Contributors. Anne Allison, James Clifford, Michael M.J. Fischer, Kim Fortun, Richard Handler, John L. Jackson, Jr., George E. Marcus, Charles Piot, Hugh Raffles, Danilyn Rutherford, Orin Starn, Kathleen Stewart, Michael Taussig, Kamala Visweswaran
Contributors. Anne Allison, James Clifford, Michael M.J. Fischer, Kim Fortun, Richard Handler, John L. Jackson, Jr., George E. Marcus, Charles Piot, Hugh Raffles, Danilyn Rutherford, Orin Starn, Kathleen Stewart, Michael Taussig, Kamala Visweswaran
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Contributors. Anne Allison, James Clifford, Michael M.J. Fischer, Kim Fortun, Richard Handler, John L. Jackson, Jr., George E. Marcus, Charles Piot, Hugh Raffles, Danilyn Rutherford, Orin Starn, Kathleen Stewart, Michael Taussig, Kamala Visweswaran
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822375654 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/09/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 280 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Writing Culture and the Life of Anthropology
By Orin Starn
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2015 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7565-4
CHAPTER 1
Feeling Historical
James Clifford
Twenty-five years after Writing Culture. What was that moment? Where are we now? The conjunctures. And a story to connect them.
Telling history in medias res, historicizing while standing on the historical banana peel. One thing is certain: you will be proven wrong, or at best, passé.
I'd like to say from the start that I'm uncomfortable with statements like those I've heard recently: "Writing Culture transformed ethnography" or "Writing Culture was a game changer." Transformations were occurring. Games were changing. But Writing Culture was part of the changes, not their cause—however avant-garde we may have felt at the time.
Writing Culture registered, very imperfectly, what now seem to have been historic forces for change: anticolonial and feminist, to mention only the two that I stressed in my introduction. There were plenty of others. The book's gaps, its "exclusions," have been amply explored: race, class, gender, sexuality. And where is visual culture? What about film, so important in the reconfiguration of ethnographic practice? Isaac Julien's Territories was screened in 1984, the year of the Santa Fe seminar. And Faye Ginsburg recently reminded me of Jean Rouch, a neglected inspiration. Where are technology, communications media—structuring forces that today loom so large?
The fact that the book was widely read, that it was debated and made sense in contexts beyond anthropology at least shows its embeddedness in the historical moment. Its originality? At best, you get to be six months ahead of the zeitgeist.
This is how our project looks to me a quarter-century later. The retrospection I offer here is very much a song of experience, not of innocence. My own writing (I won't speak for the others) now seems innocent in its tone of confident, knowing critique—a voice so irritating to many of Writing Culture 's detractors.
Today I feel embarrassed by that voice. I also wish I could reclaim some of its confidence.
Let me begin again, with another return to Writing Culture, a recent French translation of my introduction, "Vérités partielles, vérités partials" (2011). The translation, with a preface, was the work of a doctoral candidate I've never met: Emir Mahieddin. I was asked for a short afterword. I'll use it as the starting point for my expanded reflections here.
Reading one's own words in translation is always an experience of estrangement. One sees, hears oneself from a distance—another person in a different time. And of course any translation, however faithful, is something new, a performance for unimagined audiences. What could Writing Culture possibly mean, what work might it do, for French readers (or for any readers) in 2011? In his astute introduction Mahieddin suggests that Writing Culture and, more important, the intense debates that followed its appearance twenty-five years ago, have attained a kind of "classic" status. No longer a succès de scandale, the book can perhaps be read for what it actually says.
