIsland Pacific cultures bringing their diseases, theirreligions, their commerce, their imperialisms, all ofwhich have devastating and irreparable effects on localsocieties. The rupture is complete: fifty years later, allthe people are Christians, traditional customs andlanguages are vanishing, etc. We know this story. Weread it every week in travel accounts of remote,supposedly primitive places. The assumption is alwaysthat, because certain central elements of the culturehave been destroyed, killed in effect, the culture itselfmust be dead. But this equates transformation,

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tradition get hooked onto elements of modernity andthen, as modernity evolves in diverse directionsincluding so-called postmodernity, elements of moder-nity can get rehooked onto elements of tradition,notions of place, new forms of indigeneity. This avoidsthe whole either-or, all-or-nothing, zero-sum game ofcultural change in a way that, I think, is true to themessiness, the shifting power relations, the dialogicaland historical open-endedness of contact-histories.

If I were to write again about the MashpeeIndians—the final chapter of The Predicament ofCulture—I would take this perspective. And in fact Inow think an articulation approach was implicit inwhat I did write, but at that time I didn’t have thetheoretical language which since then I’ve learnedfrom neo-Marxian analyses of cultural process andpolitics.

MRS: Describing your concept of articulation, youmentioned bodies. Are there any organic elements inthese bodies? I was thinking of articulation as apredominantly constructivist concept.

JC: I think we’re on the same track. The word cultureis deeply tied up with organic notions of growth, life,death—bodies that persist through time. All theetymologies of the word go back to cultivation. So,what articulation offers is a much more historical andpolitical sense of the process of sustaining, making andremaking these forms. When I think of a cultural bodyas an articulated body, it doesn’t look like an organicbody. It looks more like a monster, sometimes, or

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Orthodoxy or Hawaiian reggae—just the normalactivity of cultures, changing and adapting in thecontact zones of colonial, post-colonial and neo-colo-nial situations.

MRS: Your description of culture as an articulatedbody reminds me of Kleist’s marionettes, thoseconstructed organisms with a center of gravity in eachmovement, with its tension between the natural andthe artificial, the organic and the mechanic. The mari-onette is thus not to be seen as a system, closed initself: it opens up to differences, feeds from themwithout assimilating them.

JC: That’s very interesting, and you’re making meremember, in that Kleist story, the claim that preciselybecause the marionette is artificial, it has a kind ofliveliness. The puppet’s sense of being animated andreal is intensified by the fact of its artificial non-natural quality. I’ve always connected that story withRoland Barthes’ essay on the Bunraku puppet theatrein Japan, where you’re seeing a disaggregated body, asone group of masked puppeteers is moving the limbsof the bodies with rods, and another group stands onthe side, speaking, intoning the voice; so speech andbody are disconnected, but then reconnected in theentire performance, where the power, the evocativepower of the body, is multiplied precisely by its beingvisibly in pieces. That was a text that influenced me alot, actually. That and Barthes’ writings on Brecht—who is doing some of the same disaggregating aroundbodies, and voices, and realistic settings. I would

however violent, with death. It’s based on the model ofan organic body, in which, for example, if your lungsor heart were torn out the effect would be fatal. It’scommon sense...

MRS: Yes, you’re right. And this is what makes peoplefeel nostalgic about “pure” or “intact” cultures. Butdon’t you think that there are cultures dying out? Andisn’t there the real danger of the corruption of beliefs,values by the ongoing process of globalization we arewitnessing?

JC: What you’re invoking is only half the story—animportant half. But I tend to be suspicious ofdiscourses of “corruption” because they blind us to therevival and persistence of local and indigenous move-ments all over the world. Many people continue tofeel themselves whole and different despite the fatalimpact and all the many subsequent changes. Theycontinue to feel themselves Native Pacific Islanders, orNative Americans, or First Nations peoples of Canada.Even though they may not speak their nativelanguages, though they may be good Christians orbusinessmen, these groups have built alliances linkingelements of the old with the new; and while certaincultural elements have dropped away, others have beenadded in. So these persisting—not exactly “living”—cultures use prosthetic processes, that is, added orconnecting devices more like political alliances thangrafted limbs or hybrid growths. Nothing weird orbizarre, then, about Indian Gambling Casinos orAboriginal video productions, Yup’ik Eskimo Russian

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another way of thinking about that might be to speakof inhabiting tensions, or antinomies, given to us byour time, by the constrains of the historical momentsin which we live. We can’t transcend, or step outsideof, these contradictions, paradoxes, predicaments. Wecan, however, critically and self-consciously exploretheir possibilities and limits. For example, I considerthe whole debate of essentialism/anti-essentialismwhich writers in cultural studies go round and roundwith, to be one such antinomy. The result can bepeople stuck behind their chosen barricades. Myintellectual approach, for what it’s worth, is not toresolve the antinomy, to search for some sort ofmiddle space that I take to be true and rational, andthen defend it systematically. I believe in dialecticalinteraction (but not necessarily transcendence). Mymethod is more like tacking, as one might say insailing. It’s going out to one extreme and back acrossto another extreme, thus making some headway. I’vealways liked William Blake’s aphorism: “The road ofexcess leads to the palace of wisdom.” The goal is tosee how far you can get with an approach, ametaphor, a theory, see what it opens for you, andthen watch it fall apart, as everything at a certainpoint will fall apart, or turn into its opposite—asBlake, a great dialectician, would expect.

So, I take notions like text or writing andapply them to fieldwork and anthropology, to seewhat light could be shed, what productive defamiliar-izing would result. And then eventually I find myselfgetting into trouble, discovering that the insight I amgaining from that particular term or theory had

persist in calling this a kind of realism, radically semi-otic and historicist, broken free from naturalism andthus better able to grasp the complicated, uneven,patched-together continuities of contemporarycultural life.

MRS: Notwithstanding the unity I started to mention,there is a complexity in your thought and writing thatmakes it prone, I think, to all kinds of misunderstand-ings. You have been accused of being too reflexive andtextual, ignoring the “real experience” of fieldwork, ofde(con)structing the limits between fact and fiction, ofexhibiting a too detached observing position (byFriedman), of eluding “final definitions” thus risking“inconsistency” or “ambivalence” (by Rabinow), andmore recently of having too insistently stressed the“moving” element in cultures.

JC: I could obviously say a lot in a defensive modeabout how I’ve been read by various people, butthere’s nothing more boring than an author insistingthat he has not been read carefully enough by hiscritics. So I’ll just pick up on a couple of things. I’vebeen accused of a multitude of sins, many of themcontradictory, as I offend in one direction and thenfor a different reader offend in an opposite way. Ithink this actually gets at an element of my ownprocess, both of thinking and writing.

Take that word “ambivalence” you attribute toPaul Rabinow. Paul is right to point to the ambiva-lence in my writing. I’ve actually tried to turn it intoa kind of lucid uncertainty, a method. I suppose

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mind Marcel Granet’s marvelous definition: “Laméthode, c’est le chemin, après qu’on l’a parcouru!”).

MRS: But these misreadings are to me the more star-tling as I also realize how self-reflexive, self-explana-tory your texts are. I am thinking, for instance, of therole played by the introductions to your books whereyou provide an integrative reading of the differentparts of it. How would you explain the mentionedinterpretations, misreadings? How far have they beendisappointing, defiant, or inspiring to your work?What have they brought you?

JC: The way some people have read my work, andthat of others like me, is caught up in the currentproclivity for what I call “pushing off the posts”.There’s a minor industry, at least in America and inBritain, of people who are establishing their owndiscursive identity, their own authoritative position, bysaying “we are not postmoderns, not postcolonials, weare not poststructuralists.” Beyond many substantialdifferences of analysis on questions of epistemologicalrelativity, the coherence and future of the worldsystem, the salience of “identity” formations, etc.(important debates that do not, in fact, line up along asingle frontier), a kind of reflex rejection has devel-oped. To some extent this polemical response is partof normal generational and institutional differentiationwithin intellectual life, the domain of “trends,” “fads,”and “back to basics” reactions. But I think it is intensi-fied with respect to the “posts,” because of a kind ofgeneral anxiety, perhaps of a millennial sort in the last

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produced blindnesses in other areas. Then the chal-lenge is to understand the process, not to dig in anddefend a position, but to begin tacking in anotherdirection where eventually the same kind of thing willoccur. Now to me, for better or worse, this movingback and forth, going to excess and then going inanother direction—which is never an opposite direc-tion, of course, because when you think you’re goinginto reverse you actually end up in a new space—issimply the movement of thought enmeshed in history.It’s a process of endless repositioning, never an oscil-lation, always a kind of open-ended spiral of thought,a way of navigating in onrushing time.

I’ve tried in some respects to make that navi-gation visible in my work, and it’s got me into troublewith those who were looking for certain kinds ofconsistency. They don’t recognize my method ofjuxtaposition. To take an example from ThePredicament of Culture: a strong textualist approach,the chapter called “On Ethnographic Authority” isplaced beside “Power and Dialogue in Ethnography,”on the French Africanist Marcel Griaule, in which Italk very explicitly about colonial formations ofknowledge. One chapter is more formal, the othermore historical; and by putting those next to eachother I’m trying to set up a productive space oftension between approaches, both of which I considernecessary. Some readers simply ignore one or theother and praise or criticize me for working one sideof the dialectic, while others find only inconsistencyor ambivalence. As I said, I like to think there’smethod in the ambivalence. (But let’s always keep in

ethnographies, but I have the impression that thediscursive and political practices “outside” (to put it ina sort of reductive way) the actual ethnographies havegained more relevance. What has changed afterWriting Culture in the world, in academia, that wouldexplain such a shift?

JC: Well, my work has always moved between theperspectives of literary studies, history and culturalanthropology, and partly as a result of that, I findmyself often addressing different audiences, withdifferent expectations. I often function as a kind ofimport-export specialist between the disciplines.Looked at most cynically, the import-export person inthe disciplines takes some idea that’s outmoded in onefield and moves it into another field, where it becomesan exciting new thing. A bit like the smuggler, thevalue of whose merchandise depends on the border ittransgresses. More positively, I would say that themovement of ideas from one field into another field isnever simply a matter of transporting an object fromhere to there, but is always really a matter of transla-tion. And through the process of translation in thenew context what’s brought across is made new; ittakes on unexpected dimensions. I came to profes-sional maturity in a moment of the American academywhen literary theory had an enormous prestige. Itcarried the epistemological authority of people likeBarthes and Derrida, and it was getting applied in alot of extra-literary domains. (I had colleagues in the‘70s who complained of “literary critical imperi-alism!”)

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couple of decades, about where in fact the world isgoing. I do think that the old big stories about wheremodernity was headed, where the West was going,today seem much less certain. What all those “posts”refer to is not some sort of rigorous historical notionabout where we are. “Post” registers nothing morethan the sense of a significant change, something newwe don’t know what to call yet. So we add “post” tosome more familiar thing, drawing a line across theflow of time, a moment in which something like anemergent “period” is perceived by people who them-selves are complexly and confusedly located in transi-tion. I think that, given the breakup of a sense of tele-ological direction, intellectuals in the West, andunevenly in other parts of the world, “push off theposts” in the name of something more rigorous,rational, and progressively political, or somethingmore authentic, something, in any event, less rela-tivistic, confused, open-ended.

MRS: Maybe the intense readings and misreadings wehave talked about derive also from the very diverseapproaches to your work. People with quite differentinterests, intellectual formations, and agendas havebeen reacting to it —responses from anthropology,literary theory, art history, cultural studies. But I alsohave the impression that you are less and less preoccu-pied with “textual” readings, the literary critic seemsto have gradually yielded to the cultural critic. Theissues are very much the same, but I think you are lessconcerned with rhetorical strategies, discourseanalysis. You still derive much of your reflection from

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trends under the name “Cultural Studies,” a ratherdifferent formation from the tradition of Britishcultural studies: the Birmingham School’s heyday ofthe ‘70s and then its movement into London and thepolytechnic universities during the ‘80s. In the UnitedStates the influence of literary studies, in more or lesspoststructuralist veins, predominated, to the detrimentof cultural studies’ updated Gramscian Marxism. Theinterface with anthropology, something strangelyabsent in Britain until recently, was strong, butconducted largely through the expanded “ethno-graphic” domain. For a time, virtually everything wasethnographic, to a point where the term stoppedmeaning anything. And there was also a tendency toturn everything into a text, with the result that allsorts of institutional, and material, economic realitiesgot obscured.

