Ryang, 1997 Native Anthropology

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NATIVE ANTHROPOLOGY AND OTHER PROBLEMSAuthor(s): Sonia RyangSource: Dialectical Anthropology, Vol. 22, No. 1, "INDIGENOUS" ANTHROPOLOGY: PARADOXAND PRAXIS (March 1997), pp. 23-49Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29790443.

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24around native anthropology, this article aims at exploring thehighly elusive positionalities of anthropologists as authors andambiguous identitiesof ethnographical texts.

Auto-anthropologistsMarilyn Strathern's chapter, The Limits of Auto

anthropology, in an ASA monograph entitledAnthropology atHome1 helps us to open thediscussion. According to Strathern,8who draws her analysis fromRabinow's contrast of writers andauthors, theethnographer inher home culture is author and notwriter, in relation to thosebeing studied. The writer ismore orless invisible from the text, while the author embodies herrelationship with the world in her text. In the case of theethnographer of another culture/society, she becomes first of allthe writer who uses her writing as a vehicle to render others'representations and interpretations intelligible to the homereadership, and then secondly, the author who controls therendition, by influencing the reader's conceptualization of thatculture/society.9 Such a division of labor was possible in thetraditional anthropological exercise, according toStrathern,butthe challenge of anthropology at home is different, in that theethnographer is a simultaneous doublet of author and writerwithout separation of her intellectualwork and social role. And,if she is still a writer, she writes mainly for her colleagues, theacademic and anthropological readership.10 One of thecharacteristics of such home authors, so to speak, is closelyrelated to the fact that the ethnographyproduces self-knowledgeforboth those studied and for theanthropologistherself.And thisis how anthropologists at home fulfill the conditions of autoanthropology through their writing. Strathern defines autoanthropology as anthropology carried out in the social contextwhich produced it. Here it is not the anthropologist's culturalorientation, but the anthropological knowledge that is producedby the ethnography. Hence, for Strathern, the issue of autoanthropology is not thedegree of the anthropologist's familiarity

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25with a particular culture she studies;11 it is about themode ofknowledge, more precisely, differentmodes of self-knowledgeincluding the societal knowledge of thatparticular society itself.The key concept for thisargument is contrivance. This termcan be understood, following Collin's Thesaurus, as synonymouswith artifice, design, dodge, expedient, fabrication, formation,intrigue, inventiveness, machination, plot, project, trick, etc. Itcould also be understood as something similar to criticalreflexivityon one's own culture/society, in thevein of Strathern'schapter. When the anthropologist studies another society, hercontrivance becomes a necessary means of access to theunfamiliar, while when she turnshome, contrivance is differentin the sense that shewould end up writing about contrivance. Thedifference between studying one's own society and studyinganother society lies in the epistemological terrain, not in asimplistic matter of cultural affinity or distance between theresearcher and the society concerned. Here, the distinctionbetween the writer and the author becomes relevant. Stratherncites theexample of Bronislaw Malinowski who, as writer,madehis narrative transparentenough tobe an authenticdescription ofthe Trobriands which required technical elucidation and asauthor, he displaced no Trobriand accounts . . . because hecould not possibly have been an author in respect of knowledge oflocal social interest. Nor did his organization of material, hisfunctionalist models and principles of social organization,participate in Trobriand modes of self-knowledge. 12 Strathernstates:

The point to stress is very simple. Anthropological accounts ofexogenous societies such as the Trobriands can never be the selfknowledge in theway that a parallel account of the social world ofElmdoners [in Essex] (say) would be. It does not matter where theanthropologist comes from: itcannot be self-knowledge in a reflexivesense because it does not draw on the specific techniques by whichpeople know themselves.13

There are three,closely connected points inStrathern's chapterwhich Iwish to engae and explore further. irst is theproblem of



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26separation between the self-knowledge of the (presumably

Western) ethnographer and that of the natives. Often, goingnative dimensions are emphasized for the anthropologist in thefield, but, such a phenomenon does not arise inonemoment. It isa long process of negotiated relations during which theanthropologist herself learns about native others and figures outhow she can approximate herself to them.Fieldwork relations areincreasingly written about in today's anthropological texts ascompared to the silence given to such relations inpast texts.And,

Malinowski's relation to theTrobrianders was a significantpartof his self-shaping.14The fact thathe kept his ethnography anddiary separate, for example, should not mean thatMalinowskiwas skillfully separated into writer and author, for theTrobrianders and for theWestern readers, respectively. Inmostfieldwork situations, anthropologists are observed as much asthey observe thepeople in the field, and recent anthropologicaltexts are frank about it.Dorinne Kondo felt constrained duringher fieldwork in Tokyo amidst people shemet there, some ofwhom were her relatives, and she was influenced by them andforced tomake certain reflections on herselfwhich may not havebeen necessary had she stayed in theUSA, where shewas bornand grew up.15At the same time,when her American conventionsas a thirdgeneration Japanese-American appeared to be differentand striking in the eyes of her Japanese neighbors, she wasinfluencing them, intriguing them and fascinating them. Kondorefers to herself, viewed by them, as a living oxymoron,someone who was both Japanese and not Japanese. 16Parallel to the recent spate of literature reassessing theintercourse between colony and the metropolis in culturalhistories of colonialism,17 the communication or intellectualexchange between anthropologists and people in the field is beingexplored in termsof mutually influencingspheres, rather thanasentities that are sealed up from each other. These realms ofknowledge (including self-knowledge) are not identical.Nevertheless, theymay, inmediated form,be connected to eachother one way or theother and, furthermore,the anthropologist'spresence can connect them. No matter how colonial itmay



