THE A NTHROPOL OGIS T A S HERO

THREE EXPONENTS OF POST-MODERNIST

ANTHROPOLOGY
Review Article

Bruce
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Kapferer, University College London

Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives: the Anthropologist as Author (Polity Press: Cambridge, 1988)
Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: a Study in Terror and Healing (The University of Chicago Press: Chicago
and London, 1987.)
James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: 20th-century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass.,
1988)

All the books discussed here are distinguished examples of a new spirit of criticism and writing in anthropology. Each is powerfully influenced by European philosophical arguments, arguments which have received new form and
vitality in crossing the Atlantic. The three books examined manifest a North
American post-modernism which is rapidly becoming a dominant anthropological genre, one in which writing style and the process of descriptive authentication hitherto kept in the background are made central and examined.
Whilst each book is distinctive, in various ways they are strikingly similar.
Often they cross refer, Geertz and Clifford especially. In a sense, they are in
a debate with each other as well as with much of conventional anthropology.
All raise critical issues vital in the practice of anthropology. For me the most
challenging book is Taussig. I devote the major part of this review to a discussion of it. The two others are more methodological and less ethnographic
than is Taussig, though as we shall see, Cliffords work is in fact an ethnography, an ethnography of anthropology. I start with Geertz, whose work sets
the scene and close with a discussion of Clifford. The latter is more conventional in style and theme than Taussig, but remarkably similar in the structuring of its text and argument. Taussig has a political concern which I find
particularly exciting and relevant, Geertz and Clifford are far more bland. But

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Geertz, like some grand master, sets the scene, and in certain ways Taussig
and particularly Clifford are his children. I close with Clifford because he is
a clear development out of Geertz and his book represents the most extensive evaluation of the state of the art. Clifford also clarifies the deconstructionist purpose behind the new critical ethnography and, I think, avoids some of
the pitfalls in the approach which Taussigs important book encounters.

GEERTZS BRIEF LIVES

Geertz book is short and typically highly compressed. Many of its arguments
are already well-known and it is for this reason that I discuss it somewhat briefly. However, Geertz is a good beginning. He has always been the anthropologist most explicitly concerned with authorship and modes of writing and
ethnographic presentation. His many monographs can be seen as experiments
in styles of ethnographic argument. It is Geertz who has often registered sharp
disagreement with ruling analytical orthodoxies in anthropology. He has
championed particular European influences in philosophical and sociological
concern, most notably Schutz and Weber. These more fluid and open-ended
approaches contrast with the more rigid paradigms of anthropological thought
and practice which have hitherto been dominant. Geertz has scorned the tight
analytical frames which characterize much anthropology in Europe and it is
the breaking free from such approaches which is characteristic of the three
books discussed here, and of the new post-modern anthropology in general.
In Works and Lives Geertz organizes his argument tightly around the issue
of ethnographic writing, the ploys of style whereby the ethnographic account
achieves its authenticity, the coding of the authors ideological commitment
and so on. The book is an overall statement on Geertz methodological and
conceptual orientation and misgivings. He achieves this through a critique of
some of the acknowledged greats in the formation of modern anthropology
(Levi-Strauss, Evans-Pritchard, Malinowski, Benedict) as well as some, as
yet, less recognised figures (Dwyer, Crapanzano, Rabinow, Read). I stress
that Geertz in his interpretational assessment of other anthropologists appears, in my reading at least, to reveal both the historical phases of his own intellectual development and the reasons behind his current view as to the
direction of anthropology.
He does in his critique what he states anthropologists do in their ethnographies, exfoliate dimensions of themselves through the medium of the other.
I might add that Geertz own various ethnographic studies are oriented in a
similar direction to those anthropologists whom he critically confronts. The
sprawling, inchoate, cover everything style of The Religion of Java is in the

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tradition of Malinowskis writings on the Trobriands. A structural formalism

and a concern for organizing principles not greatly distant from an Evans-Pritchard is discernable in Agricultural Involution and, more recently, in Negara. A Ruth Benedict kind of sweeping comparativism is evident in Islam
Observed or in Geertzscelebrated study of the Balinese cockfight.
Geertz is opposed to chronologically linear interpretations of intellectual
development. Ideas or intellectual directions with vastly distinct orientational
implications can take root in similar circumstances. Levi-Strausss formalism
and Ruth Benedicts comparison, with its concern to elucidate contrasting experiential realities, took root in similar conditions of global conflict and crisis. Both scholars developed their ideas in the exciting ferment of East Coast
intellectual society. Both, in differing degree, discovered their anthropological direction influenced by the work of Boas and the wonderful complexities
of American Indian worlds. Geertz starts his lapidary sketches of major anthropologists whose names categorize or mark specific styles of anthropological writing with Levi-Strauss. He closes with Ruth Benedict.
Benedicts direction rather than that of a Lkvi-Strauss is clearly preferred
by Geertz-her generalizing relativism, with its concern to uncover the dimensions of diverse and autonomous subjective worlds. Benedict leads the
way into certain aspects of present-day anthropological debate and dilemma.
Despite the fact that Benedicts Chrysanthemum and the Sword was written
to inform the United States Government in the context of its post-conquest
administration of Japan, Benedicts work acutely decenters any American
sense of cultural superiority. Geertz approves of Benedicts directness and her
own sense of critically involved commitment. She takes anthropology beyond the distanced formalism of Levi-Strauss. Benedict essentializes culture
while Levi-Strauss essentializes structure-and thereby universalizes culture in structure and dehistorizes humanity in a way long disliked by Geertz.
Levi-Strauss formalism obscures the dynamics of human agency and the power of human beings to construct and thus to change their worlds of experience. Benedicts vision is born in a consciousness of the forces and powers at
work at a particular historical moment. She, I think, in Geertz view, confronts
the world we live. Lvi-Strauss flees from it.
Geertz overvalues Benedict and undervalues the decentering work of LeviStrauss and others. All the figures he discusses in their different ways aimed
to decentre certain dominant Western conceptions of humanity. Levi-Strauss,
though he may be intellectualist, formalist, and misguided, has done more
than most to reveal the vital importance of non-western worlds in penetrating

