Sameness and the Ethnological Will to Meaning Author(s): Vassos Argyrou Source: Current Anthropology, Vol. 40, No.

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Current Anthropology Volume 40, Supplement, February 1999

1999 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved 0011-3204/99/40supp-0004$3.00

Sameness and the Ethnological Will to Meaning

1

by Vassos Argyrou

This article examines the claim that there is a crisis in ethnological representation. It argues that no such crisis exists because the truth of the most fundamental ethnological representation Samenessis questioned by no one. It suggests that this claim must be understood as an attempt to uphold Sameness in the face of representations of difference that contradict it. The article further argues that it is impossible to demonstrate Sameness and that every attempt to do so results in the production of difference and Otherness. It concludes by suggesting why anthropologists must nonetheless persist in this self-defeating endeavor. vassos argyrou is Associate Professor of Social Science at Intercollege (P.O. Box 4005, 1700 Nicosia, Cyprus). Born in 1955, he was educated at North East London Polytechnic (B.Sc, 1980), the London School of Economics (M.Sc., 1989), and Indiana University (Ph.D., 1993). He has been a visiting assistant professor at Reed College, Holy Cross College, and Colgate University. His research interests are social and cultural theory, symbolic power, religion and ritual, and Southern Europe. Among his publications are Tradition and Modernity in the Mediterranean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), Is Closer and Closer Ever Close Enough? De-reication, Diacritical Power, and the Specter of Evolutionism (Anthropological Quarterly 69:20619), and Keep Cyprus Clean: Littering, Pollution, and Otherness (Cultural Anthropology 12:15978). The present paper was submitted 22 xii 97 and accepted 10 iv 98; the nal version reached the Editors ofce 11 v 98.

1. Several friends and colleagues read earlier versions of this paper and provided generous feedback. I thank Peter Sutton Allen, Trish Glazebrook, Michael Herzfeld, Yiannis Papadakis, Nancy Ries, and current anthropologys anonymous referees.

There was a time in the Western intellectual tradition when manthe thinking subject that makes knowledge the condition of its own possibilitydid not exist. At this time, the Classical Age as Foucault (1970) labels it, scholars had no epistemological consciousness, no awareness of being part of the picture they were painting. They went about their scientic tasks using the tools of their traderepresentationswith the certainty that the image of the world they constructed was the exact replica of the world as it existed in itself. In short, they assumedor had no reason to think otherwisethat representations were neutral and innocent, a transparent medium through which the world manifested itself to the mind undistorted. Then, an event of enormous complexity, what we would today call reexivity, took over scientic minds. Scholars who represented everything except themselves in the process of representing discovered that representations were also things of this world and hence amenable to representation. At this point, the threshold of Western modernity, there was a fundamental displacement, which toppled the whole of Western thought: representation ha[d] lost the power to provide a foundation [to knowledge] (Foucault 1970:238). If representation was the product of socially and historically situated subjects rather than the immaculate conception of a transcendental being, one could no longer maintain the implicit assumptions of neutrality and transparency. Nor, by extension, could one maintain that what representation represented was the true nature of things. From now on, it would not be their identity that beings manifest in representation, but the external relation they establish with the human being (p. 313). One of the rst scholars to have applied this critique of representation to the discourse that makes Others its object of study is Edward Said. In his well-known book Orientalism (1978) he points out that Western knowledge of the Orient, like all knowledge, is political. This is not, however, because scholars of the Orient intentionally distort their accounts to serve their personal interests or the interests of their societies. Rather, they are situated and operate within the framework of a geopolitical awareness that informs their decision to study the Orient to begin with and shapes everything else that they may have to say about it. Knowledge of the Orient, then, is inherently political, not as an afterthought. It is political precisely because it is a social and historical productthe product of social and historical beings who are unable to see the world through disinterested eyes. No one has ever devised a method for detaching the scholar from the circumstances of life, writes Said (p. 10), from the fact of his involvement . . . with a class, a set of beliefs, a social position. No one has because no one can. There is simply no such method, no vantage point outside the world, even for scholars. All academic knowledge [is thus] tinged and impressed with, violated by, [this] gross political fact (p. 11)the fact, that is, of the scholars inevitable involvement in life. For Said, then, there is a politics of perception of OthS29

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ernessof difference, that is, understood as inferiority. In ethnology itself, the critique of representation shifts the emphasis from the politics of perception to the politics of presentation. Heterodox anthropologists 2 are primarily concerned with the circumstances surrounding the production of discourse, particularly the transformation of ethnographic experience into a text. The central argument is that ethnological discourse is mediated by the fundamental need to tell an effective story, one that is both coherent and persuasive. This need in turn forces anthropologists to adopt two complementary strategies, one of exclusion and one of inclusion. Anthropologists typically exclude from their accounts all those things that undermine the credibility of their story, among others states of serious confusion, violent feelings or acts, censorships, important failures, changes of course, and excessive pleasures (Clifford 1986a:13).3 The other side of the coin is the inclusion of poetic, literary forms that transform dry data into a vivid, lively, and entertaining story 4 and the use of discursive conventions that stamp the story with academic authority. Despite the emphasis on presentation, heterodox discourse is unable to ignore completely the politics of perception. Over and above any rhetorical devices that anthropologists employ, what makes a story truly effective is its relevance, the extent to which it addresses current concerns. Indeed, the decision to study a particular Other or a certain aspect of Otherness is motivated, albeit mostly unconsciously, by the social and political concerns that anthropologists share with members of their own societies. Thus, in response to the breakdown of European reciprocity in World War I, Mauss wrote The Gift; Benedicts and Meads work reects dilemmas in American society during the interand postwar periods, while current studies of Other women respond to the contemporary concern with gender and the construction of female subjectivity (for these and other examples of this argument see Clifford 1986b). To say this, of course, is to argue that our perception of Others is shaped by the way we perceive ourselves, and this indeed is the heterodox argument. However, the way we perceive ourselves is inuenced by our social and historical circumstances. Thus, in this way, the heterodox argument returns to the radical kind of sociology of knowledge put forward by Said. Whether one emphasizes the politics of perception or the politics of presentation, the critique of representa2. I use the term heterodox to refer to what goes by the name of postmodernism. The latter term is far from neutral, but I am particularly concerned with avoiding the implication that postmodernism objecties and disenchants ethnology. As I will argue in this article, the postmodern is based on the same fundamental and enchanted premise as the modernSameness, which is a metaphysical ontology of the social. 3. For Clifford (1988b) the archetypal case of exclusion is to be found in Malinowski and the contrast between his personal diary and The Argonauts of the Western Pacic. 4. Note, for instance, the connections that Crapanzano (1986:68 69) draws between Geertzs essay Deep Play and the pornographic lm Deep Throat.