Since the mid ‘80s we’ve seen a process ofretrenching and revisionism, a process of recognizingthe blindness that came with the insight. My ownwork has certainly moved in a kind of uneven zigzagsince then. It’s not that I think that those movementswere useless or that they were distortions; everytheory, every interpretative perspective is an intensifi-cation that distorts. The question is whether we havebegun to get a perspective on the nature of the fore-shortening, and may be able to learn not only fromwhat the approach showed us, but also from what itdidn’t show.

MRS: In Europe we tend to think of Americancampuses as worlds outside the world, ivory towers.

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I was among those who brought literary theoryto bear rather intensely on anthropological writing,especially the various forms of realist writing associ-ated with ethnography, cross-cultural description. Atthe same time we were involved in expanding whatcould be called the ethnographic style to a wide rangeof contexts and methods for describing, analyzing andevoking cultural phenomena. And, since we haddecoupled ethnography from anthropology, ethnog-raphy could no longer be restricted to what anthropol-ogists did when they did proper fieldwork.Ethnography turned out to be something that couldapply to all sorts of different people interpretingthemselves and their communities in “cultural” terms.The notion of ethnography became rather promis-cuous. People started finding out that they’d been likethe bourgeois gentilhomme speaking prose all along: theyfound out they had always been doing ethnography, asinsiders/outsiders in their everyday life, and so therewas a kind of drastic expansion of “ethnographic”work.

One of the sites into which it expanded wasliterature and literary studies, but it also moved intofilm, media studies, museum work, a whole range offields. Many artists, conceptual artists and otherwise,started doing explicitly ethnographic kinds of installa-tions and analysis. The work of Fred Wilson, ReneGreen, Lothar Baumgarten, people like that. So thiswas a fertile, somewhat anarchic period of crossoversamong the fields, among the disciplines, that I asso-ciate with the ‘70s and the early ‘80s in the UnitedStates. It also involved a coalescence of many of these

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There’s something to literary analysis that has its ownspecificity. I see a reconnection with tradition inmany fields. But it’s not—even though sometimes it isportrayed that way—a reactionary, “back to basics,”movement. There is no going back. I see a rearticula-tion, a reformation of the domain of the “literary” inresponse to the border crossings that have occurred,and that are still going on. Similarly, we can see arenegotiation of borders around anthropology, as itdraws lines with respect to “textualism,” as it distin-guishes itself from “cultural studies.” Many want torethink and reclaim what is specifically anthropolog-ical about their disciplinary kind of ethnography—“fieldwork.” Or, if anthropology has a distinctive useof the “culture” idea, what is that distinctive idea? Isthere anything left of the notion of Man—capitalM—which once united the various sub-disciplines ofanthropology? I don’t think there’s anything leftmyself, but there’s plenty of debate about that today.

I see this as the normal process of what Iwould call disciplining, which is something I writeabout in Routes, a process of working borders. Bordersare never walls that can’t be crossed, borders arealways lines selectively crossed: there’s a simultaneousmanagement of borders and a process of subversion.There are always smugglers, as well as border police.And often the smugglers and the border policedepend on each other for their jobs, for the value ofwhat they do. But the permeability, the crossings ofborders, needs to be renegotiated periodically, and Ithink that is certainly going on now. A lot of extra-anthropological stuff was taken into the discipline,

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Santa Cruz is often quoted as an example. I would alsolike to add that, as a visiting scholar there, I was quitesurprised by the political engagement in the Centerfor Cultural Studies. I had the feeling that people wereaddressing some very important issues, while inEurope, or at least in Portugal, there seems to be anongoing tendency to the non-political. It is difficult togeneralize. On the other hand in Portugal there arediscussions about the humanities becoming morecompetitive. Curricula should be changed in order toattract more students. Some people fear that culturalstudies with its interest for media or youth culturesmay be co-opted and neutralized, others that it mayusurp the terrain of literary studies. Others again reactto postcolonial or diasporic studies seeing in them thedanger of the dissolution of the canon or a menace to“national integrity”—some Europeans even go so faras to consider “identity politics” and its influenceoutside the U.S. academy as mere “American culturalimperialism.” This to contextualize the discussion.How different is your experience? I guess working inthe UCSC History of Consciousness Program is avery special situation. And what about the relationsbetween anthropology and cultural studies?

JC: In the U.S. context— at least where I work—the‘70s and the ‘80s saw rather dramatic interdisciplinarywork in many fields, particularly in the humanitiesand the interpretative social sciences. But now we are,as I’ve said, in a period of disciplinary reformation.We find literary theorists saying, for example, wait aminute, we’re not just cultural-studies ethnographers.

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JC: The interests were there, but I’m realistic enoughabout the disciplinary force of communities to knowthat if my first job had been in a History DepartmentI would not have written anything like what I in factwrote. So I feel fortunate to have been in a programwhere there was permission to cross-over, to mix andmatch. I had colleagues, particularly Hayden White,Norman O. Brown, and Donna Haraway, whoencouraged and inspired me to do just this. So I’m abit of a special case. But I would hasten to say that thekind of work I’ve done has been successfully pursuedwithin disciplines by people working the edges of theirown communities. It doesn’t require utopian spaceslike the History of Consciousness Program. It’s actu-ally, as I’ve already suggested, part of the interdiscipli-nary process of disciplining, a necessary feature ofknowledge which waxes and wanes in the social life ofideas. I’ve spoken a bit about the expanding andcontracting of interdisciplinarity over the last twenty-five years or so in the U.S. But the tempo of theseprocesses varies in different contexts, and what’shappening in Europe, Mexico, or Australia may bequite different.

MRS: Although very sympathetic to indigenouscauses, faced with discussions on concrete examples ofindigenous claims, I have almost suspected you werebecoming an essentialist. My fear of essentialismsresults from European experiences, such as destructivenationalisms and ethnicisms: Nazi Germany and itscelebration of “blood and soil,” Sarajevo and Kosovo,not to speak of a very narrow concept of Portuguese

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from literature, from history, from feminism and fromcultural studies. And a lot of “cultural” stuff hasentered literature and the rest from anthropology.This is all to the good, I think. But then as thoseintellectual communities begin to lose their sense ofidentity, of their core tradition, then an aggressiverearticulation of insides and outsides takes place. Thecurrent reaction can’t last forever, to be sure, sinceany discipline that builds impregnable walls arounditself, like any society, is dooming itself to a kind ofmuseum life.

All knowledge is interdisciplinary; knowledgedoes not naturally fall into disciplinary forms. At thesame time, disciplines, like tools, are useful, becauseyou can’t explain everything at once. You can’t masterall methodologies at the same time, and masteryrequires specialization. There are good reasons fordisciplines, but they need to be seen as historically inmotion and relational. I’ve had the unusual academicfate of being positioned between fields. I was trainedin history, always liked literature as much or morethan history and had a deepening fascination withanthropology. I’ve been fortunate enough to work formore than two decades in a program that has wantedme precisely to juggle the three balls of history, litera-ture and anthropology.

MRS: Does this mean that working in the History ofConsciousness Program has had a decisive influenceon your work, or would you say that your interestswould have led you anyway to the path you havetaken?

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and conventions. They do this for better and forworse, and we need to be able to distinguish the“essentialism” of, say, the East Timorese resistingIndonesian annexation in the name of their people-hood from Milosevic’s Serbian chauvinism.Epistemology isn’t very helpful here. We need histor-ical specificity and an analysis of social inequality andpower. Now, we might in a kind of abstract, purelyphilosophical way find that all these political andcultural machinations are somehow done in bad faith.But of course just because cultural essentialism hasbeen theoretically refuted doesn’t make it go away.

MRS: But I found it difficult to understand yourapparently too quick empathy with certain issues inindigenous movements, like biologically groundedland claims, or Hawaiian hereditary monarchy and thestress of blood ties.

This is one of the reasons why when I was inSanta Cruz universals seemed again important to me.Of course I realize the limits and unsustainability ofsuch abstract essentialisms, even when we admit theyare not a mere expression or a strategy of Westernhegemony. But I am still suspicious of identity politicsas practiced in the United States: don’t they divide toomuch?

JC: I don’t think we will get beyond so-called identitypolitics. And when I contemplate the project ofsustaining a rigorous anti-essentialism I sometimesthink of the Futurists coming to Paris before WorldWar One—do you recall the photos, all of them

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identity cultivated by the dictatorship with itsemphasis on tradition and continuity, and significantlyassociated with the ideology of colonial “univer-salism.” I am more and more aware how much I tooam prey to other forms of localism, as you may be ableto derive from my obviously Eurocentric associations.

JC: I suppose, with regard to that question of essen-tialism and anti-essentialism, I am in tune with writerslike Paul Gilroy, in The Black Atlantic, trying to articu-late an anti-anti-essentialist position. The two nega-tives do not, of course, add up to a positive, and so theanti-anti-essentialist position is not a simple return toessentialism. It recognizes that a rigorously anti-essen-tialist attitude, with respect to things like identity,culture, tradition, gender, socio-cultural forms of thatkind, is not really a position one can sustain in aconsistent way. One can’t communicate at all withoutcertain forms of essentialism (assumed universals,linguistic rules and definitions, typifications and evenstereotypes). Certainly one can’t sustain a social move-ment or a community without certain apparentlystable criteria for distinguishing us from them. Thesemay be, as I’ve said before, articulated in connectionsand disconnections, but, as they are expressed andbecome meaningful to people, they establish acceptedtruths. Certain key symbols come to define the weagainst the they; certain core elements of a traditioncome to be separated out, venerated, fetishized,defended. This is the normal process, the politics, bywhich groups form themselves into identities andpeople recognize each other within a set of symbols

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various of us have tried to maintain, with unevensuccess. We have found support from insurgentscholars and activists who, from their own perspective,are critics of essentialism, but often in a non-absolute,historically contingent, dialogically and politicallyengaged way. The current moment is one of contin-uous struggle around essentialist claims both withinand outside the various identity struggles. And in thatsense the ‘60s rigueur are inescapable elements of thescene. Perhaps from your perspective my ownthinking flirts too closely with essentialisms of onesort or another. I find I need to do that in order tostay engaged with the concrete situation I’m in, andnot to seek some place of philosophical or politicalpurity which would evade the historical conjunctureand its cultural politics.

MRS: In that sense I think your way of thinking aboutculture as articulation is very helpful, as it offers amore complex way to deal with such issues. On theother hand I am reminded of one of your Jardin desPlantes postcards. There you speak of le vertige hori-zontal, “one of those miracles of travel,” of “trans-planted civilization” and, quoting Alicia DujovneOrtiz: “But if I have no roots, why have my roots hurtme so.” And you get “infatuated” with the palms ofthe Luxembourg gardens “symmetrical, perfect inboxes with iron feet. Vegetable extraterrestrials.” Irecently visited the Berlin Jewish Museum by DanielLiebeskind. What impressed me was the way thebuilding proposes an articulation between Jewishculture and the city and how the tension between past

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buttoned up in dark suits?—decreeing that representa-tions of the nude should be banned for fifty years!Prescriptive anti-essentialisms are a bit like that. Thepoint really is to develop a critical notion of thevarious forms of essentialism, when, and where, andhow they are deployed. It’s just a bad utopianism, andrather condescending, to think that claims to roots,tradition, identity, and purportedly natural attach-ments should be opposed across the board. This issomething that has been rudely impressed on thetheoretical sophisticates of my own generation. Forjust at the moment all the radical post-structuralismsbecame popular in the U.S. academy a whole range offormerly marginal and excluded peoples and perspec-tives were fighting for recognition: women, racial andethnic minorities, new immigrants. These groups, forthe first time entering this public sphere, often felt thesophisticated cultural critics to be, in effect, tellingthem “Oh yes, we understand your gender, race,culture and identity are important to you, but youknow, you’re just essentializing.” Well, the insurgentswere not amused, and some bitter polemics aroundtheory and the potentially reactionary effects of rigidanti-essentialisms were a part of the transformations,the struggles, the wars around authority and culturalidentity, which have been a fundamental part of life inthe post-‘60s U.S. academy.