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authentic understanding of humanity. Levi- Strauss is oriented to displacing the arrogant authority of western philosophy and western reason, despite the fact that his analyses may subtly and paradoxically restore the
position of western thought. Evans-Pritchard, whose intellectual sketch follows upon that of L6vi-Strauss-guilt by contingency, a Geertzian structuralist conceit?-was profoundly antagonistic to western notions of order, power
and authority. His study of the Sanusi is deeply anti-colonialist. Yet Geertzs
presentation highlights Evans-Pritchards colonialist, Boys Own imperialist
side, no doubt a powerful element of Evans-Pritchards consciousness but an
aspect against which he struggled. This struggle is evident throughout his
works.
Geertz is brilliant in demonstrating how the writing style of an ethnography, its rhetoric of form, contains its authority or its own means of validation.
Lvi-Strauss s Tristes Tropiques, the most self-conscious of his books, reveals an argument for the erasing of experience and glossing disconnected
events in the interest of presenting a scientific sense of a continuous, interrelated paradigmatic whole. Levi-Strauss very style of writing carries the
structuralist message. It is the disguised device which rhetorically supports
a structuralist theory, winning acceptance of the structuralist point even before the point is demonstrated. Geertz employs the rhetoric of textual form
and writing to counter the structuralist argument. Works and Lives is laid out
in a structuralist syntagmatic form. But he shows that the different lives he
explores can indeed be different, disjunct and in intellectual conflict. They do
not comprise-as by extension, anthropology does not comprise-variations
upon a single theme. In his discussion of Benedict, Geertz almost seems to
adopt her style of writing and direct conviction. By such a device he objectivizes style, and, perhaps, communicates his own sense of a personal identity
with Benedicts project.
Geertz is alert to the general historical contexts of discourse in which his
Lives are located. The sketch approach he adopts and the particular direction he imposes in his textual construction (formalist to non-formalist, structure to culture, institution to agent, Old World to New World) is sometimes
overly disjunctive and fragmentary. Placing Evans-Pritchard before a discussion of Malinowski certainly upsets a conventional anthropological understanding of what develops out of what. But it obscures a strong sense of the
degree of Malinowskis empiricism and positivism. Both these were ingrained in Malinowskis stress on the centrality of the individual, upon the primacy of experience and in his views on the act of description and the capacity
to an

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of the

anthropologist

a complete, total, world. The hallmark of

in
his
later works-was his powerful disagreemEvans-Pritchard―especially
ent with this Malinowskian vision and his disagreement, too, with the Durkheimian scientism which wooed so many of his contemporaries in British
anthropology. It is the Evans-Pritchard ofNuerReligion which announces the
direction of his approach. Such a direction is ingrained in his other work,
though perhaps ambiguous, sometimes confused, and often uncertain. EvansPritchards concern to unravel cultural worlds in their own terms, an aliveness to the study of practices, and a sensitivity to the fact that anthropological
explanatory constructions destroy the rich texture of lived realities, accord
strongly with Geertz own direction.
One of the fascinations in reading this book is the elaboration of Geertz
own critical perspective. He challenges the past of anthropology and also
questions modern directions, often those closely connected to his perspective. This is not necessarily a move by the master to rein in his children and
maintain command of a discourse he was so instrumental in creating. The present day mood in critical anthropology often seems filled with an air of crisis
and despair. Geertz is cautious about such a perspective. His book is positive
in tone, broadening in vision, and communicates an excitement with an ever
emerging and diverse discipline.

to

present

TAUSSIG AND THE POLITICS OF EXPERIENCE IN

COLOMBIA
In Shamanism, Colonialism, and The Wild Man, Michael Taussig translates
an abstract discourse on method into ethnographic practice. With Taussig, a
potentially radical deconstructionist method is joined with an empirical and
politically radical commitment to understanding processes of power, resistance and suffering. The style of writing is often in keeping with the violence of
the subject. I open with an attempt to communicate some of the excitement
and importance of this volume. I close with a critical evaluation which indicates the challenge and importance of Taussig work but also some of the traps

which may await some anthropologists eager to fly the colours of deconstructionism.
Colombia is the scene of Taussigs description. Themes familiar to readers
of The Devil and Commodity Fetishism are continued in this work but with
an ethnographic elaboration found lacking in the the earlier book. Taussig
presents a vivid, ever-changing, kaleidoscopic vision of agonistic worlds. The
death spaces of human degradation, torture and destruction wrought in the

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fury of colonial conquest and capitalist penetration are recounted in their savagery and wretchedness. This history is the subterranean force in magic, sorcery and shamanism which are active in the disjoint and shifting vertices of
modem daily life. But the import of the historical and modem journey upon
which Taussig takes his reader stretches beyond the limitations of space and
time which tend to confine the significance of modern ethnography concerning the nature of historically formed human experience and the direction of
its passionate course. Taussig directs his critical gaze at the conventional categories of anthropological description. His object is to break free from many
of the restraining bonds of routine anthropological thought. The objectivist,
distanced and dispassionate style of so much anthropological writing is discarded. Taussigs intention is to dissolve that line which may separate art from

science,. He favours the aesthetic power of the dramatist, poet, and novelist
in an effort to pierce to those depths of meaning and truth which are too often obscured rather than revealed in the concepts and categories of Western
social science. In common with the aims of post-modernist, deconstructionist text-makers, Taussig presents us with a descriptive form which is antihegemonic. The text is so presented as to disrupt itself. The events of history
and ethnographic record swirl and shift, no one perspective necessarily occupying a dominant place. The ambition, perhaps, is to free the reader from the
tyranny of the text and from the domination of the author.

The colonial imagination and the logic of terror

Taussigs journey starts at the turn of the century, with the Putamayo Indians
of Colombia. Roger Casements prosaic and restrained report of the Putamayo
terror is the text which frames Taussigs account. His own literary model for
the retelling is Conrads Heart of Darkness. Coppolas film adaptation of
Conrad to the imperialist horror in Vietnam, Apocalypse Now, gives a better
sense of the spirit of Taussigs recounting of the events-the journey to Brandos murky abode where all meaning is annihilated, Eliots worlds end. Taussig presents accounts of the torture and murder of the Putamayo Indians at the
frontier of the expansion of the capitalist world. The Putamayo are forced to
extract rubber from their forests, and the horrors they experience may be seen
as integral to their being alienated from control of their own labour and ultimately from life itself. This is a terror repeated worldwide. Therefore, one
may transpose the Putamayo with other groups in Amazonia today, or with
those peoples exterminated in the capitalist progress in North America, in Africa (e.g. the German genocide of the Herero in Namibia), in Australia (the

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enslavement or blackbirding of Pacific Islanders by Queensland planters,

the organized genocidal slaughter of the Tasmanians), and so on to every part
of the globe. The self-alienating experience of such terror is everywhere available to us to day. Taussig displays some of the universal possibilities of torture through the modem experience of the journalist Timmerman in
Argentina, experiences which are undoubtedly being repeated nearly everywhere at this moment. Taussigs explicit historical parallel with the Putamayo
is the horror of the Belgian Congo.
The colonialist outrages in South America and in Africa attracted the critical attention of two towering figures of the time: Roger Casement, lawyer,
a rational pragmatist but also a passionate fighter for human liberation, and
Joseph Conrad, who engages his own experience to his writers craft in penetrating the heart of the worlds of those caught in the dramas and dilemmas
of colonialism and capitalist expansion at the frontier. Perhaps Taussig sees
his own project to be in keeping with the ambivalences and contradictions of
these men, to embody their spirit and also to transcend their creative and liberating direction.
Taussig reopens Casements question concerning the reason behind the
torture and brutal slaughter of the Putamayo. Casements appeal to a common
sense political economy (i.e. that the torture functioned to create labour) is
found by Taussig to be inadequate. He makes the important observation that
at the frontier labour is not a detachable commodity from the being of the
worker as it is in the capitalist-industrial heartlands. At the frontier, it is not
merely labour which is fetishised but the labourer as well. Thus the torture of
the Putamayo is not a mere means for the creation of labour. Potential labour
was routinely killed, which would seem to defeat the object of an intention to
generate its supply. Rationalist perspectives of whatever ilk-utilitarian or
historical materialist fail in achieving a full understanding. Taussig develops an argument which explores the imagination at the frontier, the absurd
destructive horror conjured in the imagination of Conrads Kurtz in his remote trading post. The imagination at the frontier constitutes a fantasized construction of self and other-one in which colonist and Indian synergically
interact to create a totally imagined reality. This reality is no less real for all
its construction and has a life and destructive force all of its own.
I stress the merit of Taussigs approach here. The absurd and the fantastic
integral to the culturally creative thrust of humanity does not appear from out
of the blue, as some functionalist and structuralist anthropologies would have
it. In contrast to the assumptions of many materialist analyses, the imaginings