tion leads to the same conclusion: Our knowledge of Other societies and cultures is constructed not only in the sense that it is we who produce this knowledge but also in the more radical sense that we create something that does not really exist. Others, of course, exist, but in-themselves, as a reality wrapped up in itself, forever inaccessible to us. What does not exist as an objective presence is that particular Otherness that we construct by means of our ethnographic representations. In this sense, what we know of Others, that which we claim to be true, is nothing more than ction (see Clifford 1986a:6). Such is the heterodox critique, but the argument runs into an intractable paradox. If indeed it is the case that we are all caught in the circumstances of life and the circumstances of discoursein society and history the question arises how heterodox anthropologists can be aware of this fact. If they too are socially and historically situated, how can they know anything of society and history? How can they speak about these boundaries from a position within them? To be aware of the existence of boundaries and of the space they enclose one must have a view of the whole, and the only way to have such a view is from a position outside it. To know that the forest one lives in is a forest and not a multitude of trees, one must have a view from a summit over and above it. The same paradox can be put in another way. If indeed it is humanly impossible to know how Others are in-themselves, what sense does it make to say that what we can know is ction? One would have thought that precisely because we can know only by means of our representations, what we do know is what isreality. Is this not, for instance, what we say about things that exist in space and time, reserving the term ction for things that lie outside these cognitive limits? To speak of ction, then, is possible and makes sense only when one already knows what nonction is, namely, the truth. It would seem, therefore, that heterodox anthropologists are able, somehow, to step outside society and history even though, apparently, they too are caught within these boundaries. It would seem that they somehow know the truth about Others, the decient nature of ethnological representations notwithstanding. If that were not the case, they would not be able to argue as they do, nor would their claims make sense. And yet to acknowledge this is also to recognize that, in spite of everything, there is no crisis in ethnological representation. Indeed, there is no such crisis; the truth of the most fundamental ethnological representationSamenessis questioned by no one, heterodox anthropologists included. Sameness is the most fundamental representation precisely because it is the condition of possibility of all particular representations that ethnology has produced ever since its inception as an academic discipline, if not earlier.5 To say this is not to claim that the way in
5. See, for instance, Pagdens (1982) discussion of the Spanish churchmens ethnological work in the 16th century.

a rg y ro u Sameness and the Will to Meaning S31

which Sameness has been conceptualized over the years and across paradigms has remained unchanged. Rather, it is to argue that whatever its particular historical manifestation, Sameness is an ethnological a priori. It is the axiomatic proposition that demarcates the epistemological space within which it becomes possible to study Othersas human beings or as human beings whose culture is of the same value as ours. This distinction points to the two broad conceptions of Sameness as they emerge in the history of the discipline. In the English-speaking world, anthropology became a recognized academic discipline with the appointment of E. B. Tylor as reader at Oxford in 1884. Before this time, the British Association for the Advancement of Science classied anthropology under natural history (Kuklick 1991). This should not be surprising. Ethnology could not have been born nor could it have emerged as an independent domain of knowledge as long as Others were considered to be less than human. Racism was what kept anthropology chained to natural history. Others could certainly be studied as part of nature and its history but not as social beings. What liberated ethnology from nature and allowed it to develop into a social science was the psychic unity of mankind, the fundamental tenet of a universal mental Sameness (for discussion see Stocking 1982[1968], 1987). Nor could modern ethnology have emerged and developed into what we recognize today as sociocultural anthropology as long as other societies were considered culturally inferior to European ones. Ethnocentrism set the limits within which Victorian anthropology could operate and dictated its agenda as the study of the origins and evolution of civilization. Others could be studied as surviving specimens of the European past but not as contemporary ways of life. What made the latter possible was the invention of cultural relativism, the tenet that no matter how different Other societies are, they embody the same cultural value as Western societies. To argue that there is no crisis in representationfor the truth of Sameness is questioned by no oneis not to say that there is no crisis at all. Rather, it is to suggest that the problem with ethnology is not epistemological but ontological. More specically, the problem is to be located in the opposition between two different denitions of social reality or two different kinds of representation. The rst is the a priori and, as I will argue, metaphysical representation of Sameness. The second is empirical and emerges within social and historical constraints such as those discussed by heterodox discourse. It refers, in other words, to all those a posteriori representations of Othernessof difference understood as inferioritywhich heterodox anthropologists call ction. The crisis, then, or the ethnological problem (cf. Stocking 1987) emerges because the empirical contradicts the transcendental. Indeed, in a very important sense, the entire history of ethnology can be read as a persistent attempt to demonstrate Sameness in the face of the a posteriori representations that contradict it.

Strategies of Mediation
In their quest for a solution to the ethnological problem, anthropologists have employed three analytically distinct strategies of mediation. The rst locates manifestations of the self in other societies, for instance, a certain practical rationality6 or a particular institution which Others are said to lack. In the same vein but in reverse, anthropologists seek to locate manifestations of Otherness in Western societies; beliefs and practices that were once thought to be the (sad) prerogative of Others are now shown to exist among us as well (see Argyrou 1996). The third and perhaps most important strategy of mediation tackles Otherness itself. In effect, its aim is to demonstrate that although Otherness has form, it lacks content or, to put it in another way, that its content is the Same despite its different form. There are countless examples of these three strategies in the ethnological literature, but here I will try to locate them in the work of only two major gures, E. B. Tylor and E. E. Evans-Pritchard. More specically, I will explore what these writers have to say about that which has served as perhaps the primary trait of Otherness magico-religious beliefs and practices. Neither the choice of writers nor the choice of topic is arbitrary. Tylor is more often than not presented in the literature as the ethnocentric villain par excellence; he was, in fact, using the same three strategies of mediation that most if not all anthropologists have been using ever since. Evans-Pritchards work on magic is critical because it contains the seeds of the paradigm that was to dominate the eldsymbolic interpretation. As for the choice of magico-religious beliefs and practices, past interpretations illuminate the heterodox critique in interesting ways and implicate it in what it seeks to avoidethnocentrism. I shall return to these implications below. In his address to the Ethnological Society of London in 1866, the famous British explorer Sir Samuel Baker (quoted in Morris 1987:91) had this to say about the Nilotic peoples he had visited: Without any exception they are without a belief in a supreme being, neither have they any form of worship or idolatry; nor is the darkness of their minds enlightened by even a ray of superstition. In the same vein, the ethnographer J. D. Lang (quoted in Tylor 1874:418) wrote that the Australian Aborigines had nothing whatever of the character of religion, or of religious observance, to distinguish them from the beasts that perish. For Tylor, religion was a fundamental human institution; if it existed in European societies it had to exist everywhere else as well. The problem, according to Tylor (1874:41920), was not that Others had no religion but that Europeans like Baker and Lang had failed to recognize it because they understood religion in terms of the organized and established theology of the higher races. Tylor made certain that Other religious conceptions would be