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27originally have been, we know that, for example, TrobriandIslanders play cricket and Cuna curing figures inSouthAmericannative people have white men among them.18 n a differentlevel,today we do have Trobriander anthropologists or SolomonIslander anthropologists who write about indigenous cultures ofTrobriand or the Solomon Islands and conduct teaching andresearch in anthropology in institutions nd universities in theseplaces. Would itbe too hard to imagine, too unusual to happen,or too conceited to think that the anthropologist's presence caninfluence the community that she studies in various ways,including personal relations and organization of academicinstitutionsand disciplines, thereby influencing the formationofthe ulturaldentityf the eople in the ield?It would also be difficult to assume that the anthropologistherself cannot change the community due to her presence,through either personal relations she can develop withinformants,or some forms of feedback in thefield. Of course, ifwe take theWittgensteinian proposition very far (and with somedistortion) and dismiss any possibility of inter-personalunderstanding on the basis of the opacity of purely privatelanguages, itwould not be possible to accept the anthropologist'sunderstanding of such a community.However, such a reasoningwould simultaneously be to cancel all the possibilities ofanthropological and any other forms of mutual intellectualunderstanding. In as much as we allow for anthropologists'effortsto familiarize themselveswith the internal logic of others'cultures, it is possible, maybe not always but often, to rely ontheirability to render theirdiversified relationship to thepeoplethey study intelligible to heterogeneous readers, including thosepeoples who are studied by anthropologists themselves. And ifso, this is a process of self-knowledge for the anthropologist,albeitmediated by her relationship to thepeople in thefield.

My second point is related to thephenomenon of contrivance.For example, to try to understand what Trobrianders take shellmoney tobe, inmy view, is an exercise thatdeals with thenotionof contrivance. Such contrivance may not constitute the selfknowledge of the ethnographerbecause of its culture-specificity,



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28but it remains the same; writing about Trobrianders cannot escapewriting about contrivance, as exactly as writing about an Englishvillage. Anthropology has always dealt with contriving others.For example, anthropological studies of Japan have always beenconstrained by what John Lie calls auto-Orientalization, 19which is manifested by an on-going phenomenon of literaryproduction of books and other formsofwritings, art and objects,generally embraced by the term nihonjinron, the study ofJapanese cultural uniqueness. In other words, Japanese do notstop talking about themselves, construing and constructingwhat itmeans to be Japanese, concocting and contriving means andmethods of self-representation.20 hen anthropologists study theJapanese, it is not possible to disregard such self-representations,which are, inmost cases, already inwritten form. Such is a verydifferent situation from the ideal-typical writer of othercultureswho may just have to deal with spoken data collected inthefield and not the textual ones thatcan be read in the librariesat home. The difference between auto-anthropology andtraditional anthropology is notnwhether the anthropologist hastowrite about contrivance or not, but exists elsewhere.This leads tomy thirdpoint, which is related to the culturalbasis of knowledge?including self-knowledge. In my view,

knowledges (broadly-interpreted)have cultural foundations on thebasis of which they are formed. Even the seemingly neutralscientific knowledge we know today reflects materialcircumstances thathave emerged historically and socially, withincertain limits of a given cultural parameters.21 In the modernschool system, every child learns the equation 2x3 = 6.However, theprocess bywhich they learn theequation is culturebound. In a particular school, the child may be encouraged tounderstand thatwhen two apples are delivered three times, thesum total is six; in another context, she may be forced to

memorize without any encouragement tounderstand the situation.These are related to Gilbert Ryle's notion of the connectionbetween knowing that and knowing how. 22We need toknownot only that but also how. Some cultures emphasize thatknowledge, while others, how knowledge, forexample. At any



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29rate, both knowledges are acquired byway of a culturally-positedteaching/learning system, through application of specific rules oflearning. The Western anthropological knowledge, themajor partof which developed during and within Victorian time and space,has its own cultural foundation.23 If so, to the same extent thatMalinowskian anthropology had a cultural bent for what ErnestGellner called transplantingEast European practices to theWestand endowing themwith aWestern rationale, 24Trobriand selfknowledge, expressed in the form of showing how to build acanoe or how to appreciate gardens, is culture-specific.Although Strathern maintains that the definition of autoanthropology should not be about thecultural distance and degreeof familiarity between the researcher and the field, if theknowledge is produced on the cultural basis?by using aparticular language, through culturally institutionalizedpedagogy,etc.?all the contrivances are culture-based and it is indeedWestern cultural specificity that prevents the anthropologicalaccounts of the Trobrianders ofMalinowski frombecoming selfknowledge of (say) English readers. But, this should bereformulated, since reading about Trobrianders?the act oflearning?forms part of the cultural process of knowledgeformationfor the readers. In otherwords, for aWestern reader toappreciate the self-knowledge ofTrobrianders, such a knowledgeneeds to be placed within the knowledge acquisition process ofthat reader, which in its turn is institutionalized and organizedwithin the cultural norms and limits of Western education. Theknowledge about Trobrianders for English readers ismediatedthrough theprocess of incorporating theanthropological textsandinstating the act of such a learning into theirown culture-boundlearning system such as the courses in the anthropologydepartments of universities. Thus, the knowledge thatTrobrianders do A or thatTrobrianders thinktheyare B willbe appropriated by an English reader/learner throughthe culturespecific process of how ?how they learn about theTrobriandIsland in theEnglish education systemprefigures theirknowledgeof theTrobriand Island itself.This much would be the same foran Elmdon reader of the ethnographyof Elmdon village. But, if



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30the ethnography of Elmdon by an English ethnographer can beregarded as a relativelyunmediated form of the self-knowledge ofElmdoners themselves, it is because their epistemology pertainsto aWestern cultural foundation and theethnographer can assumehow things are normally understood by her villagers and readersor her villager/reader. In this sense, what Strathernregards as anepistemological question is in fact a cultural one and, therefore, itdoes matter where anthropologists come from.Native Anthropologists