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of human beings are not mere representations, the relatively passive reflections of a more solid base. In Taussigs historical dialectic an imagination formed in history also becomes the force in the forging and momentum of history.
The appropriation and destruction of the Putamayo, their reified transformation into objects of a particular kind in the imagination of their exploiters,
is integral to the power of the Putamayo in the lives of modern Colombians.
The Putamayo mythologized are agents in present-day magic and sorcery.
The consciousness of illness and misfortune among Colombians has inscribed within it the history of the Putamayo devastation. This is seen too in the
rituals and festivals of the catholic Church. Healing and Christian worship are
are redemptive, a Christian concept frequently employed by Taussig in his
description-a redemption of a personal and more general historical suffering. The past in the present of Taussigs description has a strong Jungian flavour to it, as if the profusion of magical practice and its mystical forming in
modern Colombia can be partly understood as a vast welling up of an historical collective unconscious. The Putamayo are an historically constituted archetype, an archetype perhaps for capitalist depredations and their modem
repercussions in general.
In the tumbling flow of his discourse and in the montage of his presentation, Taussig shows the reader how contradictory forces are bound together.
This is marvelously imaged in the absurdity of those Indians with chairs bound
to their backs carrying their colonial masters over the Andes. Back to back,
dominant and subordinate are in sweaty unity. Here is a paradox. This practice created by the force of the dominant yet reveals the dependence of the
dominant upon the strength of the colonially subdued. Dehumanized human
beings used as beasts of burden harbour a power which is generated in the act
of domination itself.
Taussig extends this point in his discussion of the Wild Man and the shaman. These mysterious figures draw their power from the constructions and
conditions of apparent powerlessness. Constituted in the historically produced inequities, for example, of race and class, the shaman and the Wild Man
are contradictions of the dominant orders of their experience. They are not
subsumed in a hierarchy of domination. They are not encompassed and this
is the meaning of their disorder, especially that of the Wild Man. Shaman
and Wild Man engage images of resistance. This is the order of their disorder. They exist as virtually autonomous figures and as confounders of totalizing ideologies and institutions and of their agents (anthropologists among

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them). The Wild Man and the shaman stand as ultimate critics of an otherwise totalizing and dehumanizing world. The bulk of the book is taken up with
driving this point home. Shamans and their practice, probably for the reasons
discussed, take up the greater part of Taussigs description.
Taussig presents numerous examples of shamanic work, most especially
wild nights on yage, their hallucinogenic potion. On yage the body, the very
being, is shatteringly decentered. Taussig graphically describes how the composure of the body is destroyed in the yage-induced shitting and vomitting.
There is here, I think, an intended symbolic identity between the shaman
and the anthropological deconstructionist. The latter, like the folk equivalent,
is concerned to attack dehumanizing orders, to heal their destructive work,
and to decentre those totalizing images of reality which wreak so much havoc in the world and with which so much anthropological theory has been
partner. Taussig so organizes his text as to present himself as the simultaneous embodiment of shaman and deconstructionist priest. He, a Castenada for
the Eighties, uses his knowledge in experience of shamanic mystery as both
an ongoing metaphor and validation of the deconstructionist enterprise.

These, then,

are some

of the broad parameters of the book. The work,

though rambling and tedious at times, flashes with numerous insights. But
conventional reviewers bouquets aside, a harder look at Taussigs argument
is demanded.

Deconstructionlsm, style and metropolitan radicalism

Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man is already being acclaimed as an

important text in the deconstructionist movement of post-modernism. The

trendy left of centre City Limits, the magazine for Whats On in the intellectual and pop scene of London, recently carried a laudatory review. Here, its
stated, at long last, is a readable anthropology for the cognoscenti. Just as before, in the Victorian era, for instance, when anthropology was a mere fledgling, the extraordinary at the periphery, the strange and the wild is being
avidly, perhaps voyeuristically, discussed in the salons and parlours of those
consumers and shapers of fashion in the metropolitan worlds of the centre.
Such popularity alone should never undermine the potential value of a work.
Quite the contrary, it may point to the very real merit of a work and correct
the poor judgement of scholars who are frequently conservative, stuffy, and
all too ready to cling to corrupt paradigms upon which their reputations depend. But we live in a world in which deconstructionism, as Malcolm Bradbury has so wittily observed, is the new dominant ideology among would-be

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radicals of the left and, I might add, of the right. Those who live in modem
Britain could possibly recognize Mrs. Thatcher as the high priestess of practical deconstructionism. In effect, she has realized deconstructionism as a
handy totalizing instrument, as a tool of alienating domination for which
change and individual agency are the watchwords of expanding state control. Paradoxically, and as a kind of inverted confirmation of his thesis, Taussigs arguments and style of presentation could be more a refraction of the
ambiguities and dilemmas confronting those in the centre than those at the
periphery. It is just conceivable that once again, like so many anthropologists
before him, Taussig has imaginatively realized the crises and collective guilt
of metropolitan society in Colombia, in the Other. The fashionable metropolitan world finds its own redemption in a fantasized periphery, the harsh struggle at the edge is once more appropriated and transformed to the interests of
the metropole eager as always for the authentication of its own world view.
So just how threatening of metropolitan attitudes and specifically of conventional metropolitan anthropology is Shamanism, Colonialism, and the
Wild Man? In keeping with the ethos of modern deconstructionism, Taussig
positions himself in the structure of his discourse. He is hotly opposed to traditional academic methods for authorizing and validating texts. He asserts
that the quotation used to head a book or chapter is used to authenticate an argument. The possibility that it may be there because it pithily condenses the
structure of an argument to come is not considered.
Taussigs version of deconstructionist positioning seems to function in his
own work in precisely the way which he condemns, maybe even more so. His
acknowledgements, like those in many scholarly works, lend opening authority and legitimacy to his text. Indeed, he presents his credentials as a radical
thinker. Unblushingly, the reader is told that he was part of the Sydney push
of the late Fifties and early Sixties. The push, whose membership and significance seems to be on the increase as the period recedes from memory, was
a loose assortment of self-identified marginal intellectuals of most political
persuasions. Further confirmation of positioned identity is revealed in his student participation in the 1968 LSE student protests. Such personal, subjective claims as to the radicalism of the author is supported further in the text
itself. Illustrious names, objectified figures of radical intellectual western
thought-Benjamin, Adomo, Foucault, Artaud, Brecht-emblazon and jostle for pride of significance in the text. Are such claims justified? How much
is mere presentation rather than substance?