6. For a recent example of this argument see Obeyesekere (1992: 1522).

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readily recognizable. He dened religion in the widest possible termsas a belief in spiritual beings. And yet if Others practiced religion and were in this sense the same as Tylors European contemporaries, they also practiced magic, which, one could argue, set them clearly apart. Not so, according to Tylor, for this manifestation of Otherness was still very much part of European societies themselves. Magic, Tylor (1874:115) pointed out, is found as a survival from the past among the ignorant elsewhere in the civilized world. In Germany, for instance, Protestants get the aid of Catholic priests and monks to help them against witchcraft, to lay ghosts, consecrate herbs, and discover thieves. Nor was it, in fact, the case that ignorance was conned to the uneducated of the civilized world. Commenting on the rise of spiritualism during his time, Tylor (1874: 142) had this complaint to make: Not only are spiritualists to be counted by tens of thousands in America and England, but there are among them several men of distinguished mental power. Whether as a survival or revival, then, the existence of magic in Western societies demonstrated that the Other was also within. Nonetheless, this argument did little to explain Otherness itself. If people everywhere were united by the same mental abilities, as the psychic unity of mankind postulated, how was it possible that so many of them were involved in such apparently irrational practices as magic? Tylor needed to reinterpret magic and to show that although it had formit was indeed false it lacked contentit was not the product of different minds. Tylor argued that the human mind operates on the basis of the three principles of association of ideas identied in the previous century by David Hume (1977 [171176])resemblance, contiguity in time and space, and cause and effect. Thus, a picture may lead one to think of the original, the sight of ones house may give rise to thoughts of ones neighbors, and the sight of a wound may evoke thoughts of the pain that follows. Primitive people practiced magic not because their minds were in any intrinsic way different from European minds but because they confused associations of resemblance and contiguityanalogiesfor associations of cause and effect. For instance, contiguity in time and space of two otherwise unrelated eventsthe crowing of the cock and sunrisewas misinterpreted as a causal relationship. Hence the belief that if the cock was made to crow the sun would rise. There was nothing mysterious about magic, then, nothing unfamiliar about its Otherness; it was a difference well within the limits of the Same. Even though analogy is distrusted . . . by severer science for its misleading results, [it] is still to us a chief means of discovery and illustration (Tylor 1874:297). The trick is to know analogy for what it is, that is, not to confuse it with reality. The same three strategies of mediation can be located in Evans-Pritchards work on Zande witchcraft. Much of this work can be read as an attempt to refute LevyBruhls claim that there was a distinct primitive mentality that was mystical and prelogical. For Levy-

Bruhl, it was not the case that primitive people misapplied logic, in which case one could call their practices illogical; rather, they knew nothing of logic whatsoever. They neither tried to avoid contradictionthe most fundamental law of logicnor sought to bring it about; they were wholly indifferent to it (Levy-Bruhl 1925:78). The reason for this, according to Levy-Bruhl, was that they were unable to distinguish between perception and representation. For example, it was not the case that they rst perceived their shadow and then developed the notion that it was the soul. Rather, the shadow was experienced immediately and directly as the soul. Moreover, given this conation, representations caused primitive people to perceive things that did not exist in the empirical world. Levy-Bruhls thesis was attacked for its presumed racism, but Evans-Pritchard was well aware that his argument was not biological but social.7 Nonetheless, the thesis was blatantly ethnocentric,8 and Evans-Pritchard responded to it by trying to mediate the radical opposition that it posited. To begin with, he was quick to lo cate in Other societies what was for Levy-Bruhl the distinguishing characteristic of logical mentality practical rationality and empirical knowledge. It was not possible for primitive people to lead a life enveloped in mysticism, he argued, because, unlike us, they live closer to the harsh realities of nature, which permit survival only to those who are guided in their pursuits by observation, experiment, and reason (1965: 8788). He also located in European societies what was for many of his contemporaries the primary trait of primitive mentalityirrationalism. Theology, metaphysics, socialism, parliaments, democracy, universal suffrage, republics, progress . . . are quite as irrational as anything primitives believe in. They are irrational, according to Evans-Pritchard, because they are the product of faith and sentiment, and not of experiment and reasoning (1965:97). The third and most difcult question that EvansPritchard had to confront was that of irrationalism itself. If primitive people were indeed practical in their everyday lives, why was it that they also entertained mystical beliefs and engaged in magical practices? The problem was to explain how apparently irrational beliefs were in reality sensible and necessary. He did this in his classic discussion of Zande witchcraft, where one of his major concerns was to demonstrate that there was no necessary contradiction between empirical and mystical explanations of the same event. The Zande attribute the collapse of old granaries on their relatives to witchcraft, but this does not exclude an empirical explanation of the event. Indeed, Evans-Pritchard argues, the Zande are well aware that granaries collapse because termites eat away their foundations, but this does not explain the timing of the event: Why should these
7. The thesis was based on Durkheims sociology of knowledge; see Evans-Pritchard (1965:82). 8. It is signicant that the original French title of Levy-Bruhls book was Les fonctions mentales dans les societes inferieures.

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particular people have been sitting under this particular granary at the particular moment when it collapsed? . . . Why should it fall just when certain people sought its kindly shelter? (1976[1937]:22). Once again, then, Otherness is shown to have form but no real content. There is no confusion of cause and effect here, nor are the Azande children of mere fancy given over to mysticism. They are simply trying to explain something which, in their culture, appears arbitrary and makes no sense. Witchcraft is the idiom which the Zande use to explain the collapse of granaries on their relatives and other such unfortunate events. Thus, what initially appears to be irrational is now shown to be both sensible and necessary. There is hardly an anthropologist (including this one) who has not engaged in one or more of these strategies of mediation. At the same time, there is no one or, better, no ethnological paradigm that has succeeded in mediating the conict between Sameness and Otherness without compromising the former. That this, indeed, is the case is amply demonstrated by the history of the discipline itself, since there is no paradigm that has not been found, to a lesser or greater extent, guilty of the ultimate ethnological transgressionethnocentrism.9 It is because of this monumental failure that heterodox discourse criticizes not particular representations but representation as such, not specic paradigms but ethnology writ large. In this lies its radicalism, but it is here also that we must locate the heterodox strategy of mediation itself. Heterodox discourse employs none of the three strategies of mediation discussed above. Rather, it strives to uphold Sameness by calling into question the means that produce Otherness. Hence, the fact that even though heterodox discourse criticizes representation it keeps silent about this representation par excellence. If Otherness, the product of representation, is ction, what remains is Sameness, which must be true. In this way heterodox discourse attempts to make room for Sameness, to open space for cultural futures, as Clifford (1988a:15) puts it, for the recognition of emergence. What remains to be seen is whether heterodox discourse can succeed where all other ethnological paradigms have failed.