In that context, finding ways to take “identitypolitics” seriously, while also sustaining the possibilityof outside critical perspectives with respect to theclaims and symbols of these movements is a difficult—but, I think, extremely important—struggle that

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MRS: I like your tactical “tacking” and the way youmove back and forth between what sometimes seemsto me Hegelian dialectics and a very nominalist, prag-matic, ethnographically sustained approach. A nomi-nalist and a cynic who believes in the redemptivemoment of small utopias, or in the Messiah, as youonce told me, after a discussion on the limits of stoicuniversals.

I must also confess that, faced with the confer-ence held at Santa Cruz in February, 2000, “NativePacific Cultural Studies on the Edge,” I had to recon-sider my anti-essentialist, anti-nationalist rigueur, andmy newly rediscovered preference for detached stoic-like universal rationales. It was for me a very strangefeeling to hear indigenous Pacific scholars speakingabout their culture, their need to find new theoriesand epistemologies, that might enable them to buildtheir own cultural studies area. And in the processthey were invoking things EurAms would hardlyventure to speak about on such an occasion, such aslong term friendships and other personal complicities,using affective ties to reinforce institutional and polit-ical alliances. These were not projected “natives,” as insome travel accounts I had read, but full subjects ontheir own terms, fighting for a discipline not only as apure theoretical, academic matter, but as somethingintrinsically political. The native Pacific was claiminga complexly traditional and postmodern existence.The fact is that my Euro-scepticism regarding essen-tialisms, nationalisms, ethnicisms was somehowtempered by this very warm and very rainy weekend insunny California. And scepticism, moderated by a

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and present, light and darkness, and the refusal ofright angles and classical symmetry leads us toconsider not only the suffering of exile and holocaust,but also the utopian moments of redemption, assuggested in the “Garden of Exile” or the “E. T. A.Hoffman Garden” by the olive trees planted on top ofconcrete pillars, aerial but rooted, like the palm treesin the Jardin des Plantes.

JC: Yes, and what’s powerful, too, is the way theconcrete pillars are leaning, as if blown by thatBenjaminian wind of history. I’m glad you picked upon my little image from the Jardin des Plantes in ThePredicament of Culture: palm trees in the Luxemburggardens, wonderfully, perfectly rooted, but in boxeswhich hover a few inches off the ground and are heldup by wrought-iron feet. I guess this is the kind of“rooting” that appeals to me! One wouldn’t want tosay those palms really aren’t rooted at all. But theroots hover a bit; they are on legs. I’m interested in allthe roots that are on wheels or carried by jumbo jetairplanes these days. Kwame Anthony Appiah, himselfcomplexly attached to Ghana, Britain and the UnitedStates, recently wrote in a memoir of his Ghanaianfather about taking your roots with you. I find it goodto think with that kind of paradoxical mobile rooted-ness, because in practice people are living all sorts oftactical combinations of roots and routes, experiencestoo easily mapped onto oppositions of stasis anddisplacement, essence and difference, native andcosmopolitan...

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But since then I’ve allowed myself to experi-ment with more than one style within the covers of asingle book. I’m self-consciously pushing against thelaw of genre—that contract between reader and audi-ence which determines the mode of reception, therhetoric, the rules of evidence and argument and soforth—within particular forms of writing. And to bequite honest, I’m not sure ultimately just why I dothis. It’s not that I think “scholarly genres” are restric-tive and must be transgressed, or that “poetic” evoca-tion is liberating. But perhaps I’m not unique infinding that my process of “thinking through” atopic—whether it is the problematic of culture, in ThePredicament of Culture, whether it’s contemporarytravel and displacement in the sequel Routes—takesplace in a number of registers. Some of these arescholarly and analytical, some of them evocative orpoetic.

And I think that, at least for me, whateversense of complexity and richness I can derive in thehermeneutic process, has to do with crossing amongthese several registers. Don’t we all operate on morethan one level of consciousness and desire? GastonBachelard wrote somewhere that you can’t really knowa topic until you’ve dreamed it. And wasn’t itApollinaire who put a sign outside his door, when hewas sleeping during the day: Le poète travaille? Andwhy not the sleeping scholar, the scholar at work: Lesavant travaille? I’ve wanted to open up a bit the rangeof processes that go into what we consider to bethought, and even methodical research: some of itvery orderly and disciplined, some of it much more

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restrained utopian enthusiasm, may also be a good wayof “tacking,” sailing against the wind. As the historygoes, Portuguese were for a while experts in the art oftacking...

I have mentioned your “Postcards fromParis.” Besides this text, “White Ethnicity,”“Immigrant,” and “Fort Ross Meditation” (all inRoutes) are what I would call examples of a moreopenly “experimental,” “literary,” “subjective”writing. What you call “personal explorations” seemto me to comment on your more “academic” texts.How do these two types of discourse relate to eachother? Do they fit together? And then there arepeople who prefer your more scholarly writing inPerson and Myth, although I must say it can be quiteunorthodox too.

JC: You ask about the different styles and modes ofwriting that I use, and my sense of what the relationis between the literary and the scholarly, the poeticand the prosaic, etc. And you suggest that somepeople prefer my more scholarly writing in Person andMyth. Well, in that biography the writing isn’tuniformly conventional—there are a few, we mightsay, experimental turns—but there is a continuousobject, a life, and a more or less continuous, descrip-tive, analytic/evocative tone sustained throughout. Nodoubt this makes it more acceptable to some readers.While I do try to problematize the idea of a contin-uous life and of a biography, I don’t do it in the formof the book itself for tactical reasons that I explain inmy introduction.

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dislike the other half, and then another reviewer willhave exactly the opposite reaction. That may beinevitable, given the diversity of styles and forms inthat book. Of course, there’s plenty of room for criti-cism of these experiments, and I’m the last to knowhow successful I’ve been.

MRS: In the Prologue to Routes you describe it veryself-reflexively as a “collage,” as “paths and not amap,” “bring[ing] parts together while sustaining atension between them.” (This reminds me very muchof Benjamin’s concept of constellation.) Your modelsare modernists and surrealists but your work has beenlabeled postmodern. I am aware of hesitationsconcerning the modernism and postmodernism inyour work. You describe yourself ironically as “asometime postmodern (liking) contamination;” andthere is a direct grappling with the issue in “Paradise”when you ask if your “concern and (taste) forcultural/historic juxtapositions [is] part of an ‘englo-bing appetite,’ a ‘hegemonic,’ ‘postmodern irony,’”and whether your work really helped establish a new“intellectual imperialism.” Going back to the surreal-ists. You mention that your interest in “culturalcollage and incongruity derives quite explicitly frommodernist art and poetry: the Cubists, Dada and inter-national Surrealism, Segalen, Conrad, Leiris,Williams, and Césaire,” all of whom figure promi-nently in The Predicament of Culture.

JC: I have never been comfortable with the label post-modern, or postmodernist, as attached to my work,

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free-flowing and open-ended, and in a sense medita-tive. I like the notion of meditation, a more inclusiveword for the real range of processes involved. But whyis it that when we come to write about what we’vebeen thinking, meditating, dreaming, researching, wehave to foreshorten a multifarious process into a singlerhetoric, one overarching form?

For better or worse, I’ve always found thatfocus to be constraining. So I’ve tended to write in anumber of styles and to produce books that look likecollages or juxtapositions of genres. My goal hasn’tbeen to blend the different styles, not to say that acad-emic writing really should be poetry or anything likethat. It’s not about blurring, it’s about juxtaposing, andthus making people conscious of the rules of engage-ment, as it were, determining their reception. So Imake demands on my readers, I ask them to shiftgears. I was doing some of that in The Predicament ofCulture and I’ve done rather more in Routes. Some ofthe book’s “chapters” really look a lot like poems;some are travel accounts; one is an evocative littlebook review; and a number are rather developedscholarly arguments with lots of footnotes and soforth. The final chapter, “Fort Ross Meditation,” iswritten in a rather personal scholarly voice—trying toexemplify the form of the meditation for serioushistorical-cultural analysis. So as the book’s readersturn to each new chapter, they have to rather quicklyget a take, a read, on what sort of a form is coming atthem. Some readers feel that this isn’t quite fair andthey work to separate the wheat from the chaff. Onereviewer of Routes will like half of the pieces and

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And this was a time when doctors went into people’shouses, so he derives an acute sense of a localism—ofaccent, of body types, of ethnicities—in the immi-grant, working-class communities of New Jersey.Now, there’s something for me very attractive aboutadopting that engaged, hands-on, perspective. SoWilliams is perhaps someone who prefigures anexpansive vision of the “ethnographic,” a visionlocated not primarily in London, Paris, New York,Vienna, Berlin, where modernist culture was elabo-rated, but which interests itself in out-of-the-wayplaces.

When I speak like that, it starts to sound likethe language of certain “postmodernisms.” But it’simportant to say that Williams is not a nomad, is notdisplaced in that normative poststructuralist sensewhich sometimes turns the observation that peopleare multiply positioned and displaced in the contem-porary world into a prescription that they should bemultiply positioned and displaced. Williams under-stood the fact of multiple location and positioningand consciously chose to localize himself. I supposehe is analogous to those palms in their boxes: Hesinks roots, he localizes himself, strategically.Rutherford, New Jersey is not the place he was born;he has a very complex multinational familial back-ground. Williams puts down artificial roots, but in alifelong way, tied to an engaged practice and involve-ment with neighborhoods, people, their bodies. Thissimultaneously intimate and analytic medical practiceproduces a set of writings which go well beyondpoetry, narrowly defined.

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and I think if people read The Predicament of Culturethey’ll see that I almost never use the term. On theother hand, since so many have insisted on calling mea postmodernist, I have to accept that there must besomething to it. But my own view is that the linebetween postmodernist and modernist is always goingto be fuzzy and debatable. I said before that the verynotion of “post” can never adequately describe somewhole new perspective or epoch but merely a sense ofchange or something “after,” still entangled in whatwe know and can name. I certainly think of mywriting as caught up with and empowered bymodernism. You mentioned the surrealists, Conrad,Leiris, Williams, Césaire, people like that; and that’scertainly the way I would locate myself.

Now taking a figure like William CarlosWilliams, one could produce a reading that wouldmake him a postmodernist avant la lettre. And theremay be a sense in which my use of him, my updating,does something like that. He’s of course a differentkind of modernist, unlike the canonical figures Joyce,Picasso, etc., who are very much associated with thegreat Western centers, such as New York or Paris.Williams is more decentered. He makes a self-conscious move to the local—a local that is notoutside of connection with the larger circuits ofpower, of literary and cultural influence, but which isa kind of strategic marginalization. I’m referring, ofcourse, to Williams’ famous choice to locate himselfin New Jersey, not far from New York to be sure, butdefinitely in a small town, adopting there the specific,quasi-ethnographic, standpoint of a family doctor.

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talk based on the trial very soon afterwards, and then Iput it aside for seven years or so, unsure I really hadthe authority, as a mere observer in the courtroom, towrite about this history. But I eventually decided Icould write it up, since it would appear at the end ofmy book The Predicament of Culture, and would beobviously tied in with all the themes in the book.

I hoped it would be evident that I was notgiving a definitive or complete picture of the trial orthe history of the Indian peoples in Mashpee or NewEngland, but that I was in fact reading this eventthrough my own obsessions, my own interests. Peoplehave, of course, criticized me for giving definitiveversions of Mashpee and the trial, even though in theessay I finally wrote I tried to position myself carefullyin the observer’s seat of the courtroom. I didn’t, inother words, try to adopt a position either of omni-science or of mobile authority. I tried to maintain aclear, partial perspective. In retrospect I see that I wasusing the very difficult and in many ways still enig-matic history revealed and obscured at the trial. I wasusing this paradigm, if you like, as a kind of transitionin my own work.

