Abstract
The publication in 1986 of the essays edited by Clifford and Marcus as Writing Culture was widely greeted as a major landmark in anthropology. Indeed, Starn suggests that it is ‘perhaps the single most influential anthropology book in recent decades’, and even manages to compare its significance to the appearance of Halley’s comet and the first IBM laptop in the same year. (That sort of silly hyperbole is not atypical.) It was certainly an influential collection of essays, though I suspect its actual influence has been more in terms of a general reputation than on the basis of its detailed contents. The collective memory of the book ascribes to it a fundamental critique of anthropology’s knowledge. Whereas anthropology could for many years cope with theoretical disputes (and it always was disputatious), it could always treat ‘the ethnography’ as given, a relatively secure bedrock of empirical knowledge. The Writing as Culture moment proposed a radical re-assessment of even that certitude. It crystallised a particular critique of ethnographic fieldwork and reportage. It disparaged the ethnography written from a single omniscient authorial standpoint, couched in a single authorial voice. It advocated more open or ‘messy’ texts. Reflexivity and representations were its main themes. It was a critique that paralleled many of the fashionable tropes of postmodernism.
Now the current volume contains a series of essays that in various ways reflect upon the past thirty years or so, and the current state of anthropological knowledge. In the course of those reflections, the authors comment on the alleged crisis of representation, and the discontinuities that anthropology has experienced over that period. They unconsciously reveal some remarkable continuities at the same time. Indeed, anthropology as a discipline and as a body of texts has remained more robust in many ways than its authors might be aware of. One cannot do justice to all of the contributions here, so some generalisations must suffice. First, one needs to appreciate that when these authors refer to ‘anthropology’, they in fact only mean American cultural anthropology. They show virtually no interest in any scholarship beyond the United States. Indeed, it is one of the recurrent ironies of the discipline that its authors should be so resolutely ethnocentric. Despite the fact that there have been significant contributions from elsewhere, the bibliography remains almost completely innocent of any texts from Europe, the United Kingdom or Australia. France and Britain appear briefly in these pages, only as formerly colonial powers, not as sites of scholarship.
Secondly, the anthropology represented here is quite extraordinarily self-satisfied. It acknowledges no other work in the social sciences. You would not know that fieldwork was practised by people calling themselves sociologists for as long as anthropologists have done it. You would not know that a very large number of social scientists have analysed their own and others’ textual practices, because they do not exist. The only passing reference to ‘others’ practising fieldwork is in the editor’s introduction (p. 6), where he refers to ‘market researchers, political strategists, global health specialists, and other lost souls searching for something beyond the census numbers and online questionnaires’. So much for ‘othering’ on the part of anthropologists. How arrogant. How smug. How ignorant.
More to the point, of course, there were plenty of people writing about the textual practices of the social sciences before and after the Clifford and Marcus moment. Many of them in fact paid much closer attention to the actual texts of their disciplines than the anthropologists ever did. But they do not count. This collection also illustrates quite vividly yet another rot that has assailed anthropological writing – one that these authors might turn their attention to with advantage. It is now fashionable for anthropologists to write in the most overblown manner. A discipline that was once admired for its texts, dense and technical though they could be, is now afflicted with purple prose. It goes with the self-congratulatory tone of so much of this stuff. There is a final irony. Inspection of the journals, the book reviews and the publishers’ catalogues suggests that there are still plenty of anthropologists (as well as many others) producing lucid accounts of social settings and organizations that are relatively free of textual experimentation and self-absorption. The foundations were not quite as thoroughly shaken as these authors might like to believe.