In this section Iwould like to focus on the debate over nativeanthropology. In her recent book, Kirsten Hastrup denies thenotion of native anthropology since there isno way inwhich onecan simultaneously speak from a native and an anthropologicalposition .... We are now in a position to turn the concept ofothering towards ourselves. It is for anthropology to assume theposition of the 'radical other' in theworld.25 Hastrup emphasizesthe objective conditions for the production of knowledge assomething that one must epistemologically reflectupon in orderfor anthropological results to be theoretically and historicallysignificant, and that there is no way of incorporating such anobjective viewpoint for the native person, and here nativeanthropology is a contradiction in terms. 26Let us consider the notion of objectivity. Consider the caseof The Nuer.27 Critics have already pointed out the assumednotion of equilibrium inherent in the text and the confidencearising from self-closing discourse, 28 or invisible and,consequentially, authoritarian voice over of E. E. EvansPritchard, whose description does not have a sense of anytransformationinternal to theNuers, and altogether is blind to thecolonial presence of theBritish, which ultimately guaranteed hisresearch. Can we, nevertheless, credit his precision of accountswith an objective description of the Nuer? The answer isnegative. First, no text escapes the angles of cultural andideological lenses worn by the author. The second, a technicalproblem which is closely connected to the first, is that at the



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31moment when Evans-Pritchard selected certain data, omittedothers and interpreted aspects of Nuer life, he was alreadyexercising his authorial intervention.Even ifwe concede to anabsurd degree and say thathis accounts were objective, such aconcern would have to be appreciated as a limited one and,hence, necessarily partial.29His claims that anthropologists arethe ones who can study a society in its totality30 ounds todayrather anachronistic.Why? Because we now know thatno societykeeps its constitutionunchanged for the sake of anthropologists;complex and diverse transformations that take place in everynook and corner of a society are often connected to worldhistorical transformations?if not always in a passive, reflectivemanner, but at times in theform of positively securing a niche foritsown in a larger system.No society conveniently lends itselfto the anthropologist to be studied from all aspects, that is,totally.This kind of notion of objectiveness is closely related to thenotion of authenticity suggested earlier by Strathern inconnection with the ethnographer-cum-writer (not theethnographer-cum-author) capable of making his narrativetransparent enough to be an authentic description of theTrobriands; 31 The assumption of authenticityof description is anuneasy one. Let us remember Strathern's distinction between theauthor and the writer. The author interprets, theorizes andscrutinizes the culture she studies,while thewriter authenticallydescribes that culture concerned. Does thismean thewriter iscapable of rendering the truth about that culture? Is thedescription of a culture free from authorial intervention?as inobjective description? Is this distinction tenable?The pursuit of authenticity ismisleading, has misled us fordecades, and is still going on, as can be seen in the concernraised by Mary Louise Pratt with regard to anthropologists'reaction to Shabono: A True Adventure in the Remote andMagical Heart of theSouth American Jungle,written by FlorindaDonner, who claimed to have lived among theYanomamis, andwhose text, however, did not come up to the authenticityexpected for an ethnographical text.32 he point was, Pratt tells



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32us, that itwas not debated according to ethnographic accuracy,but to its similarity, toomuch similarity, to other texts dealingwith the same topic/people.33 Pratt cites a critic of Donner,Rebecca DeHolmes, who wrote that itmust be shown that theethnographic data on which she bases her storywere actuallygathered personally by her while living among theYanomama,and not re-writtenfrom previously published works. 34 Implicithere is that ethnographical value primarily resides in theauthenticity of the text,which should be proven by the real

account of actual fieldwork. The text is taken to be somethingthat immediately reflects the culture which is discovered in thefieldwork. In this sense, fieldwork data are taken as the pregiven; all the anthropologist needs to do is to go and find it andwrite (copy?) itdown. And, therest is taken as natural; the text isnaturally authentic, loyally recordingwhat actually happened infrontof her. But, is such a writing authentic?We are not discussing here the worries about given databeing falsified into something different in the stage ofwriting.As Clifford suggested: To treat the Diary and Argonautstogetherneed not imply that the former is a true revelation ofMalinowski's fieldwork. 35Rather, this is to say that there is nodata thatare purely given and innocentlyreflected, textualized ordescribed. Since by the time certain data are selected, theauthorial intervention is already made, in the form ofinterpretation, stereotypifying, classification, comparison, andabove all, the limitation of the quantity of information. Thisimplies controlling the channel of knowledge for the readers,what Michel Foucault calls the author function. 36This mayeven have little to do with the author's intention.37 hen EvansPritchard omits theBritish colonial presence in Sudan, althoughhemay not have intended todeliberately obscure it,and hemeantto render theNuer people well within the reach of academicdiscourse, theconsequence is therebeyond the authorial intentionand control. Nevertheless, he, as the author, is not entirelyinnocent since, in the final analysis, he is the producer of thatparticular text of a particular people at a particular time and,maybe, for a particular type of reader, and indeed, he has been



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33very influential in the formulationof our knowledge of theNuer.The role of the author is, in otherwords, not necessarily to giveus a generous opportunity to expand our knowledge or selfknowledge: rather thanmaking our knowledge objective orauthentic, inmany cases itworks to limitsuch knowledge.