In the United States when "postmodernism" was so urgently resisted, the barbarians at the gates were associated with "French theory." Simultaneously in France "le postmodernisme Américain" was being held at arm's length. But of course the zeitgeist didn't respect national borders. Many of the trends associated with postmodernism had their own French trajectories in the work of Jean Jamin, Jeanne Favret-Saada, Jean Bazin, Marc Augé, and Alban Bensa, to name just a few prominent anthropological examples. I might also mention Bruno Latour and François Hartog. The interdisciplinary openness of l'Homme under Jamin's editorship seems very much in the critical, experimental spirit of Writing Culture. And yet, as Mahieddin notes, there has been resistance, a sustained suspicion of intellectual movements that were pervasive across the Atlantic and the English Channel: cultural studies, feminist theory, various neo-Marxisms, critical studies of race and ethnicity. Ten years ago a quick trip on the Eurostar from London to Paris took one into a different intellectual universe. In the bookstores, where were the topics that filled the British shelves? Where was race? Gender? Deconstruction? One looked in vain for Stuart Hall, Fredric Jameson, Donna Haraway, Paul Gilroy, Judith Butler, or their local equivalents. Today the situation seems to be changing, the general attitude less insular, certainly among younger scholars. Perhaps Writing Culture will have its delayed moment in France. Perhaps.
* * *
As I read Writing Culture now—my own words especially—I feel most profoundly their historicity, their distance. They belong to another world. There is no entry for globalization in the book's index. No Internet, no neoliberal, no postcolonial. A wiki? For us, back then, it might have been some kind of djinn or spirit! Writing was, well, writing—a matter of pen and paper. Today it's not hard to imagine the cover photograph of Writing Culture with Stephen Tyler furiously texting and his bemused "informant" absorbed in a cell-phone call.
So much has changed in these twenty-five years. How can the changes be understood? What historical narratives make sense of them? In retrospect I have come to believe that a profound shift of power relations and discursive locations was going on, and still is. Call it, for short, the decentering of the West. The discipline of anthropology has been an inextricable part of this decentering, and so have its critiques, books like Writing Culture. I hasten to add that decentering doesn't mean abolition, defeat, disappearance, or transcendence of "the West"—that still-potent zone of power. But a change, uneven and incomplete, has been under way. The ground has shifted under our feet.
A conversation from the early 1970s comes to mind. I was a doctoral student doing research work at the London School of Economics in the Malinowski papers, and one day outside the library I found myself chatting about the history of his discipline with Raymond Firth, the great anthropologist of Tikopia. Firth had been a student and colleague of Malinowski. He shook his head over attempts to connect anthropological research with colonial power, in particular the important book edited by Talal Asad, Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (1973). Without minimizing the issue, Firth thought the relations between anthropology and empire were more complex than some of the critics were suggesting. He shook his head in a mixture of pretended and real confusion. What happened? "Not so long ago we were radicals. We thought of ourselves as gadflies and reformers, advocates for the value of indigenous cultures, defenders of our people. Now, all of a sudden, we're handmaidens of empire!"
This is what it's like to feel historical. The marking of colonialism as a "period" (a span of time with a possible ending) came suddenly to Euro-American liberal scholars, at least those who noticed the changes. Who would have predicted in the early 1950s that within a decade most of the colonies ruled by France and Britain would be formally independent? Feeling historical can be like a rug pulled out: a gestalt change perhaps, or a sense of sudden relocation, of being seen from some previously hidden perspective. For Euro-American anthropology, the experience of a hostile identification as a Western science, a purveyor of partial truths, has been a troubling, alienating, but ultimately enriching process. The same learning opportunity challenged many scholars of my generation with respect to gender and race.
In retrospect I locate Writing Culture's intervention within a larger, postwar narrative of political and cultural shifts. To explain the changes and the perspective I bring to them I will need to explore my personal experience, like Firth's, of being repositioned. The relevant slice of history just happens to coincide with my own lifetime. Perhaps the critics who insisted that postmodern reflexivity could only lead to solipsism were right after all!
* * *
Born in 1945, I grew up in New York City and Vermont. This was the peace of the victors: the cold war standoff and a sustained, U.S.-led economic boom. My fundamental sense of reality—what actually existed and was possible—would be formed in circumstances of unprecedented material prosperity and security. Of course, my generation experienced recurring fears of nuclear annihilation. But because disarmament was not around the corner, we learned, on a daily basis, to live with "the balance of terror." In other respects the world seemed stable and expansive, at least for white, middle-class North Americans. We would never lack resources. Wars were fought elsewhere. The lines of geopolitical antagonism were clearly drawn, manageable.