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There is no reason to doubt Taussigs own radical urgency, and there is

every reason to support a shift in the style of much ethnographic writing and
a major overhaul of anthropological categories, conventional explanations
and so on. Yet whilst Taussigs style is fresh, the radicalism of the arguments
generally fall far below the format and style of their presentation. Separated
from their medium the message of the ideas is often decidedly old hat. New
ideas go far if excitingly presented. Maybe old ones can achieve new vitality. Taussigs hall of mirrors text, his montage of images approach to the
building of his argument, is full of wonderful potential. His style points up
the issues and problems at stake. But ultimately, in this book, at least, the style does more to inhibit rather than expand understanding.

Chaos and a new positivism

The very construction of the text resists sustained analysis. Taussig may very
well be against rigor or analysis, seeing it as dictatorial and imprisoning. However, his method of presentation could produce the very conservatism, stultified thinking, and tyranny his textual organization is designed to avoid.
Taussigs montage runs the risk of decentering itself. He likens the contrary,
contradictory, sometimes Rabelaisian presentation of ethnography to the role
of humour and laughter in the healing work of shamans. Humour, the play of
the trickster, can, as so many others have realized, cut to the quick, dig out
the roots of personal malaise, and expose epistemological confusion. Modem
philosophers of science would share such an opinion, and the anthropological ethnographic record is filled with instances of the creative, explosive, and
regenerative possibilities of humour. But humour, as practitioners of the art
well-recognize, can be as reactionary and conservative as it may be radical.
The deep ambiguities of the comic and of humour are such that it can just as
easily obscure as it may clarify. This is the joke that humour can play. It is a
dangerous thing to play with and can turn against itself, defeating its purpose.

One danger which Taussigs presentation manifests is evidenced in his ofcumbersome descriptions and obscure theorizing. Much of the ethnography-frequently extended citations from others texts or from his own
notebooks-is much like a Malinowskian apt illustration. The analysis does
not build or extend through the ethnography. The descriptions are too often
exhaustingly long, boring, and pointless. The facts are made to speak for
themselves. This is the very kind of empiricism which a deconstructing, decentering perspective might seek to avoid.
ten

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Indeed, in this book such empiricism supports a positivism. Abstract theoretical rhetoric is wedged between extended stretches of description. Disconnected from the world being woven around them they are transformed into
assertions. These are often moralistic, akin to a religious revivalism, so much
so that one senses that to demur might risk a moral condemmnation of the
most extreme kind. This does not strike me as the kind of threatening and ultimately liberating debate which deconstructionism promises. We are bound
in a moralism.
Thus Taussig summarily dismisses Victor Turners approach to ritual. How
could we possibly approve of Turners concept of communitas when Taussig links it with fascist among other evil sentiments? Impregnating people
with unity may fit well with certain fantasies of maleness and fascism
(p.442). This kind of assertion abounds in the book. It destroys thought. Given much of his ethnography, I find Taussigs unsympathetic glance at Turner difficult to comprehend. So many of the figures which Taussig portrays
fit Turners categories of the liminal-the muchachos, the Wild Man, the shaman. If Taussig had considered matters a little more deeply he may have seen
that for Turner communitas and liminality are processes or ritual methods
of cultural and social deconstruction and decentering. In fact Turner and Taussig are potentially very close to each other in spirit, even down to a nascent
anarchism. Communitas for Turner was similar to that perfect mutual sociality which existed independent of imposed social and political orders or the
state developed in the thought of political anarchists like Bakunin and Kropotkin. Taussig too seems to cleave to an anarchism, though it is highly individualistic, anarchic in the populist and more conservative sense and distant
from the revolutionary political anarchism of this century and the last. Any
and every kind of order smacks of restriction to Taussig and denies individual freedom. Taussigs assertion of his own intellectual distinction, important in an academic world where distinction has commodity value, is
overdrawn. The use of terms like soppy to distinguish Turner from himself
disguises a great underlying similarity. The distinction is in Taussigs rhetoric, an illusion of writing style, a performativ~an instance of the magical
power of words.

Moreover, stylistically, Turner is in many respects a forerunner to Taussig. The writing of both is discursive, ebullient, often stream of consciousness in style. Turner, as Taussig, had literary ambitions, and he seasoned his
work with literary allusions, as now only the best anthropologists should. Tur-

ner, and now

Taussig, but even more imaginatively, heaped metaphor upon

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metaphor. The reader sometimes flounders in a virtual sea of tropes. Their

implication is that the restricted writing of conventional ethnography is the
contradiction of its claims of exactness and precision. For them, lived realities, as in speech, are wonderfully nuanced. Only by piling up the images and
metaphors can the anthropologist capture the impression, the sense of reality. While I have some sympathy with this view, obviously the kind of writing both Taussig and Turner favour risks an obscurantism all of its own, the

obscurantism of bad art.

The method Is the reality

Reality is only manifest in the reality of its illusions. This seems to be Taussigs justification for his ethnographic presentation. Despite his apparent antagonism to empiricism, I feel that the very manner of Taussigs approach
displays both an empiricist and a positivist bent. Like those he criticizes, Taussig betrays a methodologism. He unites his posited view of the world with his
method for describing it. The method is the reality. Whatever reality might
be, it becomes grasped in the method and fashioned to the shape of the method. Thus, the reality of Colombia presents itself as a swirling storm of shifting perspectives, of alternative attitudes, of contradictory and disjoint modes
of thought and action. Everything is uncertain. Quite unexpectedly as in a dream or in a drunken stupor new mysterious shapes can emerge out of nowhere. There is no determinate meaning, rather an epistemic murk, to use
Taussigs phrase. Beneath meaning there is no meaning. But this view is integral to a deconstructionist method.
The arrogance of positivism in the social sciences was that its adherents
refused the ideological constitution of their method, and claimed the unmotivated, disinterestedness of their theories. In short, they claimed objectivity.
The subject-object dualism, always a problem for Western social science, is
not overcome here. There is merely a switch in places. The subjective, the value of an ego-centered personal experiencing (fetishized in anthropology as
the technique of participant observation), is removed from its repressed
scientific positioning and valorized. While I may agree that what is realized as objective is always reached through a subject a point most scientists
would accept as trivially true-this means that all understanding must be ideological. Indeed, if this is so, then I would say that anthropological understanding must primarily involve the exploration of the ideological. Not only
must we explore the worlds of others in their ideological formation but we

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must also be constantly aware of our own ideological positioning and the way

it intrudes upon our understanding.

Taussigs method refuses its own ideologically constitutive possibility.
This is why it could be labelled the new positivism. It is thoroughly conceivable that it refracts a crisis in western social science. Taussigs attacks on
theory mirror the pragmatic and conservative reaction felt throughout the western world and refract the despair among social scientists themselves. As I indicated earlier, Taussigs fragmented and fragmenting deconstructionist
reality may be more the illusion of metropolitan experience than anything
else. Taussigs overdetermined concern with image and style in the presentation of his work certainly generates the dominating presence of a metropolitan world.
The metamorphosis of totalizing systems
The failure of positivists to recognize their own ideological constitution systematically led them into failure and frustration. The same is also a possibility with Taussig. His deconstructionism and decentering is a virtual method
for the avoidance of ideological introspection. This is why he produces little
extension in understanding, often realizing as original merely the inverse of
that he opposes. So disorder is valued against order. He does not see that
his revaluation may be conditioned within similar ideological presuppositions. His own ideas and many of those he opposes are, I would suggest, emergent within a western Judaeo-Christian tradition. His romance of the
Putamayo and the shaman has powerful resonances with a Rousseauesque
primitivism. What is at base is ultimately pristine and resistant to the orders
that are imposed upon it.
The deconstructionism of a Taussig, I am suggesting, is not able to grasp
its own ideological foundation. Indeed, its method is potentially the very
embodiment of the conditions of current Western ideological thought and is
the means for carrying such thought forward. The ideology ingrained in Western social science categories is not threatened but, like Zande witchcraft or
even Colombian shamanism, maintained and given renewed force in the me-

thod. Moreover, Taussigs approach risks becoming a means for critical avoidance. Anti-systematic, it can embrace contradictory perspectives. But these
perspectives only touch. They do not necessarily radically subvert each other
but in the form in which they are presented-discover a way of living together, albeit uncomfortably.