What the Natives Dont Know

One of the most fundamental divisions that ethnology effects is between those who know the truth of the world and those who are oblivious to it. In all ethnological paradigms that take a hermeneutic approach, what we know and the natives do not is an ontological truththe truth of the human condition.10 It is that the
9. Critiques, of course, are numerous, but Fabian (1983) provides what must be one of the most comprehensive. 10. The division between us and them may raise objections. It could be argued, for instance, that the category them includes increasingly people from ones own society. This is no doubt true,

world is intrinsically arbitrary and absurd and that whatever meaning, sense, and purpose we nd in it exists only because we have constructed and placed it there beforehand. The division that this disenchanting realization effects, then, is between those who forget the truth of the human condition because they cannot bear it and turn to the metaphysical to protect themselves and those who cannot forget because they would be deluding themselves. The story of the Zande and their granaries exemplies how this division is effected in ethnology as well as any other study of Others. In this story, the Zande emerge as a people unable to deal with the possibility that unfortunate events may happen by themselves. They are well aware that it is termites that cause granaries to collapse and injure their relatives, but termites do not have intentions. And without intention suffering is absurd, meaningless, and unbearable (Levi-Strauss 1963, Douglas 1966, Geertz 1973). Thus, they resort to witchcraft. For Evans-Pritchard this is understandable, but it is also something to which he cannot relate as the Zande do. He knows the truth of the world and is unable to delude himself in this way. In fact, this truth appears to have cost Evans-Pritchard, who was a believing Catholic, his own faith. As Morris (1987:72) points out, his studies of the Zande and the Nuer had precisely the effect he viewed with alarm, namely, to render theistic beliefs untenable. This division between us and those who, like the Zande, must forget the truth of the world has been made even deeper, sharper, and more poignant by heterodox discourse itself. Heterodox scholars cannot forget, and will not let anyone else forget, that what up to now was taken for granted and was treated as a self-evident truth is nothing of the sort. They seek to remind all those who may have forgotten that representation and everything that depends on itscience, objectivity, the truthare things that we have invented and inserted into the world, just like any other social construct, and that it would be sheer delusion to think otherwise. Despite appearances, then, heterodox discourse is armed and operates with the most fundamental modernist weaponthe logic that objecties and disenchants the world. It disenchants the social sciences in exactly the same way in which they disenchanted religion in the not-so-distant past. When science encounters the claims of the ethical postulate that the world is a God-ordained, and hence somehow meaningfully and ethically oriented, cosmos, writes Max Weber (1946: 35051), it pushes religion from the rational into the irrational realm. When social science encounters its claim that representation is the means to the truth of
but there are structural limits to this trend. Ethnology cannot become a study of us because it would cease being ethnology; it would be absorbed by sociology or cultural studies. As for the category us, I use it to refer to anthropologists, but anthropologists too are socially and historically situated, and if it is possible to distinguish them from other people in their own societies on some grounds it is equally possible to identify them with such people on other grounds.

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the world, one might add, it has no option but to treat itself in a similar fashion. This treatment of ethnographic beliefs and practices does nothing less than to reproduce the very divisions that the established orthodoxy has already effected, since what heterodox discourse posits about us is not only different from everything that ethnology has posited about Others but also something that distinguishes us at their expense. Let me illustrate this with a few examples. To begin with, the heterodox critique suggests that anthropologists are not, or at any rate should not be, as innocent as Tylors natives. For Tylor (1874:305) primitive people occupied the childlike or poetic stage of [human] thought; they thought and spoke like poets, using metaphors, similes, and other such rhetorical devices. Unlike the latter, however, who never confuse the imaginary worlds they construct with reality, natives, being innocent as children, fell prey to precisely this misconception (p. 297): What we call poetry [is] to them real life. The heterodox claim that ethnography must be understood as poetry reproduces and cements Tylors distinction between poets and natives. Here is how Stephen Tyler (1986:125) argues the heterodox point: A post-modern ethnography is a cooperatively evolved text consisting of fragments of discourse intended to evoke in the minds of both reader and writer an emergent fantasy of a possible world of commonsense reality, and thus to provide an aesthetic integration that will have a therapeutic effect. It is, in a word, poetry (my emphasis). Unlike Tylors natives, then, postmodern ethnographers do not confuse fantasy with reality. They are well aware that it is poetry we write, and they call on anthropologists who may have mistaken ethnography for a science to see through this veil of illusion and recognize it for what it really is. But the heterodox critique also serves to distinguish us at the expense of Evans-Pritchards kind of native the symbolic type, so to speakas well. Anthropologists often argue that in Other societies there are times, such as during ritual, when the ow of time is reversed. To use Levi-Strausss (1966:237) celebrated phrase, rites bring the past into the present and . . . the present into the past. Such practices, we explain, are symbolic. As Levi-Strauss himself (p. 236) points out, in the former case natives re-create the sacred and benecial atmosphere of mythical times, thus denying the profanity of the present, and in the latter they deny the nality of death. In short, in both cases such rites, rather like witchcraft itself, transform arbitrary and absurd happenings into meaningful events. This kind of symbolic interpretation, however, we reserve for natives only, for when it comes to our own ethnological practices, which also appear to reverse the ow of time, symbolism is put aside. We turn instead to an old-fashioned positivism and appeal to the truth of the empirical world. It was Fabian (1983) who rst pointed out that our use of such terms as precapitalist and traditional to describe Others suggests that we take the present into the pastto do eldworkand

bring the past into the presentthe capitalist, modern erato write about it. But this, according to Fabian (p. 71), is sheer ction (rather than a symbolic claim). As all anthropologists knowbut apparently forget eldwork is possible only when researcher and researched share Time (see also Cliffords 1988a and Tylers 1986 uses of this argument). It is not possible, then, to allow this delusion of time reversal to persist in our midst. We must expose it for what it is, even if to do so it is necessary to state the obvious. Thus, in ethnological discourse it seems that, unlike them, we cannot forget the truth of the human condition, whether in speaking about them or about us, and, as a result of our persistent remembering, live in a thoroughly disenchanted world without metaphysical illusionswhether religion, magic, or immaculately conceived representations. In short, the picture that emerges is one in which Others need myths to protect themselves from the meaninglessness of the world and are thus, to use a phrase from Foucault (1984:95), happy in their ignorance, while we can exist without ctions and may not be as happy but neither are we as ignorant. And yet if this is how things appear it is only because we have not carried the process of objectication and disenchantment far enough. Even heterodox discourse stops short of what is most fundamental in ethnology, that which is ethnology, namely, the a priori representation of Sameness. We must, then, complete the cycle of objectication by thematizing what we have forgotten and placed beyond questioning. We owe it not only to ourselves but also to those whose lives we objectify and disenchant. I shall turn to this unhappy but necessary task of objectifying Sameness in the next section. For now, I wish to examine briey a paradox and an impossibility. It may be argued that the divisions I have been discussing are unintentional, committed as they are in the course of trying to demonstrate Sameness itself. It was necessary for Evans-Pritchard to explain witchcraft in symbolic terms because the alternative would have been endorsement of Levy-Bruhls thesis. So would it be for heterodox anthropologists to argue that our discourse is poetry and time reversal ction, because the alternative would be endorsement of the divisions that our discourse effects. All this is no doubt true, but this is precisely the pointand the paradox: ethnology divides the world because it strives to unite it. This brings me to the impossibleSameness. To say that Sameness is the impossible is not to say that it is nothing. It can be and certainly is imagined, desired, and even experienced. It should be obvious that without such imagining ethnology would not be able to exist at all. Rather, Sameness is the impossible because it cannot be demonstrated. Every time such an attempt is made, Sameness is disproved; every time it begins to emerge it is instantly annihilated. The structural movements of this impossibility can be sketched out as follows: For Sameness to manifest itself, anthropologists must dene difference as that which does not know it-