The trial pushed me beyond my early focus onthe history of European anthropology and exoticism,with a particular emphasis on textual forms of critique.And it led me into a concern with the possibilities andlimits of indigenous agency, dynamism, and self-repre-sentation. The next thing that I wrote after theMashpee text, an essay republished in Routes, was anaccount of “Four Northwest Coast Museums,” two ofwhich were tribal museums/cultural centers. There I

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And, once again, this is not some sort of defin-itive return to the local. I see it as the construction ofa local/global place. While Williams writes his epicPaterson from the standpoint of a fading industrial city,he stays in contact with the most “advanced” art andliterary scene in New York. And he knows quite wellwhat’s happening in Paris. These high modernistplaces are simply parts of his world, not its center. It’sthat sense of off-centered connectedness that I havefound so interesting, in my foreshortened readingfrom the late twentieth century. The exercise may, atleast, give a sense of the sort of anachronistic, apro-gressive postmodernist I am—if I am a postmodernist.

MRS: You have mentioned “Identity in Mashpee” andthe importance of that trial for your further thinking.Could you elaborate?

JC: Well, the essay about the Mashpee trial has playeda central role in the development of my thinking. In aBoston federal court in 1978 a group of Indians onCape Cod had to prove that they were a tribe in orderto have status to sue for land. I sat in on this trial,more or less by chance, and became engrossed. I sawall the concepts I had been studying historically—thenotions of culture, of history and of historical conti-nuity, identity and so forth—efficiently torn apart bylawyers. And I saw a very complicated and apparentlydiscontinuous history of Native American peoples inNew England being put together and pulled apart bythe various discourses in the courtroom. I attended theproceedings and kept extensive notes. I actually gave a

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studies articulate the local and the global? How canwe think of ways of surpassing, while maintaining, ourlocal ways of speaking, writing, teaching, developing atthe same time ways of communicating and researchstrategies that may allow smaller communities/coun-tries to participate more adequately and visibly in the“global discussion”? In Portugal, where we are verymuch aware of such dependencies and possibilities, weare, I think, very interested in such strategies.

JC: That’s a very large set of issues. I’ve been focusingon what I call articulated sites of indigeneity, particu-larly in the Pacific—returning in some of my recentwork to the Southwest Pacific, Melanesia, where myfirst book was centered. I see this as working toward ahistorically rich, non-reductive account of transna-tional cultural politics. The strand of analysis I’mextending developed through a critique of notions of“ideology” in late capitalist situations, a critique stem-ming from the moment of the New Left in Britain.After 1960 people like Raymond Williams, E. P.Thompson, and Stuart Hall grappled with the factthat the old economistic models and trade union poli-tics were simply not dealing with facts like theAmericanization of Britain, new patterns of consump-tion, religion, youth cultures, race and gender, a wholerange of things that couldn’t be rounded up in anolder class-based view of the political.

The best cultural studies work demonstratedthe relative autonomy of cultural politics fromeconomic determinations, while not severing the linksand allowing “culture” to be reified and float free. By

was preoccupied with the processes by which indige-nous communities on Vancouver Island in Canada—Kwagiulth (or Kwakwaka’wakw, formerly Kwakiutl)—reappropriated the institution of the museum.Founding museums was a condition for the repatria-tion of artifacts from the national collections inCanada. In the process the native communities trans-formed a dominant Western institution for thepurposes of telling an anti-colonial tribal history. Theyalso combined the functions of display and use, forcultural outsiders and insiders. This resourcefulnessrecalled the complex way the Mashpee had survivedover several centuries of brutal war and intense pres-sures to acculturate in New England. I saw howforeign institutions such as the tribe, or the museum,externally imposed institutions, were being made andremade, translated for indigenous use. And that themebecame a dominant issue in my thinking. So in someways I’m still trying to figure out the Mashpee case,the improbable, possible persistence of Native peoplesin New England. The very complex processes of tribalcontinuity, in colonial situations of great violence andrelentless pressure, have preoccupied me. And I’vecome to think that the contemporary emergence ofindigenous politics and contestations into new andlarger, articulated public spheres is one of the reallyimportant developments of the late twentieth century.

MRS: This reminds me of the importance of thinkingabout the local in ways that may pay due attention tothe ongoing changes in our contemporary intercon-nected world. How can a transnational critical cultural

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4. Interviewer: Robert Borofsky Honolulu/Santa Cruz, Winter 2000

RB: Can you explain the intellectual trajectory thatbrought you into the Pacific? You have mentioned thatit was almost by accident that you became interestedin the region.

JC: Initially, I had no intention of studying anythingconnected with the Pacific. But then I stumbled onMaurice Leenhardt. Writing about his life plunged meinto the history of French colonial New Caledonia. Iencountered a brutal colonial history and, at the sametime, a remarkable history of cultural survival andtransformation. Kanaks, the island’s Melanesian inhab-

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rejecting economic determinism it opened a breach inmodernizing, Euro-centered teleologies. But it wasstill very much centered in Britain, in a small range of“advanced” capitalist situations. In the past couple ofdecades, however, we have seen the emergence of“diasporic” theories, Subaltern Studies, the recogni-tion of Caribbean and South Asian histories andspaces within Britain, and the traveling of culturalstudies itself into places like Australia, New Zealandand the U.S. We are starting to see the cultural poli-tics of late capitalism, articulated with local places andhistories all over the globe, analyzed in ways whichavoid economistic reductions and top-down, system-centered visions of the planet. The challenge is to seethe world whole—or whole enough—while leavingroom for the kinds of dialectical and ambivalent histo-ries I’ve been trying to articulate in this interview.

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Gilroy, Hazel Carby, Kobena Mercer, Avtar Brah andmany others. The evolving British tradition of culturalstudies, with its concern for post-colonial relations andfor complex historical formations of “identity,” seemedanother version, differently mapped, of what I saw inMelanesia.

The theorizing of Stuart Hall, for example,offered tools that would have helped me with theinteractive self-fashioning of Leenhardt and hisconverts. And Hall’s neo-Gramscian approach tocultural politics has guided my continuing interest inrearticulations of tradition and the emergence of newcoalitions of indigenous identity, processes very activein the Pacific. But I’ve always had the sense that“Pacific Cultural Studies,” should such a thing takeshape, would have to be different in important waysfrom the North-Atlantic varieties.

RB: Despite your own enthusiasm for the Pacific, theregion rarely seems to attract the same amount ofintellectual attention as do various other areas of theglobe. What do you think accounts for the region’sintellectual isolation?

JC: It’s something that puzzles me and has puzzled mefor some time. In Euro-American contexts of intellec-tual work, I try to interject Pacific examples that Ithink will be particularly provocative. But people oftenseem to glaze over. I’m something of a booster for theWestern Pacific—a deeply complex and fascinatingpart of the contemporary world, a mind bogglingplace. Take, for example, the fact that the island of

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itants, were said to be dying out. Yet they havepersisted. One of the ways they survived was bybecoming Christian, and religious conversion turnedout to be a complex process, as Leenhardt put it, of“acculturation in two directions.” MelanesianChristianity would be a different, a new kind, ofChristianity—a way of making the best of a bad situa-tion and a strategy for continuing to be Kanak in anew context. I had to understand a concatenation ofelements, both very old and very new, in an original,fraught cultural and political experience.

It all seemed very contemporary, somehow,and I found myself wanting to think of Melanesia asthe future, not as the past. The experience brokedown historical categories, in my North-Atlanticmind. Recognizing the Kanaks’ resourcefulness andability to work with innovation, I gained a better senseof interactive process, an understanding enhanced byreading Roy Wagner who, at the time (1975), waswriting about the invention of culture in Papua NewGuinea. What I had to grasp in New Caledonia wasthe politics of culture in an unequal colonial situation.While I developed and applied this processualperspective in other contexts later on, this is reallywhere I first grappled with it.

After this encounter with a Melanesian history,I passed through poststructuralist critiques of ethno-graphic writing to post-colonial theory and culturalstudies. The writing of Raymond Williams and E. P.Thompson had been crucial to me in graduate school,and I was able to build on that, in transnationalcontexts, through the work of Stuart Hall, Paul

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Island places never really fit those projections. Thismakes it easier to imagine what might be called “apro-gressive narratives of modernity,” something bothempirically and politically important to do.

Pacific societies participate in the contempo-rary world less encumbered by the assumptions thatcame with the modernist visions either of liberal capi-talism or anti-imperialist national liberation. Seen as acomplex, dynamic region, the ex-primitive, neo-tradi-tional, para-postmodern Island Pacific confounds tele-ologies. And for me, at least, that makes it very good tothink with.

RB: One of the ways the Pacific remains distinctive isin how it embraced decolonization, or perhaps moreprecisely phrased, how decolonization embraced it. Itinvolved a more complex, ambiguous set of processesthan occurred say in Africa or Asia.

JC: The timing of decolonization in the Pacific seemscrucial to me. Changes in political sovereignty mostlycame in the 1970s and the1980s—a couple of decadesafter the classical experiences of African or South Asianindependence. Occurring later, decolonization in thePacific took place—is still taking place—in a differenthistorical context. For one thing, the notion that polit-ical independence under the leadership of nationalizingelites will lead to liberation and social justice, particu-larly for indigenous peoples, has been pretty defini-tively exploded in many parts of the world. Nation-state affiliations no longer seem, so unambiguously, theroyal road to a better future.

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New Guinea—Papua New Guinea and Irian Jaya/WestPapua—contains, by some counts, 20% of the world’slanguages. Once one digests this astonishing news, itmakes an emerging “nation” like Papua New Guineasomething extremely interesting to imagine!

Sometimes I think of New Guinea as almostarchetypically postmodern. Its not just a backwardplace catching up, traveling “from the Stone Age to theModern World in a few generations,” as popularcommon sense has it. The region’s overlaid temporali-ties can’t be captured by familiar evolutionist or devel-opmentalist projections. Its cultural dynamics arecontemporary in a peculiarly hybrid and broken, yetconnected, way that’s increasingly characteristic ofcultural conglomerations. In my mind, places likePapua New Guinea and Vanuatu are exemplarycontexts for thinking about the articulated sites of anunfinished modernity—fractured, sutured, overlaid,incredibly diverse, yet hooked up, complexes of local,national, regional, and global elements.

One can, of course, find plenty of places in theworld to grapple with such complexities. But for me,thinking from Euro-North America, the Pacific has aspecial clarity. Because its places have been so firmlyheld in a primitivist space/time warp—“back then” and“out there”—they have never been perceived asmodern. This persistent exoticism may be a blessing indisguise, once we break with the romanticism andcondescension that long accompanied it. When we tryto conceptualize the contemporary Pacific we may beless oriented by all the familiar modernist and modern-izing narratives, and perhaps we can see how Pacific

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nisms, as well as the pressures and opportunities of acapitalist world system that, as Jonathan Friedman hasargued, actively makes room for, and to a degreecommodifies, the politics of localism, identity, andculture. I would insist, however, on the phrase “to adegree,” as I think Friedman and many historically-minded ethnographers of the Pacific would too. Thesources and outcomes of the cultural and politicalarticulations often reductively termed “identity poli-tics” are historically complex and locally, regionallydynamic.

In the context, then, of “belated” Pacificdecolonization—or what I like to call post-/neo-colo-nialism—the forms of political sovereignty beinghammered out take all kinds of forms. Stuart Firth’sessay in your collection Remembrance of Pacifics Past is agood opening. Because decolonization comes to thePacific when sovereignty is an increasingly ambiguousand contested concept, we are seeing the emergenceof different forms of national identity, new sorts ofnegotiations among the local, the regional, thenational, and the global. In this light, it might be illu-minating to compare questions of regionalism andsovereignty in the Pacific with the same issues in theEuropean Union—without recourse to notions ofmargin and center, backward and advanced.

RB: One of the Pacific’s interesting aspects is its “Seaof Islands” to use Epeli Hau’ofa’s phrase. What is yourimpression regarding this multiplex, overlapping,interactive sense of “islands” as a way of conceptual-izing identity?