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Taussig is highly critical of totalizing theoretical orientations or modes of

presentation. They are hegemonic, tending to fascism. His important point
is that they are restrictive. They distort the world, perpetrate a violence upon
it and, similar to the Putamayo experience, dismember and mutilate it so that
the world is made to conform to totalizing categories. I, and I suspect many
other anthropologists, could not agree more. Ideology, and theory in social
science is certainly ideological, is totalistic. But Taussigs position is no less
totalizing than those he criticizes. Indeed, his preferred orientation could be
the ultimate totalizing system.
Systems of order, those which cohere around certain organizing and orienting principles or logics, are likely to be relatively inefficient totalizing systems. They should be continually in crisis, constantly threatened in the
movement of historically formed conditions of which they are a part. The
world is forever extending beyond their grasp. This may be the key to understanding the dynamic of such totalizing ideological orders and the process of
their endurance through transformation in history. Put another way, it is the
struggle by human beings to grasp the meaning of experience, perhaps the
existential condition of the very humanity of human beings, which is the impetus for the dynamic and transformation in history. It is this, I suggest, coupled with the routine failure of totalistic ideologies, especially those which
strain to internal coherence, to totalize in fact, which is the key to understanding their change and metamorphoses.
Thus Taussigs approach is indeed the historical metamorphosis of earlier
restrictive and disillusioned totalistic social science perspectives. It is ingenuous. The deconstructionists have discovered a way of making integral to
their system what was previously constructed as external to other systems,
and at the heart of their routine failure. Non-meaning, epistemic murk, is
now at the core; fragmentation, disjunction, chaos is now the final principle
of order.
I note that parallel

developments, though qualitatively and intellectually

distinct,
taking place in the corridors of science. Witness the chaos theoof
ry mathematical physics. Once non-meaning, non-integration, and asysare

tematic processes are made central then

created, perhaps a monster.

super

totalizing

order has been

It is interesting, for the foregoing reasons, that Taussig makes the link behis method and the worlds of magic, shamanism, sorcery and witchcraft. In my view, and I think in Taussigs, these practices operate in death
spaces. These are realms of non-meaning-and here I differ from Taussigtween

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but realms so defined in the context of totalistic, internally integral, ideological systems. Anything and everything imaginable is possible in the death space of sorcery and magic. They are practices for conceiving the inconceivable.
Here is the point. Magic, witchcraft, and sorcery, far from being resistant to
totalistic systems, are vital in the imagination of totalistic systems, a method
by which the participants-weak and strong-incorporate what appears to be
outside all meaning and ultimately make it meaningful or else annihilate or
destroy it. I do not think it accidental that Nazis were fascinated in the potential efficacy of the occult. There is a connection, too, between the non-meaningful deconstructed world of witchcraft and sorcery and death camps.
Recently, Wyschogrod (Spirit in Ashes, 1987) has argued convincingly that
the Holocaust was made possible in the circumscription of domains of nonmeaning in which anything became reasonable. Dreadful violence is the potential of deconstruction as it is the possibility of those reified constructed
orders of the human imagination. If this is so, if deconstruction is the totalized character of the world, and the death camp is the ultimate encompassment
of meaningless reality, then we are confronted indeed with a potentially acutely pessimistic, not to say horrendous, world view. Human existence is finally amoral. Perhaps, this is why, throughout his deconstructionist discourse,
Taussig must make his reader constantly aware of his own morality and theoretical conviction, that his heart is still in the right place, that he is still with
the struggle and, therefore, is not suffering from romantic disillusion.
In their totalizing theories positivists imperialized their own world view.
Taussig does much the same, although I have suggested that it is possibly on
a grander scale. A charge against positivism is its insensitivity to the conceptions of others and to their existential conditions, its insistence on the explanatoryvalue of its ordered, rationalist perspective. Taussig could be viewed
as engaging in similar practice.

The authenticity and autonomy of the shaman

I have said that shaman and deconstructionist share an identity in Taussig the
anthropologist. It is possible that Taussig has created the shamans he presents
in a deconstructionist mould. While they may have been fashioned within a
western ontology of crisis, they are presented by Taussig as autonomous and,
in their chaos, resistant to those forces of order which generated their power.

Like so much anthropology before, a deconstructionist anthropology may reflect itself in the other and, thus, merely use the other to demonstrate the uni-

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versal veracity of a message already imagined before any encounter with the
other.
None of the evidence Taussig presents convinces beyond that already conventionally available. How autonomous really is the Colombian shaman?
Like the practice of healers elsewhere, their chaotic, fragmented vision may
be simultaneously a metaphor of the destructive unreason of the oppressive
orders powerful in the daily life of Colombians, a means for making sensible
the unreasonable, and a salve for the experienced disjunction and disruption
of daily existence. As Taussig says, shamanic dream, drugged reverie and humour can derive their power because they operate outside the rational logic
of coherent conceptual schemes. Apparently autonomous of worlds of reason, the shaman and the trickster in dream and joke leap and jump realizing
the unimaginable and disrupting the already imagined. A vast world of experience is brought together, totalized, in a way which may routinely fail or defy
the reasonings of ordinary daily life. Shamans may realize the unreasoning of
the reasonings of daily orders but their deconstruction may still be oriented
towards the constructions of lived existence and ultimately directed to their
maintenance. Deconstruction as a shamanic way of life is the source of the
shamans power. Living with fragmentation the shaman demonstrates a power of control and ultimate transcendence, the strength of which is passed to
those who seek the shamans aid.
Taussig is uncomfortable with this kind of approach because it may reveal the shaman as essentially conservative, in line with what he judges to be a
conservative anthropology. Shamans must be something else. I see no reason
why the peoples with whom anthropologists work must finally represent the
moral ideals of the anthropologist or their conceptual predilections. But in
any case, why should a totalistic and ordered conception of the universe necessarily be conservative in the terms of a radically oriented Western anthropologist ? It is everywhere demonstrated that some of the more revolutionary,
system-overturning, schemes of the human imagination in themselves manifested coherent orders. It was in their very alternative coherence that they successfully disrupted the orders to which they were opposed. The Sinhalese
exorcists whom I studied were radically opposed to the Portuguese colonial
domination. They were construed as evil, devil-dancers, who contradicted
the Catholic orthodoxy. Sinhalese exorcists worked their threatening art within Buddhist conceptions of the cosmos and of the state which in its very coherent contradiction of Christian authority and in its location in the routine of