a rg y ro u Sameness and the Will to Meaning S35

self, for if difference knew itself it would cease being different and would become the same. If the Zande were persuaded to adopt the truth that Evans-Pritchard posited about witchcraft, they would lose faith in itin the same way that Evans-Pritchard lost his own Catholic faith. If difference does not know itself, then, Sameness begins to manifest itselfrather than being prelogical or irrational the Zande now appear rational like us. But as soon as Sameness emerges it is instantly destroyed because a new difference is born. It is the difference between us who know the truth of difference that it is, in fact, the sameand the Zande who do not and, as our explanation suggests, cannot know this truth. A structurally similar case can be made about heterodox discourse. For Sameness to manifest itself in this case, ethnology must be constituted as that which knows itself, because if ethnology does not come to terms with the limits of representation it will not cease to create difference. If ethnology knows its truththat the Otherness it constitutes is ctionSameness begins to emerge, but before it has time to emerge it is destroyed. Ethnology has now become different from all those cultural systems, such as Zande witchcraft, that do not know their truth. The limit of Sameness, then, is this: it can manifest itself only on the condition that it creates differenceon the condition, that is, that it destroys itself in emergencewhich is another way of saying that it cannot be demonstrated. This, no doubt, is an unhappy predicament, but not only for anthropologists. It is also a predicament for those who are the object of ethnology, those whose presumed cultural inferioritytheir Othernessethnology strives to refute only to reproduce, time and again, farther down the road. How should nativesat any rate those who, like the native anthropologist, are concerned with such thingsrespond to this predicament? I shall return to this by no means easy question.

particularly popular in the 1970s is entitled The Airplane: When you y, the world looks like a picture from high up and you took it seriously! Towers look like matchboxes and people like ants, the largest palace looks like a childs football. My dearest, dont cry. If you like, come high up as well to see the Earth from the moon; it too is a moon. In this song, Hadjis is advising a friend who seems to have taken lifes problems seriously to y with him. From a vantage point high up in the air the mighty and the wealthysymbolized in the song by towers and palaceswho can make one cry appear very small and insignicant. We all appear this way: small, insignicant, and indistinguishable from one another, just like ants. A perspective outside the world, then, has a leveling effect. It effaces all distinctions, divisions, and differences and demonstrates the absurdity of taking them seriously and thinking of them as real, either by allowing them to hurt us or by using them to hurt one another. The second anecdote is from Nicos Kazantzakiss (1973) novel, The Life and Times of Alexis Zorba.11 Kazantzakis is traveling with Zorba to the island of Crete, and he is standing on deck enjoying the sunshine and the sea breeze. At the same time, he is deeply disturbed by his fellow passengers on the boat, the sly Greeks with rapacious eyes, their narrow-mindedness and petty quarrels. Kazantzakis imagines seizing the boat and plunging it into the sea to clean it of all the living beings that have polluted itboth people and animals. But he also cannot help feeling compassion, a cold, Buddhist compassion, the outcome of complicated, metaphysical reection; a compassion, not only for people, but also for the entire world that struggles, cries, weeps, hopes, and does not understand that everything is a spectacular illusionNothingness (pp. 3031). Once again we have two conicting visions of the world: that of Kazantzakiss fellow passengers, who are totally immersed in life, who struggle to take advantage of one another and cannot see beyond their petty personal interests, and that of Kazantzakis himself, which generates compassion from a vantage point beyond the worldthe outcome of complicated, metaphysical reection. From this vantage point, the struggle for existence and all that it entailscompetition, calculation, and divisionappear absurd and meaningless. Such things are for nothing, since in the wider scheme of things life itself is Nothing. The nal anecdote comes from the island of Cyprus and has to do with deaththe death of the wealthy, the distinguished, and the powerful. When such deaths occur, ordinary people often remark, Plousii tje ftoshi, to idhion khoman en na mas fai (Rich and poor, well be eaten by the same soil), or Kanenas en perni tipote mazin tou; oullous thkio metra ghi miniski mas (No
11. The book is known in English as Zorba the Greek. The translation that follows is my own.

The Will to Meaning

If Sameness is impossible yet clearly not nothing, what is it exactly, and how do we come to know the impossible? Certainly, we cannot know Sameness from a position within society and history, since all such positions are condemned to produce visions of a divided world. However, if the vantage point from which we all appear the same lies outside of these boundaries, how is it possible for anyone to have access to it? But there is another question we must raise, the most important one: If, as I have suggested and the history of the discipline itself demonstrates, it is impossible to demonstrate Sameness, if every attempt to do so produces the contrary, why is it that we persist in this self-defeating endeavor? All these are interrelated questions, and I will begin searching for answers with the help of three ethnographic anecdotes from the Greek-speaking world. The rst is a song by the Greek singer and critic of modern Greek life, Costas Hadjis. The song that was

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one takes anything with him; we all end up with two meters of earth). Such comments are meant to highlight the absurdity of the struggle for wealth, power, and fame since none of them survive death. At the same time, they point to the fundamental equality of all, rich and poor, important and unimportant. In the face of death, such divisions are obliterated and what remains is the same for all, two meters of earththe grave. It is now possible to return to the questions raised at the beginning of this section and attempt to address them. To begin with Sameness, it now appears that this axiomatic, a priori representation is not simply an ontology of the sociala denition of what the social world is really likebut a metaphysical ontology, for it is made possible by an imaginary position beyond the world. In the rst anecdote, the vantage point from which we all appear the same is spatialan airplane, the moon. In the second and third anecdotes, the spatial metaphor begins to assume its proper metaphysical signicance. Although he does not elaborate, Kazantzakis makes it clear that his compassion for the world of struggle and division was the outcome of metaphysical reection. For their part, Greek Cypriots make death the ultimate social equalizer. The objection could be raised, of course, that death is a this-worldly phenomenon and as empirical as anything else we know. We may not experience our own death, but we witness the death of others. This is no doubt true, but it is also the case that death always intimates something beyond itself. We conceive it not just as the end but as a passagea passage through which, as the Cypriot saying has it, no one takes anything with him. What lies on the other side of this passage could be anything, but whatever is posited does not affect the present argument. It could be, for instance, the believers eternal life or, as in the case of Kazantzakis the atheist, an eternal silence Nothingness. What is important for the purposes of this discussion is that the other side is imaginable and imagined. Thus, in this sense, even Nothingness is something and not nothing. It is a metaphysical position, a notion that we use to reect on what is happening on this side. It is not death as such, then, that is the ultimate social equalizer. It is whatever position beyond death and before life, for that matterone cares to imagine. Positioning oneself in this way enables one to constitute lifeones own life as well as life in generalas a spectacle, to demarcate its boundaries and to visualize it as a whole. In short, it enables one to become aware of life as a radical nitude. Life can now be contrasted with, measured against, and evaluated in relation to the innity of the beyond and the beforebe it God, Nothingness, or the Unknown. It is this inescapable nitude that makes us all the same. And it is this nitude also that makes life appear absurd and meaninglesslife in general perhaps (and Kazantzakis comes close to this view), and certainly life of a particular kind. As the ethnographic anecdotes clearly show, this is the kind of life characterized by the struggle to gain and maintain advantage over othersexemplied by the pettiness and