Although, like Strathern, Hastrup suggests nativeness aspertaining to the epistemological issue, her emphasis onobjectiveness as something that native anthropologists cannotreach in terms of their native cultures pushes us back to the

question of cultural specificity of the anthropologist. ForHastrup's objectiveness is a cultural insider's impossibilitywhich can be overcome by cultural outsiders who observe thingsobjectively. The fact is, no one does. As Hastrup herself says,we are all native to a certain culture/society and in this sense

(following Hastrup's notion of objectiveness) we are all theproducts of culturally conditioned forms of learning, includingWestern cultural specificity. Let me try to explore this pointfurther.To say thatone comes from a certain cultural background andto studyone's own background are two differentthingswhich arenot necessarily mutually exclusive. More practically, where dowe end theboundary-drawing of such culture? In otherwords,who are the natives? On the one hand, it is true that ananthropologist who comes from a white, middle-class Englishbackground with well-to-do financial circumstances, on topof herhigh-level education, would find herself very alien amongst hercompatriot prostitutes standing in the back ofKing's Cross, or toan English working-class woman whose alcoholic husbandroutinely beats her up, or ethnicminorities living in theUK.When JudithOkely studiesGypsy women, she is not studyinghernative people. She writes:

Unlike anthropology abroad, fieldwork at home is not a matter ofmemorizing a new vocabulary; only slowly did I realize that I had tolearn another language in thewords ofmy mother tongue. I unlearnedmy boarding school accent, changed clothing and body movements.Dropping my 'aitches and throwing in swear words, I was doing an



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34Eliza Dolittle in reverse and without Professor Higgins to superviseme.38

On the other hand, there are those of us who do not have togo native in the field, since we are native to the culture we

study.And, there are certain distinct attributes to such cases. Asstated by Okely, the ambiguity of the cultural identityof theanthropologist becomes inflated in the case of theanthropologist doing fieldwork in her own country.39WhenJapanese-American anthropologistKondo's professional identitywas made into a sense of vertigo and a fear of theOtherness?in the self'40 in her fieldwork in Japan, there aresome distinct, or at least different, experiential moments ascompared to the anthropologist doing fieldwork in aculture/societywhere she has had no generational, familial orpersonal connections prior toher opting for thatparticular site forher fieldwork.

This difference, it seems, needs to be recognized, but shouldnot be overrecognized. Divisions are crisscrossing across gender,race, class, age. If these divisions are recognized, it should beclear that native anthropology is not referring to the study ofthe people who are identical to the anthropologist herself;although itmay be referring to the home country or homeprovince of the anthropologist, it is infestedwith difference,diversity and division to the same extent as anthropology of othercultures and societies, since the self-knowledge we may obtainfrom studies of such a diverse us is as foreign as otherculture/society is to us. This means that what nativeanthropology can do is not the firsthand account of others(addressed to theWest). In this sense, the set of epistemologicalissues the native anthropologist is concerned with are not toodifferent from what the so-called Western (or traditional ornormal . . .) anthropologist should deal with when studyingothers.

Here, I find thediscussion suggested by Strathern in hermorerecent work on partial connections between feminism andanthropology enlightening. Strathern takes the view thatfeminist



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35scholarship is not a discipline isomorphic with otherdisciplines?it simply invades and draws on them.Thus, I cannotsubstitute feminism for anthropology or vice versa . . . . 41 Canwe not say here that theknowledge and experience one has as aperson native to a certain society can invade and draw on theacademic disciplinary asset that one has acquired as ananthropologist?In a similar, but slightly different vein, Lila Abu-Lughodobserves that female feminist anthropologists face a similarproblem to the one faced by native anthropologists in the sensethat they study women.42 This being said, as suggested byElizabeth Grosz, the female sex of the author does notautomatically render the text feminist or feminine.According toGrosz, it is not their status as women thatdecidesfeminist identity of female authors' texts, since thispsychological and sociological designation is quite independentofa woman's authorial status. 43Likewise, native voices cannotbe automatically privileged only because thewriters are native tothe culture described.44Abu-Lughod suggests that therearewaysof writing against cultures and thatwe can proceed withethnographies of thepeculiar. According toher:The very gap between the professional and authoritative discourses ofgeneralization and the languages of everyday life (our own and others')establishes a fundamental separation between the anthropologist and thepeople being written about that facilitates the construction ofanthropological objects as simultaneously different and inferior.Thus, tothe degree that anthropologists can bring closer the language ofeveryday life and the language of the text, thismode ofmaking other isreversed.45

However, to approximate the language of the field and thelanguage of the text is not as easy as it is hoped to be, since itinevitably involves the question of theuse of the language, or aparticular language?English, in this case. English is placed in aprivileged position in anthropological discourse (and probably inother social scientific discourses as well) as compared to other,less pervasive languages such as (say) Japanese.When someonelikemyself, a Japan-bornKorean who grew up as bilingual in



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36Japanese andKorean and received her anthropological training inEnglish in a British university, studiesKoreans in Japan, usingKorean and/or Japanese, their firstlanguages, as the language forthe fieldwork, and writes about them inEnglish, which neithermyself nor theyregard as their firstlanguage,my anthropologicalstudy of them is not in any sense the same as an English personstudying nglish society and writing about it in English,expecting theEnglish readers to read it inEnglish.46 Inmy case,although I am studyingmy own culture/society,my readers areprimarily foreigners tome. This is a dilemma faced especially bythosewho are, inAbu-Lughod terms, halfie anthropologists. 47Hundreds of such halfies, including myself, in today'stransnational academic milieu, can be sensitive about thepowerful position of theEnglish language48 and find the takenfor-grantedtransparencyof ituneasy and problematical.The matter is not simply about theuse of a particular languageas a communicative tool between the author and the reader. Theprivileged use of a particular language involves privileging ofconcepts and categories historically and epistemologically definedby that language, thereby simultaneously subjugating conceptsand categories defined by other languages. There is a definitepower relation between them. In this connection, HenriettaMoore's following suggestion ishighly relevant:

. . .non-western anthropologists?andthe termhere obscures more than

it reveals?often have towrite about theirfindings in termsof theWestversus the Rest dichotomy which informs theoretical concepts in thediscipline. For example, a Japanese anthropologist who wants toworkon concepts of theperson or the self in Samoa may find herself havingto describe such concepts in terms of implicit, international disciplinaryconventions .... She must, either implicitly or explicitly, orient atleast part of her discussion in terms of the recognized debate withinanthropology and, in so doing, she brings intoplay the set of contrastedand contrastive differences which depend for their existence on theimagined category of theWest.49

