Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences
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Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences
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| ISBN-13: | 9780226229539 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 12/10/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 230 |
| Sales rank: | 225,628 |
| File size: | 747 KB |
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Anthropology as Cultural Critique
An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences
By George E. Marcus, Michael M. J. Fischer
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 1999 The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-22953-9
CHAPTER 1
A Crisis of Representation in the Human Sciences
The present is a time of reassessment of dominant ideas across the human sciences (a designation broader than and inclusive of the conventional social sciences), extending to law, art, architecture, philosophy, literature, and even the natural sciences. This reassessment is more salient in some disciplines than in others, but its presence is pervasive. It is not just the ideas themselves that are coming under attack but the paradigmatic style in which they have been presented. Particularly in the social sciences, the goal of organizing disciplines by abstract, generalizing frameworks that encompass and guide all efforts at empirical research is being fundamentally challenged.
Clifford Geertz's paper, "Blurred Genres" (1980b), attempted to characterize the current trend by noting the fluid borrowing of ideas and methods from one discipline to another. Geertz did not, however, attempt to analyze the dilemmas of the various disciplines. While the problem of the loss of encompassing theories remains the same from discipline to discipline, the formulation of and responses to this predicament are varied. For example, in literary criticism, there has been the waning of the "new criticism," a paradigm which asserted that the meaning of texts was fully explorable in terms of their internal construction. Now, literary critics have incorporated, among other moves, social theories of literary production and reception (see Lentricchia 1980 and the excellent discussion in the late Elizabeth Bruss's Beautiful Theories, 1982). In law, there have arisen demystifying critiques by the Critical Legal Studies movement of the long authoritative model of legal reasoning (see, for example, Livingston 1982.). In art, architecture, as well as literature, techniques that once had shock value or reoriented perception, such as surrealism, today have lost their original force, thus stimulating a debate about the nature of postmodernist aesthetics (see Jameson 1984). In social theory, the trend is reflected in challenges to establishment positivism (see Giddens 1976, 1979). In neoclassical economics, it is expressed in a crisis of forecasting and economic policy (see Thurow 1983) as well as in a critique of the ideal of growth in economic theory (see Hirsch 1976, and Piore and Sabel 1984). In philosophy, it takes the form of a recognition of the devastating implications of issues of contextuality and indeterminancies in human life for the construction of abstract systems, based on clearly derived and universal principles of justice, morality, and discourse (see Ungar 1976, 1984; Rorty 1979). In the current lively debate about the possibility of artificial intelligence, a key issue is precisely that of an adequate language of description (see Dennett 1984: 1454). Finally, in the natural sciences (physics, especially) and mathematics, the trend is indicated by a preference among some theorists for concentrating less on elegant theoretical visions of order, and more on the micropatterns of disorder—for example, the attention that "chaos" theory has recently gotten in physics, chemistry, biology, and mathematics (for a popular account of this development, see Gleick 1984).
Present conditions of knowledge are defined not so much by what they are as by what they come after. In general discussion within the humanities and social sciences, the present indeed is often characterized as "postparadigm"—postmodernism, poststructuralism, post-Marxism, for example. It is striking that in Jean-François Lyotard's acute exploration of The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1984 [1979]), he too should cite the contemporary "incredulity towards metanarratives" which previously legitimated the rules of science. He speaks of a "crisis of narratives" with a turn to multiple "language games" that give rise to "institutions in patches." "Postmodern knowledge," he says, "is not simply a tool of the authorities; it refines our sensitivity to differences and reinforces our ability to tolerate the incommensurable" (p. xxv). The key feature of this moment, then, is the loosening of the hold over fragmented scholarly communities of either specific totalizing visions or a general paradigmatic style of organizing research. The authority of "grand theory" styles seems suspended for the moment in favor of a close consideration of such issues as contextuality, the meaning of social life to those who enact it, and the explanation of exceptions and indeterminants rather than regularities in phenomena observed—all issues that make problematic what were taken for granted as facts or certainties on which the validity of paradigms had rested.
The part of these conditions in which we are most interested is what we call a crisis of representation. This is the intellectual stimulus for the contemporary vitality of experimental writing in anthropology. The crisis arises from uncertainity about adequate means of describing social reality. In the United States, it is an expression of the failure of post—World War II paradigms, or the unifying ideas of a remarkable number of fields, to account for conditions within American society, if not within Western societies globally, which seem to be in a state of profound transition.