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And secondly, the capitalist world system hasbeen going through some important mutations, begin-ning in the early 1970s and emerging as what’s vari-ously called flexible accumulation, late capitalism,post-Fordism, or post-modernity. As a result, the veryidea, the rallying cry, of independence seems increas-ingly to have quotation marks placed around it. Thenotion of sovereignty, that sense of control overborders, over culture, over economy, is complicated bythe fact that no nation, not even the most powerful,now has control over its economy and over its culturalsymbols. The same holds true for borders: The move-ment of populations is dramatic and often non-linear.Experiences of citizenship and identity are oftencomplexly divided between places. One can be bornand live in California, for instance, and still bestrongly connected to Hawai’i, to Samoa, to Tonga.

Of course, such dynamics existed previously.But their salience for cultural, for trans-cultural, poli-tics was not at all clear in the 1950s and ‘60s. Amodernist vision of nationhood held sway, a vision ofdrawing lines around particular territories andbuilding imagined communities inside. Nation-building—making “Nigerians” or “Indonesians,” forexample—in ethnically-complex territories, involvedreducing or opposing retrograde “tribalisms.” Thenation alone could be progressive.

Such ideas are, of course, far from dead. Butthings are inescapably ambiguous today. Pullingagainst such attitudes are revived projects of theindigenous and the local. These developments reflecttraditional regional differences, new “ethnic” antago-

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Teaiwa, Kehaulani Kauanui, April Henderson, NoelaniGoodyear-Kaopua, Heather Waldroup, and PamKido—about lived experiences of roots and routes. Todo justice to these complex dynamics we need some-thing a bit different from the post-colonial theorizingof Appadurai or even Gupta and Ferguson, crucialthough their critiques have been. The oppositionbetween colonial fixity and post-colonial mobility,between indigenous roots and diasporic routes, can’tbe naturalized, or seen as a progression, a before-afterscenario. When reckoning with traveling natives, if Ican call them that, in the Pacific, this sort of catego-rization breaks down. One encounters a range ofattachments to land and place combined with old/newtraditions of indigenous cosmopolitanism.

RB: In our conversations together, you have referredto the work of Stuart Hall on the articulation ofcultural elements. Could you elaborate on what youfind interesting about Hall’s concept and how it relatesto your comments here regarding the Pacific?

JC: The politics of articulation for Stuart Hall is, ofcourse, an updating of Gramsci. It understands fron-tier-effects, the lining up of good and bad guys orinsiders and outsiders on one side or another of a line,as tactical. Instead of rigid confrontations—us andthem, civilized and primitive, bourgeois and prole-tarian, white and black, men and women, West andThird World—one sees continuous struggles over aterrain, portions of which are captured by differentalliances, hooking up particular elements in different

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JC: I am very taken with Hau’ofa’s struggle to getIslanders to see themselves and the spaces betweenthem not as dots in a vast ocean but as a sea of islandswhich they themselves create through old and newpractices of travel, visiting, trade, and migration. I amstruck by the way he is able to connect old stories andmodern situations, recognizing temporal overlays in acomplexly con-temporary space. Hau’ofa’s sea ofislands is not the “Pacific Rim,” of course, a regional-ization based on capital flows, with an empty center.It’s a region cobbled together from the inside out,based on everyday practices, and linking islands witheach other and with mainland diasporas. Hau’ofa isreaching back to voyaging canoes and, at the sametime, telling stories about jumbo jets. Tongans,Samoans, and Hawaiians, for example, going back andforth to Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Like PaulGilroy’s “Black Atlantic,” or emerging connectionsacross the indigenous “Arctic,” the Pacific “sea ofislands” helps us conceptualize practices of subalternregion-making, realities invisible to more top-down,center-periphery, models of globalization and locality.

Such Pacific mobilities map, with unmistakableclarity, a kind of indigenous cosmopolitanism. Yetthere’s a paradox, a rich tension, here. Hau’ofa’s lateressay (in Remembrance of Pacifics Past) on habitat andmemory brings it out clearly, I think. To recognize aspecifically indigenous dialectic of dwelling and trav-eling requires more than simply unmaking the exoti-cist/colonialist concept of the homebody native,always firmly in place. I’ve learned a lot from Island-savvy students at Santa Cruz—Vince Diaz, Teresia

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formed. In part this was a matter of processing thenew through ongoing traditional structures. But thecontinuity of indigenous societies has been moreuneven. Since local traditions were often violentlydisrupted, and inasmuch as new modes of individu-alism and universalism have restructured bodies, soci-eties, and spaces, the traditions that persist are bestseen as original articulations of heterogeneouselements, old and new, indigenous and foreign.

In articulation theory, the whole question ofauthenticity or inauthenticity is set aside. It’s assumedthat cultural forms will be made, unmade, andremade. Communities can and must reconfigurethemselves, drawing selectively on re-memberedpasts. The relevant question is always a political one:Can they convince and coerce insiders and outsiders,often in power-charged and unequal situations, toaccept the articulation? This to me is a more realisticway of talking about what is often termed culturalinvention. As people in the Pacific know, the questionof the invention of tradition is a highly disputed one.Much smoke has been generated as well as a certainamount of light. But a lot of what is referred to asinvention could be rethought in terms of the politicsof articulation, bypassing a lot of unfruitful impasses.It seems to me we are on much more concrete,because more dynamic, historical grounds. The wholenotion of custom looks quite different when seen thisway. The question of what is borrowed from here orthere, what is lost and rediscovered in new situationscan be discussed within the realm of normal polit-ical/cultural activity.

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ways. There’s a lot of middle ground and many polit-ical and cultural positions which are not firmlyanchored on one side or the other but, instead, arecontested and up for grabs.

Articulation suggests discourse or speech. Butmore importantly, it refers to connections, joints.Something that’s articulated or hooked together canalso be unhooked, disarticulated. So that when youconsider a cultural formation as an articulatedensemble it does not allow you to prefigure it on anorganic model, the notion of a living, persistent body,continuous and growing through time. An articulatedensemble is more like a cyborg, or a political coali-tion. While the elements and positions are historicallygiven and sometimes quite persistent, there is noeternal or natural shape to their configuration. Thiskind of an ensemble is made up of structuringelements hooked onto elements of another structure,often in unexpected ways.

To me, this offers a very useful way ofthinking about cultural transformation and theapparent coming and going of traditional forms.When Jean-Marie Tjibaou, the Kanak independenceleader, asserts in an interview that the Bible does notbelong to white people he is detaching and rearticu-lating elements of European and Melanesian tradi-tions. The creation of unexpected politico-religiousensembles, often in moments of colonial stress, iswhat first fascinated me about the region. There areelements of Christianity to which people attachedthemselves and their societies rather easily, and therewere other elements that they rejected or trans-

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nology, schooling, commercial commodities, tourismand so on.

Land/habitat signifies a persistent and contin-uous base of political and cultural operations.Articulation theory, which sees everything as poten-tially realigned, cut and mixed, has difficulty with thismaterial nexus of continuity. When a community hasbeen living on an island for more than a thousandyears, it’s not enough to say that their claims to iden-tity with a place are historical strategies of oppositionand coalition in struggles with neighbors, with colo-nizing or world-systemic forces. It may be useful tosay these things. People aren’t, in fact, always attachedto a habitat in the same ways, over the centuries.Communities change. The land alters. Senses of placeare continuously rearticulated. And yet...this historicalsense of interacting places doesn’t capture the identityof ancestors with a mountain, for as long as anyoneremembers and plausibly far beyond that. Indigenousmyths and genealogies change, connect and reach out,but always in relation to an old and enduring spatialnexus.

I’ve found that when importing the work ofStuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, or Avtar Brah into the PacificI’ve been made sharply aware of the diasporicCaribbean, British post-colonial, histories that liebehind it. There needs to be a significant adaptationto a different space. And I think this provincializationof theory as a condition for its travel and translation innew contexts is crucial for a really cross-cultural,cultural studies.

Articulation theory does have problems; youcan only go so far with it. You can get to a pointwhere every cultural form, every structure or restruc-turation, every connection and disconnection, has afundamental contingency as if, at any moment,anything were possible. That is, in fact, a misreadingof Hall on articulation. He is quite clear that the artic-ulations, the possible connections and disconnectionsare constrained at any historical moment. And indeed,certain forms and antagonisms persist over longperiods. Yet the enduring power of structuring forcessuch as Christianity, capitalism, or traditional kinship,can’t be understood except as they work throughspecific cultural ensembles and political blocs. Andthese are never guaranteed, but actively sustained andpotentially contested.

When thinking, as one must in the Pacific, ofdifferently articulated sites of indigeneity, one of theenduring constraints in the mix will always be landed-ness, the power of place (which includes, of course, alot of ocean). This is a fundamental component ofcontemporary neo-tribal, First Nations identifications.Many people live where they have always lived, evenas the habitat around them has gone through violenttransformations. While the scale of “tribal” and“national” existence has altered dramatically, and aspeople live exiled from ancestral places, they sustain ayearning, an active memory of habitat. Thisgrounding offers a sense of depth and continuityrunning through the colonial, the post- and neo-colo-nial ruptures and attachments that have come withChristianization, governmental control, modern tech-

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took in the village, the valley and the mountains: Mais,c’est ça la maison. But that’s the house.

Tjibaou’s sweep of the hand—including somuch in his Kanak house—expressed a deep sense ofbeing rooted in a village and a valley. This feeling ofbelonging, of being in scale with the world, was funda-mental to Tjibaou’s hope that Kanaks might find waysto feel a’l’aise, at home, in the twenty-first century.And as I’ve read more of Tjibaou’s political, ethno-graphic, and personal writings—now collected in asuperb volume, La Présence canaque—I’ve begun tothink his gesture was taking in even more. Beyond theHienghène Valley he certainly included NewCaledonia and the Loyalty Islands where an articu-lated “Kanak” identity was emerging in politicalstruggle. And did he also embrace the Pacific sea ofislands—a wider world of cultural exchanges andalliances which were critical for Tjibaou’s thinkingabout independence as inter-dependence? AndFrance—whose religion and civilization, for better andworse, still contribute to the Kanak house? And...in adistinctive Kanak articulation...the world?

RB: You referred, before the interview, to an experi-ence from your early research in the Pacific that gets atsome of this.

JC: It has to do with articulated indigenous spaces.When I was writing the Leenhardt book, Person andMyth, I traveled in New Caledonia. I was taken aroundfor a few days by Jean-Marie Tjibaou, who at thattime, 1978, was just coming into prominence as aleader of the Kanak movement. He took me toHienghène in the north of the island which was hishome area. He had left for more than twenty years, tobe trained as a Catholic priest. Now, when his clan wasmoving to occupy expropriated ancestral lands, he hadreturned as an activist.

In New Caledonia you have steep greenvalleys, with mountainous outcroppings. The tradi-tional villages often occupy small hills with symbolictrees, palms and special plants dispersed in a very beau-tiful, orderly way.

We were in one of these villages reclining onthe lawn, talking and just feeling comfortable lookingout through the trees. Earlier I had been in several ofthe village houses, concrete structures mostly bareinside with perhaps a few newspaper clippings stuckhaphazardly on the wall. I was puzzled and askedTjibaou: “Look at this village, beautifully set in thisvalley, everything so aesthetically laid out. Yet insidethe houses it’s bare....”

We talked it over, agreeing that here, after all,people don’t spend a lot of time indoors. Thensuddenly my guide made a sweep with his hand that

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5. Interviewer: Yoshinobu Ota Santa Cruz, Spring 2002

YO: When I entered graduate school in 1978 tocontinue pursuing anthropology, one of the books thatcaptured my attention was Dell Hymes’ ReinventingAnthropology. In particular, I felt empowered when Iread Hymes’ “Introduction,” in which he stated, citingR.G. Collingwood, that “one person’s general anthro-pology need not be another’s.” This call for perspec-tivism has stayed with me to this day. Your work, ThePredicament of Culture, similarly appealed to mebecause it invited me to think more critically abouttaken-for-granted assumptions and categories inanthropology. I often wonder how this critical

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representation were central to Thompson, as he triedto evoke a whole way of life for English workingpeople. He wrote about daily life, religion, craftrituals, local traditions, and much more. But of coursehe was tracking what he called a “whole way ofconflict” rather than a functional unity. There wastension and rupture, there was class struggle andtransformation in the middle of his rich culturalanalysis. I’m sure that those ideas persisted in mythinking as I grappled with anthropological ideas ofculture, especially when colonial contact histories tookcenter stage.