Moore adds that such a constraintbecomes most notable when theanthropologist iswriting inEnglish or other European languageswhich are presumably foreign to the ethnographerherself. In her



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37more recentwork criticizing themonopolistic position ofWesternsocial science as the originary point of comparative andgeneralizing theory, Moore refers to the illustration that if theanthropologist from the developing states were to producetheoretically innovativework, and yet if shewere not to conformtomainstream Western social science, it is likely thather workwould be denigrated as partial and/or localized. 50 Such anasymmetrical relation of power applies not only to text anddiscourse, but also to the entiremode of trainingand discipline ofanthropology as taught in the academia. For example, manyanthropology departments of non-Western universities teachBritish, American or French anthropological history as thehistory of anthropology.Ifwe consider these factors,postulating native anthropologyas problematical may start looking quite ethnocentric or culturespecific to the West. As Okely writes, it is no accident thatthegeographic space which has been obliterated or defined as theethnographic periphery for orthodox anthropology is the verysame which is occupied by a centre of academic power.51 Thequestion of native anthropology is the issue the emergence ofwhich reflects the Western hegemony internal to theanthropological discipline. This is also connected to thenotion ofnatives itself; as stated by Arjun Appadurai, natives arecreatures of the anthropological imagination. 52 It cannot becoincidental thatcategories such as anthropology at home andnative anthropology are registered only when anthropologyreturns to its European home. Would it be too far-fetchedorresentiment-motivated to say that the discovery of nativeanthropology is somewhat alarmingly new only for theWesternEuropean metropoles which are stripped of their colonies?therebymore researchers are forced to study their own homes?For the colonies?broadly meant to include North America,India, Africa and Australia?anthropology has always beencarried out somewhere at home during and after the colonialperiod, mainly dealing with domestic others. Practicingcolonial anthropology necessarily involved people whose homewas no longer pure ?Anglicized Indian scholars,



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38Orientalized English eccentrics, Westernized native

bureaucrats, dislocated colonists and marginalized nativeintellectuals, etc., whose native culture was somixed up thattheywould not easily fall into a neat classificatory pigeonholes,andyetthey ertainlyad a culture ithwhich theyould feelathome or they could display native expertise and skillfulness inthat culture. And if so, would it be too much to suggest thatbefore denying native anthropology as a contradiction in terms,those ho find t ontradictoryhould ethinkhy they o so andinwhatkind ofhistorical enealogy fknowledge hey racticeanthropology?Which brings us back to the issue noted in the previoussection?the heterogeneity of the community of anthropologists.In other words, the identityof anthropologists is a complicatedone, or their identitiesaremultiple. This multiplicity is very richand ready to be used to strengthen rather than breach thevaguely-defined orthodox rules of anthropology. When AihwaOng calls herself a post-colonial, Malaysian/Chinese/Americanwoman, triply displaced and exiled from a home culture andcredits such existence as having no possibility of subscribing toa singular authority, 53 itcan be interpretedthat she includes theauthority of anthropological orthodoxy; Ong suggests, as acritique of anthropological knowledge as it exists now, thatalternativemodernities in less culturally hegemonic peripheriesare evolving in a series of sites, in dialogue and tensionswitheach other in the region, while seeking to define their overalldistinctiveness from theWest. 54 For such a critical work asOng's, Ong being a complex anthropologist-in-exile is surely anasset rather than disadvantage. Similarly, when Appaduraiproposes the notion of deterritorialization and globalethnoscape, 55 his own transnational career and home-makingexperience are part of the contribution, rather than the negativefactor.When he remembers his father's biography in which hisfatherwas once theminister of publicity and propaganda in aJapanese-backed Indian government-in-exile in Southeast Asia,and connects this memory and other memories of his ownchildhood to his critical study of patriotism, the unorthodox



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39patriotism he experienced?seen from the Nehrus and theCongress party and other mainstream Indian nationalists?ispositively turned into thepoint of departure for a more criticaland original analysis.56 It is also closely related to the fact thatmost radical feminist critique and cultural critique come fromexperiential accounts ofwomen andmen of color.57Of course notall anthropologists and scholars with various native or otherconnections canmake their cultural assets useful, but at leastweshould be able to question the validityof the image ofanthropologists as a group of scholarswho as a rule do fieldworkand stick to writing about the people in the field, who arepresumably different from the culturewhere the anthropologistcomes from; fieldwork is here taken as something that isnecessarily juxtaposed or counterpoised toher native culture. Itwould be all the better if the anthropologist could use her ownexample to explore further the society she studies, and thatexample does not have to be alien to, or far from, everydaypractices of the studied society. Putting things thisway at leastenables us to avoid exoticism and other branches ofOrientalism,including Occidentalism. It also allows for the coexistence ofnativeness (in the transformativesense, as in the cases ofOngand Appadurai) with anthropology, rather than dismissing it ascontradictory.There is a downside to such a celebratory approach, however.Not all the triplydisplaced persons are in a position tobe able touse such a personal circumstance as an asset.Millions of refugeesand overseas guest workers, who are forced tomove from onecultural entity to the other in search of better work or, at times,pure survival, would not put their displacement anddeterritorialization into celebratory terms. When JonathanRutherford states that home iswhere we speak from, 58we cangive it only a partial credit, since themajority of homeless andstateless peoples are simultaneously deprived of language andaccess to speak to theworld. For the language-less people, todefine home as somewhere you speak from is of little use.Indeed, the image of executives in themultinational firmshavingbreakfast inNew York, lunch inTokyo, and dinner in Sydney is



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40a remote picture of hundreds of malnourished laborers beingcarried away from one location to the other for industries thatarecatered to by themultinationals, although they both are theimages of displacement and splitting experience of home

making. One should not conflate the privilegeddeterritorialization and theunderprivileged one.The situationwe face today in and around the anthropologicalfield of discipline is a complex one and no longer particular to a(usually prestigious, Western) university regarded as some kindof a legitimate center, a such-and-such School and some kindof pace-setter for an orthodox and normalizing producer ofanthropologists.What we see here is not just an interdisciplinarytransformationof the anthropologists' training,but an interethnicand transcultural constitution of currently practicinganthropologists, including the students. If the term nativeanthropology were tobe chargedwith thisproblem, itwould notbe as a terminological contradiction, but as an anachronism; thepopulation of anthropologists has always had a large componentconsisting of natives who studied their own culture/society,even when such a society was ruled by foreign colonists or isbeingmade plural and ambiguous due to theanthropologist's owndisplacement.