New York City during the 1950s felt like the center of the world. North American power and influence were concentrated in downtown Manhattan. A subway ride took you to the United Nations, Wall Street, the Museum of Modern Art, or avant-garde Greenwich Village. The dramatic decolonizing movements of the postwar period arrived belatedly in the form of civil rights, the Vietnam debacle, and a growing receptiveness to cultural alternatives. My critical thinking would be nurtured by radical art and the politics of diversity. Its sources were dada and surrealism, cross-cultural anthropology, music, and popular culture. New historical actors—women, excluded racial and social groups—were making claims for justice and recognition. I saw academic work as inseparable from wider challenges to societal norms and cultural authority. The moment brought a new openness in intellectual, political, and cultural life. To mention only the U.S. university, the ethnocentric, male-dominated English department of the 1950s now seems like a kind of bad dream. The moment also produced exclusivist identity politics, hedonistic subcultures, and forms of managed multiculturalism. The language of diversity could mask persistent inequalities. My own writing never escaped the liberal pretense of "making space" for marginal perspectives. Yet despite these limitations, the politics of cultural critique, of experimentation and inclusion were serious responses to an ongoing, irreversible displacement.
When I was thirty-three I moved from the North Atlantic to the edge of the Pacific, from one global ocean and world center to another. For a time I was a diasporic New Yorker, living out on a periphery, the West Coast. But little by little the presence of Asia, the long history of North-South movements in the Americas, and influences from culturally rich Island Pacific worlds made themselves felt. I was living in a decentered, dynamic world of contacts. The whole idea of the West as a kind of historical headquarters stopped making sense.
Moreover in northern California I could clearly see that the decentering at work was not just an outcome of postwar decolonizing energies and contestations during the global 1960s. These forces had made, and were still making, a difference. But the shift was also the work of newly flexible and mobile forms of capitalism. I was caught up in two unfinished, postwar historical forces working in tension and synergy: decolonization and globalization. Santa Cruz, California, my home after 1978, epitomized this doubleness. A 1960s enclave of countercultural, antiauthority visionaries, the town was also a bedroom community for the high-tech world of Silicon Valley. This was the "Pacific Rim" of massive capital flows, Asian Tigers, and labor migrations. I also lived on a frontera, a place in the uncontrolled, expanding borderland linking Latin America with the United States and Canada. In the northern half of Santa Cruz County: a university and town government strongly identified with multicultural, feminist, environmentalist, anti-imperial agendas. In the southern half of the county: a population of Mexican and Latino immigrant workers, a long history of labor struggles, and the growing power of agribusiness. I began to think of the present historical moment as a contradictory, inescapably ambivalent conjuncture: simultaneously post- and neocolonial. My writing in the 1990s grappled with this recognition that the energies of decolonization and globalization were historically entangled—sometimes tightly, sometimes loosely or in struggle.
California felt less like the U.S. West Coast and more like a crossing of multiple unfinished histories. My book Routes (1997) reflects this sense of dislocation. Its final chapter, "Fort Ross Meditation," took me north to Alaska and another frontera region, Beringia. Fort Ross, just up the coast from San Francisco, was an outpost of the Russian fur-trading empire, its labor force composed of Aleut (or Alutiiq, as they now call themselves) sea otter hunters. I would follow the legacy of these mobile natives in contemporary Alaskan identity politics. (This is in my current book,Returns.) The Fort Ross contact zone also led me to a deeper concern with the histories of indigenous California, a topic I've pursued through the open-ended story of "Ishi," the state's most famous Indian. Teaching in Santa Cruz also opened contacts with South Asia and the Island Pacific through the graduate students who studied in the University of California, Santa Cruz's interdisciplinary history of consciousness program. Academic travelers, they identified themselves as "postcolonial" or "indigenous." Some would remain to teach in the United States; others went home. Circulation and contact continue. These younger scholars' clear sense of working within—while resisting and looking beyond—a Euro-American world of ideas and institutions intensified my own sense of being displaced, a "late-Western" subject. I also felt myself recruited to their projects.