What was I reading in anthropology at thattime? Well, you mentioned Reinventing Anthropologyedited by Dell Hymes. That was an important book.We all read it: for example, Laura Nader’s advice to“study up,” and Bob Scholte on a “reflexive and crit-ical” anthropology. Everything in that book was partof our discourse, so much so that we sometimes forgotto reference it. Among the classics, I rememberreading Malinowski and also his scandalous field diary.I guess I was part of a generation that, from theoutset, read Malinowski in light of the diary and itsrevelations. I didn’t read a lot of Clifford Geertz atthat time, although he later became a very importantinfluence. Another thing in the air was the founding ofthe “Cultural Survival” project by Pia and DavidMaybury-Lewis. I attended some of their early meet-ings at Harvard.

But I’m having difficulty making these influ-ences add up to anything coherent. What was perva-sive and in the air was a relentless questioning of

genealogy has emerged in anthropology, a genealogyof which I would like to think I am a part, howevermarginal. Now, I am struggling to connect—youmight prefer to say, “translate”—this critical genealogywith the intellectual development in the late ‘60s inJapan. My effort in translating your work is a steptoward this struggle.

Being a historian with a great deal of interestin literature and anthropology, you have mentioned inyour previous interviews that works of E.P. Thompsonand Raymond Williams were very important to you inyour intellectual formation. In the late ‘60s and early‘70s as you went through graduate school, whataspects of anthropology—as exemplified in whatconstellation of texts—captured your imagination?What sort of texts and events were influential informulating your critical thinking in anthropology?

JC: Of course, my Ph.D. was in history, and most ofmy closest friends were historians; I was a marginalparticipant in the anthropology scene at Harvard. As agraduate student I did not know—at least initially—that I would be writing in close dialogue with socio-cultural anthropology throughout my career. Andwhile I may not be a “proper” anthropologist, I’vecertainly become part of anthropology, at least in itsborderlands. But that relationship was all in the future.At Harvard, most of my reading was in history. I sawthe work of people like E.P. Thompson or EricHobsbawm as cultural history (though we didn’t yethave the term), as much as social and economichistory. Many rather complex issues of “ethnographic”

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anthropological orthodoxies. The anthropologystudents I knew were asking: “What is anthropology?”“What is it good for?” “How is it related to (neo)colonialism?” “How can we responsibly representother peoples and cultures?” After the Hymes collec-tion and after the debates that Gerald Berreman andothers brought into prominence around the anthro-pologist’s involvement in the Vietnam war, nothingwas taken for granted. Another book which had a lotto do with questioning the epistemology and politicsof established anthropology—a book not muchdiscussed today but which influenced me a lot—wasStanley Diamond’s In Search of the Primitive. Diamondplaced anthropology in a subversive Western intellec-tual history—Rousseau, Marx, and Lévi-Strauss wereits mainstream—a critical utopianism. He derived aradical perspective through a concept of “the primi-tive,” an alter-ego to “civilization,” and a resource forcultural criticism. That made a big impact, and it’s aperspective that would be developed, with somewhatmore irony and less romanticism perhaps, in my laterwork, as well as in the writings of George Marcus andMichael Fischer. In my own formation, this kind ofcultural critique went together with the “ethnopo-etics” of writers like Dennis Tedlock and JeromeRothenberg.

These were the mid-‘70s—and of course “the‘60s” lasted into the ‘70s—a time of radical culturalvisions. Many critical currents were present, some ofwhich, like feminism, I would engage seriously onlylater. I went to Paris to do research on the history ofFrench anthropology, and I stayed for two years. That

would be about 1973-75. There I came into contactwith a lot of new influences: among them, of course,French structuralism and poststructualism. I attendedFoucault’s lectures at the Collège de France (La SociétéPunitive), and I made contact with Michel Leiris and ahost of writers and scholars little known in the UnitedStates. My friend Jean Jamin, now editor of L’Homme,was then sharing digs with Leiris in the rather chillybasement of the Musée de l’Homme. He openedmany doors for me. We’d have coffee with Leiris inthe atmospheric Museum restaurant, Le Totem, andtalk about Mauss, Lévy-Bruhl, Griaule, Schaeffner,Paulme, Métraux, Bataille, Césaire… Much of thisfound its way into The Predicament of Culture. It’sironic, in fact, that when the book was translated,French readers who expected a product of le postmod-ernisme Americain found so much of themselves.

YO: The first work of yours I read is the article onMaurice Leenhardt, the one entitled “Fieldwork,Reciprocity, and the Making of Ethnographic Texts”in the British journal, Man (1980). I basically pickedup the following two points from reading it: (1) apossibility for collaboration between an anthropologistand the local people, something that might, one day,turn into “Melanesian anthropology;” and (2) a focuson a transformation of the New Caledonian culture, asthe term “living culture” from Michel Leiris seems tosummarize it. In addition, these two points had comefrom your reading of works by an evangelist-missionary-ethnographer rather than a professionalanthropologist. I interpreted this article as your saying

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Mead or Malinowski or Evans-Prichard, because,although one can glimpse the authority and theagency of their indigenous interlocutors (especially inMalinowski’s extensive textual citations), one does notsee native authority ever quite in the mode of writing.But if you dictate a myth or legend to an ethnogra-pher, if you interpret the meaning of a festival, aren’tyou inscribing it? In fact, an “informant” producesmany of the functions of writing even though he orshe may not be the one actually using a pen. So theLeenhardt work opened up the whole question ofvarious forms, relationships, and moments of theinscription process, a process that no longer fit intothe progression: oral to literate, something unwrittenthat’s textualized by the executive hand and function ofthe anthropologist.

I had to recognize a much more multi-leveled,multiply inflected sequence, which doesn’t stop withthe text of a published ethnography, but includes thequestion of reinscribing ethnographies after publica-tion. And this points toward the “repatriation” ofethnographic texts by indigenous peoples, a directionalready present in “On Ethnographic Authority,” espe-cially in the footnotes, where I talked about some ofthe recycled textual collections of James Walker. Inthe early twentieth century Walker collected an enor-mous number of Lakota texts, written and transcribedby various hands, which are now being used bycontemporary Lakotas as part of contemporary indige-nous literature and history. The same is true of“salvage” collections in many places. Recently I’vebeen following the “second life” of the linguistic and

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that these are the things that anthropologists cannotafford to neglect. I then went to the southern Ryukyusto do fieldwork. When I came back to Ann Arbor,everyone was talking about “On EthnographicAuthority” in the journal, Representations (1983). Couldyou talk a little bit about that Man article onLeenhardt, and its relation to “On EthnographicAuthority” since the Man article was not included inThe Predicament of Culture?

JC: “On Ethnographic Authority” was actually writtenin 1981, just a year or so after the article youmentioned on Leenhardt. In fact it flows directly fromit. A major idea I derived from the experience of aliberal missionary was an explicit recognition ofmultiple authorship in ethnographic texts. Leenhardt,as a part of the Protestant evangelical project, elicitedextensive vernacular writing from his Melanesianconverts. He asked them to record their traditions andalso to reflect on their whole life experience. Some ofthese texts were reprinted and translated in his laterscholarly collections, and they were re-processed andrethought throughout his oeuvre.

This rather open-ended experience of writingand cultural interpretation made me question thenotion of the “informant” as the uniquely oral sourcefor cultural knowledge first written down (and thenwritten up) by the visiting ethnographer. I started tosee the whole process of ethnographic text-making asdialogical and multiply authored. One would havedifficulty deriving the argument of “On EthnographicAuthority” from a classic monograph of, say, Margaret

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through the prism of some of your later works thathighlight a concept of articulation. To be moreprecise, I see an idea of recombination and recodingfound in surrealism (widely defined as you have donein that piece) as akin to articulation, which of course Iunderstand comes from a different intellectualgenealogy. Perhaps my reading is one-sided, but Ihave felt empowered, since your intellectual directionis open to emergent “Third-World modernisms,”exemplified by a chapter on Aimé Césaire. This ideaof “Third-World modernism“ seems to raise a ques-tion of agency: who deploys recombination andrecoding? I might be misled by my own desire for asmooth narrative of progression, but would you locateeven in “Ethnographic Surrealism”—a product of yourcritical rereading of a period of decentering the Westthrough encounters with the unfamiliar—your interestin native agency?

JC: The notions of recombination and recoding arethere in surrealism, as you say; and the notion ofjuxtaposition, which I connect with the practice ofcollage in artistic practice, is reminiscent of articula-tion, which I use in my recent work and which isemergent in Routes. Certainly these notions arepresent in The Predicament of Culture. What I think isnot there or, at least, not yet sufficiently, is the polit-ical dimension of all this recombination, recoding, orcollage. It’s still a cultural/aesthetic notion, which doesnot yet have, as in articulation theory, a clear idea ofcombinations and transformations as part of particularpolitical strategies under specific moments and

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ethnographic compilations of A.L. Kroeber’s genera-tion in California, as California Indians reconnect withtradition and rewrite their history. Writing clearlydoesn’t begin with the moment of ethnographicinscription nor does it end with the moment of publi-cation. “Writing culture” is a more open-ended socialand political process.

In retrospect it seems a bit strange that Ishould have derived this notion of writing from thework of a missionary, rather than, say, from Derrida(whose expanded concept of writing did exert an influ-ence). But maybe not so strange.

We’re now in a position to see that missionarywork in many places—the Pacific offers especiallygood examples—was part of a chain of resignifications.The moment of so-called conversion inflectedcomplex transformational processes that wouldproduce unexpected results. Melanesian Christianitiesare not European Christianities. Many of the earlyanti-colonial independence leaders in the Pacific werepriests or pastors. The gospel sown by missionarieslike Leenhardt, was reprocessed by their “converts,”and the endlessly translated Word thus got involvedwith some unorthodox local loops and combinations.This is an ongoing story.

YO: Perhaps, it might be interesting to begin, again,from elsewhere, in a field other than anthropology. Inmy reading, as one who reads your work on“Ethnographic Surrealism” from a perspective of non-specialist on the French avant-garde scene of theinter-war period, I must confess that I have read it

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on that issue. So the “Ethnographic Surrealism” essayeventually led me to engage with non-Europeantrajectories of cultural poetics and critique which onecan’t think of as simply emanations of Paris, or NewYork or Berlin. Diverse Third-World modernismsemerged from rather complicated engagements anddisengagements, travels to, through, and out of, thoseFirst-World places.

YO: As one of the translators of The Predicament ofCulture I am curious to know how you might locateyour work in 2002. In March a Japanese translation ofyour more recent work, Routes, became available; forthis reason many Japanese readers will encounter twoof your works in a reverse chronological order withinthis year. This fact, I think, might produce a readingof The Predicament of Culture quite different from theones dominant in the United States: For example, aninterpretation that The Predicament of Culture signals a“literary turn” in anthropology might be less salientthan another reading that it creates a space for tribalmodernities, presents-becoming-futures. How wouldyou characterize the trajectory of your thought as youreflect on it, here and now?

JC: I’m glad that these two books are appearing inJapan in a reverse order. Doesn’t every author wanthis/her work to take on a new life when translated?Having the books read out of sequence is an excellentway to produce new meanings: Japan in the twenty-first century is hardly the context of reception thatguided my writing. And, yes, I would like to think that

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regimes of power. While this emphasis emerges moretoward the end of The Predicament of Culture, it is notthere yet in the “Ethnographic Surrealism” chapter. Idid attempt a certain amount of revisionism withrespect to that essay. In particular, I was unhappy withthe “Paris-centeredness” of it all, leading in 1990 to are-collaged version. This brought into prominence theThird World modernist intellectuals like AiméCésaire, Léopold Senghor, Alejo Carpentier, andWifredo Lam, who were traveling through Paris ontrajectories that made Paris a kind of critical way-station, a moment in what Edouard Glissant, the theo-rist of Caribbean creolité, would call détour and retour.Paris was a détour for Third-World intellectuals, whoadopted elements of surrealism while indigenizing itor localizing it in non-Western historical predica-ments.