Disciplinary dentityIn closing this article, I wish to raise the issue of the futureofanthropological knowledge and its disciplinary identity. AsMoore wrote, anthropology is no longer a singular discipline,but amultiplicity of practices engaged in awide variety of socialcontexts. 59 She raises questions of the role of anthropologicalknowledge in the multipolar, globalized, postcolonial worldand suggests that the answer to what is social knowledge for?should be a series of interrogations, rather than a singulardefinition.60Starting from there, Iwish to suggest thatwe can tryto expand critical edges and explorative scopes of ethnography,including regions to cover, theoretical issues to raise and genres



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41

to experimentwith. My preceding criticism of certain approachesto native anthropology and the posture of privilegingepistemology over culture should be understood in this vein.The complex constitution of anthropologists todayworks forboth unifying and dividing the discipline's identity.Culturaldifferences of anthropologistswhose epistemological groundingsare differentalso, seem todeserve more appreciation. This is not

simply to celebrate such a diversity, but to recognize inequalityand difference in power existentwithin our discipline as well.There is firstof all a hierarchy in social prestige and academicmaturity among them. Distinctions are made betweenanthropologists of non-Western background, anthropologists ofinterdisciplinarybackground, anthropologists affiliated tomore orless prestigious academic institutions,or with or without suchaffiliation, male or female anthropologists, rich or pooranthropologists, anthropologists who study regions that arehegemonic in thediscipline and thosewhose studyareas thataremarginalized, etc., etc. The problem of native anthropology andanthropology at home is not unrelated to the power relationinternal to anthropology as a discipline. Such a power relation isorganized along multiple matrices, including regional hegemony,personal fame, college alumni connections, current workrelations, political commitment, cultural snobbery, economicsituation, favoritism and seniority and so on.On the other hand, merely to endorse thediverse compositionof the anthropological population is to fall into a truism andendless regress. By the same token, to situate centrally the selfconsciousness of the anthropologist or toprivilege her reflexivityvis-?-vis the indigenous voices can be misleading, whilefetishizing fieldwork and empirical findingsbyway of dismissingthe poetics of anthropology is no solution, either. Someprofessors have not been able to go back to their field fordecades, although theykeep writing about itby using either outof-date data or others' works. In themeantime, we witness thatfieldwork as amethod of intellectual inquiryhas traveledwidelyand, today, most social scientific disciplines and humanitiessubjects can combine fieldwork and interviews to their research,



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42including History, Gender Studies, Area Studies, CulturalStudies, Literature, Film Studies, Communication Studies,Sociology, Political Science, Philosophy of Science, just tomention a few. Reflecting the education funding cut,anthropologists of less hegemonic regions of the discipline arefacingthefateof havingto shift heir rofessionaldentityoArea Studies or other related disciplines. To be able to teachone's own topic or specialized fieldwith which one dealt inone'sPh.D. thesis is becoming a luxurywhich is reserved for a handfulof prestigious universities. Many anthropologists are pushed tomake certain compromises, including that of having to reeducatethemselves in an entirelydifferentregion and language, in ordertokeep theirjobs in academia. In thismood of disciplinary crisis,how can we anthropologists try to retain anthropology asanthropology without making it a monopoly of certaininstitutions, thereby reducing the significance of itsplace withinthe larger system of human knowledge and learning, at the sametime,without blurring itsdisciplinary identityto theextent that itmay have tobe called somethingelse?Ifwe take a parallel approach toGrosz's suggestion and applyit to anthropological texts, we may be able to say that theprofessional identity of the author as anthropologist does notnecessarily render the text anthropological. Grosz suggests for aworking experiment of feminist texts that the relations betweenthe text and the prevailing norms and ideals which govern itsmilieu . . .must be explored. 61 Adapting from that,we can tryto explore the scope for critical reflection on the social andtheoreticalmilieu fromwhich ethnographical textswere born anddistributed. For that, we need to clarify where we stand inrelation toboth our fieldwork and text.Every anthropologist, it istrue, plays a different role as an ethnographical author, sinceher/his relation to the people whom he or she studies is alwaysdifferent. However, to explore ethnographer-field relationsshould not mean merely to write everything about fieldworkinteractions, as if themore exhaustive is fieldwork account, thefairerbecomes the text.That isnot thecase. On the contrary, theone-sided honesty and self-righteous fairness on the part of the