This trend may have much to do with the unfavorable shift in the relative position of American power and influence in the world, and with the widespread perception of the dissolution of the ruling postwar model of the liberal welfare state at home. Both the taste for totalizing frameworks and the predominance in many academic disciplines of general models of stability in the social and natural order seemed to have coincided with the previously more confident and secure national mood. The current exhaustion of this style of theorizing merely points up the politicized context in which post-World War II intellectual trends have been shaped all along.
The questioning of specific postwar paradigms, such as the social theory of Talcott Parsons, gained its force during the 1960s when there was a widespread politicization of academic thought in the United States. Yet, those times were sufficiently dominated by hopes for (or reactions to) images of massive, revolutionary transformations of society that grand, abstract theoretical visions themselves remained in vogue. While retaining its politicized dimension as a legacy of the 1960s, social thought in the years since has grown more suspicious of the ability of encompassing paradigms to ask the right questions, let alone provide answers, about the variety of local responses to the operation of global systems, which are not understood as certainly as they were once thought to be under the regime of "grand theory" styles. Consequently, the most interesting theoretical debates in a number of fields have shifted to the level of method, to problems of epistemology, interpretation, and discursive forms of representation themselves, employed by social thinkers. Elevated to a central concern of theoretical reflection, problems of description become problems of representation. These are issues that have been most trenchantly explored by philosophical and literary theories of interpretation—thus their prominence now as a source of inspiration for theoretical and self-critical reflection in so many disciplines.
The intellectual historian must have a sense of déjà vu in contemplating these recent developments, for they recapitulate issues debated in other periods, most proximately during the 1920s and 1930s. There is often a circular motion to intellectual history, a return with fresh perspectives to questions explored earlier, forgotten or temporarily resolved, and then reposed in attempts to manage intractable contemporary dilemmas. Yet, this history is better conceived as spiral rather than circular. Rather than mere repetition, there is cumulative growth in knowledge, through the creative rediscovery of older and persistent questions in response to keenly experienced moments of dissatisfaction with the state of a discipline's practice tied to perceptions of unprecedented changes in the world.
Ours is once again a period rich in experimentation and conceptual risk-taking. Older dominant frameworks are not so much denied—there being nothing so grand to replace them—as suspended. The ideas they embody remain intellectual resources to be used in novel and eclectic ways. The closest such previous period was the 1920s and 1930s when evolutionary paradigms, laissez-faire liberalism, and revolutionary socialism and marxism all came under energetic critiques. Instead of grand theories and encyclopedic works, writers devoted themselves to the essay, to documenting diverse social experiences at close quarters, and to fragmentary illuminations. The atmosphere was one of uncertainty about the nature of major trends of change and the ability of existing social theories to grasp it holistically. The essay, experience, documentation, intensive focus on fragments and detail—these were the terms and vocabulary of the generation of Walter Benjamin, Robert Musil, Ludwig Wittgenstein, the surrealists, and the American documentary realists of the 1920s and 1930s.
Fascism and World War II brought to fruition the worst fears of the prewar speculations about the effects of the social transformations in industrial capitalism, communications/propaganda, and commodity production. In the aftermath, America emerged as the dominant economic force, and it created a new creed of can-do modernization. In the social sciences, Parsonian sociology became a hegemonic framework, not merely for sociology, but for anthropology, psychology, political science, and models of economic development as well. Based on his synthesis of the major systems of nineteenth-century social theory (including Weber and Durkheim, but excluding Marx), Parsons provided a comprehensive, abstract vision of the social system, and its relationship to the separate systems of culture and personality. His theoretical project promised to coordinate and unify conceptually the empirical work of all the social sciences. It was an intellectual effort of such vast scope and ambition that it occupied minds and disciplines for some time.
During the 1960s, Parsonian sociology rapidly lost its hold, to disappear quite as dramatically from open terms of reference by the time Parsons died as had, for example, Spencerian sociology before it. The apolitical and ahistoric character of Parsonian theory could not be sustained through the upheavals of the 1960s. In purely analytic terms, reducing the richness of social life, especially conflict, to the notions of function and system equilibrium on which the Parsonian vision depended, proved unsatisfactory. Parsonian social theory has not vanished; too many generations of students, now prominent scholars, were trained in terms of it for that to happen. But the theoretical edifice of Parsons has been thoroughly delegitimated, though many ideas within it remain intellectual resources at present, along with a multitude of other influences.