* * *
A deepened awareness of geopolitical (dis)location empowers and limits my historical perspective in ways I can only begin to grasp. Developments after 2000 are even less susceptible to narration than the post-1960s decades. It is impossible to say with certainty what comes next. A few things, at least, seem evident: The United States, newly vulnerable, is no longer an uncontested global leader. Its military surge following 9/11 proved unsustainable—a spasmodic reaction to secular, irreversible changes. There will doubtless be further adventures, but U.S. global hegemony is no longer a credible project. It is countered economically by Asia and Europe; by Islam as only the most visible among non-Western globalizing ideologies; by resistance to neoliberalism in Latin America and elsewhere; by financial instability and uncontrollable markets; by the volatile, uneven spread of predatory forms of capitalist accumulation; by rising inequality, scarcity, and instability worldwide; by deepening ecological limits and competition for resources; and by the internal fragmentation and fiscal emergency of more and more nation-states. The signs of systemic crisis and transition are everywhere—crisis without resolution, transition without destination. In the 1980s Margaret Thatcher could famously declare, "TINA: There Is No Alternative." In the early 1990s Francis Fukuyama, with a straight face, announced "the end of history." Today everyone knows there are many alternatives, for better and worse.
Where does Writing Culture fit in this history that I've been painting with a broom? Conceived in the early 1980s it can be understood as either a late 1960s or an early 1990s work. The book's critical energy, its reforming zeal, and its sense of (neo)colonization as the principal locus of power relations signal a 1960s genealogy. But one need only contrast it with a precursor, Dell Hymes's influential collection from 1972, Reinventing Anthropology, to see the changes. Writing Culture is distinctly post-1960s in style and emphasis, especially in its concern with discursive determination, its assumption that forms of representation actively constitute subjects in relations of power. The world it expresses is more that of Foucault than of Fanon. Or perhaps I should say more late Foucault than early Fanon.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Writing Culture and the Life of Anthropology by Orin Starn. Copyright © 2015 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Introduction / Orin Starn 11. Feeling Historical / James Clifford 25
2. The Legacies of Writing Culture and the Near Future of the Ethnographic Form: A Sketch / George E. Marcus 35
3. Between History and Coincidence: Writing Culture in the Annual Review of Anthropology, ca. 1982 / Richard Handler 52
4. Time, Camera, and the (Digital) Pen: Writing Culture Operating Systems 1.0-3.0 / Michael M. J. Fischer 72
5. Kinky Empiricism / Danilyn Rutherford 105
6. Ethnography in Late Industrialism / Kim Fortun 119
7. Excelente Zona Social / Michael Taussig 137
8. Ethnography Is, Ethnography Ain't / John L. Jackson Jr. 152
9. From Village to Precarious Anthropology / Anne Allison 170
10. Kinship by Other Means / Charles Piot 189
11. Dying Worlds / Kamala Visweswaran 204
12. Precarity's Forms / Kathleen Stewart 221
13. Writing Culture (or Something Like That) / Hugh Raffles 228
Bibliography 237
Contributors 261
Index 265
What People are Saying About This
"This exceptional collection is indeed about the lives of anthropology in the post-Writing Culture era. Beyond a uniquely enlightening discussion of the multiple faces of the field at present, it envisages the rich paths the discipline might take in the era of radical climate change and planet-wide social and cultural dislocations. It shows how, in the interstices of recalcitrant notions such as fieldwork, ethnography, and culture novel approaches to context, history, life, and connection are yielding an amazing range of practices that portend powerful anthropological futures. To the question posed twenty-five years ago of 'Why write, and how,' some of the essays now pointedly add 'Why act, and how do we act?' It still behooves us, all of those doing intellectual work, to grapple with these question that have haunted the academy for decades."
"This volume's contributors offer lively and provocative readings and show the legacy of Writing Culture in their reflexive first-person accounts of fieldwork and teaching. The authors experiment not only with writing but also with new kinds of topics that are reframing the field. All write with wit, creativity, and a passion to secure anthropology’s contemporary and future relevance."