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43authormay bring about disastrous implications to the people inthe field. Such an act is ultimately nothing but a selfishconfession and hypocritical gesture. The act ofwriting is in itselfa mutation of fieldwork and the relations the anthropologistcultivated with the people in the field.When one writes aboutsomeone else, even with fully acknowledged permission fromthem, it is already a rupture, a certain disequilibrium in the sensethat themutual relationship is being written by one of thepeopleinvolved, that is, the anthropological author. The positionality oftheanthropologists made differentymovingfrom thatoffieldworker to that of author, although such a shiftmay occurduring the fieldwork.Neither an author's identity or an author's intentionforms thetextual identity f ethnographies, since such a decision pertains tothe societal level. Readers can pick itup or drop it. In factmanytexts do not even get published and even when they arepublished,theymay just siton the library helves uietlyfordecades in their initial, limited-numberhardcover edition. Thisdoes not necessarily mean that theyare not good. But, itmeansthat theydid not find themarketplace to exchange themselves as adistributable article. (And, I do not at all intend to suggestfairness of themarket.) This is therefore,not just thematter ofwriting a good (but forwhom?) text,but to circulate it.No textis guaranteed circulation and distribution prior to the societaloption. If the author is a professorwith her own courses, she canexpect her book to be read within such an institutionalframe bymany students, by making such reading compulsory through itsexamination connections. But, whether to read it or not aftergraduation or her retirementor death, and hence, outside suchpedagogical constraints, is entirelyup to the social market. So,the span of fiftyyears or so is only an interimguarantee?theguarantee that involves a lot of symbolic and pedagogicalviolence.This kind of readership-focused identity f the textcan enlargethe scope of its interpretation. s Roland Barthes noted:



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44We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single

theological meaning (the message of theAuthor-God) but a multi?dimensional space inwhich a variety ofwritings, none of themoriginal,blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from theinnumerable centers of culture.62

Pointing to the fact that classic literary criticism never paidattention to the reader as compared to thewriter, Barthes alludesto the non-personal, sociological category of the reader.63 Itseems important that anthropological authors take the readershipas a field inwhich meanings and interpretations re produced andreproduced on the societal level. It also means thatanthropologists are both author and reader, not just as in thecaseof native anthropologists. They participate in cultural productionofmeaning in thefield, which is an immediate reflection of theirpersonal history as well as future intellectualwork?in this case,we all become producer-consumer of anthropological texts.

To understand readership thisway has an implication for theexperience ofwriting, sincewriting isnot necessarily a reductionof fieldwork andmeaningful social relations cultivated therein, tothe text. Textualization may not have to be the qualitativereduction of life experiences of both the anthropologist andinformants, inotherwords.64 It can be a creative process forboththe author and thepeople in thefield throughthemediation of theact of reading the text produced by the ethnographer. Such acommunication is a societal event, given that the readership is asocietal milieu where social meanings and interpretations arecreated and recreated.

It is important to extend the regional repertoires ofethnography geographically and culturally?as in transnationalortranscultural anthropology. At the same time, can anthropologyextend its parameters of genre as well? It has been said thatethnography is similar to, for example, travelwriting,65 and theethnographer was likened to the traveler^or the literary authorsuch as JosephConrad.67Whether such companions are useful ornot is a separate matter,68 but can anthropological texts retaintheir identity after they absorb methods of fiction or travelwriting, for example? There are todaymany anthropologistswho



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45are also playwrights, travelwriters, novelists, biographers andother media-related writers and film-makers.70Within what arenormally regarded as ethnographical texts,genre experimentationhas been with us for some time.71Whereas to block out suchexperiments would do a great disservice to us, we cannot becontent by calling everything ethnographical, since beingethnographical and being an ethnography may be quitedifferentfromeach other.

In a way, to keep the disciplinary identityof anthropologyambiguous and hybrid is not a bad thing. Anthropologists, as Ihave argued in the preceding pages, are and have always beenconstituted by cultural and intellectualhybrids?including nativeanthropologists. The same goes to the anthropological readershipand composition of texts as well. The constitution of readerstoday is highly diverse and no longer can we talk only aboutanthropological readers, the ethnographer's colleagues, or evenmore generally, academic readers as a specified target.To recognize this allows practitioners of anthropology to haveless fixed and more movable positionalities, which becomes auseful weapon when critically approaching what is taken forgranted both in academia and the society at large. To recognizethis also means thatwe look to theproductivityof non-orthodoxysuch as native anthropology?if ithas ever been non-orthodox?and perversion such as anthropology at home?including the losthome of Western anthropologists.Notes1. Quoted in John Lie, Sociology of Contemporary Japan, in Current

Sociology, Vol. 44, No. 1 (1996).2. James Clifford, Introduction: Partial Truths, in James Clifford andGeorge Marcus eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics ofEthnography (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1986).3. James Clifford. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-CenturyEthnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UniversityPress, 1988a).



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464. George Marcus and Michael Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique:An Experimental Moment in theHuman Sciences (Chicago: University ofChicagoPress, 1986).5. George Marcus ed., Rereading Cultural Anthropology (Durham: Duke

University Press, 1992).6. Richard Fox ed., Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present(Santa Fe: School ofAmerican Research Press, 1991).7. Anthony Jackson, ed., Anthropology atHome (London: Tavistock, 1987).8. Marilyn Strathera, The Limits ofAuto-anthropology, in AnthropologyatHome.

9. Ibid., p. 25.10. Ibid., p. 26.11. Ibid., p. 17.12. Ibid., p. 16.13. Ibid., p. 29.14. Ibid., pp. 29-30.15. George Clifford, On Ethnographic Self-Fashioning: Conrad andMalinowski, in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth CenturyEthnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,1988b).

16. Dorinne Kondo, Crafting Selves: Power, Gender and Discourses ofIdentity in a Japanese Workplace (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1990).17. Ibid., p. 11.18. See Nicholas Dirks ed., Colonialism and Culture (AnnArbor: UniversityofMichigan Press, 1992), and StuartHall, New Ethnicities, inDavidMorley and Kuan-Hsing Chen eds., Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues inCultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 70.19. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity:A Particular History of the Senses(London: outledge,1993).20. Lie, Sociology of Contemporary Japan, pp. 8-12.21. For example, Chie Nakane, The Japanese Society (Berkeley: Universityof California Press, 1970), and see Tamotsu Aoki, Nihon Bunkaron noHeny? (TransformationfTheoriesof JapaneseCulture) Tokyo:Ch??K?ronsha, 1990), and Peter Dale, The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness(New York: St.Martin's Press, 1986).22. For example, Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions(Chicago:UniversityfChicagoPress, 1970).