Furthermore, it is not that contemporary attempts to revive Parsonian sociology do not sometimes occur (as in the work of Niklas Luhmann 1984 and Jeffrey Alexander 1982-83) or that different, but equally ambitious efforts at grand theory do not arise (for example, sociobiology, "the new synthesis"—see Wilson 1975). It is simply that they each become just one more voice to be heard at the moment, with little likelihood of achieving hegemonic status. Indeed, if Talcott Parsons were writing today, his synthetic scheme would merely take its place among several other grand, and not so grand, programs and suggestions for research, each capturing its own fragment among scholars within and across disciplines.
So, too, in the contemporary period a similar diffusion of legitimacy and authority attends Marxism. Marxism is a nineteenth-century paradigm which presented itself as a natural science of society that not only had an intellectual identity but also a political one. It was a grand theory to be enacted and measured against history. In the period of Parsonian hegemony in the United States, Marxism maintained itself as an alternative, suppressed and awaiting its release. Today, there are still those who desire to preserve the framework, dogma, and canonic terminology of Marxism—formalists like Maurice Godelier and Louis Althusser. But there are also more interpretive Marxists, accepting the framework loosely as a realm of shared discourse, but probing within it to find out in cultural and experiential terms what concepts such as mode of production, commodity fetishism, or relations and forces of production might mean under diverse and changing world conditions. The label Marxist itself has become increasingly ambiguous; the use of Marxist ideas in social thought has become diffuse and pervasive; and there no longer seem to be any clear paradigmatic boundaries to Marxism. There is indeed a new empirical, and essentially ethnographic/documentary mood in Marxist writing (see Anderson 1984). It is just this sort of diffusion of ideas across boundaries that is to be expected in a period such as this when paradigmatic styles of social thought are suspended. Old labels are thus a poor guide to the current fluidity and crosscurrents in intellectual trends. While Marxism as a system of thought remains strong as an image, in practice, it is difficult to identify Marxists anymore, or to locate a contemporary central tradition for it.
Parsonian social theory and Marxism (as well as French structuralism, more recently) have all served prominently during the postwar period as paradigms or disciplined frameworks for research in the human sciences. All remain today as sources of concepts, methodological questions, and procedures, but none authoritatively guides research programs on a large scale. They have become merely alternatives among many others that are used or discarded at will by researchers operating much more independently. The current period, like the 1920s and 1930s before it, is thus one of acute awareness of the limits of our conceptual systems as systems.
So far we have viewed the present crisis of representation as one distinctive, alternate swing of a pendulum between periods in which paradigms, or totalizing theories, are relatively secure, and periods in which paradigms lose their legitimacy and authority—when theoretical concerns shift to problems of the interpretation of the details of a reality that eludes the ability of dominant paradigms to describe it, let alone explain it. It is worth playing back this broadly conceived vision of intellectual history, which sets the context of the present experimentation with anthropological writing in terms that specifically capture the literary and rhetorical qualities of such shifts. To do so, we consult the pioneering study by Hayden White, Metahistory (1973), which traces the major changes in nineteenth-century European history and social theory, registered at the level of techniques for writing about society. In briefly considering White's framework, we see twentieth-century anthropology, as well as any other discipline which has depended on discursive, essentially literary accounts of its subjects, as comparable to the efforts of nineteenth-century historiography to establish a science of society through presenting realistic and accurate portraits of conditions and events.
Any historical (or anthropological) work exhibits emplotment, argument, and ideological implication, according to White. These three elements may be at odds with one another as well as being in an unstable relation to the facts they attempt to encompass and order. From these instabilities come shifting modes of writing which also show connections with broader social currents. The struggle to reconcile conflicts among these elements in the writing of texts, especially of important, influential works, poses problems of method for other practicing historians that define a theoretical discourse about the interpretation of reality. White's scheme is of interest to us here precisely because it translates the problem of historical (and anthropological) explanation, most often conceived as a clash of theoretical paradigms, into the writer's problem of representation.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
ContentsPreface
Introduction
1. A Crisis of Representation in the Human Sciences
2. Ethnography and Interpretive Anthropology
3. Conveying Other Cultural Experience: The Person, Self, and Emotions
4. Taking Account of World Historical Political Economy: Knowable Communities in Larger Systems
5. The Repatriation of Anthropology as Cultural Critique
6. Two Contemporary Techniques of Cultural Critique in Anthropology
A Concluding Note
Appendix
Notes
References
Index