readiness of the sly and rapacious, the power of those who own palaces and towers, of the rich and famous. In short, it is the kind of life characterized by distinction, division, and difference. From a vantage point outside the world, this kind of life is absurd because it has lost contact with reality. Although it unfolds within the boundaries of nitude, it proceeds as though there were no such boundaries. Having forgotten its limits, it portrays the eeting moment as eternal and elevates the contingent and the accidental to the status of the immutable and the necessary. This kind of life, in other words, is so immersed in the game and has invested so much in it as to mistake the game for reality. But from a position beyond the world reality is nothing of the sort. What is true, permanent, and inescapable is human nitude and by extension the essential and fundamental Sameness of allcommon humanity. Hence, the more entrenched the divisions of the world, the more absurd and meaningless life becomes. This brings me to the last and for the purposes of this essay most important question: If it is impossible to demonstrate Sameness, if every such attempt has no other outcome than to create difference, why is it that we persist in this futile endeavor? The positivistic methodological formula that argues for the rejection of hypotheses that are not corroborated by facts does not apply and has never applied to ethnology. Sameness is not a hypothesis, nor does it have anything to do with epistemology. It is a metaphysical ontology of the order of magico-religious systems, itself a system that makes anthropological lives meaningful and hence something that must be and is placed beyond all empirical questioning. This becomes quite clear when one considers two things. First, ethnology is a discipline without history, or, to be more precise, it has a history that its practitioners reject as little more than a grand mistake. As I have already pointed out, there is no single ethnological paradigmbe it evolutionism, functionalism, structuralism, or culturalism, to name just a fewthat has not been found guilty of ethnocentrism. In practice, this means that for the past 150 years anthropologists have sought to place Sameness outside history and beyond the reach of all those empirical representations of Othernesswhat heterodox anthropologists call ctionthat contradict and undermine it. One does not need to call this strategy cold (Levi-Strauss 1966) or label Sameness an archetype (Eliade 1959) to see that it is intimately connected with magico-religious imaginings. Second, the incorporation of Sameness into history would mean nothing less than tolerating the arbitrariness and absurdities of the world, chief among them racism and ethnocentrism. This is not to say recognizing that such absurdities exist; it is to say, rather, recognizing that they are intrinsic and inescapable characteristics of the world, and anthropologists clearly do not. If the three ethnographic anecdotes are anything to go by, a world of difference and division is absurd and meaninglessan unbearable world. Thus, we must nd

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ways to deal with the Problem of Meaning (cf. Geertz 1973) ourselves, and apparently we do. We tackle the meaninglessness of a world of division in the same way in which the Zande tackle the meaninglessness of a world in which granaries collapse by themselves: We forget to objectify Sameness as they forget to objectify witchcraft. If we did, we would have to recognize that Sameness is itself a construct and hence that whatever sense, meaning, and purpose we nd in the world exists only because we placed it there in the rst place. And, as we well know, this is a dangerous thought. To quote Geertz (1973:102) again, it sets ordinary human experience in a permanent context of metaphysical concern and raises the dim, back-of-the-mind suspicion that one may be adrift in an absurd world. Ethnology, then, must persist in its endeavor to uphold Sameness in the face of all those representations that produce difference and division. But if it must persist, it must also reckon with the divisions that it itself creates. As we have seen, Sameness can manifest itself only on the condition that it destroys itselfon the condition, that is, that it creates difference. Thus, the stage is set for a vicious circle in which attempts to demonstrate Sameness produce difference that must be and is reckoned with only to be reproduced farther down the roada long road that leads from Victorian anthropology to heterodox discourse. It is this will to secure Sameness that has been driving ethnology for the past century and a half. But this is not simply or even mainly a will to power or a will to truth. It is above all a will to meaninga desire for an ethically meaningful, that is, socially unied world.

discourse would have us believeis the same as the natives magic and religion. Ethnology is the anthropologists witchcraft, insofar at least as it makes anthropological lives meaningful. I am well aware that in striving to demonstrate this Sameness I am setting up a certain division. In effect, the implication of my argument is that the native anthropologistan Other of sortsknows what the natives dont knowthe natives, in this case, being ones Western colleagues. This division is regrettable, but perhaps it is not without a certain value. No doubt it provides additional proof that Sameness cannot be demonstrated, but what is more important is that it may begin to do what we wish but are unable to achieve, namely, to undermine whatever power ethnological discourse exercises over Others. It would now be possible for Others to respond to our discourse with a knowing smile, the sort of smile that recognizes ethnology as a quest for meaning, one to be taken no moreand no lessseriously than any Other such quest.

Comments
k a m a ri m. c l a r k e Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, Calif. 94720, U.S.A. (kmclarke@uclink4.berkeley.edu). 1 x 98 Argyrou argues that the social scientic attempt to highlight Sameness results in the oppositethe production of difference, but this effect is critical because the native anthropologist . . . knows what the natives dont knowthe natives, in this case, being ones Western colleagues. Essentially, for Argyrou, although articulations of human difference have been the product of scientic racism, it is the will to meaning that differentiates one group from another and one individual from another. The crisis of representation in anthropology since the publication of Saids (1978) Orientalism has made it critical not only to call into question the idea of objectivity but to empower marginality and allow for new and creative ways of disrupting the discursive powers that inform identity formation. The relationship between representations of Sameness and the discursive powers that naturalize Sameness and/or difference are central to authorization of certain tropes of difference as opposed to others. Although Argyrou clearly demonstrates how representations, the tools of the trade, have been used by scientic minds to construct difference, the privileging of textual authority has also played a major role in determining whether Sameness is questioned at all. Given the history of human difference, Argyrous dissatisfaction with the inevitable lack of attention to Sameness and his focus on anthropologists persistence in articulating difference through the explication of cultural meaning is no surprise.

Conclusion: The Native Anthropologist

This paper does not tell a story with a happy ending. If what I have tried to show has any truth to it, the picture that emerges is rather bleak. Ethnology strives to demonstrate Sameness, but Sameness is one of those beingsand what I have in mind here is the existentialist philosophers Beingthat cannot be demonstrated. What is even worse, every attempt to do so inevitably results in the production of Othernessof differenceas-inferiority. I have also argued that this self-defeating exercise, which is ethnology, must persist because its practitioners are motivated by a will to meaning. Indeed, if such a will existsand I think it doesthen calls for an end to ethnology, such as those from outside the discipline (cf. Said 1989), fail to understand the nature of ethnology completely. But if ethnology must exist, how are those who must deal with its consequences to respond? This brings me to the native anthropologist. The native anthropologist, who is not merely a subjectivity but also a historical phenomenon, strives to do what anthropologists do, namely, demonstrate Sameness. This has been my aim in this paper. I have sought to show that ethnology, far from being a disenchanted realm of belief and practiceas heterodox