23. Gilbert yle,TheConcept fMind (Harmondsworth:enguin,1949).24. Talal Asad ed., Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (London:Ithaca Press, 1973).25. Ernest Gellner, Anthropology and Politics: Revolutions in the SacredGrove (Oxford: lackwell,1995).



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4726. Kirsten Hastrup, A Passage toAnthropology: Between Experience andTheory London: outledge,1995),p. 159.27. Ibid.28. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer: A Description of theModes ofLivelihood nd Political Institutionsfa NiloticPeople (Oxford: xford

University Press, 1940).29. Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author(Cambridge: olity,1988),p. 71.30. James Clifford, Introduction: Partial Truths, in James Clifford andGeorge Marcus eds., Writing Culture.31. Evans Pritchard, Social Anthropology (London: Cohen & West, 1951), p.11.32. Strathern, The Limits ofAuto-Anthropology, p. 29.33. Florinda Donner, Shabano: A True Adventure in theRemote and MagicalHeart ofthe outhAmerican ungleNewYork:LaurelBooks, 1982)and

Mary Louise Pratt, Fieldwork inCommon Places, inWriting Culture.34. Ibid., p. 29.35. Rebecca DeHolmes, Shabano: Scandal or Superb Social Science, inAmerican Anthropologist, Vol. 84, No. 3 (1983), pp. 664-667, quoted inFieldwork inCommon Places.36. Clifford, On Ethnographic Self-Fashioning, p. 97.37. Paul Rabinow ed., Foucault Reader (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984),

pp. 101-120.38. Umberto Eco, et al., Interpretation and Overinterpretation (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1992), ch. 3.39. JudithOkeley, Own or Other Culture (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 23.40. Ibid., pp. 3-4.41. Dorinne Kondo, Dissolution and Reconstitution of Self: Implications forAnthropological Epistemology, in Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 1 (1984),p. 79.42. Marilyn Strathern, Partial Connections (Savaga, MD: Rowman &Littfield, 991),p. 35.43. Lila Abu-Lughod, Writing Against Culture, in Richard Fox ed.,Recapturing Anthropology: Working in thePresent (Santa Fe: School ofAmerican Research Press, 1991), p. 151.44. Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time and Perversion (St. Leonards: Allen &Unwin, 1995), p. 14.45. Takie Lebra, Self in Japanese Culture, in Nancy Rosenberger ed.,JapaneseSenseof Self (Cambridge: ambridge niversityress, 1992),p. 105.46. Abu-Lughod, Writing Against Culture, p. 151.47. Sonia Ryang, North Koreans in Japan: Language, Ideology, Identity(Boulder, O: WestviewPress, 1996).48. Abu Lughod, Writing Against Culture.



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4849. For example, Talal Asad, The Concept of Cultural Translation inBritishSocialAnthropology, nWriting ulture; eealsoChinuaAchebe, TheAfricanWriter and theEnglishLanguage, in PatrickWilliams andLaura Chrisman eds., Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory: AReader (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993).50. Henrietta Moore, A Passage for Difference: Essays inAnthropology andGender Cambridge:olity,1994),pp. 130-131.51. Henrietta Moore ed., The Future ofAnthropological Knowledge (London:

Routledge, 1996), p. 3.52. Ibid., p. 3.53. Arjun Appadurai, Putting Hierarchy in Its Place, in CulturalAnthropology, Vol. 3, No. 1 (1988), p. 39.54. Aihwa Ong, Anbthropology, China and Modernities: The Geopolitics ofCultural Knowledge, in The Future of Anthropological Knowledge, p.86.

55. Ibid., p. 85.56. Arjun Appadurai, Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for aTransnational Anthropology, inRecapturing Anthropology.57. Arjun Appadurai, Patriotism and ItsFutures, inPublic Culture, Vol. 5(1993), pp. 411-429.58. For example, Cherrie Morraga and Gloria Anzald?a eds., This BridgeCalledMy Back:WritingsyRadicalWomenofColor (Watertown,A:

Persephone Press, 1981), Bell Hooks, Feminist Theory. From Margin toCentre (Boston: South End Press, 1984), Paul Gilroy, 77**7* Ain't NoBlack in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation(London: Routledge, 1987), Minh-ha Trinh, Women, Native, Other:

Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana UniversityPress, 1989) and Catherine Hall, Histories, Empires and the PostColonial Moment, in Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti eds., The PostColonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons (London:Routledge, 1996).59. Jonathan Rutherford ed., Identity: Community, Culture, Difference(London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), pp. 24-26.60. Moore, The Future ofAnthropological Knowledge, p. 1.61. Ibid.

62. Grosz, Space, Time and Perversion, p. 22.63. Roland Barthes, The Death of theAuthor, in Image, Music, Text (NewYork: Hill andWang, 1077), p. 146.64. Ibid., p. 148.65. Robert Emerson, Rachel Fretz and Linda Shaw, Writing EthnographicFieldnotes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Pp. 10; 38.66. Pratt, Fieldwork inCommon Places.67. Stephen Tylor, Post-modern Ethnography: From Document of theOccult toOccult Document, inClifford andMarcus eds., \ThePoeticsandPoliticsof thnography.



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4968. Clifford, On Ethnographic Self-Fashioning, and JohnGriffith, JosephConrad and the Anthropological Dilemma. Bewildered Traveller

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).69. See, for example, Strathern's criticism of Tylor inPartial Connections.70. Dorinne Kondo, Bad Girls: Theater, Women of Color, and thePoliticsof Representation, in Ruth Behar and Deborah Gordon eds., WomenWriting Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).71. Susan Allen, Media Anthropology: InformingGlobal Citizens (Westport:Bergin Garvey, 1984).72. See Vincent Crapanzano, Tuhami, Portrait of a Moroccan (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1980), for a successful example.

Documents

Ryang, 1997 Native Anthropology