In The Predicament of Culture, as you say, thisemergent awareness was crystalized in the figure ofAimé Césaire. I came to Césaire through MichelLeiris, who was both a surrealist—or sometimes asurrealist—and an ethnologist. Leiris kept the twopractices separate but, let’s say, near-by. Cultural poli-tics—a notion of culture-in-transformation, inconflict, working through impurities to produce a newdynamism and a mode of resistance to colonial hege-monies—this vision of culture is very much part ofCésaire’s work, of course. And it’s also central toLeiris’ ethnological vision as it took shape in the post-war period of anti-colonial rebellions. Leiris wrote, inthe early ‘50s, an essay “L’Ethnographe devant le colo-nialisme” which I think is still one of the best essays

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nous people in Japanese society is not an isolatedphenomenon. Could you say something about theemergence of indigenous peoples as voices to be reck-oned with in the contemporary world? Since the lastchapter of The Predicament of Culture is about theMashpee trial, does this chapter point toward thedirection of your more recent work?

JC: The fact that in 1989 the Ainu were more publiclyactive than ever before is part of a global phenom-enon. Fifteen or twenty years ago the word “indige-nous” simply was not on our agendas, was not some-thing we needed to be talking about. Of course weknew there were native peoples: Aboriginals, FirstNations, tribal peoples. We knew they were strug-gling, dying, surviving, transforming. All of this washappening, but not in relation to a global category ofthe indigenous, in its present articulated form. Therewas not yet a United Nations Year of IndigenousPeoples, and we didn’t have a whole world of NGO’sconnected with indigenous politics, hooking uplocal/global environmental coalitions, and a variety ofFourth-World institutions. This new public sphere is afeature of the last twenty years, and in my currentwork I’m struggling to account for its old and newroots and routes in a comparative way.

I first confronted these complexities, as yousuggest, in 1978 when I attended a trial in which theMashpee—a community of Indians on Cape Cod—had to prove that they were a real Indian tribe. Itseemed to me that they lost in court because theycame up against certain categories, a number of them

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after reading Routes it would be more difficult toconstrue The Predicament of Culture as essentially abook about the “literary turn” in anthropology or asprimarily about textualization—though it is, of course,partly about these things. Looked at from the perspec-tive of what is emergent in the book, Predicament isless concerned with textual form than with culturalprocess, with projects of transformation and withopening up—displacing—colonial authority in waysthat go beyond simply a matter of who writes theethnographic text, and in what form. It’s primarilyabout discourse. And discourse, of course, is a conceptthat has much broader, “cultural” application, bothinstitutionally and politically, than writing as usuallyunderstood.

YO: I was born in Hokkaido, the land of the Ainu, theindigenous people of Japan. Until recently they weresaid to be assimilated completely to Japanese society.When I returned to Japan to teach in 1989, I couldnot help noticing the presence of Ainus in the mediamore than any time I could remember: the Ainupeople were struggling to regain their language, toconstruct their own museums, and even to offereducational tourism. In 1994 the first Ainu person waselected a member of the Diet. But, the Japanesegovernment has not recognized the Ainu as indige-nous, despite the fact that in 1997 the government losta trial (over the construction of a dam) in which theverdict clearly defined them in those terms. Like manysimilar peoples around the world, Ainu have beenbuilding a global network; so the emergence of indige-

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Native American, First Nation’s Canadian, Pan-Mayan, Arctic, Australian, and Pacific Islands indige-nous movements.

YO: The complex trajectories of indigenous moder-nity in the contemporary world have also forcedanthropologists to think about the nature of ethno-graphic practices. Sometimes, the indigenous“coming-into-representation,” to borrow a phrasefrom Stuart Hall, has complicated relationshipsbetween individual anthropologists and indigenouspeoples: for example, the debate surrounding the“invention of tradition” in the Pacific and SouthAmerica; and closer to my current interest, the case ofRigoberta Menchú and David Stoll. Could youcomment on this problematization of “anthropologicalauthority” in the light of indigenous cultural andpolitical mobilization?

JC: I’ve always felt that possibly the most significantchange in redefining and repositioning the authorityof anthropologists in the late twentieth century is thesimple fact that the so-called objects of their study,their “informants,” are increasingly critical readers oftheir work. Anthropologists now operate in domainsof publicly contested authority. And the presence ofthe new indigenous politics, of locally mobilizedcommunities, has made life more difficult, no doubtabout that. Anthropologists are greeted with a newly-public suspicion. In some contexts fieldwork is simplyoff-limits. In others, different forms of alliance andshared authority have emerged. Some scholars react

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anthropological, which made it very hard to demon-strate their existence as a continuously existing people.Their historical experience, over several centuries ofconquest, colonization, and partial assimilation, hadbeen discontinuous and embattled in ways that couldnot be accommodated by prevailing notions of identityand cultural continuity. As a critical historian ofanthropology I was interested in problematizing justthese categories. But what I needed to understandmore positively, what the categories obscured, was thevery complex historical persistence of the Mashpee.These Indians don’t fit most of the models of what anauthentic tribal group should look like, yet theyunmistakably do exist and are a part of a multiply-sitedphenomenon, the emergence of locally, regionally,nationally, even internationally connected worlds ofindigenous life. For example, Mashpee people hadtraveled to Hawai’i and all over. This was held againstthem in the trial, because it made them seem lessrooted and therefore less authentic. I had to learn thatthis sort of movement, in-and-out-of-a-place, acrossvery uneven landscapes, could be very much part ofnative life. This led me into the whole paradigm of“routes” articulated with “roots,” that formed the basisof my next book. I was trying to come to terms withemergent and multiply-scaled performances and trans-lations of indigenous life in the late twentieth and nowearly twenty-first century, experiences for which thecategories that had been given to me by a generalanthropological common sense did not seem adequate.So now I’m trying to sort out the differently articu-lated, but comparable, experiences of contemporary

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wet blanket, producing empirical refutations of the“merely political” native. Inasmuch as two positions ofauthority are reified here, that of the indigenousactivist and the scientific reporter, this is dangerousfor anthropology. It blocks the diverse forms ofcomplicity and alliance that have always made goodethnographic collaboration possible, and it reinforcesa native stereotype of the anthropologist. I don’t thinkthat one needs to give up skepticism and a commit-ment to empirically verifiable truth (when somethinglike conclusive evidence does actually exist) while stillstaying engaged with the many avenues of truth-telling in cross-cultural interpretation and resistingmoves to confine anthropology to a narrow scientism.There is, as I’ve said, a lot of middle ground.

YO: So the agendas of the anthropologist and theindigenous communities need not be contradictoryand confrontational?

JC: No, not necessarily. There are plenty of examplesof collaborative work being done by anthropologistswith mobilized native communities, where scientificand indigenous projects can overlap, while agreeing todiffer on other matters. A couple of cases from Alaskacome to mind. Archaeologists Aron Crowell and AmySteffian, along with various academic/Nativecolleagues, have recently published an exemplary book,Looking Both Ways: Heritage and Identity of the AlutiiqPeople. It records a long process of collaborative workwith Alutiiq elders and activists, including their co-editor Gordon Pullar, linking together research

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with anger and bitterness to the changes, saying theyundermine the ground of a disengaged science, thevery possibility of objectivity. I see their point, espe-cially in polarized situations where research is reducedto simple advocacy. But there are many intermediateaccommodations, in practice. Moreover, as a historianof the discipline, I don’t think anthropologicalresearch, particularly in the field, has ever been disen-gaged. And I’m not sure objectivity, or scientific“freedom,” was ever something anthropology had tolose. At least since Paul Rabinow’s hard-nosedReflections on Fieldwork in Morocco we’ve had toconfront the limits, trade-offs, negotiated reciproci-ties, and the sometimes violent push-and-pull of field-work. And the geo-political conditions that had madepossible the kind of science for which some nowexpress a certain nostalgia, are finished, at least inmany parts of the world. The decolonization move-ments of the 1950s and ‘60s have had an uneven, but Ithink cumulatively irreversible effect. So today ethno-graphers (also archaeologists and linguists) negotiatedifferent relations of access, authority, inscription andreciprocity.

In the case of Rigoberta Menchú and DavidStoll, for example, or the well-known arguments inthe Pacific and elsewhere about the “invention oftradition,” we see a freezing of roles, in which anthro-pologists are pushed into the corner of being theobjective witness who judges the truth of indigenousclaims, adjudicating the authenticity of the culture inquestion: what is really traditional, what is made up.In relation to Menchú, Stoll plays the part of scientific

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modernity. As I read The Predicament of Culture againin the mid-‘90s, I linked this phrase in my mind withan idea proposed in Blues People by Leroi Jones/AmiriBaraka, the “changing same.” He’s writing of DukeEllington’s jazz as something one can trace the rootsof yet that sounds fresh. I would be very interested inhearing you talk a bit about this concept, “present-becoming-future”? To me, it’s very different fromapproaches often developed from the “invention oftradition” idea.

JC: The phrase “present-becoming-future” is, ofcourse, an attempt to get tribal folks out of an almostautomatic association with the past. And the idea of a“changing same” is probably what a lot of indigenousneo-traditionalists are interested in, a sense of longuedurée, of a continuity of belonging, with room for a lotof change. It’s important to keep in mind that this“present-becoming-future” is complexly connected tosome very old “pasts.” There are affiliations, roots, toancient traditions, and especially to ancient places,specific locations in the land, which have an enduringquality. But enduring and transformation are never inopposition; the backward connection isn’t aboutnostalgia in the sense of returning to something lost.People are always “looking both ways,” (as the Alutiiqproject title suggests) to the past and to the future.Reaching back in indigenous movements to recoverlost traditions, to reclaim languages which are threat-ened, to make legal claims on expropriated land, torepatriate human remains and works of art (which havebeen traveling on a long detour, through museums and

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agendas. Where worldviews collide, an openness todifferent stories, a respectful live-and-let-live attitude issustained. Another example is the work of anthropolo-gist Ann Fienup-Riordan: an evolving series of booksabout Yup’ik Eskimos, works that increasingly fore-ground their own collaborative structure. Workingclosely with local authorities she helped develop anextraordinary exhibition of masks which opened first inYup’ik communities and then traveled to major Alaskancities and in the lower 48 states. Local reception of theproject was crucial, but not exclusive. The masks andtheir stories meant different things to different audi-ences, as Fienup-Riordan shows in her recent co-authored book, Hunting Tradition. These are examplesin which serious ethnographic, historical, archaeolog-ical scholarship has been combined with indigenousagendas to produce compelling accounts of local tradi-tions and emergent cultural formations. David Hurst-Thomas, in Skull Wars, his recent history of Americanarchaeology’s often exploitative history of relationswith indigenous peoples, ends with similar examples ofcollaborative work. I don’t mean to suggest that thereare any guaranteed, “post-colonial” relations for ananthropology that is still enmeshed in unequal powerrelations. Only that notions of scientific authority can,in practice, be re-negotiated in specific, and more egal-itarian, alliances.

YO: You write in The Predicament of Culture of anindigenous “present-becoming-future,” and I’ve foundthis useful in thinking about the complex trajectoriesof tribal peoples as they negotiate their existence in

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I think a place like Japan is still entangled inthe uneven process of decolonization. I say thisbecause decolonization, when equated with demilita-rization after World War II, did not register as suchfor the Japanese. What made matters worse is thatJapan’s entry into the Cold War regime effectivelyocculted it from the Japanese consciousness.Consequently, decolonization for the colonizer—theissue is relevant both for the colonized and colonizer,as historian Taichiro Mitani says—did not surfaceuntil the regime ended in the late ‘80s. In the case ofJapan, the ex-colonized came into representation onlyin the early ‘90s, demanding to be heard by theJapanese people: so-called “comfort women” and colo-nial laborers coerced into work in the mines and atfactories, to name just two cases now contested in thecourts. The histories of Japanese colonialism repre-sented in school text books remain contested byformerly colonized nations in East Asia. The peoplewho were once seen as nothing but a part of the warmemory come back to voice their demands for repara-tion.