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It seems to me, however, that the empirical strengths of anthropology have nothing to do with this existential question of sameness or difference. Rather, they are concerned with the larger issue of constructing a narrative of the psychic unity of mankind that helps us to ask more theoretically interesting questions about the past in the present. The task of anthropological inquiry should become enabling us to understand that cultural interpretations and meanings not only are similar but are constructed and authorized as similar and legitimate. The broader questions then can be What are the conditions of reception which facilitate assumed notions of community? How are similarities and meanings legitimated? And what role do disciplining mechanisms play in the quest for community? I propose that we replace the problematic of the corroboration of authentic sameness or difference with that of the cultivation of difference. The lingering gap between the political economy of discourse production and the history of power provides a special space for new frontiers. Tracing the relationship between power and other idioms of division is important as we rethink how inequalities and representations develop, grow, and transform communities. j oh a n n e s f a b i a n Department of Cultural Anthropology, University of Amsterdam, OZ Achterburgwal 185, 1012 DK Amsterdam, The Netherlands. 10 vii 98 Argyrou states his argument boldly and clearly, and CA is to be commended for circulating his heavily critical and philosophical piece. It has helped me to further work on some thoughts I have been pondering. However, I will limit myself to the central issue he calls Sameness. Leaving aside the merits of his appeals to history the gap between Foucaults classical age and Edward Saids critique of Orientalism seems rather large, and Tylor, Evans-Pritchard, and Levi-Strauss hardly cover the history of our discipline since the Enlightenment Argyrou assumes a position that is as unassailable as it is gratuitous. The problem with ethnology, he says, is not epistemological but ontological. In the end everything is, maybe, but ontology does not get us through the day. He needs to make his claim because the only way he seems to be able to locate himself in the world of anthropology is by taking a position in what he imagines as a space or place (and by insisting that taking a position is something of a metaphysical nature). Philosophers may worry about the being of anthropology. Anthropologists, since they have lost, as Argyrou repeatedly and astutely observes, their ontological certainties, have been worrying about what they are doing. What are we doing? We work to produce knowledge about people who usually do not share what goes, for us, without saying. The problem of alterity is not one of (ontological) difference but one of being able (willing,

and competent) to engage in practices from which such knowledge can emerge. Knowledge worth laboring for, I would argue, is knowledge that changes the knower (and the known; there are no one-way practices). The key is in the difference between meaning and sense. Meaning posits and conrms (as do the whimsical insights into the human condition Argyrou derives from his ethnographic examples). Anthropology, as I see it, is about making sense; it is not a quest for meaning. Assuming we would nd it, to whom would we peddle it? With whose authorization? Sense strikes and illuminates; it comes from, and causes, struggle; it is, to use an apt Greek term, agonistic. Meaning may be met with a knowing smile. It is not always easy to deal with sense gently. In the end, to use an old, somewhat arrogant but useful phrase, the argument afrming that ethnology is always about Sameness is either trivial or wrong. Trivial, because no doing is imaginable that does not give itself, or cling, to an identity (which, incidentally, makes ethnocentrism also a trivial notion); wrong, because action, in our case knowledge production, could not take place unless identities were transformed. What sounds like a paradox is, however, just a way of afrming that Sameness and Otherness are neither qualities nor states but actions and processes. Such actions are historically situated and politically involved. To suggest, as Argyrou seems to do, that because we are always working in, from, against situations we are condemned to enacting Sameness may have the attractiveness of a pathetic gesture admitting defeat; it also elevates failure to do the damn work that ethnology always is to a metaphysical condition. So there we are: Argyrou says Sameness is an ontologicalwhat? A problem? A position? A being? I say, it is, inasmuch as it enters our critical thoughts on anthropology, a matter concerning the possibility of knowledge production, hence an epistemological matter. This is what allows me to continue presenting experiences and documents in ethnographic and historical accounts that have a chance to strike by the sense they make rather than give meaning that comforts. What I dread is being read as if all the pleasures and pains of writing anthropology were about nothing but taking a position, or about nothing but enacting a position, which comes to the same. r ik p i n x te n Cultural Sciences, University of Ghent, Blandyberg 2, 9000 Ghent, Belgium (Hendrik.Pinxten@rug.ac.be). 7 vii 98 Argyrous paper is remarkable in a variety of ways. He takes seriously the critique by Fabian on anthropologys one-sided perspective on the Other. This was an epistemological critique, to be sure. At the same time he grants Saids political criticism on Orientalism. He is at home with the postmodernist attacks, but he claims there should be a place under the sun (of science) for

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the strange business of studying Sameness in the Other. Indeed, he thinks that our implicit and aprioristic conceptualisation of the Other in terms of Sameness has ontological rather than epistemological status. It is at once inescapable, unprovable, and necessary. Thus, oldfashioned positivists and phenomenologists, on the one hand, and heterodox critiques, on the other, are both wrong in their investment in epistemological battles, since they should address the deeper ontological level, where opponents unconsciously meet. This is a neat analysis, but will it do? I think Argyrou has a point in referring to the ontological level. I guess I am just one among many who have been told by native subjects that as far as they were concerned, they conceived of the world and its peoples according to their way, different from the Western one. This can easily be phrased as consciousness of ontological differences. The question, then, was how to organize (avoid, confront, . . . ) the apparently unavoidable meeting of these different worlds. For instance, Navajos would look upon this meeting as risky, potentially protable, and contaminating, while the worlds would meet and stay clearly separate from each other (Pinxten 1997). There is, in other words, a variety of ways of which the Navajo way is one. That there is one way (world) is a Western preconception. However, ontological arguments in themselves do not sufce. Contrary to Argyrou I hold that epistemological stands of necessity complement ontology. In other words, there is no ontological knowledge (knowledge about the ontic) without . . . knowledge, hence epistemology. Argyrou himself takes this path by identifying with the postmodernists an intractable paradox: one cannot say anthropology ction without an epistemology (factuality, truth notions, etc.). The argument I want to make runs as follows: It may well be that we Westerners (probably because of Christian cosmology, as Argyrou vaguely suggests) share an ontology which ascribes sameness to all human beings, and it certainly is the case that we have gone all over and been able to communicate and interact with all kinds of people in a more or less awed but real way. But that part points to epistemology: How do we know and what do we know (with aws)? The statement that whenever we have tried to capture and express Sameness we have ended up with difference is not, however, saying anything about our knowledge of Sameness. It is only speaking about our fallibility in knowing, an epistemological characteristic. It would be problematic only in the naive epistemological position in which we stick with an absolute notion of truth based on a strict correspondence between ontic reality (people are the same) and the truth of our knowledge that we can describe them (as absolutely the same). This is, however, just one and indeed an old-fashioned absolutist view of the relation between ontology and epistemology. A second possible position would be that of ontological relativism (people are fundamentally different in reality) combined with epistemological relativism of the postmodernist kind (for example, all stories about these re-

alities are equally valid). To me the latter position is an absurdity, forgetting how to explain that we can communicate and interact (though not awlessly). But yet other positions are possible. One of the more interesting ones, I think, is that of ontological realism (presupposing the ontic Sameness of people) and moderate epistemological objectivism (and hence moderate relativism). The early advocate of such position was Joseph Needham, the China historian. He was intrigued by the way traditions of learning about the world (the epistemological level) differed and indeed induced more or less different views about the world: Chinese science and European science prove suited to their tasks but incompatible. The existence of one world (the Sameness in Argyrous argument) need not be given up, but different methods, intuitions, and/or criteria for knowledge may pertain, yielding different knowledges or different ways with the world. Choosing that position, I have to allow some room in and around the notion of truth (rightness, validity): instead of a direct correspondence between ontological and epistemological knowledge I advocate a position of perspectivalness (with D. T. Campbell). That is to say, one ontological reality can be approached from different perspectives on and of knowledge. The weaving together of these perspectives may result in a more encompassing truth than the knowledge produced from just one perspective.