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Sinhalese daily life was effectively resistant to a very destructive and oppressive colonial conquest.
Ordered, totalistic conceptions are not by nature oriented in a fascist direction, which is Taussigs strong implication. Fascism lies in the argument of
an order and in the principles underlying its totalististic conception, not in order per se. To assert the latter is newspeak, a gallery play, and smacks of a
Western despair and disillusion. It refers to a western consciousness of its own
history, a consciousness that Western revolutionary visions of new orders carried into practice have inevitably turned sour and manifested oppressive, fascist, humanity-destroying qualities. This view cannot be separated from
developments in Western liberalism, part of a revitalized ideology of capitalism, in which the individual and individualist self-determinant agency is revalued. Deconstructionism-and perhaps its modern American variant most
of all-may have intimate connection with this revaluation.
Taussigs deconstructionist anthropology seems more often than not to be
in the direction of this spirit. In the book the individual shaman, and ultimately Taussig as shaman, becomes hero. Virtually Cartesian in its celebration
of the authenticity of experience, the final authority for the decentered directions of the work appears to be founded in the truth of a shamanic dreamworld. The individual experience realizes the nature of the world. The world
is nothing other than the individual made the totalistic centre of the universe.

The domination of the anthropologist

One commentator on recent Western metropolitan intellectual developments
has noted that the critic has now come of age. Once derided and considered
subordinate to the wonder of the text, the critic now rules over it. It is not the
text or the reality of the text we now wonder at but the artistic mastery of the
critic who now towers in importance over the text and who now must be the
object of our enquiry and of our desire. Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild
Man manifests this apotheosis of the critic, in this case the process of the domination of the anthropologist over the worlds he encounters. The book effectively begins with the anthropological distanced awe of the world of the
Putamayo destruction. By the close of the description, the anthropologist has
subjectively united with that world which was once only object to him. But
in his apparent unity with the other, may not he be appropriating it? Postivist
and empiricist anthropologists may have arrogantly confined worlds within
their own deterministic vision. Taussig may come dangerously close to achie-

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ving something similar by declaring the authority of his individual experienexperience already conditioned in a Western consciousness.
Taussig, in common with much of the new ethnographic writing in anthropology, seems to be of the opinion that his exploration of his own experience, and the sharing of this with his readers, is the road to an authentic and
liberated critical anthropology. I do not disavow this possibility and the conce, an

tributions which do indeed stem from such an attitude. However, rather than
self-exploration, which, as Taussigs own material suggests, may confine one
in the prison of ones own fantasies, it may be more fruitful to confront critically the ideological orders from which the anthropologist comes rather than
the anthropologist alone. The anthropologist is positioned within ideology
which is no more reducible to the anthropologist than are the ideologies of
the other reducible to its individual voices. The critique of ones own world,
as that of the other, in my view begins with the refraction of one through the
lens of the other, and vice versa. This is, I think, a dialectical alternative to
the kind of dialectic which Taussig offers. Certainly, it is a more holistic perspective than the more fractionalized approach which Taussig offers. But I
think it directs the anthropologist away from a narcissistic contemplation of
self where, indeed, the anthropologist is realized as hero who captures in the
unique anthroplogical experience the diverse realities of a collectivity of
others. For the worlds of others to realize their critical force, their schemes of

thought and practice must be explored systematically and, further,

given equivalent ontological and epistemological status.

must be

CLIFFORDS AL TERNATI VE:

A PARALLEL PREDICAMENT
The importance and excitement of Taussigs book disguises a reproduction
of the difficulties encountered by conventional anthropology, difficulties
which the proponents of the new ethnography are striving to escape. Perhaps
the foremost text of the new ethnography is Writing Culture, edited by James
Clifford and George Marcus, a work, incidentally, which Geertz refers to, somewhat jaundicedly, as overblown. This important work is likely to be superceded by James Cliffords new book. Here many of the ideas present in
Writing Culture discover a clarity and force of direction which I think have
hitherto been lacking. Clifford emerges strongly as an anthropologist of anthropology. But more, those worlds, those discursive formations, within
which anthropology and ethnographic work are shaped and become shaping
are explored and opened to criticism.

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I found the study particularly refreshing in Cliffords

preparedness to ex-

pose his own position to critical reflection as well as those from which he distances himself. Clifford examines the historical circumstances in which his
own positioning is ideologically constituted. The same intellectual figures
who crowd Taussigs text are to be found in Clifford. But they are presented
neither as demons to be despised nor as deities to be venerated, as in Taussig.
They are not instruments of self-presentation or analytical validation or rejection. Clifford, for example, engages with a Bakhtin, a Ricoeur, a Malinowski, a Conrad, a Mashpee Indian. In accordance with this deconstructionist or
new ethnographic vision all have worth in the struggle for understanding and
reveal what must be problematic in any interpretation or textualizing of experience. With Clifford, the critic-whether anthropologist, philosopher, novelist, or artist, a person who in the West has somehow come to be imbued
with a privileged view of reality-is repositioned. Where Taussig progressively retreats from a world as object into a celebration of subjectivism, thus
never escaping the dualism he scorns, Clifford demonstrates a way out of the
impasse. The interpreter and the interpreted, the ethnographer and the ethographized, are joined in common cause and unified as at once subject and object. The central issues are no longer what is the best and most authoritative
description, method, model, theory or perspective (although these concerns
by no means disappear). Rather, the issue is the examination of the grounds
within which a particular or general view of reality achieves its authority or
the circumstances within which a specific problematizing or theorizing gains
intellectual legitimacy and significance. Clifford shows how this redirection
of ethnographic practice is not mere navel gazing-a charge too easily and
too often made. Like Taussig, Clifford is concerned that his deconstructionist and decentering approach looks out critically upon the manifold realities
of lived experience. Cliffords work is both highly sensitive to the political
nature of ethnography and oriented to illuminate the political worlds in which
human beings live and of which anthropology is so much part.
The books cover brilliantly captures major dimensions of Cliffords project. Cliffords cover features two images, back to back, of an Igbo masquerade performer, White Man. (Compare it with Taussigs dust jacket whose
more strident line as well as theme is indicated in the figure of a gun-toting
white man towering over Indians.) The Igbo performer is disguised, hidden
beneath the mask of a white colonial official. This official (or anthropologist ?) holds an open notebook, pen poised to inscribe and perhaps to fix the
other in his text, like in the frozen grin of his mask (the ambivalent grin of

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imperialist power or the beckoning smile of entrapment of the friendly anthropologist eager for rapport?). Cliffords own work unpacks the interpretational potential constrained within the cover photograph. One important
concern is to give voice to those silenced in the text-like the Igbo gagged
by the costume of colonial power, subordinated in the writing of the text. Here
Cliffords deconstruction shares much with that of Taussig. I underline the
import of this. The restoration to speech of the hitherto subordinate threatens
the authorial power and claims to authenticity of colonial and post-colonial
representations, for example, of the other. More important, their speech returned, the subordinated are recognized as active in the making of their own
history and, most significantly, of the history which is made of them. They

remain active even where other accounts would see them as obscured or obliterated, as with the Igbo performer or the Putamayo, and are vital influences
in the constructive and constitutive texts of powerful others.

The author or the mask?