Decolonization is, indeed, a very “unevenprocess”: I heard from a Mayan leader that decolo-nization, far from being something in the past, has notyet started in Guatemala. In a similar vein decoloniza-tion, thought to belong to the past and to other places,caught up with the Japanese at the height of economicprosperity in the early ‘90s. I approach GuatemalanMayan movements—emerging from the experience ofgenocide—from a perspective that links them with thedemands made to the Japanese government by ex-

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universities in cities of the dominant societies); all ofthese movements of return are movements forward:the indigenous present-becoming-future.

One of the ways that anthropologists and histo-rians have understood such processes is under therubric of “invention.” But the idea has run into troublewith mobilized indigenous people for both good andbad reasons. The bad reasons have had to do withidentity politics in an exclusivist sense, with policingthe borders of “insider” knowledge. The good reasonsconcern the inevitable semantic weight the word“invention” carries, the idea that something invented issomething made up, in some sense, “fake,” or not fullyauthentic. You can’t use the language of inventionwithout getting involved with the language of authen-ticity. But I think this almost always leads us intolocking horns, into rather fruitless arguments fromprescribed positions. The kinds of collaborative, trans-lational practices I was referring to, and the kind ofhistorical thinking I have been struggling towardmyself, need to go beyond all-or-nothing attitudes toauthenticity, cultural purity, and ascribed authority(whether indigenous or academic).

YO: You have mentioned in previous interviews thatyou find intriguing the timing of decolonization in thePacific and that you see the “uneven process of decolo-nization” as the “hinge of your work,” a politicalprocess taking new forms as capitalism transforms itselfinto post-Fordism. The idea of sovereignty becomescomplicated in the face of the declining control ofnations.

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great liberatory appeal that the generation of postwardecolonizers like Césaire or Ho-Chi-Minh expressedis bought off, channeled into what is now called glob-alization. But is the history really so linear?

In the current moment—call it globalization,late capitalism, postmodernity—everything seemsmore flexible, Americanized, overdetermined, simulta-neously ordered and chaotic. My view is that theforces unleashed by decolonization movements afterthe Second World War have not been contained ordefeated. Something fundamental took hold there andhas continued to generate contestations in systems ofhegemonic power. But the last fifty years clearly showthat decolonization does not guarantee liberation; itdoes not build to some complete, global overthrow ofsystems of domination. Capital and empire don’tsimply wither away—far from it. But the historicalprocesses active in the world do produce aspirations toliberation and partial displacements of power, openingup, as we’ve been discussing, political spaces forindigenous peoples who were expected to die, whohad no futures in previous historical imaginings. Sowhen forced to periodize I fall back on formulas thatexpress this tension, like “post-/neo-colonial.”

Speaking now of the United States, decolo-nization (always in tension with new forms of govern-mentality) has been active in educational institutionssuch as the ones I have known since the ‘60s. I’mthinking of a dramatic opening up of the curriculumto non-European works and of the arrival in ouruniversities of more diverse faculty and students.These are processes which are far from complete,

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colonial subjects. I see this unfinished project of decol-onization as the key term which links the concernsJapanese society cannot ignore for constructing mean-ingful relations with Asian countries in the future withthose the Guatemalan society cannot ignore forconstructing a more democratic Guatemala out of thehistory of genocide now documented in two importantpost-Peace Accord reports. As a Japanese anthropolo-gist who studies Guatemalan society, I cannot helpcreating this juxtaposition of the two countries,twisted out of time and space.

Could you comment on the process of decolo-nization? In the United States it may have verydifferent effects from what has been occurring in thePacific, Guatemala, and Japan.

JC: What you say about different temporalities ofdecolonization is very interesting. It’s especiallyimportant to think of decolonization not as an event,but as unfinished, uneven processes. There is atendency to say that decolonization is something thathappened in the ‘50s and perhaps the early ‘60s. Thisview highlights the political independence of variouscolonies during that period rather than an ongoing setof struggles and re-positionings occurring not only atpolitical-economic levels but also at many culturallevels within a variety of societies. If one assumes thatdecolonization was an important event whichhappened in the ‘50s, then what followed can only beits containment by neo-colonialism. This is a verycommon Left critique which I think has a significantelement of truth in it. Neo-colonialism sets in, and the

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JC: In the United States and Europe, we have seen awidespread reaction against the anti-colonial disrup-tions that were only partially contained by themisleading name “multiculturalism.” The wholeprocess is reduced to a narrow form of so-called iden-tity politics, where people are said to ghettoize them-selves inside essentialized or absolutist notions ofidentity, claims of victimhood, self-congratulatorynationalisms, and so forth. Wider forms of citizenship,or oppositional politics, become impossible. Diversityappears as little more than postmodern divide-and-rule. I am only half persuaded by this kind of critique:multiculturalism as divisive identity politics. Thecritique does name real political problems of coalitionbuilding. But its diagnosis of their causes is simplistic,and unexamined universalisms are often assumed toprovide the cure. I don’t think the dismissal of identitypolitics really accounts for the full range of reactions,the unruly forces that decolonization has set inmotion.

We always need to distinguish between ideo-logical identity and pragmatic identity. The samepeople who draw a hard line around peoplehood andculture in one moment, will be involved in some verycomplex crossings and negotiations of those veryboundaries in another. Fredrik Barth, some time ago,taught us that ethnic difference is border work, articu-lated in contexts of entanglement and similarity.People are connected-in-difference, if only becauseeverybody is economically and culturally linked.There is no way to cut oneself off, and this goes forthe most isolated island in the Pacific. (Actually, it’s

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processes that have not revolutionized our universitiesbut that in significant ways have transformed them. Acertain containment by so-called “identity politics”and a liberal managed diversity are very much part ofthe story. But not the whole story. In any event, fewwould want to go back to the prior condition ofhomogeneity. That’s the ambiguous history I’ve beenpart of and that had do to with the ways decoloniza-tion began to bite in the United States. Feminism wasa critical part of the process, related to, but not iden-tical with, decolonization. It has to do with the specifichistory of the ‘60s and its aftermath in the UnitedStates, the ambiguous emergence of so-called multi-culturalism—in both critical and governmentalstrains—the consequences of which are as yet undeter-mined. It’s an open-ended story—at least I hope so.The Predicament of Culture was part of this history. Butread now, in Japan, it becomes part of a differentmoment which you, better than I, can understand.

YO: If indeed the effect of decolonization is still feltin the various discussions of multiculturalism and, tobe a little more general, of the politics of identity, inthe United States, could you talk a bit about that?How do you approach the ethnically mobilized, iden-tity-based movements? In my work in Guatemala Ialways find myself disagreeing with the point oftenmade by critics of Mayan movements that Mayans donothing but assert essential and fundamental differ-ences, with the result that national unity can never beachieved. This seems to be a case of colonial discoursesurviving into the twenty-first century.

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us surprised, listening, receptive to emergence, peeringinto the shadows shed by our enlightenment. n

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especially true of islands, who must look outward.) Soabsolutist notions of identity, sovereignty, culture,community, etc. need to be seen in bifocal or multi-focal ways, not simply in terms of the identity politicsthat insurgent social movements often claim, and thatofficial multiculturalisms struggle to manage, in condi-tions of postmodern globalization.

The kind of ethnographic work you’re doing inGuatemala with Mayan movements, ambivalent partici-pants in this simultaneously globalizing and localizing,post- and neo-colonial moment, is very important. Byfocusing on complex, lived experiences we begin to seethe multiple strategies and often discontinuous opera-tions of both decolonization and recolonization. I thinkof these indigenous movements for recognition andself-determination as conjunctural, Gramscian politics,struggles over particular pieces of cultural andeconomic terrain, attempts to carve out living spacesand breathing room in situations that can at best bepartially controlled. It’s not “revolutionary” politics inthe sense of a cumulative Third-World (or Fourth-World) movement that at some point escapes, or tran-scends technological/industrial modernity. I do not, inany case, think of modernity, or the West, or capi-talism, as unified phenomena. Nor do I think of thevarious identities that are reckoning with globalprocesses as all following similar historical paths. Notnecessarily. The range of actually-existing articulationsis full of surprises, if one knows how to pay attention.Marshall Sahlins calls this attentiveness “anthropolog-ical enlightenment.” I agree. And this is why we willalways need historically-engaged ethnography—to keep

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Clifford, James and George Marcus, eds. 1986 WritingCulture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography.Berkeley: University of California Press.

Crowell, Aron, Amy Steffian and Gordon Pullar, eds. 2001Looking Both Ways: Heritage and Identity of the AlutiiqPeople. Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press.

Diamond, Stanley 1974 In Search of the Primitive. NewBrunswick: Transaction Books.

Diaz, Vicente and J. Kehaulani Kauanui, eds. 2001 “NativePacific Cultural Studies on the Edge.” Special Issue:The Contemporary Pacific 13 (2).

Einzig, Barbara, ed. 1998 Thinking About Art: Conversationswith Susan Hiller. Manchester and New York:Manchester University Press.

Fienup-Riordan, Ann 1996 The Living Tradition of Yup’ikMasks: Agayuliyararput (Our Way of Making Prayer)Seattle: University of Washington Press.

_____ 2000 Hunting Tradition in a Changing World: Yup’ikLives in Alaska today. New Brunswick, N.J.: RutgersUniversity Press.

Firth, Stewart 2000 “Decolonization.” In Remembrance ofPacific Pasts. Robert Borofsky, ed. pp. 314-332.Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

Friedman, Jonathan 1994 Cultural Identity and Global Process.London: Sage.

Further Reading

Appiah, Kwame Anthony 2000 “Cosmopolitan Patriots.” InCosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation.Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, eds., pp. 91-116.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Barth, Fredrik, ed. 1969 Ethnic Groups and Boundaries.Boston: Little Brown.

Clifford, James 1980 “Fieldwork, Reciprocity, and theMaking of Ethnographic Texts.” Man 15: 518-532.

_____ 1982 Person and Myth: Maurice Leenhardt in theMelanesian World. Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress.

_____ 1988 The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth CenturyEthnography, Literature and Art. Berkeley: Universityof California Press.

_____ 1990 “Documents: A Decomposition” In AnxiousVisions. Sidra Stitch, ed., pp. 176-199. New York:Abberville Press.

_____ 1997 Routes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress.

_____ 2000 “Taking Identity Politics Seriously: ‘TheContradictory, Stony Ground…’” In WithoutGuarantees: In Honour of Stuart Hall. Paul Gilroy,Lawrence Grossberg and Angela McRobbie, eds.,pp. 94-112. London: Verso.

Thomas, David Hurst 2000 Skull Wars: Kennewick Man,Archaeology, and the Battle for Native AmericanIdentity. New York: Basic Books.

Thompson, E.P. 1963 The Making of the English WorkingClass. London: Victor Gollancz.

Tjibaou, Jean-Marie 1996 La Présence kanak. Alban Bensaand Eric Wittersheim, eds. Paris: Editions OdileJacob.

Tomlinson, John 1999 Globalization and Culture. Chicago:University of Chicago Press.

Wagner, Roy 1975 The Invention of Culture. EngelwoodCliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall.

Williams, Raymond 1958 Culture and Society, 1780-1950.New York and London: Chatto and Windus.

Hau’ofa, Epeli 1993 “Our Sea of Islands.” In A NewOceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands. EricWaddell, Vijay Naidu, and Epeli Hau’ofa, eds., pp.2-19. Suva: School of Social and EconomicDevelopment, University of the South Pacific.

_____ 2000 “Pasts to Remember.” In Remembrance of PacificPasts. Robert Borofsky, ed., pp. 453-471. Honolulu:University of Hawaii Press.

Hymes, Dell, ed. 1972 Reinventing Anthropology. New York:Pantheon.

Jones, Leroi 1963 Blues People. New York: Quill.

Leiris, Michel 1987 Nights as Day, Days as Nights, translatedby Richard Sieburth. New York: Eridanos Press.

Said, Edward 1975 Beginnings: Intention and Method. NewYork: Basic Books.

Pratt, Mary 1992 Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing andTransculturation. London: Routledge.

Rabinow, Paul 1977 Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco.Berkeley: University of California Press.

Sahlins, Marshall 1999 “What is AnthropologicalEnlightenment? Some Lessons of the TwentiethCentury.” Annual Review of Anthropology 28.Reprinted in Culture in Practice, pp. 501-526. ZoneBooks, 2000.

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