Reply
v a s s o s a rg y ro u Nicosia, Cyprus. 8 x 98 I thank Fabian, Pinxten, and Clarke for responding to my paper. Their comments give me the opportunity to clarify certain important aspects of my argument. Clarke seems to have misunderstood much of what I am trying to do in my paper. She thinks, for example, that I am saying there is lack of attention to Sameness in ethnology and a focus on differences, I am in fact saying the reverse. She argues that the empirical strengths of the discipline have nothing to do with Sameness but rather with the psychic unity of mankind; and yet, as I show in my paper, the latter is a particular case of the former. Nor can I argue with Clarke about what she proposes, because it is not at all clear to me. Pinxten thinks that I have a point in bringing ontology into my analysis, but, as he points out, ontological arguments are not enough; they must be supported by epistemology. There can be no ontological knowledge (knowledge about the ontic), he argues, without . . . knowledge, hence epistemology. But ontology is not knowledge about the ontic, not about beings, that is, not factual, empirical knowledge. On the contrary, it is what makes such knowledge possible; it is knowledge of Being, any denition of reality that opens up space

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for empirical investigation. An example of ontological knowledge would be the tenet of the psychic unity of mankind. What kind of ontic, factual knowledge does this tenet make possible? Everything that one can say about Others as human and hence social beings whether about their kinship system, religion, exchange, or marriage practices. Without this piece of ontological knowledge, Others would be regarded as less than humanas they clearly were even during E. B. Tylors timeand investigation of these and other institutions would make little sense. As far as we know, it is only human beings who believe in God, trade, or marry. It is not ontology that needs epistemology, then, but the other way round. But, more to the point, I brought ontology into my analysis for two reasons. First, I wanted to demonstrate that, contrary to what heterodox discourse claims, the divisions of the world that ethnology effects are not the result of our inability to know the truth about Others. We know this truth and posit it a prioriOthers are the Same as Us. Second, my aim was to inquire about the nature of this ontological knowledgeSamenessan inquiry that has shown it to be a metaphysical notion. The foregoing could, of course, be interpreted as an attack on ethnology, and, indeed, this is how Fabian understands my paper. It should be apparent, however, that if my paper is an attack on the discipline, it is a strange one indeed. What I have tried to do is nothing different from what ethnology has been striving to achieve for the past 150 years, namely, to demonstrate Sameness. My aim has been to show that far from being a disenchanted realm of belief and practiceso disenchanted, in fact, as to know that its own representations are ctionethnology is as enchanted as the magicoreligious systems that it studies. But my paper is ethnological for another reason as well. It tries to make sense of the discipline on the basis of ethnological ideas. Unlike heterodox discourse, which treats ethnology in a manner reminiscent of E. B. Tylors scientistic treatment of magic, I employ the ethnological method par excellencesymbolic interpretation; and instead of pronouncing the discipline ction, as heterodox discourse does, I argue that it is neither true nor false but a way of making anthropological lives meaningful. Fabian strongly objects to this idea. There is a distinction to be made, he says, between meaning, which posits and conrms, and making sense, which strikes and illuminates. Ethnology is not a quest for meaning but a quest for illumination. The distinction that Fabian makes is not new. Geertz posits something of a similar nature in his distinction between religion and sciencethe former strives to maintain the givenness of the world, the latter to dissolve it into a swirl of probabilistic hypotheses (1973:112). I discuss the ethnocentric implications of this argument in my paper, and there is no need to repeat any of it here. The question that I want to raise is this: Is Fabians distinction valid? Is ethnology a quest for illumination for illuminations sake or, as I argue, a quest to illuminate those dark areas that threaten to undermine a meaning-

ful vision of the world? Take, for example, Fabians best-known work, Time and the Other. Its aim is to illuminate how anthropology makes its object of study. But why, one might ask, should anyoneincluding Fabianbe interested in this topic at all? Why bother to explain how ethnology places the Other in the Western past? I do not need to answer these questions myself; Fabian does that for us in the opening pages of his book. [We are] trying to make sense of what happens, he explains, in order to overcome a state of affairs we have long recognized as scandalous. What is this scandal? It is the scandal of domination and exploitation of one part of mankind by another (1983:x, my emphasis). Fabian, then, wants to make sense of and to illuminate what ethnology does because what it does is to divide mankind into West and Other. And this is scandalousindeed a profanity of the highest orderbecause, as every anthropologist knows, mankind is indivisible. It is One and the Same. To tolerate this division would be to tolerate an arbitrary and absurd world. My argument, Fabian suggests, is that ethnology is always about Sameness, and this, he says, is wrong. It is wrong rst because knowledge production would not be possible and second because there are other meaningful things about ethnology, such as the pleasures and pains of writing [it]. I could add many other meaningful things to Fabians list, but what does this provethat ethnology is a polysemic symbol? All symbols are. Ethnology is always about Sameness, not because there is nothing else meaningful about it but because this tenet of common humanity is the disciplines condition of possibility. As for the question of knowledge production, far from being an obstacle Sameness or, at any rate, the will to uphold itwhich is a will to meaningacts as a catalyst. If we now know how anthropology makes its object of study, it is because Fabian could not tolerate the divisions of the world that ethnology effects. Fabian nds my argument about Sameness trivial. In order to do anything, he suggests, one must have an identity. No doubt. But the point is not that we all have identities. It is rather that some of these identities are open to question and doubtthe anthropologist as scientist, for examplewhile others are not, that some can be a conscious basis for action and others cannot. My paper tries to explain why Sameness (if it is an identity at all) is placed beyond questioningwhy, even though it is the ethnological basis for action par excellence, its true nature must remain unconscious. And this is hardly a trivial matter. It shows that what we say about Others applies with equal force to our own beliefs and practices; and it undermines the division we effect by claimingwhether indirectly or, as in the case of heterodox, explicitlya thoroughly disenchanted universe for ourselves. One last point: The argument that everyone must have an identity leads Fabian to suggest that ethnocentrism [is] also a trivial notion. Fabian does not appear very condent about this last statement. He makes

a rg y ro u Sameness and the Will to Meaning S41

the claim incidentally and places the statement in parentheses. The hesitation is understandable. It is one thing to make this claim in a polemical context and quite another to uphold it as a general position. It runs counter to everything that Fabian has done in Time and the Other and must withstand the enormous weight of all of 20th-century ethnology.

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