Clifford opens his work with a poem, Elsie, written in 1920 by William Carlos Williams, a medical doctor. Elsie is a Mashpee Indian, and here we may
note a striking parallel between Clifford and Taussig in the construction of
their texts. Both begin with accounts (brief in Clifford) of the abjection of
ethnic or tribal minorities in consuming and rapacious metropolitan or imperialist worlds. Speechless at the start, the members of such minorities are, at
the close, presented in the active voice. Clifford concludes with the modem
struggle of the Mashpee. Their own constructions of their situation are foregrounded against the background of a history of changing interpretations of
the nature of their cultural realities. This is presented through the event of a
court trial in 1976 where the Mashpee sued for control of their tribal land.
The progression in the book from poetic text to court trial underlines a crucial methodological point in Cliffords approach, which he develops from
Foucault. This is that texts are constituted not by authors alone but by authors
located in discursive formations. Clifford may be critical here of the interpretative position of a Geertz, with whom he is nonetheless closely allied.
Geertzs insistence on a hermeneutic of culture as text does not attend sufficiently to the discursive formation within which a text is formulated: the arenas of noisy speech and action in which different perspectives on the world
clash, displacing and decentering each other. Clifford suggests such a critique in discussion of Geertzs analysis of the Balinese cockfight. Despite
Geertzs opposition to the intellectualist formalism of structuralism, his own
ethnographic texts-The Balinese cockfight is but one example-are open
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similar comment for their subjugation of the active role and voice of the
subject. However, I do stress Cliffords acknowledgement of the difficulty of
any scholar, himself included, escaping such a charge.
Clifford critically addresses attempts to give the ethnographized greater
active voice. Favret-Saada, Dwyer, Crapanzano, and Renato Rosaldo are instances. He discusses these and others (e.g. Griaule, Malinowski, Turner) in
a sequence of excellent chapters On Ethnographic Authority and Power
and Dialogue in Ethnography. These discussions are important for his understanding of the historical development of ethnographic discourse. In some
ways they are more penetrating than Geertzs discussion of similar themes in
Works and Lives. Clifford locates himself directly in his critique, whereas
Geertz mutes his own presence. Thus Clifford heads his chapter on ethnographic authority with a quote from Rabinow on Clifford. An unnecessary egocentricity, I immediately thought. But this is an unwarranted judgement. In
doing this Clifford is positioning himself as an object in the history he recounts and exposing himself to similar inspection. One of the general points
he arrives at, one shared with Geertz, is that present attempts to give voiceedited texts of tape-recorded interviews, for example--can be made into the
vehicle for the ethnographers own views. The ethnographer hides behind the
mask of the other. This could be more insidious than in the less self-conscious ethnography of yore. It can be another mode whereby the other is appropriated and controlled. Again I am confronted with the image of the Igbo
White Man. While white colonial autonomy effaces the Igbo presence, the
Igbo animates that power and gives and takes its life. Part of the fun of the
masquerade, I surmise, is that the figure of autonomous power is in fact a mere
puppet, a cipher, for a hidden directing force. Indeed, that hidden force did
reverse the political tables and asserted its own autonomy. The photograph
was taken in 1982.
Cliffords solution to the masking of the ethnographers authority in the
guise of the others subjectivity and self presentation is to encourage a mode
of description and analysis which gives full vent to the myriad perspectives
engaged in the discursive structuring of accounts. The method is one which
stresses the relative autonomy of orientation, perspective and voice. This is
facilitated by mixing modes of textual presentation-conventional analytical
reasoning, representation of direct experience, excerpts from notebooks, verbatim speech, montage, dadaism. The autonomy of perspective and the capacity of one perspective to dislocate the claims to authority of another (there
is that Igbo masquerade again!) is revealed in the clash of perspective and in
to

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their dialectic. Such methodological orientation gives additional point to Cliffords focus on anthropology and upon anthropological careers. It is not just
an intellectual historians interest in the development of ideas and the construction of knowledge.
Anthropologists practice in regions of conjuncture. In their lives and in
their work a great variety of perspectives become acutely problematic. So too
does the nature of the account and the text, the process of their construction
and the kind of authority or power which is embedded within them. Anthropologists and anthropology as conjunctural are thus made into the ethnographic object and become the demonstration, the evidence, for the insights and
understanding a deconstructionist method and interpretation can attain.
Delusions of radicalism In anthropology
Anthropologists are likely to register a mixed response to Cliffords efforts.
Since they are now the objects of an anthropological enquiry they may be expected to feel uncomfortable. This should be so, for most anthropologists are
likely to have differing opinions and diverging reservoirs of knowledge concerning their practice. If I am right about the kind of reaction Clifford should
expect, then he has realized at least two facets of his deconstructionist project : rejection of fc ms of description which assert single coherent schemes
of interpretation, and the appropriation or claim by the outsider of the inside
knowledge of the other. Anthropologists should be made aware of the variety of standpoints they hold even within a single tradition. Cliffords own ordering of their native world-he would admit that he cannot escape his own
deconstructionist critiqu~-and his assumption of authority as the producer
of a text on the subject of anthropological knowledge is little different from
what anthropologists conventionally manage in their practice. By thus deconstructing anthropology, Clifford sensitizes anthropologists to the nature of
their practice.
Anthropologists often present themselves and their work as radical in
vein. Their sense of cultural otherness, their claim to depict realities at sharp
variance with a Western commonsense, is frequently used to legitimate their
practice and to underline its epistemological and scientific value. This is an
ideological motivation behind the divination of its various heroes and heroines-a Malinowski, an Evans-Pritchard, a Mauss, a Boas, a Mead etc.
Geertzs very sympathetic treatment in Works and Lives of Ruth Benedict,
her decentering of mainstream American culture through her representation

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of Japan, has much to do with an anthropologists self-image as a potential

radical deconstructionist.
Clifford reveals much of the falsity behind such presentation, one already
well-suspected within anthropological circles and increasingly the subject of
open debate. However, he does develop the point further. His two chapters
Histories of the Tribal and the Modem and On Collecting Art and Culture demonstrate the integration of anthropological thought with other western
intellectual developments: the modernist universalism whereby the other is
decontextualized, appropriated to a western history, and reconstructed in the
ideological terms of a Western humanity. Cliffords discussions of the interrelation between developing ideas of anthropological practice, western art
movements, collecting, and museum representation are challenging as they
are informative. Many anthropologists would accept that Uvi-Strauss structuralism methodologizes as it universalizes dimensions of western thought.
Clifford extends this line of argument and shows how its overdetermined sense of order is a reaction to a historical moment in a western crisis and fragmentation. A struggle, perhaps, against the truth of a deconstructionist
reality which, in turn, is-the condition of a Western and increasingly global
historical experience.
One vital aspect of Cliffords deconstruction is the questioning of the
claims of some anthropologists to their distinction, the uniqueness of their vision or anthropological attitude. This claim grew in the context of the professionalizing of the discipline, the drawing of subject boundaries in the political
discourse of western universities. This point is well-accepted and Clifford
does not discuss it. What he argues is that the routine of anthropological orientation and practice, a focus on culture, knowledge of other cultures, fieldwork, and so on, is a feature of many-travellers, novelists, literary critics,
collectors-and is by no means limited to professional anthropologists. Cliffords reflections are salutory. They are not self-serving, allowing Clifford
entry by a backdoor into a community which often threatens the exclusivity
of a private club. By breaking with narrow professional definitions of anthropology, Clifford broadens its vision. Anthropology again becomes the exploration of the grounds of humanity in its original, general, and philosophically
fundamental sense.

The new ethnography and theoretical argument

At least, this is the potential. As yet, Cliffords deconstruction seems to be in
closer keeping with Geertzs notion of the anthropologist as a civilized, high-

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ly intellectual, metropolitan

renaissance man. Clifford impresses with his

within western aesthetic and literary traditions. Yet in
all this I could not escape a sense of superficiality. Clifford alights, like some
gorgeous butterfly, in the great garden of human possibility which is the field
of anthropology. But he passes from flower to flower, seldom staying for long
to examine thoroughly their possibility. This I found frustrating.
Clifford is wary of that anthropology that searches for the deep structures
of human thought and action or for fundamental essences. This could account
for the pattern of his flight. While critical of Said, Clifford endorses Saids
powerful critique of orientalism. He extends this into a criticism of cultural
essentialism in anthropology, analyses in which cultural coherence and distinctiveness are stressed to the exclusion of important cultural interpenetrations and cross-cultural appropriations. The point is well-taken. But some
distinction should be made between essentialist notions like rational choice,
modes of production etc., as canons of general anthropological method and
theory, and the essentialism to which the human subjects of anthropological
enquiry may cleave.
We may question the evidence of the anthropological record, noting the
role a particular ideological climate played in the construction of the description. Even so, the anthropological record is replete with information which
indeed indicates that many human realities are formed through logical and
coherent cosmological and ideological schemes. As in much modern nationalism these coherent ideologies may generate disastrous totalitarian consequences. This totalitarian possibility or a moral repugnance at the coherent
form of totalitarian destructiveness does not support the theoretical rejection
of such essentialism or support a refusal to search for the inner logic of particular lived human realities. This does not demand a return to a crude relativism, or lead to a suggestion that because no logic has been found then the
ethnographer has somehow failed. Furthermore, an interest in the principles
which may structure a particular world view does not involve a necessary insistence on the kind of rationalism typically found in the west. Also, as Weber recognized long ago, systems of thought and practice which are built
around essential, ideologically recognized, principles are not necessarily coherent or ordered in the conventional sense, for example, of functionalist anthropology. The Western ideological contexts of individualism and
egalitarianism manifest numerous different forms, many of which are in violent contest.
vast intellectual range

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Cliffords arguments, in common with the general trend in deconstructionist anthropology, involve a redirection of the anthropological gaze: a focus
on authorship, mode of presentation, and writing style. Theoretical debate and
argument over the analytical interpretations which anthropologists place on
the worlds of their encounter are not the prime concern. Clifford and Geertz
are not principally engaged in a sociology of knowledge, a thorough concern
with how anthropologists arrive at their knowledge. (This is surprising, given
the influence of phenomenology in their work, and of such philosophers of
knowledge as Foucault and Ricoeur.) Rather, they are more interested in the
way an anthropolgist puts knowledge across and convinces an audience. Conviction is in the performance and not in the substantive argument and its ideological resonances. It is the focus by Clifford and others on performance and
style which accounts for a certain thinness of theoretical understanding and
lack of rigorous argument.
Geertz, who has written so many important anthropological monographs,
in Works and Lives (p.148) goes so far as to question the point of continuing
with the anthropological ethnographic monograph tradition. Undoubtedly, as
Geertz suggests, the circumstances of ethnographic writing and the manner
of description must change. But an important aspect of the monograph must
not be ignored. Its convention is one which demands an increasingly rigorous
and systematic exposition of anthropologically encountered worlds. For all
the sense of criticism and self-reflection which exists in anthropology today
the standard of anthropological monographs and writing is far and away an
improvement, I think, on the works of our predecessors not withstanding their
centrality in the construction of anthropological self-images. I am not convinced that present circumstances have rendered the anthropological monograph
obsolete.
Clifford appears to accept this implicitly. The Predicament of Culture is,
in fact, a monograph on the society of anthropologists. The final chapter of
the book approaches the classic ethnographic monograph in shape, albeit in
decontructionist style. The diverse ways in which the Mashpee are understood
to constitute their community and identity in the context of their land claim
are discussed. The trial of the Mashpee is examined after the manner of a
Gluckmanesque situational analysis, though not, to my mind, done as well.
Again like Gluckman or Victor Turner, Clifford treats the trial as an event within an open-ended social field, in which various perspectives on the
Mashpee reality, those of the historian, the sociological expert, the anthropologist, the jurist, and the Mashpee themselves, are organized in contest, re-

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vealing the assumptions underlying their definitions and understandings and

the source of their relative discursive power. The whole account expolores
the issue of identity and the problematic character of conventional descriptive labels. In this last chapter Clifford finally participates as an anthropological ethnographer employing the form of the monograph to substantiate the
general points he develops throughout the book. Clifford presents some interesting information. However, for all its deconstructionist build-up, Cliffords
ethnography simply turns over well-ploughed ground. Indeed, without the
preceding chapters, Cliffords account of the Mashpee trial would pass as
pretty conventional general ethnographic description, a description informed
by a voluminous sociological literature on ethnicity and ethnic identity.
CONCLUSION: ART, BUSINESS AND COMMITMENT

Geertz, Taussig and Clifford represent distinct developments within a critical

anthropology. More than Geertz, Clifford and Taussig propose radical new

directions in the ethnographic project of anthropology. One last serious question should be asked. All the writers are critical of the past in anthropology
and launch the now conventional and thoroughly domesticated anthropological self-criticism concerning its colonial roots and emergence in the wellsprings of western domination. But all are relatively muted on the political
significance of the North American context of their present writing. How
much is their argument and programm~their chosen themes, their critical
discourse-structured within a world still dominated by American political
and economic power? Clifford and especially Taussig address this context,
but do not recognize its hegemonic force in relation to their own practice, that
such power is deeply embedded in the flow and style of their discourse, writing and texts. For all their excitement and insights, the works discussed express a clear continuity with those very Californian sociological concerns of
the Sixties-symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology and so forth. This
could not be more evident than in Geertz plea for moderation in the conclusion of Works and Lives:
Half-convinced writers trying to half-convince readers of their (the writers) halfconvictions would not on the face of it seem an especially favorable situation for
the production of works of very much power, ones that could, whatever their failings, do what those of Levi-Strauss, Evans-Pritchard, Malinowski, and Benedict
clearly did: enlarge the sense of how life can go. Yet that is what must happen if
the business is to continue; and if either mere digging in (Dont think about ethnography, just do it) or mere flying off (Dont do ethnography, just think about it)

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be avoided, it should be possible. All that is needed is comparable art. (Works

and Lives, p.139)
can

Here Geertz is

leading

to a restatement

of his

point that anthropologists

disagree. I am un-

must be aware of the burden of their authorship. But I still

comfortable with some of the ideological sentiments which may be seen as

embedded in this text. Most of all, I think it is symptomatic of the growing
lack of commitment in anthropological circles which the new ethnography
often expresses, a lack of the very commitment which, despite all the faults,
was integral to the vital and often radical understanding that an earlier anthropology did bring.

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